Category Archives: In the News

Paws, Peers and Poor Processes

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The Chief Mouser

Tomorrow will be a significant anniversary in British politics: It will be fifteen years since Larry, the cat pictured above, was appointed Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office. If he makes it another three years he will be the hold the record in that office. Already he is on a record six Prime Ministers and will soon greet his sixth Cabinet Secretary as well (see next paragraph). Actually, it would be interesting to do a census of the human officials currently working in Downing Street to see how many predate him. Larry, who was adopted by the Camerons just as the government’s modern web presence was being established, is the first to officially hold the title, but culturally it goes back just over a century to Rufus (or Treasury Bill), who performed the role during the premiership of Ramsay MacDonald. Larry is now well-established as an international celebrity in his own right, to the point that the government is rumoured to have made special plans for the announcement of his eventual death (he’s 19 years old). Despite this, there have also been reports that he is rather lazy and incompetent in his actual job of killing vermin. Yesterday Larry’s own Twitter account acknowledged the passing of his former colleague Palmerston, who was Chief Mouser to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office from 2016 to 2020.

The Cabinet Secretary

Sir Chris Wormald succeeded Simon Case as Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Home Civil Service fourteen months ago, having previously been Permanent Secretary at the Department of Health & Social Care since 2016. Whereas his tenure in that job was on the long side, his time as Cabinet Secretary is the shortest in the history of that post. Last summer there were already leaks from Number 10 suggesting that the government regretted his appointment and wanted him out. Two days ago it was announced that he would step down “by mutual consent”. Before the announcement had even been made there was speculation in the press that Sir Keir Starmer intended to choose Dame Antonia Romeo as his replacement. Romeo has spent the last ten months as Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, and for four years before that she was at the Ministry of Justice, where she concurrently held the ancient office of Clerk of the Crown in Chancery which among other perks gave her a prominent seat at the coronation. While she is a favourite among constitutional scholars (such as Elijah Granet of Legal Style Blog), there were also briefings against her by some former colleagues. So far, Starmer has not named a successor to Wormald, but has said that Romeo will form a troika with Catherine Little and James Bowler while the position lies vacant.

The Lord Doyle

Matthew Doyle is, like Peter Mandelson, a figure from the Blair years brought back to help Starmer’s government only to quickly bring the regime into serious disrepute (and for very similar yet unrelated reasons). Doyle was appointed Downing Street Director of Communications (a role created in 2000 for Alastair Campbell and later satirised with the fictional Malcolm Tucker) after the 2024 general election and stayed until 28th March last year. On 10th December it was announced that he had been nominated for a life peerage. He was created Baron Doyle on 8th January and took his seat in the upper house four days later. Four weeks after that he was suspended from the Labour Party. Given that the government was already embroiled in the Mandelson scandal, this was particularly embarrassing for Starmer. Conservative backbencher Lord Harper pointed out that Doyle’s letters patent were not sealed until after the revelations came out and thus it would have been possible for the Prime Minister to postpone or withdraw his ennoblement. This was confirmed by House of Lords authorities.

Discussing this on the Parliament Matters podcast, Mark D’Arcy made an observation that I have long held:

Even though the House of Lords is half of the legislative process in Parliament, it’s remarkable how little most people in the House of Commons actually know about how it works. It’s another country from whose bourne no traveller returns as far as the Commons is concerned. Not quite true actually. A couple of them have. But it is this very strange feature of Westminster life that there is so much ignorance in the Commons about the workings of the Lords and very little inclination to learn much about it either.

He had earlier brought up a speech made in the Commons by Darren Jones, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister, about proposed legislation to allow disgraced peers to be deprived of their baronies. I’m a little surprised D’Arcy didn’t highlight what the minister actually said, because at one point while bringing up the Titles Deprivation Act 1917 he managed to get World War One and World War Two confused. Worse still, nobody else in the chamber at the time pointed this out.

The Next State Visit

Nothing about Their Majesties’ outbound diplomacy has yet been confirmed for this year, but already we have one inbound state visit on the cards: The President & First Lady of Nigeria will be coming to Windsor Castle on 18th March. This is unusually early in the year for such an event (as they normally don’t start until the autumn) and is only the second time in the present reign that a Commonwealth president has been received in such a way. President Tinubu last had a royal audience in September 2024, and before that was visited in his home country by James Cleverly in 2023.

The Palace of Westminster

It has been over six years since the Parliamentary Buildings (Restoration & Renewal) Act was passed, yet progress on the actual restoration has been negligible. The House of Commons and House of Lords Commissions recently put out a joint report predicting that the work could take up to sixty-one years and cost up to £39 billion. This naturally has caused widespread outrage and been held up as the perfect symbol of the British state’s incapability of getting anything done in the modern age.

The R&R Programme in its current state was savaged in The Critic by Nicholas Boys Smith, Founding Director of Create Streets. Smith’s article seems to have been taken up by Parliamentarians themselves, with Lord Hannan of Kingsclere in particular claiming

Rarely have I seen an article taken up by politicians as swiftly and as thoroughly as this one. Every MP and peer is talking about it.

although of course that will be hard to objectively verify. Although Smith himself does not mention it directly (despite the article name), I have seen a few commentators bring up the possibility of Charles III personally taking charge of the project. While that may seem outlandish by the conventions of modern politics, there is a logic to it: Charles has been dedicated to the cause of traditional architecture for many decades, and has arranged the construction of two entire towns (Poundbury and Nansledan) in less time than the Westminster restoration is expected to take. Given that the Palace is technically a royal residence, it is also worth bringing up restoration works on other royal residences which the royal family still occupy: The rebuilding of Windsor Castle after the 1992 fire was completed in five years without a government grant, and the refurbishment of Buckingham Palace is expected to be completed next year with relatively little disruption along the way. It may solve a different problem, too: It has been known for a long time that the royals themselves are not all that keen on Buck House and have long wished to shift the emphasis to Windsor as the main residence. Elizabeth II & Philip Mountbatten were happily embedded at Clarence House before the death of George VI and would have continued living there had Churchill not insisted they move. As the 2020 pandemic seized the nation, the late sovereign decamped to Windsor for the duration of the lockdown, and as restrictions eased she decided not to move back. Charles & Camilla are likewise still at Clarence House, even continuing to use it for their private social functions and all the charities they founded as Duke & Duchess of Cornwall. The refurbishment has given them the perfect excuse not to move, as well as to redirect state visits to Windsor. As the building returns to an available state next year it could be a canny strategic move for him to graciously offer it to MPs and peers while he takes back control of Westminster. Caroline Shenton’s book Mr Barry’s War details the reconstruction of the Palace in the nineteenth century following the great fire. It mentions that Parliament turned down an offer from William IV to move to Buckingham Palace. This time around it may prove harder to refuse. Furthermore, a lot of the delay in the current project is due to some MPs’ and peers’ reluctance to commit to a full decamp, understandably fearful that once they take their foot out of the door they may never get it back in again, or that by the time they do their old home will have changed beyond all recognition. The King’s own hand at the tiller may be just the reassurance they need.

UPDATE (15th February)

Professor Norton has put out an article on the matter of peerage nominations and their opportunities for withdrawal.

The Return of Mock the Week

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By the time it was decommissioned by the BBC in 2022 (the last series kicking off just as Elizabeth II died), Mock the Week had been around for seventeen years. It started after Tony Blair’s re-election for a third term in 2005 and ended just as Rishi Sunak was about to take over from Liz Truss. It had become a mainstay of British political comedy, and no true successor emerged in its absence in 2023, -4 and -5.

Last month it was revealed with little notice or fanfare that the series had been recommissioned, but not on the BBC this time. Instead it now airs on the multinational but lesser-known TLC, as part of a major relaunch of that channel’s British offerings. There is also a small change of recording venue, from the BBC Elstree Centre to Elstree Studios a few hundred metres away.

At time of writing, two episodes of the revived series have been aired, with perhaps another five scheduled.

By and large, the new episodes are the same as the old with no changes to the fundamentals of the formula, so the segments and rounds are all familiar to those who saw the original. Notably the latest series features a revival of the “Between the Lines” which the BBC series dropped a long time ago.

Many of the panellists are also carried over, including late-stage regulars Angela Barnes, Sarah Pascoe and Rhys James; perennial recurring guests Ed Byrne and Milton Jones; and late-stage semi-regular Ahir Shah. The only brand new guest so far is Lou Sanders. Dara Ó Briain of course returns to host. There was no return of Frankie Boyle despite much public clamouring, though the premiere did feature a one-off comeback by early-regular Russell Howard, who acknowledged that it had been more than fifteen years since he last appeared on the old show. This is all important for establishing a sense of continuity. The one glaring absence is Hugh Dennis, who was a constant presence on the original series but had scheduling conflicts for the first two episodes of the revival.

As I have written before, a lot of British comedy panel shows are now experienced primarily as a series of online compilations of short segments, often many years removed from the context of their original air dates. This works even if, as is the case here, the jokes and commentary are in direct response to weekly events and thus in theory should be locked in time. Because so many years are mashed together like this, one’s mental cache of what the programme was like can become a vague blend which averages at somewhere about a decade ago. This is also true of the appearances of the panellists, and thus seeing them in new recordings can be quite a shock to the system as they seem to age a great amount very suddenly. I found this to be especially true in Howard’s case.

This still the main photograph on Howard’s Wikipedia page. I screenshotted it from a promotional video he did in 2017.

Also, I found that something was… slightly off about the set. It almost looked the same as the old one but a few little details had changed, the most obvious being that the main desk looked smaller and tighter than before. The font on the SWLTS topics looked different too. It was as if the old set had been recreated by sight, or even from memory, without access to the blueprints.

The overall effect of the sum of these little details was to make the first episode feel like something of a fever dream. I had to check online the next morning to reassure myself that the experience was real and not just something my brain had extrapolated out of desperation. Luckily it is real, and it looks set to be around for some time to come (although actually finding TLC to watch it at the correct time is difficult as the panellists themselves acknowledge).

The only major and deliberate departure from the old format is the increased runtime: Each episode is now three quarters of an hour long (padded to a full hour with commercial breaks) instead of half. Ó Briain says this is not a case of filming more material than before but rather of cutting less of it out before broadcast. While it is difficult to turn down the chance to see more material from the team, especially after a drought of three years, I was conscious sometimes that the lack of tight editing occasionally caused a segment to drag on too long and lose momentum, and that the panellists were sauntering back-and-forth too many times between the main desk and the performance area. Still, these issues are very minor and hopefully will be sorted as the series progresses. 

The Dark Lord Falls

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He won’t be smiling much anymore.

Peter Mandelson is no stranger to scandal-induced resignations: He resigned from Blair’s cabinet twice in the space of three years and lately he resigned as Britain’s Ambassador to the United States after a tenure of just seven months. He was dismissed from the ceremonial office of High Sheriff of Hull at the same time.

Today he announced his intention to retire from the House of Lords, having already taken leave of absence on Saturday. He additionally resigned from the Labour Party on Sunday, meaning he briefly had the designation of non-affiliated peer.

His departure from the upper house will not make much practical difference as he had long ceased to be a regular contributor to proceedings — he spoke in the House just five times in the past five years and thirteen times in the five years before that. In a break from normal procedure, the Lord Speaker announced Mandelson’s gave advanced notice of his retirement, “given the public interest”. This, incidentally, was the first retirement announcement of Michael Forsyth’s speakership, which only began yesterday. On the woolsack he must obviously remain studiously neutral in such matters, but I can’t help wondering what his personal feelings are, given that he lost his seat in the House of Commons in the 1997 New Labour landslide in which Mandelson played such an important role.

The retirement is obviously a case of jumping before he was pushed, as many of his political enemies (always a sizeable group, now an enormous one) had been threatening that if he did not leave of his own accord then they would take measures to force him out.

The House of Lords Reform Act 2014 (by which he retired) allows peers to be expelled if sentenced to prison terms of at least one year while the House of Lords (Expulsion and Suspension) Act 2015 allows the House to evict members who breach the code of conduct, but the necessary investigations — both by Parliament itself and by the Metropolitan Police — would have taken too long to satisfy the public’s bloodlust. In any case the former act only applies to convictions for crimes committed after its own commencement, whereas most of Mandelson’s alleged offences are from well before.

Even after this announcement, there are still some calling for him to lose his title. As with the former Prince Andrew (and for many of the same reasons), this could most quickly achieved by him writing to the Lord Chancellor to request his name by omitted from the Roll of the Peerage. This may not satisfy his opponents, some of whom are explicitly calling for an Act of Parliament to formally revoke the letters patent of 2008 by which his peerage was created. Perhaps the old-fashioned Bill of Attainder will come back into fashion after all.

UPDATE (4th February)

Mandelson’s retirement was announced properly today. I note that the words “On behalf of the House, I should like to thank the noble Lord for his valued service to the House.” which normally accompany such announcements were omitted on this occasion.

It was also reported today that the Prime Minister wishes to remove him from the Privy Council. It appears he came to this decision just after yesterday’s meeting as nothing to that effect is listed in the agenda or the minutes. Either the enactment of Mandelson’s expulsion will wait until next month’s meeting or a special session will shortly be convened for this purpose.

The New Lord Speaker

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Following the slightly-expedited retirement of the Lord McFall of Alcluith, the Lord Forsyth of Drumlean today sat on the woolsack for the first time as Lord Speaker.

Michael Forsyth’s political career began with a five-year stint (beginning 1978) on Westminster City Council, followed by a fourteen year tenure as Member of Parliament for Stirling, where he was unseated in 1997. In the 1990s he served in a rapid succession of Minister of State roles before peaking at Secretary of State for Scotland in 1995.

He spent two years out of Parliament before receiving a life peerage in 1990. He never returned to ministerial office but did serve in a lot of important (if unglamorous) committees. He was declared Lord Speaker-elect on 12th January, having beaten the crossbencher Baroness Bull (former creative director of the Royal Opera House) by 383 votes to 297. His royal confirmation was notified to the chamber by the Lord Chamberlain of the Household, Lord Benyon. A hustings for the election was filmed by the Hansard Society in December.

Now that the office of Lord Speaker is nearing its twentieth anniversary and is on its fifth holder, it may be prudent to review some statistics:

  • The office has been held by two Ladies (Hayman and D’Souza) and three Lords (Fowler, McFall and Forsyth).
  • Three were born and raised in England (Hayman, D’Souza, Fowler) and two in Scotland (McFall, Forsyth).
  • Two came from the Conservative party (Fowler, Forsyth), two from Labour (Hayman, McFall*) and one the Crossbenches (D’Souza).
  • Hayman and Fowler attended Cambridge (Newnham and Trinity Hall respectively), D’Souza UCL and then Oxford (Lady Margaret Hall), McFall Paisley College of Technology, then the Open University, then the University of Strathclyde; Forsyth the University of St Andrews.
  • The five have had varying levels of prior political experience: Fowler spent thirty-one years in the Commons, eleven of them as Secretary of State; Forsyth had fourteen years, of which two as Secretary of State and five as Minister of State; McFall twenty-three years, of which two-and-a-half as a very junior minister then nine as a very senior committee chair; Hayman spent under five years as an MP (all on the backbenches) but then had four years of ministerial experience in the Lords, of which two in cabinet. D’Souza is the only one never to have been a minister nor a member of the Commons.
  • D’Souza was a peer for seven years before becoming Speaker, Hayman ten, McFall eleven, Fowler fifteen, Forsyth twenty-six.
  • Hayman took office aged 57, D’Souza 67, Forsyth 71, McFall 76 and Fowler 78.

As I have mentioned before, no armorial bearings are known for the first four Lord Speakers (despite Hayman having been on Flags & Heraldry group). Forsyth breaks this trend, as I found his blazon on page 470 of Debrett’s Peerage 2015. The illustration below is by Cakelot1.

  • Escutcheon: Argent a chevronnel engrailed Gules between in chief two griffins respectant Azure armed and membered Gules crowned Or and supporting a square block of roughly dressed sandstone Proper with a ring at each end Sable and in base a hurt charged with a mascle Argent.
  • Crest: A griffin sergeant Azure armed and membered Gules crowned Or and charged on the shoulder with a mascle Argent.
  • Supporters: Two griffins Azure armed and membered Sable crowned Or and each charged on the shoulder with a mascle Argent.
  • Motto: Learn From The Past

It is worth noting also that McFall interviewed Forsyth on the Lord Speaker’s Corner podcast in December 2023. Last week, in the final episode before the handover, McFall was himself interviewed by the Baroness Hazarika (incidentally he interviewed her almost exactly a year before).

*Although McFall had left the Labour group and sat as unaffiliated from 2016.

Reformare vel Florere

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Photograph from 9th July 2024 in the House of Commons Chamber

It has been widely reported in the past few months that Reform UK has experienced significant growth in Parliamentary representation. In July 2024 its caucus in the House of Commons had five members:

  • Lee Ashfield (Ashfield)
  • Nigel Farage (Clacton)
  • Rupert Lowe (Great Yarmouth)
  • James McMurdock (South Basildon & East Thurrock)
  • Richard Tice (Boston & Skegness)

(Anderson is not included in the photograph above because it was an event for new MPs and he had already served since 2019. More on that later.)

Given the history of parties with which Farage has been associated, it should be no surprise that this combination did not last long.

Lowe was the first to go: On 7th March 2025 he was suspended from the party due to bullying allegations. On 30th June that year he launched his own party named Restore Britain. Oddly, on 1st December he then launched a second (though as yet unregistered) local party named Great Yarmouth First. I don’t know of any precedent for the same person leading two self-founded parties simultaneously.

Mc Murdock wasn’t long behind him: On 5th July, the anniversary of his election declaration, he was suspended due to allegations that he fraudulently claimed state loans for his businesses during the pandemic. Three days later he resigned from the party and now sits as an independent.

Losing forty per cent of your original parliamentary party in the first year of that Parliament’s sitting is, to say the least, unfortunate, but the party gained MPs faster than it lost them:

On 1st May 2025 Reform candidate Sarah Pochin narrowly wrought the seat of Runcorn & Helsby in a by-election, following the resignation of disgraced Labour MP Mike Amesbury. On 15th September the shadow junior minister Danny Kruger (East Wiltshire) defected. In January 2026 there were three further defections from the Conservatives to Reform:

  • Robert Jenrick (Newark) on 15th.
  • Andrew Rosindell (Romford) on 18th.
  • Suella Braverman (Fareham & Waterlooville) on 26th.

Rosindell has been mentioned on this blog once before. He is relatively-low profile, being a junior shadow minister under both Cameron and Badenoch (the latter right up until his defection) but missing out on any actual post while his party was in government. Jenrick and Braverman are relative high-flyers, having both been Secretaries of State since 2019 and both contested the Conservative Party leadership at least once.

On 6th December last year, the Lord Offord of Garvel (a junior minister from 2021 to 2024) joined the party, and on 15th January was appointed head of its Scottish branch with the intent to lead the party into the Holyrood elections in May. This gave Reform its first representation in the upper house, but the experience was short-lived because he formally retired on Friday.

Looking at the Reform group in the House of Commons now, this is what we get:

  • Lee Ashfield (original)
  • Suella Braverman (defection)
  • Nigel Farage (original)
  • Robert Jenrick (defection)
  • Danny Kruger (defection)
  • Sarah Pochin (by-election)
  • Andrew Rosindell (defection)
  • Richard Tice (defection)

Nineteen months from the general election, the original group have already become a minority, outnumbered by the newcomers — which feels oddly poignant given how much of the party’s support is based on anxieties about immigration. It’s worth remembering that even among the original group, Ashfield was not new to the House of Commons, having been elected as a Conservative candidate in 2019 and served as that party’s Deputy Chairman as recently as January 2024. It remains to be seen how stable this association will be given that it involves at least two people who only joined the new party after trying and failing to win the crown of the old, and who may not be comfortable for long submitting to the authority of Farage when he has so much less legislative and governmental experience than they do.

As has been pointed out in numerous articles and editorials by now, this illustrates the dilemma facing Reform: They have long leaned on their “outsider”, “anti-establishment” status under their charismatic leader, but now as it looks ever more likely that they could actually win power they obviously need to start acting more like a serious party of government rather than a protest movement, which means getting people on board with experience of how to operate in Whitehall and Westminster. Unfortunately for them, the Conservatives aren’t necessarily sending their best people, so that Farage could end up being forced to present the electorate with a supposedly-revolutionary government composed in no small part of the very same individuals who created the mess against which he’s revolting!

As a counter all this, a new movement has recently emerged called Prosper UK. This is a group within the Conservative Party, rather than a new party in its own right, though ironically the same name was used in 2018-20 for an unrelated (and unsuccessful) minor party under Alan Sked, the original founder of UKIP.

Prosper is predominantly a campaign for the liberal, moderate, “One Nation” (and also Remain-voting) Conservatives who have found themselves increasingly marginalised following the referendum ten years ago.

The Baroness Davidson of Lundin Links, Co-Founder and Co-Chair of Prosper

I found the group’s Wikipedia page with a simple list of the names of its supporters taken directly from its own website. Bit by bit I transformed the simple list into a sortable table with photographs and notes. Unlike the ill-fated Change UK/Independent Group from 2019, Prosper launches with seventy prominent names attached, many of whom have held senior government posts. The downside is that the group looks to be mainly a collection of yesterday’s stars: Among the seventy names in that list I found only three who are currently holding an elected public office (one council leader and two police commissioners). There are no incumbent members of the House of Commons at all, instead the vast majority are former MPs who either stood down or were voted out out some time ago. Fifteen of the former MPs now sit in the House of Lords, as do two of the party’s former leaders in the Scottish and European Parliaments (Davidson and Kirkhope respectively).

Shortly after the launch, Kemi Badenoch gave a speech explicitly rejecting a return to centrism, which means that their prospects of meaningful influence over the direction of the wider party are likely to be very limited for the foreseeable future. Still, at least this whole exercise helped me to bump my edit count up. Labutnum rank, here I come!

Some Small Trifles About Titles

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There was a fair bit of media interest generated two days ago when the Prince of Wales took his elder son to London homeless charity The Passage.

Nowadays most television news broadcasts have a ticker graphic at the bottom of the screen which gives the top few trending headlines. News headlines often adopt a strained form of English which omits various words from a sentence for the sake of concision. When it comes to ticker reels, this is often so that the sentence can fit within the width of the screen without needing to use an illegibly-small font*.

In this case, the BBC ticker reported the royal headline as “George joins Prince William in preparing meal for homeless“, raising the awkward question of why the former’s princely title was omitted while the latter’s was retained. The next was an entirely-unrelated headline about the final of the latest series of Strictly Come Dancing, in which the celebrity finalists were Amber Davies, Karen Carney and George Clarke. The ticker omitted all their surnames, resulting in two adjacent titles involving apparently-mononymous Georges. A viewer unfamiliar with the subject matter could have thought they were the same person. There may have been yet another headline about “Andrew” in the same rotation, but I can’t find the clip on iPlayer to check.

Prince George of Wales in 2023

George Clarke in 2024

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As it turned out, there was a royal connection in the Strictly story: The Queen had written a message to two outgoing presenters, which was read aloud by Craig Revel Horwood during the broadcast. The online text of the message was headed by the Timothy Noad illustration of the royal arms (rather than the impaled arms of the actual sender, as might have been more appropriate), and signed “Camilla R”. Horwood read it out as “Her Royal Highness, Queen Camilla” which of course is not correct. The page on his clipboard is briefly visible but never properly shown to the camera.

For the past year Sir Stephen Fry has been playing the role of Lady Bracknell in a production of The Importance of Being Ernest. He performed a small skit in that role for this year’s Royal Variety Performance. Jason Manford, the host, introduced the character as “Lady Augusta Bracknell”. This another pet peeve of heraldists, for she derives her title as the wife of a peer (of unspecified rank, but presumably not a duke) rather than as the daughter of an earl or above.

*This is less of a problem when the text continually slides from right to left instead of the bar rotating vertically every few seconds.

Jimmy Wales on the BBC

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Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, yesterday gave an interview about the challenges of keeping the project running, including maintaining fidelity in the age of misinformation and staying neutral in the face of (often bad faith) bias allegations from both sides of a paranoid partisan divide. These are of course issues with which the BBC itself is all too familiar.

Two months ago Wales gave a similar interview to Channel 4.

The King’s Cancer Message

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Since the announcement last February that His Majesty had (an unspecified form of) cancer, speculation about the monarch’s health was inevitable. In just the past few days I found a handful of headlines suggesting that he was on death’s door:

The above are the few I can find that are close to original. There were plenty of duplicate headlines either from other news sources that were mirror sites of these, or that repackaged the same articles, or at least referred to these as their source. They all seem to come from one interview with an unnamed royal insider and the story was not picked up by any of the remotely reputable British papers (or even some of the fairly disreputable ones) so I would judge that it is safe to dismiss as trash.

Early yesterday it was announced that Charles III himself would release a message about his experience. Some outlets referred to this as his “cancer journey”. Based on the headlines above, one would expect the message to be that he would soon, well… arrive. The message wasn’t actually released until after 8pm, so for the entire day viewers were held in suspense. This strikes me as perhaps a misstep, since the vacuum allowed further morbid rumours to circulate.

The King actually announced that he was recovering and his treatment could be reduced next year. Clearly, he does expect to see the Christmases of 2026, 2027 and beyond after all.

The message was uploaded on the royal family’s official YouTube channel as a standalone video but it was also broadcast on Channel 4 as part of an episode of Stand Up to Cancer. The video on the YouTube channel was clearly extracted directly from the television broadcast as, unlike their other videos, there were no title cards featuring any royal insignia. Instead all the onscreen graphics were from Channel 4, and it even had the “4” logo in the top left corner throughout. This could be an oversight, or perhaps it was at the channel’s own insistence.

Notes on the German State Visit

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Last week Windsor Castle hosted the last of three state visits this year, featuring Frank-Walter Steinmeier & Elke Büdenbender, President & First Lady of the Federal Republic of Germany.

This one made the news far less (most likely because it was far less controversial) than that of Donald Trump in September. Unlike Trump, Steinmeier was able to partake in the public-facing elements of a state visit, such as the carriage ride through the streets of Windsor and an address in the royal gallery of the House of Lords.

This was in some ways the reciprocation of the state visit which our King & Queen made to Germany in 2023. In his state banquet speech Steinmeier said to Charles

“the fact that your very first trip abroad as King brought you to Germany was a special symbol of the German-British friendship, a gesture of appreciation which meant a great deal to me and to us Germans.”

This is not strictly true as Their Majesties had been planning to visit France first, but that visit was postponed a few months as Macron dealt with protests over state pensions.

The King’s speech at the same event included this quip

“our languages, English and German, [ ] share such deep common roots, but now do sound a little different. It is undoubtedly true, that your language contains a very large number of very long words. As someone who has spent some time trying to learn a little Welsh, I have some sympathy for the proposition that needless gaps between words are a dreadfully inefficient use of paper… “

There was no exchange of honours this time, as Steinmeier had already been appointed an honorary GCB during the aforementioned 2023 visit. He and Charles both wore their red sashes to dinner. The Prime Minister, a KCB, notably continues not to wear his badge.

The Duke of Kent did not attend the state banquet but he later separately met the Bundespräsident at a service at Coventry Cathedral, to commemorate its bombing during the Second World War. It is worth remembering that the Duke is now the only living British prince to have been born before that war started. We got a rare glimpse of his royal cypher on a wreath lain at the old altar.

Steinmeier also had a meeting with Sir Keir Starmer at 10 Downing Street. While his state visit was still going on Starmer also had an unrelated meeting with the Prime Minister of Norway, and already since the President’s departure he has held another “Coalition of the Willing” meeting including Chancellor Merz.

From a ceremonial perspective there is little innovation here (bar a lot of stories about tiaras), as the proceedings stuck closely to the template established by recent precedents. The most interesting parts are His Majesty’s and His Excellency’s speeches, which I think, well, speak for themselves.

Recent state visits have been good opportunities for uploading free-licence photographs to Wikimedia Commons but sadly on this occasion the pickings have been very limited as the government Flickr accounts’ only pictures of Steinmeier are of his visit to Downing Street, leaving out anything involving the royals. Those on the Parliamentary accounts are not released under the correct licence, and it doesn’t look as if the German government has the same attitude to copyright that the British one does so finding anything from their end is also unlikely.

David Lammy and Bleak House

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David Lammy, in his new role as Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain and Secretary of State for Justice, has recently announced plans to tackle a long-running backlog of cases in the English & Welsh judicial system by severely narrowing the circumstances in which juries are used for deciding the verdicts in criminal cases, transitioning trials for less serious offences to relying solely on the judge. These plans are highly controversial, with detractors expressing suspicion that he will undermine long-standing principles of English constitutionalism as well as scepticism that the move will actually save any time or money.

Lammy has attracted particular ridicule for a comment in an interview that was reported in The Times two days ago:

I remember studying Bleak House for my A-levels, and the Jarndyce and Jarndyce case that went on and on and on. We cannot go back to a Victorian system in which all new people who are the victims of crime don’t get justice.

The 1853-2 novel Bleak House is a satire of the English court system of the early nineteenth century and is credited with spurring on reforms later in that century, but to use the Jarndyce case (or any of the real one inspiring it) as a justification for Lammy’s proposals is nonsensical as this was a probate case in the Court of Chancery (later succeeded by the Chancery Division in the High Court of England & Wales) not a criminal case, and crucially it did not involve any juries!

Then again, the Lord Chancellor is not the only one to fail to understand that story: Over recent years (well, decades really) there have been growing concerns among the intellectual classes that their own numbers may functional literacy among the populations of developed countries is going into decline. One particular alarm bell was sounded last year in A Study of the Reading Comprehension Skills of English Majors at Two Midwestern Universities, entitled “They Don’t Read Very Well“, which used the first seven paragraphs of Bleak House as the yardstick. A worrying proportion of English majors (for whom reading literature should really be a specialist skill) struggled to understand it.

I listened to the LibriVox recording of Bleak House in 2022 and watched the BBC adaptation of it in 2024. I know from reading through Great Expectations that Dickens, being paid by the word, had a habit of using far too many when far fewer would do, but the idea that his works may be slipping out of human comprehension, even among those who have specifically chosen literature as a course of study, has implications which themselves are bleaker than the house could ever be.