Category Archives: Royal Family

Notes on the England Coast Path

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The King, fresh off his farewell to President Tinubu, made headlines on the cliffs of Seven Sisters, Sussex, on Thursday by officially opening what may physically be his largest namesake, the King Charles III England Coast Path.

Charles’s coat looks quite like the sort of thing my grandmother would have worn.

As the government’s press release explains, the project actually long predates his reign, his name being appended to it in 2023 as part of his coronation celebrations. It resulted from the Marine and Coastal Access Act passed all the way back in 2009 and, as all the updates on this other government webpage indicate, it was supposed to be completed by 2030, then optimistically brought forward to 2020, then pushed back again during the pandemic.

The ambition was to link up all the existing footpaths, as well as carving out new ones where needed, to create a continuous walking trail which covered the entirety of the English coast line. Of course, the English coast line itself is not continuous, as England has sizeable land borders with Scotland and Wales. A Wales Coast Path, proposed in 2006 and completed in 2012, links up to the English one in two places and there is also a Scottish Coastal Way in the pipeline. As this is a devolved matter, the institutions are not entirely alike and it is not certain if the other two will ever bear the monarch’s name, or if Northern Ireland will attempt something similar. Even now, despite the official opening this week, the English path has 20% still to go and is expected to be completed at the end of 2026. “Coast” is also being used in quite a broad sense, as the path incorporates trails along not only the seas, but also the rivers — including the Humber, which runs quite close to my house and along which I walk fairly regularly.

The situation with the naming and timing has some echoes of the Elizabeth Line, the commuter railway through Greater London from Reading to Shenfield, which likewise was a combination of new paths built from scratch and old ones appropriated. The proposals had been floated as far back as the 1940s and work finally began in 2009. The construction project was called Crossrail, and this by default might have become the name of the completed railway. It was only in 2016, in the run up to Elizabeth II’s ninetieth birthday, that the line was named after her. The name was slightly controversial as it gave the false impression of being part of the London Underground rather than a different railway in its own right. The completion was originally scheduled for 2018 but, inevitably, there were delays and services did not run until 2022. The repeated schedule slips raised concerns over whether Elizabeth herself would live to open her namesake line. In the event she did open the first section in May that year, but had died by the time the rest opened in November.

Hopefully His Present Majesty will not exhibit the same phenomenon.

 

 

Commonwealth Day 2026

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The Commonwealth of Nations traditionally has its annual day of celebration on the second Monday in March. This is marked in many ceremonies around the world, but most prominent is a special service at Westminster Abbey, put on by the Royal Commonwealth Society, attended by the Head of the Commonwealth and several members of his family, along with diplomatic and cultural representatives from the various member countries. The service includes some speeches, some religious readings, a parade of member states’ flags and a series of musical performances from groups representing different global regions.

For all of this century so far the Abbey service has been broadcast live by the BBC (specifically “BBC Studio Events”), and the last few have been archived on iPlayer, as well as the Corporation’s YouTube channel. This year, however, the highly controversial announcement was made that the service would not be aired, the time-slot being given instead to a rerun of Escape to the Country. Allegedly this was made on cost grounds. Although the headlines initially only referred to live broadcasts, it later became apparent that the service had not been properly filmed at all. This is a rather baffling decision on the embattled BBC’s part. Given how much experience they have shooting in the Abbey — not just for these services, but also for weddings, coronations, funerals and military commemorations — it really should be second nature by now. Also, given that they have recently lost the rights to broadcast this year’s Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, as well as some other high-profile sporting events, one might have expected them to defend their remaining prerogatives with all their might.

The service did not go totally unrecorded: There are stills available on Getty Images, the order of service can be read from the Abbey’s website and the ITN Royal Family Channel has a 25-minute montage. Unfortunately the latter does not compare to the BBC productions of previous years, being rather crudely shot from a handheld camera and focusing more on the arrivals and departures at the doorway than on the event itself.

While those interested in the content of the speeches can obviously read them from the handout, and those wishing to inspect the outfits of the royals and dignities in attendance can do so from the stills, the elaborate music and dance routines cannot really be enjoyed in this manner. The whole experience is akin to watching a Telesnap reconstruction of a missing Doctor Who episode.

If the BBC does not reverse this decision next year, perhaps the Society (or whichever body is actually in charge of this decision) will offer it to another broadcaster, or even setting up their own in-house film unit to either sell to the networks or publish online. The knock-on effects for the airing of other royal events could be severe.

UPDATE (16th March)

Happily it turns out at least some of the event was professionally recorded, as the RCS’s website has released a handful of clips. Even more happily, my comparison to missing Doctor Who turned out to be apt as it was revealed on Friday that two more episodes have been found.

Fanciful February Flotsam

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Some notes on three recent topics which I did not deem worthy of full-length articles in their own right:

Andrew’s Arrest

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was yesterday arrested at his home on the Sandringham estate and taken for police questioning, being released later the same day. He is suspected of misconduct in public office.

The King put out a statement acknowledging the situation and essentially declaring that he would not interfere with the process of law. Of course, even if Charles is going to personally recuse himself, his position as incumbent sovereign means that his name will be frequently invoked during any legal proceedings, as any prosecution would formally be “The King against…” (written as “R -v-…”), the barristers arguing for both for and against Andrew would likely be King’s Counsel and if the former prince is incarcerated it would be in one of His Majesty’s Prisons, “at His Majesty’s Pleasure”. Also, of course, the royal arms will be used on a great many letterheads in the process.

Something similar happened with the Duke of Sussex’s lawsuits regarding his security provision: As a judicial review case it was formally “The King on the application of…” and the defendant was one His Majesty’s Principal Secretary’s of State. The case was, furthermore, heard in The King’s Bench Division. As reported in The Telegraph, this was

the infelicitous situation where the King’s son is suing the King’s ministers in the King’s courts. That is pulling the King in three directions.

The government is also apparently considering legislation to remove Andrew from the line of succession to the throne. Given that he is now eighth in line with the first seven all being at least twenty-three years younger than him, the effect of this will be more symbolic than practical. The need to coordinate any legal changes with the governments of the other Commonwealth Realms add further political friction. There have also been calls to formally remove his eligibility to serve as a Counsellor of State. His removal from the line of succession would do this automatically, but otherwise it could be done by a relatively simple Act of Parliament. This status only applies to Britain so the other Realms would not need to be consulted.

A principle that has been invoked many times during these events is that “No-one is above the law.” while it doesn’t help his brother, the phrase is not strictly true: The King himself is immune to arrest in all cases due to the principle of sovereign immunity which applies to varying degrees to lots of heads of state both monarchical and republican.

Bishopric Gets Bishop Rick

Yes, I am including this one solely for the pun. Richard “Rick” Simpson has been announced as the next Bishop of Durham. The diocesan office, one of the five ost senior bishops in the Church of England, has been vacant for nearly two years since the retirement of Paul Butler. In the interim the role has been delegated to Sarah Clark, Suffragan Bishop of Jarrow, who herself was recently chosen to become the next Diocesan Bishop of Ely. It should also be noted that Sarah Mullally, having had her election confirmed on 28th January, took her seat in the House of Lords two weeks ago, but will still not be installed at Canterbury Cathedral for another month.

Chagos Chaos

Donald Trump has flip-flopped yet again on the British agreement with Mauritius to cede sovereignty of the Chagos Islands. Recently a group of four Chagossians, led by Misley Mandarin, staged a landing on the islands themselves in protest at the attempted handover. The British government ordered their eviction but that has been temporarily blocked by a court order. There has been yet another “pause” of the passage of the relevant legislation through the House of Lords where scrutiny has been very strenuous and embarrassing for the executive.

More Publications, More Podcasts

Dominic Sandbrook, whom I count among the notable people with whom I’ve communicated, is mostly famous now as the co-host of The Rest is History, an enormously successful podcast. He has recently launched another podcast, The Book Club, which he co-hosts with Tabitha Syrett. Their first episode is on Wuthering Heights. Having not read it yet, I must try very hard to avoid repeating lines from the climax of Peep Show episode 39, clips of which I now very frustratingly cannot find. Twenty-five minutes in there is a discussion of the poems and songs in The Lord of the Rings, with Syrett saying she skips over them and Sandbrook saying they’re the best bit. When I read the trilogy aloud to my mother in 2020-21 I included all of them, turning to amateur channels such as Clamavi de Profundis for musical guidance. I have learned a great many of them by heart and practice them while walking the dog along the river bank.

Sandbrook’s idea for a podcast based on books is, of course, far from original. I have already blogged about two different book-related podcasts in the last few years and searching BBC Sounds for “book club” reveals quite a long list. The idea that literacy is essential to civilisation, and that the widely-recorded decline in reading over recent years represents a serious threat thereto, is gaining traction in intellectual circles. Times columnist James Marriott, whom I’ve had on my directory page since last summer, is fast emerging as the the leader of the movement. His own book, The New Dark Ages, is already gaining critical acclaim despite the fact that it isn’t due to be published for another few months.

Secretarial Succession

Dame Antonia Romeo has indeed been appointed Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Home Civil Service, a few days after the resignation of Sir Mark Wormald. Allegations against her have apparently failed to amount to anything.

Westminster Woes

Political power-couple Richard Marc Johnson and Lee David Evans, speaking on their own podcast (yes, yet another one), discuss the state of the Palace of Westminster (as I brought up last week). They also concur with the idea of putting Charles III in charge on the grounds that the royal family clearly has a much stronger track record with this than MPs, peers and civil servants do.

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.

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.

Ongoing Heraldic Stories

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In this post I have new updates on three different heraldry-related stories that I have covered before.

The Greater London Authority

The campaign by the Greater London Authority to acquire the iconic armorial achievement of its predecessor body the Greater London Council has been successful. The King issued a royal warrant on Thursday 13th November authorising the transfer, though frustratingly it the corresponding notice in the London Gazette was not published until yesterday.

British Passports

(I’ve discussed this topic ad nauseam by now so won’t link specific earlier posts.)

It was announced by the Home Office in October that a new British passport design would be coming out which featured Timothy Noad’s illustration of the royal arms with the Tudor crown in place of the previous design favoured by Elizabeth II. Recently the story has been picked up by newspapers as the new passports actually come out.

The Prince & Princess of Wales

I and other heraldists have been waiting for some time to see evidence of William & Catherine updating their personal heraldry to reflect the former’s status as heir apparent. While searching for news stories about the GLA I found articles in Hello!, People, Marie Claire and The News International (though curiously none of the more mainstream outlets) reported that when the couple attended the Royal Variety Performance last month, their invitation printed by the charity featured their conjugal coat of arms in the updated format. The style is very clearly Sodacan, and it looks as if the particular image was created on 12th April 2023 by user Mangwanani but not actually used in any articles until 22nd November this year, presumably for lack of evidence of real-life usage. Whoever found the image for the invitation must have dug rather deeply into Wikimedia Commons to find it. Reports in the aforesaid magazines that the Prince & Princess have made this change themselves seem a little misguided as it would not have been their own office in charge of producing the image, and recent evidence of their own correspondence still shows their old-style cyphers in use (not the lack of an arch on the coronet). This is thus yet another example of Wikipedians not just getting ahead of real life, but actually pushing it along a little, however inadvertently.

The new programme can be contrasted with this one from 2023, which still uses their conjugal arms as Duke & Duchess of Cambridge (or rather as son & daughter-in-law of the heir apparent), even though the new graphic image had already existed for seven months and William had held the status of heir apparent for more than a year. The old graphic still showed Catherine’s shield with a cordelière around it to balance William’s Garter circlet, even though she had been made a GCVO in 2019. Note too that the great many depictions of the main royal arms still alternate between old and new variants.

Update on Andrew

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It has been just over a month since Buckingham Palace announced that Prince Andrew, Duke of York, would be formally stripped of the title of Prince as well as the title Duke of York. Notices to this effect were published in the London Gazette (see my previous posts). I submitted a Freedom of Information Request to the Ministry of Justice to see the full texts of the legal instruments in play. The answer arrived yesterday:

Your request has been handled under the FOIA. I can confirm that the MoJ does hold some information related to your request, it has no plans to publish the texts of the Warrant and Letters Patent relating to the Peerage Roll and title “Prince”. The Warrants relating to the Order of the Garter and Royal Victorian Order are not matters for this Department and you may wish to contact the Cabinet Office to request this information.

This feels like a refusal, and indeed the Ministry’s response does not include the documents I requested, and yet those very same documents were released to the public yesterday.

In the run-up to this I emailed Jason Loch of A Venerable Puzzle, François Velde of Heraldica and David Torrance of the House of Commons Library (no reply from the latter). I also wanted to inform Benjamin Lewis but could not find his contact details. Loch had submitted his own request and has already put out his analyses of both documents. There are many peculiarities compared to other such instruments which might be considered the nearest precedents.

Notable in the patent is that it begins with “AND WHEREAS” in the first clause, when logically that shouldn’t happen until the second. It also doesn’t refer to “Prince Andrew” first and then explain that he is being renamed “Andrew Mountbatten Windsor” but instead refers to him by his plain name from the start. There’s also the fact that the patent omits any greeting and the warrant declines to name a recipient. A lot of the flowery formalities normally seen in documents like this are likewise notable for their absence.

In part these oddities may be a deliberate choice by the Palace in response to the circumstances which forced this action (e.g. Andrew can hardly be called “Most dear and entirely beloved”) and in part they could be explained by the extreme haste in which this operation has been carried out. Even so, questions about constitutional propriety are likely to linger.

There have been further notices in the Gazette yesterday that Andrew’s appointments to the Royal Victorian Order and the Order of the Garter have been revoked. Jason or I may need to submit another request to see those legal instruments now as well.

It should be noted too, that since these instruments were originally signed off Andrew has gone through yet another change of name, very petty this time: The patent and warrant, along with the press release on 30th October, give him the surname “Mountbatten Windsor”, omitting the hyphen that normally appeared there. This was corrected twelve days later, and the Gazette notices from yesterday show his surname in the hyphenated form. This, of course, required the third movement of his Wikipedia page in the space of two months.

UPDATE (29th December)

Loch has appeared on this podcast to discuss the issue.

Belize, Paddington and Royal Variety

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The Royal Variety Performance for 2025 was held last night, though it won’t be broadcast until next month. This time the Prince & Princess of Wales attended, as they have done in every odd-numbered year since 2015. I mentioned last year that the Royal Variety Charity was extensively using Sodacan’s Wikipedia illustration of Elizabeth II’s British heraldic achievement. Looking at this year’s photographs it appears nothing has changed.

I mentioned last week the oddity of having the Prince of Wales and his aunt the Princess Royal both undertaking prominent overseas diplomatic visits to different places at the same time. This week the Firm leaned further into this by having a married couple, the Duke & Duchess of Edinburgh, simultaneously touring different continents.

The Duke flew to Nigeria to meet with the President and attend a meeting of the Duke of Edinburgh’s International Award programme, founded by and named after his father Prince Philip.

The Duchess went on a tour of South and Central America. She visited the Republics of Peru, Panama and Guatemala, finishing in Belize. The first three were standard-fare bilateral diplomatic visits on behalf of Britain, with the Palace news page explicitly saying they were requested by the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (specifically the Foreign part in this instance). In some of the photographs we can see her meeting the host president with a Union Flag prominently displayed beside that of the host state.

The visit to Belize is the more interesting one as, unlike the others, this is a Commonwealth Realm, and indeed this is highlighted multiple times in the press releases, with the Palace Twitter feed even calling it “the Realm of Belize” despite the country having no official long name. By strict Commonwealth constitutional logic Sophie should have been there in her capacity as sister-in-law to the King of Belize, acting on the advice of the Belizean government. Despite this, many of the official reports mentioned bilateral ties between Belize and the United Kingdom, which suggests a deliberate straddling of both thrones. I can’t see any royal standard flown by the Duchess on the other visits, but in Belize she was clearly photographed flying the generic ermine-bordured version. As I have lamented before, royals other than the sovereign himself do not have dedicated heraldic flags for each specific realm save Canada so must default to their British arms even where this causes constitutional confusion.

It is also worth remembering that recently there have been reports of Guatemalan military personal making illegal incursions onto Belizean territory, which was condemned by the Commonwealth. It is a little strange, therefore, that a senior royal should visit both countries in such rapid succession without the incident being brought up.

On a final note, two of the aforementioned stories featured appearances by Paddington Bear: The Duchess of Edinburgh posed with a plush toy of him at the British Embassy in Lima (Peru of course being the character’s country of origin), then the Prince & Princess of Wales greeted an actor in costume at the Royal Albert Hall. Paddington Bear has long been an international icon of British culture. Since his appearance in a video for the Platinum Jubilee celebrations in 2022, he has been particularly associated with the royal family. Some have criticised an apparent cult forming around him. This year Spitting Image created a parody of him to appear alongside the Duke of Sussex in a spoof podcast, which at time of writing is the subject of a lawsuit by Studio Canal.

EXTERNAL LINKS

DUke of Edinburgh

Duchess of Edinburgh

Paddington Bear

Royals and Remembrance

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Once Halloween and Guy Fawkes Night have passed, poppy season is all that remains to block Christmas from achieving total domination for the rest of the year. There are, of course, two separate dates for this occasion — Armistice Day (always 11th November, the exact anniversary of the end of the First World War) and Remembrance Sunday (second Sunday in November, a broader commemoration of war dead). Both of these events involve two-minute national silences… assuming, of course, that a silence actually falls. Due to the logistics and practicalities of the working week, some organisations have to hold subsidiary events outside the universal dates. Silences here can be hard to regulate if everyone around isn’t coordinated with it. I remember quite a few occasions from childhood when a reverent, contemplative peace was anything but. Even the highest are not immune to this: The Queen attended a service at Westminster Abbey last Thursday, but it was immediately outside rather than inside the main building. As you would expect from an open-air event in central London on a weekday, the “silence” was actually filled with a lot of traffic noise as well as two different emergency sirens. The only blessing was that at least there were no dogs barking. I’m actually a little surprised that this phenomenon hasn’t been the subject of a Family Guy cutaway by now, given that it would be an easy way to get two minutes of padding with minimal animation.

Another big event in November is the United Nations Climate Change Conference, now taking place in Belém, Brazil. The Prince of Wales flew down some days in advance to present his Earthshot Prize, which Sir Keir Starmer also attended, though neither stayed for COP30 itself. This is the latest in a long line of solo overseas engagements undertaken by the heir apparent since his wife’s cancer diagnosis last year*. William was back in time for the Sunday cenotaph service but he missed the Festival of Remembrance at the Royal Albert Hall on Saturday night. Prince George attended for the first time, in his father’s place. The festival includes the religious and patriotic music expected for a solemn occasion, but also a handful of modern entries. One of these was a cover of Avicii’s The Nights. I can’t work out whether it adds to or detracts from the spirit of the event to know that Avicii himself, err, left this world behind some years ago, his life clearly remembered but tragically brief, and predeceased his father. He was from Sweden, a country formally neutral in both world wars. The festival featured multiple performances from Sir Rod Stewart, who sported the unusual sartorial combination of a knight bachelor’s badge hung from an open shirt.

The cenotaph ceremony in Whitehall traditionally involves the laying of wreaths by senior royals, senior servicemen, cabinet ministers, diplomats, various officials representing the British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies, and leaders of the significant political parties in the House of Commons. This has always been a bugbear for Nigel Farage, because his parties have so far never met the threshold of six MPs needed to qualify. UKIP in 2015 got 12.6% of the popular vote but only one seat. Douglas Carswell, as the party’s sole representative in the Commons, was regarded for procedural purposes as an independent rather than a leader. Reform in 2024 got 14.3% of the vote and five seats. The cruel twist here is that since the election the Reform caucus has gained two members (one from defection, one from by-election) but also lost two of the originals, so that when November came they were back as they started. It should be noted that the six-member rule, introduced in 1984, has exceptions for the Northern Ireland parties to avoid the appearance of sectarian bias. It is also possible for two or more parties to coalesce for this purpose, as Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National Party have done since 2001**.

The Princess Royal was also absent from the London commemorations, having gone on a royal tour of Australia. She instead paid her respects at the ANZAC memorial in Sydney. It is a little extraordinary for two royal overseas visits to take place at the same time, especially when both of those away from the United Kingdom are counsellors of state. Recently I have been constructing a Wikipedia page listing all of Anne’s official overseas travel (similar to those which already exist for other senior royals) but it has quickly become a little overwhelming to see just how busy she is, with twenty such journeys listed in the Court Circular just for the last two years.

One ought probably to discuss heraldic matters now. In some of the photographs of Anne’s visit I can see her two crosses and a heart flying in various places. I didn’t see William or Camilla flying theirs in the outings aforementioned. Close-up shots of the wreaths laid and crosses planted also show royal symbols. The Queen’s monogram appeared on hers, complete with the Tudor crown. William’s, even now, still uses the pre-Carolean design (note the oak leaves and lack of arch on the coronet). The King’s wreath did not use his monogram, but instead the full royal achievement with BUCKINGHAM PALACE underneath. Once again it was the old-style illustration with St Edward’s crown.

Sir Lindsay Hoyle is something of a vexillophile and has taken to Tweeting whenever a new flag is flown from New Palace Yard. In 2021 he began making a point of raising the flags of the Overseas Territories. His most recent example was the flag of the British Indian Ocean Territory, allegedly celebrating its national day. I can’t find photographic evidence (including on Parliament.UK) of the flag actually flying in the yard, so I can only go on the image shown in the Tweet itself. The BIOT flag includes the Imperial crown, sometimes with a cap of maintenance and sometimes without, but always in the St Edward form. Hoyle’s picture had a Tudor crown. I cannot find this version on the territory’s website or any other source. Is it a custom make? The BIOT is currently the subject of a slow-moving but high-stakes political controversy as Starmer’s government intends to cede sovereignty of the landmasses to Mauritius. This would mean that the territory as a political entity ceases to exist, hence no point updating the flag. I notice that there was not a representative of the BIOT among all the other BOT representatives laying wreaths at the cenotaph. The flag of the BIOT has been widely used in the campaign against the handover, including by the displaced islanders themselves. The bill to ratify the handover passed the House of Commons and recently had its second reading in the Lords, but then there were reports that the government has paused its progress due to public resistance. In this context it is tempting to read Mr Speaker’s Tweet as a not-so-subtle dig at the Prime Minister.

Finally, a point about Flickr: The cenotaph ceremony and the Earthshot prize both produced plenty of government photographs which can be moved onto Wikimedia Commons. The former had two photographers: Simon Dawson for the Prime Minister’s Office and Gunter Hofer for the DCMS. After migrating both albums across I quickly realised that the time stamps given in the metadata were wrong. Dawson’s were one hour too late (probably not adjusted for daylight savings) while the DCMS ones were in some cases out by a whole year! This feels like an elementary mistake for a professional photographer. Sadly there are not likely to be many photographs of Anne’s excursion to Sydney for the reasons I explained last year.

FOOTNOTES

*The Princess of Wales appears not to have gone abroad on official business since 15 October 2023.
**The SNP alone has won at least six seats in every subsequent general election, so in practice the utility of this alliance is one-sided.