Royal wedding snub for the Reverend Tony and Gordon McBroon

Neither Tony Blair nor Gordon Brown have been invited to Friday’s ceremony. The former Labour prime ministers will not join the 1,900-strong royal wedding congregation at Westminster Abbey despite it being a “semi-state” occasion that they had been widely expected to attend.

By contrast, both their Conservative predecessors, Sir John Major and Baroness Thatcher, received invitations. Lady Thatcher declined on health grounds although Sir John will be present when Prince William marries Kate Middleton. A spokesman for St James’s Palace said Mr Blair and Mr Brown had not received invitations because neither were Knights of the Garter, unlike Sir John and Lady Thatcher.



However, Labour MPs said it was “surprising” and “odd” that the pair had apparently been snubbed on what was a “great British occasion”. All surviving former prime ministers, Harold Macmillan, Alec Douglas-Home, Harold Wilson, Edward Heath and James Callaghan, attended the Prince of Wales’s marriage to Lady Diana Spencer at St Paul’s Cathedral in 1981.

The spokesman added: “There is no protocol reason to invite them, so unless they [the couple] wanted to invite former prime ministers for a personal reason, there’s no reason to do so. It is a private wedding and the couple are entitled to invite whoever they want to it. Prince William is not the Prince of Wales or the King, and he hasn’t got that link to prime ministers in the way that the Queen does.”