True Brit
Sir: I am very grateful to Boris Johnson for his article k'Congratulations, it's a Belgian', 31 July) about his daughter being Belgian. I am appalled — but not at all surprised that the principal aim of most Home Office administrators is to waste British citizens' time and to make them as confused and as unhappy as possible.
Like Mr Johnson, I was not born in Britain, but I am British. To complicate matters, my wife's father is Dutch but she has never lived in Holland as her father worked for a multinational company. By education, culture and marriage she is British — however, her new European passport tells her she is Dutch. We were married in Lyme Regis but we now live in France where we run our own business. My wife is expecting a baby in December and we want our child to have a British pass- port. Naturally, this is not proving straight- forward. When we rang up the British embassy in Paris, the woman to whom we spoke said that she always returned to Britain to give birth to her British babies as it was simpler than coping with the paperwork.
The Traceys came to Britain with William the Conqueror and decided to stay. Mercifully, there were fewer officious and meddlesome people in the Home Office in those days and so no objections were raised. About a hundred years passed and then Henry II mentioned that his chancel-
lor, who was moonlighting as Archbishop of Canterbury, was being a meddlesome priest of whom he wished to be rid. Sir William de Tracey and three of his chums went to Can- terbury and did the deed which led to Thomas a Becket being canonised and Sir William being sent off on a crusade to atone for his sycophantic misjudgment. The Traceys then lived relatively blameless lives in south-west England for the next seven and a half centuries until my father, faced with the alternative of being a Cambridge classics don, decided instead that once more the Traceys should do their bit for the Crown. He enlisted in the Sudan Political Service and was serving as the governor of the Northern Province, where I was born, in 1946.
I hope that I shall not have to go to Iran to convert the ayatollahs to Christianity to atone for my father's service to the Crown and to ensure that my child has British nationality.
Richard Tracey
Le Grand Osier, St Helen, 22100 Dinan,
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