Hello Mother, Hello Father

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The fifty-ninth Parliament of the United Kingdom assembled for the first time today. As usual the first business was the re-election of the Speaker of the House of Commons.

The custom is that proceedings for the election of a speaker are presided over by the member, present in the chamber and not being a minister, with the longest continuous service. As of last week’s general election that member is Sir Edward Leigh, an MP since 1983. His predecessor, Sir Peter Bottomley (MP since 1975) sought re-election but was defeated. Had Leigh also been defeated then the task would have fallen to Jeremy Corbyn of Islington North (formerly Leader of the Labour Party, but now sitting as an independent).

This person also usually has the honorific title “Father of the House”. I say usually because the Father need only be the member with the longest continuous service, and there can be times when that person is also a minister and/or not present in the chamber for the speaker’s election. So far the title has always been Father and never Mother, for no woman has yet achieved this distinction.

In 2015 Harriet Harman declared herself Mother of the House on account of being the female MP with the longest continuous service (since 1982 in her case) and this caught on with a few other senior members (including prime ministers Cameron and May). It is not quite clear why Harman only claimed the status in 2015 given that it was already true a parliament earlier, nor whether this title ought to be applied retroactively all the way to Nancy Astor.

Harman would have been the actual Mother of the House and the member presiding had she been returned at this election, but she chose to retire and ascend to the Lords instead, as did runner-up Dame Margaret Beckett. That left Diane Abbott, MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington since 1987, the most senior female member and the fifth most senior overall. She was called Mother of the House several times during speeches, and given a place of high precedence during the day’s events – i.e. taking the oath before the cabinet ministers did.

Despite the timetable not being as urgent, the fifty-ninth Parliament copied the fifty-eighth in having two royal commissions on the same day, one to actually open the session and the other to give the speaker-elect his approbation. In previous parliaments the approbation commission was deferred to the next day of sitting. As in 2019, the letters patent appointing the Lords commissioners were not read again the second time MPs arrived at the bar.

I noticed that the expedition from the lower house to the upper for the first commission was unusually small, consisting only of Leigh, Abbott and six other members (plus Black Rod and the Clerk of the House of course).

Finally I will note that the coordination of the hat-doffing by the commissioners themselves was frankly woeful. On the first occasion Lords Laming and True forgot to do it at all!

FURTHER READING

Passing the Post

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My 2020 article on the Political Colour Wheel has proven to be one of the most popular on this blog, so today I thought I’d try another idea in that vein.

The results of this month’s general election have generated another series of discussions about proportionality, given the historically-low vote share on which Sir Keir Starmer’s party has ridden to victory. I have put together a graph showing how far the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democratic parties have risen or fallen above or below the waterline at the last ten general elections.

The data themselves are scraped off Wikipedia. I have cheated a little by backdating the name “Liberal Democrat” to 1987, when it was still the alliance between the old Liberal Party and the Social Democrats under Davids Steel and Owen. The “divide” column is of course the seat share divided by vote share. The formula to produce the score is a little arbitrary – to make the final numbers a little nicer (and perhaps more memorable) I have subtracted 1 from each answer in the Divide column then multiplied the result by 10.

CONSERVATIVE
Election Parliament Vote Share Seat Share Divide Score
1987 50th 42.2% 57.85% 1.37 3.71
1992 51st 41.9% 51.61% 1.23 2.32
1997 52nd 30.7% 25.04% 0.82 -1.84
2001 53rd 31.7% 25.19% 0.79 -2.05
2005 54th 32.4% 30.65% 0.95 -0.54
2010 55th 36.1% 47.08% 1.30 3.04
2015 56th 36.9% 50.77% 1.38 3.76
2017 57th 42.3% 48.77% 1.15 1.53
2019 58th 43.6% 56.15% 1.29 2.88
2024 59th 23.7% 18.62% 0.79 -2.15
LABOUR
Election Parliament Vote Share Seat Share Divide Score
1987 50th 30.8% 35.23% 1.14 1.44
1992 51st 34.4% 41.63% 1.21 2.10
1997 52nd 43.2% 63.43% 1.47 4.68
2001 53rd 40.7% 62.52% 1.54 5.36
2005 54th 35.2% 54.95% 1.56 5.61
2010 55th 29.0% 39.69% 1.37 3.69
2015 56th 30.4% 35.69% 1.17 1.74
2017 57th 40.0% 40.31% 1.01 0.08
2019 58th 32.1% 31.08% 0.97 -0.32
2024 59th 33.8% 63.23% 1.87 8.71
LIBERAL DEMOCRAT
Election Parliament Vote Share Seat Share Divide Score
1987 50th 22.6% 3.38% 0.15 -8.50
1992 51st 17.8% 3.07% 0.17 -8.27
1997 52nd 16.8% 6.98% 0.42 -5.85
2001 53rd 18.3% 7.89% 0.43 -5.69
2005 54th 22.0% 9.60% 0.44 -5.64
2010 55th 23.0% 8.77% 0.38 -6.19
2015 56th 7.9% 1.23% 0.16 -8.44
2017 57th 7.4% 1.23% 0.17 -8.34
2019 58th 11.6% 1.85% 0.16 -8.41
2024 59th 12.2% 11.08% 0.91 -0.92
COMBINED
Election Parliament Conservative Labour Liberal Democrat
1987 50th 3.71 1.44 -8.50
1992 51st 2.32 2.10 -8.27
1997 52nd -1.84 4.68 -5.85
2001 53rd -2.05 5.36 -5.69
2005 54th -0.54 5.61 -5.64
2010 55th 3.04 3.69 -6.19
2015 56th 3.76 1.74 -8.44
2017 57th 1.53 0.08 -8.34
2019 58th 2.88 -0.32 -8.41
2024 59th -2.15 8.71 -0.92

It is striking that the Labour and Liberal Democrat lines are almost parallel throughout, while the Conservative line neither follows nor mirrors them. The Conservatives fell below the waterline during the Blair years, then were inconsistently high above it from 2010 to 2019, falling below again in 2024. The Labour party were always above except for 2019 (albeit very slightly). The Liberal Democrats have always been below, albeit very nearly touching this year. 2024 is also the first time that they have been less disadvantaged than the Conservatives were. Labour’s score in 2024 is of course a record high.

My Political Life So Far

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Thursday 5th May 2016, © my father.

Sir Keir Starmer’s appointment as Prime Minister, following the general election in which the Labour party won a landslide victory and the Conservatives lost almost everything, leads naturally to recollections of (and generally unfavourable comparisons against) the Blair landslide of May 1997. Many people will cite this as a defining moment in the course of their lives. In particular, many ask “Were you up for Portillo?”.

I wasn’t. I only know this period from documentaries and diaries. I hadn’t quite been born yet.

I think it was around 2003-ish that I remember hearing mentions of the name Tony Blair and the office of Prime Minister for the first time, as well as of George W. Bush as President of the United States. Blair cropped up a few times in fictional television, such as his cameos with the Simpsons and Catherine Tate. Expy versions of him also appeared, most famously in Little Britain, but also the titular “Sinister Prime Minister” in the premiere of M. I. High and in the first revived series of Doctor Who, the latter as a hollowed-out skin suit. That whole two-parter, of course, was a fairly explicit parody of the events leading up to the invasion of Iraq.

When Blair resigned and was succeeded by Gordon Brown there were quite a few skits on television about it. I mentioned it in an ICT lesson that week (the task being the formatting of a newspaper). As far as specific events, the aforementioned Iraq invasion is something I only really learned about years later and I have no contemporary memories at all of 9/11, only learning about it from a documentary in the late noughties discussing conspiracy theories about it, but I was very aware of newspaper and television reports about the “Credit Crunch” and parliamentary expenses scandal as they happened. The bird flu and swine flu pandemics late in that decades were recurrent stories.

I think most of my political knowledge probably came from Jeremy Clarkson, both in the form of his many “World According To” books we’d accumulated at home and to the references he would make on Top Gear, frequently complaining about Blair, Brown and Prescott for their ideology in general and their approach to motoring and environmentalism in particular. Though I recognised Prescott’s name and face I probably did not appreciate that he was Deputy Prime Minister and represented a constituency very close to where I lived – nor that Alan Johnson, Secretary of State for a great many things, was also next door. The series includes quite a few references to (and impressions of) Margaret Thatcher, who was also mentioned in at least one storybook read in school, but it was not until years later that I heard of John Major.

Despite not really being that interested in politics as a subject, I still ended up watching a lot of political comedy – especially Have I Got News For You and Mock the Week. Possibly Russell Howard’s Good News was in there as well.

I dimly followed the 2010 general election, by which time I was in secondary school. I didn’t know or care what the parties were but there were a few others in my year who had already nailed their colours to the mast. Graham Stuart’s campaign posters could be seen at several points along the route of the school bus. I and a friend of mine would count these as we went back and forth. We would also comment “Vote Tory!” upon the disembarking of another pupil, purely because he’d ranted negatively about them beforehand. We kept that up for some years afterwards.

Of course, the 2010 election was not a clean break between Labour and Conservative – it produced a hung parliament, so there ensued a five day hiatus while coalition negotiations went on. David Cameron did not actually get to the lectern outside Number 10 until late Tuesday evening, with Nick Clegg not being named as his deputy until Wednesday and other ministerial appointments completed on Thursday.

Recently I went back through the records to see what I was up to in that week. In theory that should have been easy since I’ve kept all my school books from that time as the source material for Homework Direct. Unfortunately it seems that there are no entries at all for that month, with only one each for April and June. This is likely to be because we were headed towards the end of the year with internal examinations looming so much of our activity at that time would have been centred on revision. I look through my exercise books again is not so revealing:

Food Technology
Nothing at all from this period, it seems.
French
6-13: Some vocabulary tests and a series of answers to textbook exercises. I don’t have the textbook anymore and the test questions were given orally so I don’t really have any contextual detail.
Geography
7-12: The exercise book runs out here and the new one doesn’t start until September. All I found were a crude diagram of the courses in a river showing where erosion takes place and a wordsearch for related key terms.
History
6-13: An analysis of sources on the role of the monasteries in England and Henry VIII’s reasons for dissolving them, then about the wider consequences of the break with Rome.
Latin
6-12: A crossword (although the worksheet bizarrely calls it a “criss-cross puzzle”) translating some vocabulary from Latin into English and a wordsearch vice-versa. A short scene from the textbook translated.
Mathematics
10: A small paragraph of notes about surface areas of cuboids.
Music
Nothing at all from this period, it seems.
Science
10-13: I actually change exercise books on 13th May itself. Lots of worksheets and quizzes about the rock cycle, the three different kinds of rock and the types of weathering to which they can be subjected.

It should be noted that I could not actually find my Religious Studies exercise book. I’m sure I don’t have my English book for that year, as our teacher took them home for marking in February and mysteriously never handed them back. My planner page from that week is little more than a list of textbook chapters.

Even so, it is good that I kept so many paper records from this time as the digital trail almost disappears before 2011 (at least until I can hunt down the old memory sticks on which it was saved). Looking through my school’s online records from that time through the Wayback Machine is hopeless due to link rot. I have some surviving copies of the school’s newsletter from that year, but none from the time of the election. The closest edition is the one sent out on 15th March, on the back of which is a group photograph from BBC School Report 2010 (not to be confused with BBC School Report 2011, which actually got me on television).

It’s a shame I couldn’t straighten my tie. From the poor quality of this photograph you might well think this came from a much earlier era than it really did.

For most of the period of 2010-11 I followed American politics more closely than British, mainly through the YouTube extracts of Real Time with Bill Maher. American issues, and some that were international, came to me indirectly – a lot of my favourite reviewtainment channels were facing constant blocks and deletions due to copyright policy, and this was the age of PIPA and SOPA (later followed by CISPA and ACTA) which threatened the whole existence of such a hobby, as well as online freedom more generally.

2012 had the big British events of the Diamond Jubilee and the London Olympics, followed by the Obama-v-Romney election in the states. Late in that year I started the GCSE course on Russia & the Cold War which was the first time I had studied recent(-ish) politics in detail. As Bolshevism and its fallout continues to cast shadows on world affairs even today, naturally this was a segue into a great many other adjacent topics. Not only did I carry my reading forward to the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first to see the lingering effects of e.g. the Russian Revolution and the Word Wars, I also went backwards to the eighteenth and nineteenth to find their roots. I also discovered the Russia Today channel at this time. It was of course in RT’s interests to look for and present stories (not always true) that Western media would avoid. Obviously it was during this time that I had my first experience reading Orwell.

By 2013 this had led me back around to the politics and government of the United Kingdom. I followed contemporary stories as they came out and filled myself in on what I’d earlier missed using whatever documentaries I could find. Sacrilegious as this may be to some, you really can teach yourself a lot just by reading (and later writing) the relevant Wikipedia pages.

This all happened during the tenure of the Cameron-Clegg coalition, explicitly not a normal time in politics (not that “normal” ever truly exists, of course). Cameron is therefore “my” prime minister in that sense, though I was not eligible to actually vote for or against him during that time. The 2015 general election was the first one that I watched live.

My first actual ballot cast, as pictured above, was for Humberside Police & Crime Commissioner (not otherwise that important), followed swiftly by the EU referendum. At that point the story might as well end, for it was during Cameron’s second term that this very blog got going, and thus memory lane merges back into the main road.

Last year (around 20th May) the Conservatives from Cameron onwards passed the point where they had been in power for longer than New Labour. Slightly ahead of that they passed the point of having been in power for more than half my life.

The purpose of this exercise is to recall what I was up to the last time the Labour party governed Britain, to determine what parts of my life already came about before Brown’s resignation and what would come after.

Much of the comparison is not really a political comparison of Labour vs Conservative but more a cultural comparison of the noughties vs the new tens. As aforesaid, the first red years included Top Gear up to Series 15, as well as the first five series of revived Doctor Who (with The Vampires of Venice airing during the post-election negotiation period and Amy’s Choice being the first under Cameron). They also involved all three films of The Lord of the Rings, plus all seven Harry Potter books and the first six film adaptations. The blue years included The Hobbit trilogy and an explosion of new Star Trek spinoffs. Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe and Newswipe came before the switch with Weekly Wipe coming after. 8 Out of 10 Cats dates back to 2005 but ‘Does Countdown only to 2012. David Starkey’s Monarchy series (as well as many smaller documentaries about the Tudors) came in the noughties whereas Lucy Worsley started in the tens. Peep Show skews to the Labour end and is strongly associated with that era. That Mitchell and Webb Sound and Look had four seasons each made under New Labour, while John Finnemore’s Souvenir Programme exclusively exists under the Conservatives. This isn’t a perfect guide, though, since many of the programmes made in the former period are ones I didn’t actually watch until the latter. I’m also fudging the lines a bit for series whose production and broadcast dates fall either side of the border.

On a personal level Conservative government has been a constant throughout adolescent and adult life while Labour had the whole of my childhood. I’m obviously not in the same frame of body or mind now as in 2010, and I’ll be following Starmer’s government in real time in a way that I didn’t for Brown or Blair. There are some psychological tricks at play here – if, during the 2010-24 period, you recalled something that happened during the Thatcher-Major years, it would be easy to feel on some level that there was continuity in the partisan situation and forget that the Labour government interrupted it. Conversely, it might now be possible to think back to 1997-2010 and forget about Cameron-Sunak. This is especially the case if policies, styles of government and indeed people are carried over and political situations from long ago are restored, which is often the case. For some people it may be like finding the last decade was all a dream, for others the nightmare is just beginning.

Time to sleep… or are you waking up?

Jumping the Gun Again

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It is normal, following the dissolution of a parliament of the United Kingdom, for a Dissolution Honours list to be published, conferring peerages, knighthoods and other decorations on members of the former legislature.

Sometimes these have been published swiftly following the dissolution itself, early in the general election campaign. In more modern times these lists have tended not to emerge until many months after the new parliament has already been formed.

This time the list has been published on polling day itself, very close to the publication of the exit poll.

There are nineteen new life peers included, most of whom are recently-retired MPs (including Theresa May, the former prime minster). There are also five knightly awards – Oliver Dowden, Julian Smith and Ben Wallace all become KCBs, Alister Jack a KBE and Thérèse Coffey a DBE. The latter is especially intriguing because she is the one still standing for re-election in Suffolk Coastal, meaning her name as it appears on the ballot paper will have become out-of-date while people were crossing it.

The Wikipedia pages of the latter five were already updated before I even came across the announcement, but of course the titles of the new peers will take several weeks to confirm. It is still up in the air whether this is the last squeezing of the font of honour by Rishi Sunak or if a separate list of resignation honours will arrive later on.

Thistle Day 2024

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Today was the last in a string of high-profile royal engagements that went ahead despite the ongoing general election – although there are reports that the traditional “royal week” has been shortened due to the need for His Majesty to run back to London on Friday to meet the prime minister.

Unlike last year’s Presentation of the Honours of Scotland, this was a standard ceremony of the Order of the Thistle. The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh were due to have their banners installed at the High Kirk.

This excursion also featured the Ceremony of the Keys – which will be Alastair Bruce’s last as Governor of Edinburgh Castle.

It would be nice if I could include some photographs of either event, but it seems that unlike last year (when the Scottish Government Flickr account uploaded many) there are only commercial ones to be found. I hope that perhaps some amateur ones may be released under the right licensing arrangements soon. I also hope that we will soon get a good look at the Scottish arrangement of Her Majesty’s coat of arms – not that we don’t already know exactly what it should look like, but just to get proof that it exists!

The Emperor’s New Collar

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Naruhito & Masako, Emperor & Empress of Japan, conducted a three day visit to the United Kingdom this week. It was the third state visit to Britain during the present reign, and the first monarchical one since that by the King & Queen of the Netherlands in 2018.

The visit consisted of the expected activities – a state banquet at Buckingham Palace, then another banquet at the London Guildhall, as well as military parades and presentations.

According to the Court Circular for 25 June, the palace guest list included “Mr. Christopher Broad (Founder of YouTube channel, Abroad in Japan)”. This is thought to be the first time that a prominent YouTuber has been invited to a state event specifically in that capacity.

As is customary during state visits, the monarchs exchanged appointments to their respective orders of chivalry: Charles received the Collar of the Supreme Order of the Chrysanthemum while Naruhito became a Stranger Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Garter. It is a shame that his visit was not a few days earlier, or he could have marched in the procession.

File:Coat of Arms of Japanese Emperor (Knight of the Garter Variant).svg

Sodacan’s representation of the Japanese Garter arms.

Naruhito ascended the imperial throne in 2019 when his father Akihito abdicated. Japan now joins Spain and the Netherlands in having two Garter stalls simultaneously. What makes the Japanese representation different to the Spanish and Dutch is the different style of heraldry. The Japanese Imperial Seal is a mon representing a stylised chrysanthemum flower. Mon are normally standalone objects without a background – more visually similar to a Western crest or livery badge than a shield of arms. To make the symbol compatible with European heraldic customs for use in St George’s Chapel it is typically presented as the lone charge on a red background for the shield and banner, then again without a background as the crest atop the helm. The Emperor paid a private visit to Windsor Castle to view his predecessors’ stall plates there and to lay a floral wreath on Elizabeth II’s tomb.

The state banquet also marked the first appearance of the Royal Family Order of Charles III. Dating back to the reign of George IV, the royal family orders are an informal and highly personal decoration restricted to senior royal women. Each consists of a silk ribbon from which hangs a jeweled miniature portrait of the sovereign. The orders do not always have formal classes but their badges tend to come in different sizes which correlate to the seniority of the recipient. The colour of the ribbon varies: Charles III follows George V in using pale blue, whereas Victoria used white, Edward VII blue and red lined with gold, George VI pink and Elizabeth II yellow. The Queen was seen wearing the new Carolean order immediately above the Elizabethan one she received as Duchess of Cornwall in 2007, and there is a clear difference in size. The Duchess of Edinburgh also wore Elizabeth’s order to the banquet.

This state visit was a little unusual in that it happened during a general election campaign. Some changes had to be made to the itinerary to cut out the more obviously political elements: Unlike previous visiting sovereigns, the Emperor did not make an address to Parliament (since their isn’t one) and while the cabinet and opposition leaders attended the state banquet they did not have individual meetings with him. Notably Sir Keir Starmer and Sir Edward Davey were not wearing their respective knightly insignia.

Garter Day 2024

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Today saw yet another of the royal public events that were too big to cancel – the procession of the Knights of the Garter to St George’s Chapel, Windsor. As with other big public events, I primarily experienced it in the form of the passive livestream on YouTube.

The cameras followed the knights, heralds and other officers as they marched on foot from the castle to the chapel, then went back again by carriage. They also filmed a large procession of what I assumed to be security cars following along the same stretch of road, which took something away from the splendour of the occasion. The cameras did not go inside the chapel, instead just showing the crowds and guards waiting outside for the duration, but the microphones (wherever the may have been positioned) were able to pick up a reasonable audio feed of the speeches, sermons and hymns.

The new members being installed today were royal lady the Duchess of Gloucester and knights companions the Lords Peach, Kakkar and Lloyd-Webber.

Stall plates and banners as photographed in The Dragon. Artist unknown.

Earlier this year, at the prompting of Baz Manning, I subscribed to The Dragon, the community newsletter of St George’s Chapel. Although this mainly covers religious events, it is also often where knights’ armorial bearings are leaked for the first time. The edition of 9th June included photographs of the newly-delivered stall plates for Lady Ashton of Upholland and Lord Patten of Barnes, while that of 16th June showed the banners of Lords Peach and Kakkar. Apparently Peach’s must have been granted fairly recently, for the article claims that the sword is a reference to him carrying Curtana at the coronation last year. That means Lloyd-Webber is the only current member who remains at present armorially anonymous.

UPDATE (20th June)

The video I originally linked at the top of the article has been removed from Associated Press’s YouTube channel. All the other channels that also uploaded the same video seem to have removed it as well. For now I have replaced it with an amateur video by David Dumbrăveanu. The Daily Mail curiously still seems to have the full video up, and most other channels have at least small snippets.

Reading the Room

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The Queen’s Reading Room today celebrated its second annual festival at Hampton Court Palace.

Rather than focus on the festival event specifically, of which I could not find much footage, I wanted to use the opportunity to write more broadly about the reading room as a concept.

At the start of 2021 Camilla, then Duchess of Cornwall, launched the reading room under her title as an online book club. In 2023, her husband having acceded to the throne, she reconstituted it as a charity and updated the name to reflect her change in status.1

I had been intrigued by the royal couple’s literary interests since the pandemic forced so much of public interaction into the virtual space, and the bookshelf backdrop became an important element of one’s self-presentation. Conferences held from her study at Birkhall show her with at least three books by J. K. Rowling and six by Philippa Gregory2 — the latter suggesting an unorthodox approach to family history. Charles’s shelf was also the subject of some news articles.

The website contains numerous video interviews with authors, celebrity readings and, of course, a weekly podcast.

The most intriguing part of the enterprise, naturally, is in the particular choice of books: There is a page dedicated to Her Majesty’s own picks, which are named in batches of four every season (i.e. sixteen per year). As of June 2024 there have been fourteen literary seasons, resulting in a list of fifty-six books so far. I have listed them here oldest to newest.

Pride & Prejudice Austen, Jane 1813
Frankenstein Shelley, Mary 1818
A Christmas Carol Dickens, Charles 1843
The Queen’s Necklace Dumas, Alexandre 1849
A Tale of Two Cities Dickens, Charles 1859
The Woman in White Collins, Wilkie 1859
Black Beauty Sewell, Anna 1877
Dracula Stoker, Bram 1897
A Book of Food Shand, P. Morton 1927
Rebecca Maurier, Daphne du 1938
I Capture the Castle Smith, Dodie 1948
My Family and Other Animals Durrell, Gerald 1956
Mrs ‘Arris Goes to Paris Gallico, Paul 1958
The Far Pavilions Kaye, M. M. 1978
War Horse Morpurgo, Michael 1982
Love in the Time of Cholera Márquez, Gabriel García 1988
The Remains of the Day Ishiguro, Kazuo 1989
The Light Years Howard, Elizabeth Jane 1990
A Suitable Boy Seth, Vikram 1993
Charlotte Gray Faulks, Sebastian 1998
The Poisonwood Bible Kingsolver, Barbara 1998
Atonement McEwan, Ian 2001
The Secret Life of Bees Kidd, Sue Monk 2001
The Kite Runner Hasseini Khaled 2003
Suite Française Némirovsky, Irène 2004
The Various Haunts of Men Hill, Susan 2004
Labyrinth Mosse, Kate 2005
The Island Hislop, Victoria 2005
Half of a Yellow Sun Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi 2006
Restless Boyd, William 2006
The Book Thief Zusak, Marcus 2006
The Lords’ Day Dobbs, Michael 2007
The Year of Eating Dangerously Parker Bowles, Tom 2007
My Brilliant Friend Ferrante, Elena 2012
The Architect’s Apprentice Shafak, Elif 2013
The Red Notebook Laurain, Antoine 2015
A Gentleman in Moscow Towles, Amor 2016
Magpie Murders Horowitz, Anthony 2016
The Little Library Cookbook Young, Kate 2017
Where the Crawdads Sing Owens, Delia 2018
City of Girls Gilbert, Elizabeth 2019
Girl O’Brien, Edna 2019
Girl, Woman, Other Evaristo, Bernadine 2019
Lady in Waiting Glenconner, Anne, Baroness 2019
The Secret Commonwealth Pullman, Philip 2019
A Half Baked Idea Potts, Olivia 2020
Dark Tides Gregory, Philippa 2020
Hamnet O’Farrell, Maggie 2020
Miss Benson’s Beetle Joyce, Rachel 2020
The Mirror & the Light Mantel, Hilary 2020
Great Circle Shipstead, Maggie 2021
Left You Dead James, Peter 2021
The Fair Botanists Sheridan, Sara 2021
The Paper Palace Heller, Miranda Cowley 2021
Lessons in Chemistry Garmus, Bonnie 2022
The Whalebone Theatre Quinn, Joanna 2022

The selection skews modern. While there are some obvious classics in there (e.g. Dickens and Austen) the majority of entries are from the present century. In this long list the only one which I personally recall reading in full is The Book Thief, about eleven years ago. Fittingly enough, that story is itself about the importance of literacy for intellectual development and freedom, in the context of living through World War II under the German regime that encouraged book-burning.

There are many others from which I have at least read extracts (or listened to them in audiobooks) or which I know by reputation.

The one which sticks out to me the most, given the regal patronage of the Reading Room is The Lords’ Day (2007) by Michael Dobbs. This is a political thriller about the Palace of Westminster being captured by terrorists on the day of the State Opening of Parliament, with fictionalised versions of Elizabeth II and her then-Prince of Wales among the characters. Dobbs (himself ennobled in 2010) earlier wrote the famous House of Cards/To Play the King/The Final Cut trilogy whose second instalment also features a fictionalised version of Charles — ascending to the throne thirty years earlier than in real life and then swiftly being forced to abdicate after a losing a constitutional battle against an evil prime minister. Also featured is Lady in Waiting (2019) by the Lady Glenconner (which I bought at a charity shop last year but haven’t gotten around to reading yet), a memoir which goes into great detail about her time with the Princess Margaret.

The historical novels also often touch on potentially-sensitive topics: e.g. Dumas’s The Queen’s Necklace and Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities both centre on the French Revolution while Towles’s A Gentleman in Moscow deals with the Russian one. Seth and Kaye both write about British India, Kingsolver about the Belgian Congo. It would be hard to find a set of popular historical books set in Britain (whether fictional or factual) without encountering at least one about the royal family themselves. In this case Her Majesty chose Mantel’s The Mirror & the Light, the last in a trilogy about the career of Thomas Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII. There are quite a lot more books about Word War II as well.

The King also gets a look-in. Before his accession to the throne, the Prince Charles shared five of his favourite books: The Battle of the Atlantic by Jonathan Dimbleby, Along the Enchanted Way by William Blacker, Lustrum by Robert Harris, Travels with Myself and Another by Martha Gellhorn and Napoleon by Adam Zamoyski. That second book is likely particularly important to Charles, given his attempts to live that life himself.

There is a further section dealing specifically with children’s books, figureheaded by the Princess of Wales.3 On World Book Day 2022 Catherine similarly made five personal recommendations, and there are dozens more recommended by other friends of the charity. The proportion of these which I have personally read is higher than in the adult section but there are fewer interesting points I have to make about them.

It is also worth noting that while quite a few of the entries end up being about the royal family, there are so far as I can tell none of the books by them e.g. A Vision of Britain, The Old Man of Lochnagar, Crowned in a Far Country or Budgie the Little Helicopter. The Queen did, however, recommend one book by her non-royal son.

I daresay that Her Majesty is at times being a little, well, courageous in associating herself with some of these books. The monarchy strives to be above politics, yet literature is fundamentally about ideas and politics are never far away. A reading room project which took a wide berth from any possible controversy would probably end to watered-down to be worth doing, so Camilla has taken the riskier but more rewarding path. This was exemplified by her Clarence House speech in 2023 for the relaunch of the project, at which she told writers collectively to “remain true to your calling, unimpeded by those who may wish to curb the freedom of your expression or impose limits on your imagination” in what was widely perceived as an intervention in an ongoing controversy over the proposed Bowdlerisation of some classic Roald Dahl books. The edits ultimately did not go ahead.

FURTHER READING

UPDATE (June 2025)

I originally meant the title of this post to be a weak pun on the project’s actual name, but lately I have discovered that there actually is a newly-launched podcast called Reading the Room.

UPDATE (October 2025)

The Queen has, reportedly, gotten herself included in The Hawk is Dead, an upcoming crime novel by Peter James.

FOOTNOTES

1 It went straight from “The Duchess of Cornwall’s Reading Room” to “The Queen’s Reading Room” without being called “The Queen Consort’s Reading Room” in between, perhaps the earliest hint at the eventual abandonment of this honorific crutch at the coronation.

2 I can’t get a perfect view even in 1080p, but I think I recognised The Lady of the Rivers, The Red Queen, The Kingmaker’s Daughter and Three Sisters, Three Queens. What Camilla chose for the above list, however, was Dark Tides, one of the non-royal Fairmile series.

3 Catherine’s URL slug has been updated for the new reign but Charles’s has not, giving the impression that they are husband and wife instead of father and daughter-in-law.

The Proclamation in Public

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Yesterday I wrote about the text of the royal proclamation for the dissolution of Parliament appearing on the Privy Council website. Today it was actually read out in public.

Traditionally there are two public readings of the proclamation – the first is by the Common Cryer of the City of London (Major Peter Oweh, his first time doing this) on the steps of the Royal Exchange, the second is by the Lord Lyon King of Arms (Canon Joseph Morrow, now on his fourth general election) from the Mercat Cross in Edinburgh.

As with many ceremonial events like this it has been frustratingly difficult to find good visual recording – despite most big news outlets doing rolling coverage of the general election for the past few days. The London proclamation was filmed by The Daily Mirror as seen above and had a few still photographs taken by Getty. For the Edinburgh version I am limited to the Lyon Court’s own blog and this amateur video by Haizhen’s Hut. To make matters worse, the United Kingdom is far from the only country having a national general election this year and even just searching for “dissolution of parliament” often brings up articles about Israel.

Yesterday I received a campaign letter from the Conservative candidate for Beverley & Holderness, Rt Hon Graham Stuart. Cannily, I would presume, he had them printed and sent out on 29th May so that at time of writing he could still use the MP post-nominals on the return address of the envelope, even though he would cease to be one by the time most recipients of his letter actually read it. Electoral projections that I can find at this time are conflicted as to whether he will be returned or replaced by the Labour candidate Margaret Pinder.

Also of note are the writs of election, which of course the Lord High Chancellor has as per said proclamation caused to be issued. Medway Council recently published a photograph of the writs for the three constituencies for which it was responsible. These are, of course, the first writs for these constituencies to be issued in the name of Charles the Third.

That brings me on to another point – while dissolving Parliament is a routine part of the election process in many democratic countries, the return of the regnal name Charles in relation to such matters provokes some historical sniggering in reminiscence of the civil wars of the seventeenth century. It is curious, therefore, that the first British dissolution in this reign should be immediately after Oak Apple Day, the now-obscure commemoration of the restoration of the monarchy after the fall of Cromwell’s republic. The name refers to the Royal Oak, a tree in Boscobel Wood which Charles II used to hide from the Roundheads in 1651. Given that the oak tree went on to become the symbol of the Conservative Party, it is perhaps a little surprising that no senior figures in the party (or in the headline-hungry media) have made a prominent reference to it. Of course, once suspects that his present Majesty would prefer not to be drawn into partisanship in that way.

Comparing Dissolution Proclamations

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The Fifty-Eighth Parliament of the United Kingdom is no more. It dissolved just after midnight… or did it?

Parliament’s own website and guidance documents seem to indicate that dissolution took effect at 00:01 today, but I doubt the factual accuracy of this and I am not the only one.

I spent much of today keeping a close eye on the Privy Council website to see when there would be an update about today’s meeting. It arrived sometime before 13:00. The PDF records that His Majesty ordered the Lord Chancellor to affix the Great Seal of the Realm to the proclamation, and also (alongside the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland) to arrange the issuance of writs of summons and election. The text of the proclamation itself is reproduced below:

Whereas We have thought fit, by and with the advice of Our Privy Council, to dissolve this
present Parliament, which stands prorogued to Friday, the thirty-first day of May: We do, for
that End, publish this Our Royal Proclamation, and do hereby dissolve the said Parliament
accordingly: And the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and the Members of the House of
Commons, are discharged from further Attendance thereat: And We being desirous and
resolved, as soon as may be, to meet Our People, and to have their Advice in Parliament, do
hereby make known to all Our loving Subjects Our Royal Will and Pleasure to call a new
Parliament: and do hereby further declare, that, by and with the advice of Our Privy Council,
We have given Order that Our Chancellor of Great Britain and Our Secretary of State for
Northern Ireland do respectively, upon Notice thereof, forthwith, issue out Writs, in due Form
and according to Law, for calling a new Parliament: And We do hereby also, by this Our
Royal Proclamation under Our Great Seal of Our Realm, require Writs forthwith to be issued
accordingly by Our said Chancellor and Secretary of State respectively, for causing the Lords
Spiritual and Temporal and Commons who are to serve in the said Parliament to be duly
returned to, and give their Attendance in, Our said Parliament on Tuesday, the ninth day of
July next, which Writs are to be returnable in due course of Law.

Given at Our Court at Buckingham Palace, this thirtieth day of May in the Year of our Lord
two thousand and twenty four and in the second year of Our Reign.

The Privy Council website does not give texts like these for 2010 and earlier, but sound recordings of those earlier occasions confirm that the same wording was in use. The most notable feature of these proclamations is that they specify dissolution taking place immediately upon the date given and also fix the date for the new parliament to assemble, but don’t actually say when polling day will be.

The FTPA Era

The Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 substantially altered the mechanics of British general elections. No longer could the sitting prime minister simply “go to the country” whenever he pleased, instead the date of the general election would be fixed as the first Thursday in May in the fifth year since the previous general election, unless two thirds of the House of Commons voted to have one earlier. Dissolution of the outgoing legislature would occur automatically twenty-five working days before polling.

In a moment of supreme constitutional pettiness, the act even transferred the authority for writs of election for MPs (though curiously not writs of summons for peers) to the Lord Chancellor and Northern Ireland Secretary to act without the monarch’s instruction, so that this element was taken out of the proclamation.

Three general elections occurred while the FTPA was in force – the fifty-fifth Parliament was allowed to run its natural course, the fifty-sixth was dissolved early by the two thirds motion and the fifty-seventh by a special act of its own passage. Despite these very different constitutional circumstances, the proclamations in all cases were identical (save of course the specific dates mentioned). Below is the text of the proclamation from 2019:

Whereas We, by and with the advice of Our Privy Council, being desirous and
resolved, as soon as may be, to meet Our People, and to have their Advice in
Parliament, do publish this, Our Royal Proclamation, and do hereby make known to
all Our loving Subjects Our Royal Will and Pleasure to call a new Parliament to be
holden at Westminster on Tuesday the seventeenth day of December next: And We do
hereby also, by this Our Royal Proclamation under Our Great Seal of Our Realm,
require Writs to be issued by Our Lord High Chancellor for causing the Lords
Spiritual and Temporal who are to serve in the said Parliament to give their
Attendance in Our said Parliament on the said date.

Given at Our Court at Buckingham Palace, this sixth day of November in the Year of
our Lord two thousand and nineteen and in the sixty-eighth year of Our Reign.

The 2017 version can be read here, and that of 2015 heard here. The 2017 election also had a different proclamation nine days earlier to appoint the polling date, though this proclamation did not enjoy any of the latter’s accompanying ceremony despite clearly being the more politically important of the two.

As you can see, this version of the proclamation is a pathetic sliver of its former self – the issuance of writs refers entirely to the House of Lords and thus doesn’t actually say anything to the general public about participating in an election. The only substantive agency which Her Majesty retained was in choosing the date on which the new Parliament met – and per the other provisions of the FTPA this no longer had any knock-on effect for subsequent elections. Even the name was changed – it became simply “A Proclamation for declaring the calling of a new Parliament” instead of “A Proclamation for dissolving the present Parliament and declaring the calling of another”.

Changes in Procedure

Although it may seem a question of semantics, there is an important difference in the sequence of events between FTPA-era elections and earlier ones: Traditional practice involves a proclamation to dissolve Parliament with immediate effect, then an election happening a certain time after that. FTPA practice was for the election date to be fixed far in advance (whether by the other type of proclamation or by statute) and dissolution would happen a certain number of days before that. In the old system a privy council comprising incumbent parliamentarians would convene to cause their own dissolution and the other matters connected, whereas in under the FTPA they would meet to arrange the other matters several hours after dissolution had already occurred.

That brings us to the key point of this article – the time of day at which dissolution actually takes effect: With the FTPA in place and thus the dissolution date pre-ordained without the need for further action, it was logical to treat it as happening as soon as that date arrived*, which would also have been the case under the old system if a Parliament had been allowed to run its full course. When Parliament is being dissolved by a specific proclamation for that purpose, then it obviously must stay in existence until the proclamation is actually produced – and it is rare for a privy council to be convened at midnight. None of the proclamations specified delaying their effects until the end of the date, and obviously they cannot be retroactive to the beginning of the date because, as mentioned in the previous post, there have been instances of Parliaments still sitting earlier on the same date as that on which they would be dissolved, and retroactive dissolution would have meant that the sitting (including any acts passed and royal assents given thereat) was invalid.

In today’s example, the fifty-eighth Parliament had already been prorogued from 24th May to 31st, but until the privy council held around noon there had been nothing in law to cause it to dissolve, and its natural expiration was still many months away. If Sunak’s government had suddenly gotten cold feet about calling an election, or if His Majesty was somehow prevented from attending (for the sake of the hypothetical let us assume he could not arrange any counsellors of state to be there either) and thus the meeting to approve the proclamation had not gone ahead, then Parliament would have remained in existence and reconvened the next day for the beginning of a fifth session.

Given that the Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Act 2022 repealed the Fixed-term Parliaments Act with the explicit intention to revert to pre-2011 procedure as far as possible, it does not make sense for parliamentary authorities to declare in their guidance and press briefings that the legislature had dissolved many hours before any such thing had actually taken place. The most logical explanation (pending further research) that comes to mind is that that the guidance was written during the 2011-22 period and not updated thereafter, so that the FTPA mentality remains in force even though the law itself does not.

This whole business also caused some difficulty for me as a Wikipedia editor, since I noticed upon rising this morning that another editor had, just after midnight, already changed the tense of my disclaimer flairs on the biographies of still-current MPs. I reverted the change and did not set it forward again until many hours later when I had actually seen the proclamation published online. In all fairness the other editor was merely following reliable sources as we are bound to do. Unfortunately this goes to show that there are many times when the reliable sources can still get things wrong.

*There is a secondary deliberation as to whether this means exactly midnight or, to avoid ambiguity, one minute later. I will not quibble with that particular question here as it does not affect the primary matter I am discussing.

UPDATE (May 2024)

David Torrance has produced a research briefing for the House of Commons Library. Page 7 cites this post and states that “This timing was intended for operational purposes rather than as a statement of the legal position.” with page 10 confirming that the actual dissolution occurred at 11:57am with the application of the Great Seal to the proclamation.