The Upper House has soldiers and airmen and scholars and lawyers and scientists and film directors and heaven knows what – many of whom would not dream of seeking election on a party-political ticket. Week in, week out they beaver away, revising and improving the legislative Horlicks that they get from the Commons; doing nothing much, as the old analysis has it, and doing it rather well.

They have tended for a long time to be more representative of society than the Commons – there are more people from ethnic minorities, there are more women, more disabled people. It is probably true that there are more bishops in the Lords than there are in the population at large, but who cares? There’s nothing like a bishop or two to add a touch of class and restraint to a revising chamber. They still have a few of the less obviously inbred hereditaries, in a gesture not just to the ancient roots of the institution but also to the fundamentally different nature of the Lords. It is crucial to the success of the Upper House that it is somehow at a distance from party-political machines, and above all that it is at one remove from the electorate.

Now the Lib Dems are proposing that voters should have a new type of politico – a “senator” – with his or her own direct mandate and constituency. This will be confusing for the voters, who will be wondering whether they should be writing to their local councillor, their MP, their Euro-MP or their senator; and it will be even worse for the egos of these bozos. Consider for a second who is likely to seek election to the Lords/Senate. People who have never made it to Parliament; people who have been flung out of Parliament; has-beens; never-wozzers; people who can see the opportunity to avenge their rejections by finding an alternative route to power. Once ensconced in the Lords they will remain there for three solid parliamentary terms, swanking, swaggering and using the headed stationery for their shopping lists.

Suddenly, the politically thrusting characters of this country will work out an alternative career structure, a new way of achieving ministerial office. And if they decide to take on their green-benched colleagues in the Lower House, as they inevitably will, who will be able to shut them up? A direct mandate is a powerful thing. Look here, mate, a senator will be able to say to a poor old MP, you were elected by 70,000 people. I have 570,000 people in my constituency – and I don’t have to worry about them kicking me out. The whole beauty and balance of the present system would be wrecked. We accept the idea that the Lords is the “Upper House” only because the Commons – being elected – has the real primacy and the real democratic legitimacy. These reforms would undermine that primacy, and the status of MPs – already bashed by the expenses business – would become positively Lilliputian.

The Prime Minister was completely right when he said that reform of the House of Lords was something the government should consider in its third term. This plan is a bunch of tidy-minded Lib Dem nonsense. It would create a new, grandiose, expensive and unnecessary class of political hack. It would turn Parliament into a chronic feud between two types of elected representative. Clegg’s scheme needs to be liquidated, vaporised and generally terminated with extreme prejudice.

It took hundreds of years before the population was restored to Roman levels. If we think that no such disaster could happen again, we are not just arrogant but forgetful of the lessons of the very recent past. Never mind the empty temples of the Aztecs or the Incas or the reproachful beehive structures of the lost civilisation of Great Zimbabwe. Look at our own era: the fate of European Jewry, massacred in the lifetimes of our parents and grandparents, on the deranged orders of an elected government in what had been one of the most civilised countries on earth; or look at the skyline of modern German cities, and mourn those medieval buildings blown to smithereens in an uncontrollable cycle of revenge. Yes, when things go backwards, they can go backwards fast. Technology, liberty, democracy, comfort – they can all go out of the window. However complacent we may be, in the words of the poet Geoffrey Hill, “Tragedy has us under regard”. Nowhere is that clearer than in Greece today.

Every day we read of fresh horrors: of once proud bourgeois families queuing for bread, of people in agony because the government has run out of money to pay for cancer drugs. Pensions are being cut, living standards are falling, unemployment is rising, and the suicide rate is now the highest in the EU – having been one of the lowest.

By any standards we are seeing a whole nation undergo a protracted economic and political humiliation; and whatever the result of yesterday’s election, we seem determined to make matters worse. There is no plan for Greece to leave the euro, or none that I can discover. No European leader dares suggest that this might be possible, since that would be to profane the religion of Ever Closer Union. Instead we are all meant to be conniving in a plan to create a fiscal union which (if it were to mean anything) would mean undermining the fundamentals of Western democracy.

This forward-marching concept of history – the idea of inexorable political and economic progress – is really a modern one. In ancient times, it was common to speak of lost golden ages or forgotten republican virtues or prelapsarian idylls. It is only in the past few hundred years that people have switched to the “Whig” interpretation, and on the face of it one can forgive them for their optimism. We have seen the emancipation of women, the extension of the franchise to all adult human beings, the acceptance that there should be no taxation without representation and the general understanding that people should be democratically entitled to determine their own fates.

And now look at what is being proposed in Greece. For the sake of bubble-gumming the euro together, we are willing to slaughter democracy in the very place where it was born. What is the point of a Greek elector voting for an economic programme, if that programme is decided in Brussels or – in reality – in Germany? What is the meaning of Greek freedom, the freedom Byron fought for, if Greece is returned to a kind of Ottoman dependency, but with the Sublime Porte now based in Berlin?

It won’t work. If things go on as they are, we will see more misery, more resentment, and an ever greater chance that the whole damn kebab van will go up in flames. Greece will one day be free again – in the sense that I still think it marginally more likely than not that whoever takes charge in Athens will eventually find a way to restore competitiveness through devaluation and leaving the euro – for this simple reason: that market confidence in Greek membership is like a burst paper bag of rice – hard to restore.

Without a resolution, without clarity, I am afraid the suffering will go on. The best way forward would be an orderly bisection into an old eurozone and a New Eurozone for the periphery. With every month of dither, we delay the prospect of a global recovery; while the approved solution – fiscal and political union – will consign the continent to a democratic dark ages.

Uh-huh, you bet, there you go, have a nice day, no problem at all, sir. With all the legendary courtesy of the American catering industry, the white-hatted staff were piling each plate with enough calories to feed a family of Eritreans for a week. There were barons of beef, swaddled in ribbons of delicious yellow fat. The bed of the Atlantic had been denuded to provide the tails – just the tails – of a thousand lobsters. It was a kind of gastronomic United Nations: here the Mexican enchiladas, there the Chinese chop suey, and everything served on an all-you-can-eat basis, where all-you-can-eat turns out to be a very large quantity indeed.

So far, it would be fair to say that New York and London have responded in much the same way. We all champion healthier eating; we sing the praises of vegetables; we wag our fingers at cheeseburgers; we extol the benefits of exercise. Kate Hoey has done wonders with her grassroots sports programme, aimed at rousing inactive kids and adults from the sofa.

New York is next month installing a cycle hire scheme, modelled on London’s, in the hope of getting people out of their cars. But now Mike Bloomberg is going a stage further. Mike is a businessman turned politician, but he began as a scientist, with a training in physics.

As he puts it, you cannot get around the laws of thermodynamics, and if you eat more than your body burns, you will get fatter. That is why he is asking the New York Health Board – which he effectively controls – to approve a ban on soft drink cups larger than 16 ounces. If you want to drink more than 16 ounces of Sprite or Coke or Dr Pepper, you will be perfectly at liberty to do so: but you will have to buy more than one cup. And he quotes all sorts of tests that show human beings will generally eat what is put in front of them. If you put more in front of them, they will eat more; if you reduce the size of the portion, they will eat less.

It sounds, on the face of it, like a pretty hysterical piece of nanny-statery. Mike Bloomberg has appeared to cast himself in the role of Mr Bumble the beadle, denouncing all those kids who have the effrontery to ask for more. As you can imagine, the proposal is the butt of plenty of jokes on TV shows, and a rabid reaction from Big Soda: an indignant Coca-Cola has been on the phone from Atlanta.

For those of us who are instinctively libertarian, it is all a bit difficult – at least philosophically. But never mind the philosophy; what about the practical effects? This is the same Bloomberg, after all, whose smoking ban was also derided, and then imitated around the world. His action against smoking is now seen as a big step in reducing a particularly nasty addiction that had claimed the lives of millions. Across the West, we are seeing a falling away in the number of cancers contracted, a fall in the number of deaths. If we could reduce the consumption of sugary drinks, and release some children from the captivity of fatness, might that not be worth exploring?

By next April, we will have a new and improved anti-obesity strategy in London, and yes, we will look at the practicality of Bloomberg’s ideas. In the meantime, I think we should pay tribute to the continuing boldness of the Mayor of New York. He has been a public official for longer than Obama. He has run a corporation far bigger than Romney’s. He is the 11th richest man in the US, with wealth of $22 billion, and yet he still cares about the size of paper cups and childhood obesity. There is still time for him to change his mind and go for the White House. Bloomberg for President!

And so they came and they cheered and they waved and they provided at last a past tense for bunting. They bunted for Britain.

They were cheering all kinds of things. They were acknowledging the spectacle of the pageant itself, the sheer joy of all those launches and lighters and dhows and dragon boats – everything from a weird coracle of the kind that Charon might have used to ferry the dead, to the little boats of Dunkirk, to the Gloriana herself, the first royal barge to be commissioned for more than a century, with her bank of golden oars flashing in unison – and if there is a lovelier vessel afloat I have yet to see it.

You could argue that they were showing an atavistic delight in the skill in boating and seamanship that made this country rich and which turned London from an estuarial swamp of pleistocene clay, with no minerals worth extracting, to the most powerful commercial centre on earth.

You could say that they were revelling in the spectacle of the city itself, conscious of the glory of the buildings that line the Thames and their own role as spectators in a TV occasion that was being watched by millions, if not billions, around the world.

But there is no getting away from the central point with which we began. They were cheering mainly for the Queen. It was, at root, a pretty simple feeling the crowd wanted to get over – a wish to thank her for 60 years of service to the country.

When you looked at the crowds on the banks of the Thames yesterday, you saw that they get the point the republicans miss. They know why she is so valuable, and that it is nothing to do with her politics or her lifestyle or the many houses or racehorses she owns.

She not only incarnates the history of the country in her DNA. She provides a focus for their own love of their country: and in that sense the monarchy fulfils a function that Left-wingers should fervently support. She collectivises the nation. In a selfish and atomised age, she gives people a way of thinking not so much about themselves, but about everyone; not me, but us. She has done it brilliantly for 60 years, and that is why they cheered for such hours; because no one in history has fulfilled that role so skilfully and so successfully.

I was on a boat with several members of the Royal family and I don’t think I am being indiscreet if I say they were stunned at the number of people on the riverbank. “I have never seen anything like it in my lifetime,” I said to Sir John Major. “And we won’t see anything like it again,” he said. Maybe not; but I bet our children will.

And so they came and they cheered and they waved and they provided at last a past tense for bunting. They bunted for Britain.

They were cheering all kinds of things. They were acknowledging the spectacle of the pageant itself, the sheer joy of all those launches and lighters and dhows and dragon boats – everything from a weird coracle of the kind that Charon might have used to ferry the dead, to the little boats of Dunkirk, to the Gloriana herself, the first royal barge to be commissioned for more than a century, with her bank of golden oars flashing in unison – and if there is a lovelier vessel afloat I have yet to see it.

You could argue that they were showing an atavistic delight in the skill in boating and seamanship that made this country rich and which turned London from an estuarial swamp of pleistocene clay, with no minerals worth extracting, to the most powerful commercial centre on earth.

You could say that they were revelling in the spectacle of the city itself, conscious of the glory of the buildings that line the Thames and their own role as spectators in a TV occasion that was being watched by millions, if not billions, around the world.

But there is no getting away from the central point with which we began. They were cheering mainly for the Queen. It was, at root, a pretty simple feeling the crowd wanted to get over – a wish to thank her for 60 years of service to the country.

When you looked at the crowds on the banks of the Thames yesterday, you saw that they get the point the republicans miss. They know why she is so valuable, and that it is nothing to do with her politics or her lifestyle or the many houses or racehorses she owns.

She not only incarnates the history of the country in her DNA. She provides a focus for their own love of their country: and in that sense the monarchy fulfils a function that Left-wingers should fervently support. She collectivises the nation. In a selfish and atomised age, she gives people a way of thinking not so much about themselves, but about everyone; not me, but us. She has done it brilliantly for 60 years, and that is why they cheered for such hours; because no one in history has fulfilled that role so skilfully and so successfully.

I was on a boat with several members of the Royal family and I don’t think I am being indiscreet if I say they were stunned at the number of people on the riverbank. “I have never seen anything like it in my lifetime,” I said to Sir John Major. “And we won’t see anything like it again,” he said. Maybe not; but I bet our children will.