I have always been embarrassed by my name. It is too long and too pretentious, and it is difficult to say it without sounding self-conscious. Furthermore, although "chancellor" is a perfectly ordinary English word, people find it difficult to accept as a family name.
When I identify myself on the telephone, it is often assumed that I must be called Chandler or Challoner, so improbable does the name Chancellor seem to them. And, to my acute irritation, I am almost always asked to spell it out, even after I have explained that it is spelled the same as Chancellor of the Exchequer, or Lord Chancellor, or the Chancellor of Oxford University.
This seems to me evidence that standards of literacy really have fallen in this country.
When I entered journalism more than 40 years ago, I feared that my silly name would hold me back. And my senior colleagues in Reuters seem to have agreed, for they habitually shortened my Christian name in bylines to Alec or Alex without consulting me.
Perversely, I asked for my full name to be re-instated. It wasn't that I liked it, but it felt weird to be given a nickname in a byline that nobody had ever called me in real life. Whether I liked it or not, I wasn't Alec or Alex: I was and would remain Alexander, however great a disadvantage that might be.
You may wonder why I didn't change it. After all, Anthony Wedgwood Benn became Tony Benn and Anthony Blair became Tony Blair, so why couldn't Alexander Chancellor become something a bit snappier, too? Alex Chance, perhaps? But it seemed to me to be like interfering with nature.
My name might be horrible, but I didn't want it to be genetically modified. I didn't want to pretend to be somebody I wasn't, or to make myself artificially sound matey and egalitarian. I might or might not be those things, but I didn't see why that should have anything to do with what I was called.
Nevertheless, I cursed my parents for giving me such a long Christian name. I couldn't blame them for my surname - they had been saddled with that themselves - but they could have mitigated the damage by giving me a single-syllable first name, like my lucky brother John.
How I have envied my colleagues in the press, such as Charles Moore, or Craig Brown, or the late George Gale. Their simple, down-to-earth names must have given them a head-start in our trade. Readers would be predisposed to like and trust them, whereas I had an aura of pomposity to live down.
But I cheered myself up by thinking about other journalists with silly names who had bravely overcome their disability. What about Sir Peregrine Worsthorne? His two names are, admittedly, two syllables shorter than mine, but, arguably, they are even sillier. And he has been one of the giants of Fleet Street. And I mustn't forget Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd, the former obituaries editor of the Daily Telegraph, whose name was so long that it couldn't be squeezed into the space allotted to bylines in the books pages of the Spectator. But it didn't stop him becoming a celebrated and respected journalist. It was long after he established himself as such that he eventually decided, for his own reasons, to drop the "Montgomery" from his name.
And perhaps, after all, there is some grandeur in a long name. Into mine I could incorporate Charles Moore, Craig Brown, and George Gale, and still have one syllable left over. By the same measure, I could outstretch three members of the present Cabinet - Jack Straw, Geoff Hoon and John Reid. With just one extra syllable, I could include Charles Clarke as well.
I am hoping that the unpopularity of the Blair government may bring long names back into fashion, for the names in his cabinet are striking for their brevity. Including the aforementioned ministers with two names of one syllable each, eight of the 22 cabinet ministers (among them Tony Blair and Gordon Brown) have one-syllable surnames, and only two (Lord Falconer and Ian McCartney) have surnames of more than two syllables.
I suspect that there has been no British government in history with names so short. Tory cabinets have always contained grandees with preposterous names such as Reginald Manningham-Buller, but even Labour governments were not until now averse to double-barrelled names: think of Patrick Gordon-Walker and, of course, Wedgwood Benn.
Thank you. I'm feeling better now.