McFall Bows Out Early

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The Lord McFall of Alcluith has served as Lord Speaker since 2021. Today he announced in Parliament that he would be stepping down early because Lady McFall has Parkinson’s disease and he needs to spend more time caring for her. He has arranged for his successor to take office on 2nd February next year.

The office of Lord Speaker came into being as a standalone position as a result of the Constitutional Reform Act 2005, having previously been one of many duties undertaken by the Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain. According to Standing Order 18 (paraphrasing a little for simplicity):

  1. The first election of a Lord Speaker was held on 13th July 2011. Subsequently, elections shall be held in the fifth calendar year following that in which the previous election was held, on a day no later than 15th July in that year. A Lord Speaker elected under this paragraph shall take office on 1st September in the year of election.
  2. Where a Lord Speaker (including a person elected as Lord Speaker who has not yet taken office) dies, resigns or is deemed to have resigned, an election of a Lord Speaker shall be held within three months of the death, the giving notice of resignation or the deemed resignation. For the purposes of paragraph (1), this election is then “the previous election”.

The first Lord Speaker was the Helene, Baroness Hayman, who served from 4th July 2006 to 31st August 2011.

The second was Frances, Baroness D’Souza, who served from 1st September 2011 to 31st August 2016.

The third was Norman, Lord Fowler, who served from 1st September 2016 to 30th April 2021. He stepped down slightly early to focus on independent political campaigning.

The fifth, who has not yet been decided, will presumably serve from 2nd February 2026 to 31st August 2031.

It is a little strange to think that, despite the intention to have fixed term-lengths for the office, only one out of the first five incumbents has actually served the standard period on the Woolsack. McFall’s decision to leave office in February rather than much sooner is probably to allow the election of his successor to take place in January. If the election took place in December or November then the fifth Lord Speaker would only serve until August 2030, and thus every subsequent Lord Speaker election would be one year earlier than was originally intended. No candidacies have yet been declared for the forthcoming election.

Incidentally, Lady D’Souza has been in the news this week for almost the first time since her own speakership ended — she is facing an eight-week suspension from the House for using a Parliamentary letterhead when appealing speeding fines.

 

The Inbetweeners: A Potential Revival

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Even here I’ve managed to squeeze heraldry in. The shield of Rudge Park Comprehensive School is about as generic and uninspiring as you’d expect, but at least it conforms to the rules of heraldry unlike so many in real life. The blazon is most likely “Azure on a bend Argent three oak trees of the field”.

The Inbetweeners is a televisual franchise that can be considered, if not actually dead, then at least dormant, in as much as it’s been eleven years since the release of the second film and fifteen years since the end of the TV series. Neither the audience nor, it seems, the cast and crew, can entirely move on and yesterday there was an announcement that the four lead actors had signed up to a revival. Most of the news articles I could find were behind paywalls and those few which were readable still didn’t betray much in the way of detail despite about what form this new instalment would take. Presumably nothing of substance has been decided yet. From fans and commentators there is excitement, but also a lot of dread.

My academic cohort were a few years behind that of the character, and I think we discovered the program en mass around 2011-12* — after the series proper had ended but before we reached sixth-form ourselves. While the jokes (and indeed the catchphrases) circulated widely, I’m not sure it was ever regarded as more than fiction. Nobody saw it as a reflection of their own lives at the time, much less an aspiration for the future. A lot of cultural histories of this period refer to The Inbetweeners as the way sixth-form really worked for most people in Britain, in opposition to the fantasy version presented by Skins**, but curiously I don’t remember anyone at my school talking about Skins at all. As to whether it’s representative now, I’m obviously too old to say (and likely wasn’t qualified even back then), but I remember these articles from the end of the last decade noting how hard the format had proven to recapture.

Even so, we know we are in for some kind of comeback, and the scepticism of the long-time fans is well-founded as bringing back a property like this after such a long time always runs the risk of sullying rather than enhancing its reputation. Even this series’ own tenth anniversary special in 2018 was widely regarded as a damp squib. The problem most critical to a story of this kind is the age of the characters: Dawson Casting is routine for productions like this and right from the start the leads played characters a few years younger than themselves*** without straining credibility. Now, however, if you tried to pick up remotely close to where the second film left off they’d be about twice as old as the people they portrayed, and even with digital de-ageing it would be hard to pull off, with the added complication that the setting itself would have to be more than a decade in the past rather than contemporary^. Clearly, if the cast are to unite onscreen again, it would need to be in a “Where Are They Now?” sort of way, catching up with them at about age 35. This is tricky, as inevitably their situation in life will be very different, and that tends to cause existential problems for what is formally called situational comedy. Of course, other genres can also have this problem in their own ways, so here I will briefly change tack.

Dr Philippa Gregory has written a great many novels about English royal history, including a long string of them about the Plantagenets and Tudors. Starz has adapted some of these into TV series: The White Queen in 2013^^, The White Princess in 2017 and The Spanish Princess in 2019-20. TWQ covered the life of Elizabeth Woodville from 1461 to 1485, TWP followed her daughter Elizabeth of York until 1499. Gregory said that these parts of English history were underserved in mainstream fiction beyond Shakespeare, which may be correct. Season 1 of TSP was about the life of Catherine of Aragon from 1501-1509. This part could still qualify since Catherine’s time with Henry in their youth before their marriage broke down is also frequently neglected. When it was announced that TSP would get a second season, fans on their forums wondered just how long Starz intended to string this out, noting that the story couldn’t go much further before becoming a rehash of Showtime’s series The Tudors or myriad other productions including Gregory’s own The Other Boleyn Girl.

When it comes to this proposed revival, the comparison of which to be most wary is, of course, Peep Show, that other Channel 4 cult classic of the noughties. The exact diagetic timeline of that series is not always consistent, but the final episode has Jeremy turning 40 and the first series seems to have them both just shy of 30. The Inbetweeners, if renewed now, would land around the middle of this range. What’s more, a lot of the story ideas floated for the new script — whether by ordinary fans or by people connected with the franchise, feel very PS-esque: I saw musings about quirky flatshares, wedding disasters, failed partnerships and juxtaposed career outcomes. As I mentioned in last month’s post, PS had to end once the main characters got too old for the situation to continue, and any revival now would need to radically change its approach to adjust to the times. There might well need to be a new setting, and the characters to be written in a new way. This would also be the case for The Inbetweeners, and indeed more so given the even greater time gap both absolute and proportionate. It would not be possible to write the characters as the same personalities we remember from 2010, nearly half their lives ago. For sure, you could make arrested development an explicit feature of the story (as it also was on PS, and which would be entirely expected for at least two of the main four) but even then it would come off with a different tone.

My intention here is not to come of as overly pessimistic: I know from Futurama and Red Dwarf that an old franchise can be successfully brought back many times across several decades. It is eminently possible to get an interesting story out of a late sequel, albeit one which will need to be quite distinct from what was written the first time around and with the high risk that a large proportion of the audience will feel disgust at the outcome rather than delight. There is life here still, just not necessarily as we used to know it.

NOTES

*As the whole series ran to only eighteen episodes it was quite easy to finish the whole run on 4OD in a few days.
**I refer readers to this video essay by Stuart “Stubagful” Hardy, in particular where he says “I never got to live a life like the kids on Skins. Most of my teenage years consisted of being made to sit in a series of rooms with adults glowering at me… alright, a drama based on my teenage years probably wouldn’t have exactly made for a compelling piece of television but, in my defence, that was real! You people want real, don’t you.“ and, while it’s actually reviewing a completely different Channel 4 program, Charlie Brooker’s famous line in this Guardian article: “The biggest teenage taboo is being strait-laced. It’s easy to tell a researcher you went to a house party that turned into an orgy. It’s less easy to say you like eating toast and watching QI.”
***The four lead actors were born 1982-87 whereas the characters would have been born 1991-92 in order to start sixth-form in 2008.
^The second film already has this problem, being set in 2010-11 but made in 2014.
^^Co-production with the BBC.

Princes and Passports

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The King and the Prince of Wales made an unusual joint appearance on Thursday night – at a “Countdown to COP30” event at the Natural History Museum. I was a little perplexed to see them both getting out of the same car, given that security protocols often require the incumbent monarch and the heir apparent to travel separately. Perhaps that was itself an environmental statement, but in that case they surely would have turned up in His Majesty’s new electric BMW instead of the petrol-powered State Bentley. The limousine was, of course, displaying the undifferenced royal shield and banner.

Today the Home Office announced that British passports had been updated to, among other things, display Timothy Noad’s illustration of the British royal arms, replacing the old Reynolds Stone illustration as it has in so many other contexts. Stone’s illustration, at time of writing, still appears on Acts of Parliament.

In other heraldic news, it has been five months since the last newsletter by the College of Arms and six since the last blog post by the Heraldry Society. Still, at least there’s another virtual Oxford lecture coming up in a fortnight’s time!

Francium Decay

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It was announced today that Sébastien Lecornu was resigning as Prime Minister of France, having only taken up that office on 9th September. He hasn’t technically left office yet as he remains in a caretaker capacity until a successor can be found, but even if he lasts another three weeks like this his tenure will be shorter than Liz Truss’s in Britain.

Changing heads of government repeatedly in a short time is generally regarded as a symptom of a country’s political instability. I had a go at comparing France to some other countries — not all of them, obviously, nor is this sample chosen according to any particular principle — to see how bad things really are.

I think ten years is a long enough period from which to make a fair assessment, so I have listed all the people to have held the equivalent office in the period beginning 6th October 2015 and ending 6th October 2025. Dates of appointment are listed in brackets.

Nine

France

  1. Manuel Valls (31/03/2014)
  2. Bernard Cazeneuve (06/12/2016)
  3. Édouard Philippe (15/05/2017)
  4. Jean Castex (03/07/2020)
  5. Élizabeth Borne (16/05/2022)
  6. Gabriel Attal (09/01/2024)
  7. Michel Barnier (05/09/2024)
  8. François Bayrou (13/12/2024)
  9. Sébastien Lecornu (09/09/2025)

Six

Britain

  1. David Cameron (11/05/2010)
  2. Theresa May (13/07/2016)
  3. Boris Johnson (24/07/2019)
  4. Liz Truss (08/09/2022)
  5. Rishi Sunak (25/10/2022)
  6. Sir Keir Starmer (05/07/2024)

Five

Italy

  1. Matteo Renzi (22/02/2014)
  2. Paolo Gentiloni (12/12/2016)
  3. Giuseppe Conte (01/06/2018)
  4. Mario Draghi (13/02/2021)
  5. Giorgia Meloni (22/10/2022)

New Zealand

  1. John Key (19/11/2008)
  2. Bill English (15/12/2016)
  3. Jacinda Ardern (26/10/2017)
  4. Christopher Hipkins (25/01/2023)
  5. Christopher Luxon (27/11/2023)

Ukraine

  1. Arseniy Yatsenyuk (27/02/2014)
  2. Volodymyr Groysman (14/04/2016)
  3. Oleksiy Honcharuk (29/08/2019)
  4. Denys Shmyhal (04/03/2026)
  5. Yulia Svyrydenko (17/07/2025)

Four

Belgium

  1. Charles Michel (11/10/2014)
  2. Sophie Wilmès (27/10/2019)
  3. Alexander de Croo (01/10/2020)
  4. Bart de Wever (03/02/2025)

Three

Australia

  1. Malcolm Turnbull (15/09/2015)
  2. Scott Morrison (24/08/2018)
  3. Anthony Albanese (23/05/2022)

Canada

  1. Stephen Harper (06/02/2006)
  2. Justin Trudeau (04/11/2015)
  3. Mark Carney (14/03/2025)

Germany

  1. Angela Merkel (22/11/2005)
  2. Olaf Scholz (08/12/2021)
  3. Friedrich Merz (06/05/2025)

Israel

  1. Benjamin Netanyahu (31/12/2009 and 29/12/2022)
  2. Natfali Bennett (13/06/2021)
  3. Yair Lapid (01/07/2022)

Two

Luxembourg

  1. Xavier Bettel (04/12/2013)
  2. Luc Frieden (17/11/2023)

Russia

  1. Dmitry Medvedev (08/05/2012)
  2. Mikhail Mishustin (16/01/2020)

Spain

  1. Mariano Rajoy (21/12/2011)
  2. Pedro Sanchéz (02/06/2018)

The winner is Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, where Ralph Gonsalves has been Prime Minister since 29th March 2001.

As you can see, France is indeed doing rather badly in terms of minister retention. Britain isn’t exactly doing well either. I was a little surprised to see Australia, Canada and Germany all tied, given that the former is infamous for cycling its leaders and the latter respected for retaining them. Scholz has clearly let the side down by only lasting one term while Tony Abbot quit early enough to miss out on being counted here. Stephen Harper is only just barely included for Canada as the general election which would see him ousted was already ongoing.

Ten Years of Blogging

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It’s difficult, in retrospect, to work out precisely when this website actually started: According to some emails from WordPress I’ve recently dug up, it seems my account with them may have been created as early as July 2015, but I didn’t actually publish my first proper post until March 2016. I have settled on 5th October as the anniversary date as it is the publication date listed for the About page, as well as the earliest date for which any site views are recorded.*

This was far from my first attempt at building a website for myself: That summer I had launched Homework Direct, itself the successor to a different website started in July 2012, and I have a dim memory of working with a school friend in 2009-10 to set up an online magazine, though that never got anywhere. Thinking even further back to the mid-noughties, I have still fainter recollections of two different instances where I experimented with simple blogs, but those definitely didn’t get published either.

I can’t quite remember my original motivation for creating the blog. It may be that I had just started at Wilberforce College, leaving behind my prior social group and taking a while to establish a new one, so it wouldn’t always be possible to discuss my observations on various phenomena in person. That would have been a little redundant by March, though. More likely it was prompted by a vague sense of building one’s “brand”. I’d never fancied (and still don’t) joining Facebook or Twitter, deciding instead that having an actual website of my own would better suit my needs. The next question was which site-builder to use. I had, that summer and last, experimented with coding pages directly in HTML but it proved too much of a faff. Blogspot and Livejournal already looked a bit primitive, antiquated and amateur. Tumblr was too unstable and had too many undesirable political connotations. I couldn’t get to grips with Weebly or Squarespace no matter how much they were advertised. I didn’t learn about Medium until years later. If I was starting ten years later (and perhaps if I was ten years younger) I could well have ended up on Substack. WordPress was recommended to me by every friend and family member with webmaster experience. I suppose I could have used Wix, on which Homework Direct was already done, but it’s lucky I didn’t as I quickly came to find that service inferior. Another item to consider was the name and domain. I long had my mind set on HomeworkDirect.Com only to see it taken at the last minute by the Uncle Ben’s rice company. I ended up going for HomeworkDirect.UK instead. When it came to my personal blog I was a little annoyed to find that all the Robin Taylor domains were taken. At first I was tempted to dismiss this as the inevitable fate of all names by that point. I then tried searching for the names of my acquaintances at Wilberforce, then those I remembered from secondary and even primary school, to discover that the vast majority of them did not suffer the same problem. I had to include my middle name to find a unique domain, at the expense of the URL being a bit long. The Robin Stanley Taylor domains were all available. I settled on the one I wanted** and even designed stationery with it included, but held off actually registering it until two years later as I wanted to avoid the additional expense of a second subscription until I was sure the blog would be a long-term commitment.

Late in 2015 I became a low-level public officeholder when a senior faculty member at the college nominated me*** to be on the student council. I found myself in the position of secretary and had the role of presenting triannual reports on the reports on the council’s activities to the college corporation. That gave me some material that seemed vaguely blog-worthy. There were also visits by famous faces to the college and days out (such as university open days, or that tour of medieval Beverley) to provide extra fodder. The blog was vague enough that could write on any number of miscellaneous interests, so I discussed politics and public events a fair amount (my principal hobby at the time), such as Harold Wilson’s centenary or the recall of the National Assembly for Wales over the Tata Steel crisis. These two topic areas could overlap when Wilberforce had a political visitor, such as the Lord Norton of Louth in late 2016. At the University of Hull I became a school and then subject representative in the student union. I was a much smaller fish in this much larger pond and, although I still went to a lot of meetings, I never had anything interesting to say at them and posts about them got almost no views. More engaging were the posts I wrote about guest lecturers — such as Paul Danahar and Terence Casey. One of my most-read articles is about my time at The Lawns in Cottingham.

The COVID lockdowns put an end to campus activity anyway, so I turned almost entirely to other matters. By this point I was blogging regularly about heraldry in its various aspects, which accounts for a sizeable proportion of my posts. One upside to the lockdowns was proliferation of organisations doing free virtual conferences and lectures, often with very little scrutiny of whom they let in. I attended far more of these than I ever got around to writing up. In the years after COVID the supply of these has slowly dried up with many organisations going back to in-person events and/or restricting them to paying members. Even so, I still get to attend a handful of these each year.

As time has gone on I have drifted into standard political analyses a lot, covering both the dignified and the efficient aspect of the constitution. I got onto a particular roll with this in the closing years of the former reign and across the slow beginning of the current one. This occasionally gets recognition from high up, as when David Torrance quoted my critique of Parliamentary guidance around dissolution in 2024.

While all this is going on, I’m not really sure what to do with Homework Direct. Initially it was my main focus (which partly explains the sloth of activity on the blog) but by September 2016 I had uploaded everything I could find which fit the format and there was little more to do. There have been very few updates since then and visitor activity is low compared to the main blog. The most significant development was in August 2022 when Wix announce a hiking of the domain registration price. I was tempted to close the project completely at this point, but I ultimately decided to migrate**** it to WordPress along with everything else. A month earlier I had created a new website for Paull Holme Tower, but that is stuck in a frozen state too.

I have mentioned before the steady growth of readership on this site. From 1st January to 4th October this year I have achieved a total of 3716 views, a mean of 13.4 per day. If this trend continues for the remaining 88 days of this year I will end up just shy of 4900 views, which will exceed last year’s record but still fall a little short of my target. I don’t want to give the wrong impression here: As it says on the about page, this blog is run as a hobby not as a business, and even with an audience much larger than this it wouldn’t occur to me to put up paywalls or sell merchandise. It’s just nice to know that my contributions are appreciated.

I don’t really know what the future holds. I suppose I shall just keep on blogging about events in the news, political and royal trivia, book and television reviews, trains, buildings and virtual lectures until I physically or mentally can’t anymore, or until the hosting gets too expensive, or until WordPress shuts down or becomes unworkable, or too expensive, or until I say something controversial that gets me censured, or until the free internet is ended. Instead of planning for the future, this little exercise got me more interested in the past: There have been multiple occasions over the past ten years in which I had meant to put out an article but never got around to writing it, or wrote much of it but never got it finished, or even finished it but never published. I’m considering whether it would be worth now going back around to fill in some of the gaps, particularly for the early years where it currently looks a bit threadbare. I’m sure my student council report for the Michaelmas term in 2015 will prove super fascinating to all!

FOOTNOTES

*Most of the views are from Britain, and these are almost certainly from me checking my own site to make sure it worked, but there was also one from the United States. I wonder how they found me so soon?

**RobinStanleyTaylor.Com was also available but ‘.Net felt somehow more apposite.

***I didn’t actually meet her until some time afterwards and I never found out what was the procedure for choosing candidates.

****When I say “migrate”, I really mean a day of frantic copying and pasting.

Nova Cantaur

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The process of appointing a new Archbishop of Canterbury has been a very long one. Justin Welby announced his intention to step down on 12th November 2024. The See of Canterbury formally became vacant with effect from 7th January 2025.

Today, 325 days after Welby’s announcement, it has been revealed that Dame Sarah Mullally, currently Bishop of London, is his designated successor. Of course, that’s still not the end of the process: She won’t formally assume her new office until her confirmation of election on 28th January and her enthronement is scheduled for some time in March, which could mean the whole saga ends up taking nearly 500 days. This isn’t even the worst example of episcopal appointments taking too long — the Bishopric of Durham has been vacant since 29th February last year with no replacement in sight. Currently in this respect (and, embarrassingly, many others) the Roman church is outperforming the Anglican: Only 27 days passed between the death of Francis and the inaugural mass of Leo XIV.

When Benedict XVI resigned (for reasons quite similar to Welby), there was some speculation that Francis, already 76 and with some known health issues, had been deliberately chosen by the cardinals as someone who wouldn’t serve long. That he lived and held the crozier for another twelve years took many by surprise. The Church of England took the element of surprise out of the game fifty years ago by imposing mandatory retirement at age 70 (though a maximum of one year’s extention is allowed at the monarch’s discretion). As with judges and heralds, this means there must be consideration of an informal maximum appointment age if the candidate is to have a decent time in the job before being forced out. Mullally, who was born in 1962, will be the oldest at taking office since Coggan and the second-oldest since Lang. She will have only six years, maybe seven if extended, in which to make her mark.

The “big five” diocesan posts in the Church of England, the ones always represented among the Lords Spiritual in Parliament, are Canterbury, Durham, London, Winchester and York. Looking at the other Archbishops of Canterbury who have served since the end of Victoria’s reign, we see that F. Temple and Fisher were, like Mullally, translated from London; Welby from Durham; Davidson from Winchester; Williams from Monmouth; Carey from Bath & Wells; Carey from St Albans; Lang, W. Temple, Ramsey and Coggan from York. Clearly, it is by no means mandatory to have held one of the other top posts first but it certainly helps. Since Durham is vacant, Mullally’s only rivals here were Stephen Cottrell and Philip Mountstephen, both born before 1960 and thus realistically too old.

Given the sour note on which Welby departed, and the long time taken to find a successor, some commentators were wondering if the institution was looking for someone out of left field in order to clean the slate. That turned out not to be the case (whether or not it was ever the intention) as Mullally is, by my reckoning, rather the obvious choice.

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The Longest Month

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September commences the waning third of the year. October is where we start the waning quarter. All pretence of clinging to summer now becomes untenable, as does any attempt to ignore that most dreadful phenomenon of the later months — the long countdown to Christmas. Yesterday I was in a branch of Home Bargains and found an aisle which encapsulated this perfectly; solidly packed with Halloween decorations on one side and Christmas on the other. A fortnight earlier I went into a B&M across the road and found among the confusing maze of aisles a few which were entirely Christmas-dominated, a couple which were all Halloween and a small, pathetic half-section offering huge discounts on the remaining stock of beach buckets. We’re also past the autumnal equinox, of course, and it is rare now to maintain daylight past dinnertime. I had spent most of the preceding season reading The Book of Lost Tales in my garden, but getting through the rest of the series in that manner will be difficult now that most of the time it’s either dark or raining. Artificial light is needed more and more to make up for the loss of the natural and, indeed, daylight savings will take effect on 26th, which is what makes October longer than the other 31-day months. I think back to John Finnemore’s song about 5th February being the Most Miserable Time of the Year “with Christmas a distant memory and summer still far away”. A song about the converse situation would probably put the key date around 12th October. Of course, as I discussed some years ago, lots of TV shows have already recorded their Christmas specials by now, which must only further feed a sense of dissatisfaction from linear time.

The Met Office reported that the summer of 2025 was Britain’s hottest on record, and the record has been set several times already this century. This kind of commentary seemed to peak just after the Glastonbury festival, with lamentations that the tradition of the “washout” now seems to have quietly died. The British still stereotype themselves as living in a cold, wet country but the reality is that we are fast becoming a war, dry one, hence a growing public outrage about the low availability of air conditioning. These complaints are likely to resurface in the next few summers, but for now they have abated… because we’re moving into the colder months now and thus looking forward to panics about the cost of heating. I remember that in 2022, as an inflammatory heatwave was only just receding, there were already warnings of “warm hubs” being needed in the winter so that the poor didn’t freeze. I can’t help but feel that if we were collectively capable of thinking more than three months ahead or behind then we likely wouldn’t be in either of these messes.

Balancing the Ball

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Almost from birth I have had a strong aversion to even thinking about rugby and this was not assuaged during the few terms at secondary school when I had to learn to play it. This article is not about the sport, but about the peculiarity of a Buckingham Palace Tweet.

The text of the Tweet says:

A message from His Majesty The King to @RedRosesRugby and Women's @RugbyCanada Team following today’s #RWC2025 final.
The use of “following” here is a bit strange, since the message was put out eight hours before the game had even started. The King’s message is shown as an attached image, depicted against the backdrop of a rugby pitch with the England flag at the top and the Canadian flag at the bottom.
My wife and I send our warmest good wishes to both the
England Red Roses and Canada Women's Rugby Team as
you prepare for your World Cup final.

What a remarkable achievement for both teams to have
reached this pinnacle of the sport. I know that supporters
on both sides of the Atlantic will be cheering with equal
and tremendous pride.

May the best team win, and may you both play with the
spirit of sportsmanship, determination and true grit that
makes rugby such a wonderful game to watch. Whatever
the result, you have already done your countries proud.

Good luck to you all.

Charles R.
The message, of course, has to congratulate both teams equally for getting to the final and then be studiously neutral as to which of them will win it. I would plaintively suggest that including the Canadian coat of arms alongside the British one would have helped in this regard.
The King acted in a third capacity today when he held an audience at Balmoral Castle with Anthony Albanese, whom I think he last met in person at CHOGM in Samoa. Albanese had already been in Britain for bilateral discussions with Sir Keir Starmer at Downing Street.
Earlier this year Their Majesties made a state visit on Britain’s behalf to the Italian Republic. The trip was supposed to include a state visit to the Holy See in Vatican City as well, but things went awry when Pope Francis fell seriously ill. Eventually they managed to get a low-key private meeting on their anniversary, but anything grander was beyond His Holiness’s health. He died twelve days later. About a week ago, a few newspapers were reporting was going ahead with Leo XIV as host. Today the Palace confirmed it. The exact date has not been given yet, only “late October”. This will be the fourth British royal visit to the Vatican this year, as the Prince of Wales attended Francis’s funeral and the Duke of Edinburgh attended Leo’s inaugural mass. Those aforementioned news articles said it would be Charles III’s final overseas journey for 2025. That is very disappointing as it means there won’t be a royal tour of New Zealand this year. Given that 2026 is a general election year — in which royal tours are conventionally avoided — and that the sovereign is already expected to fly to Canada, the United States and Antigua & Barbuda at various points, it might not happen now until 2027, a full three years after it was originally planned.

The Queen’s Austen Faux Pas

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The Queen’s Reading Room has just had its annual festival at Chatsworth House. In this video as shown on the ITN royal family YouTube channel, she makes a speech about Jane Austen (who turns 250 this year), a segment of which I will now quote:

We are provided with this magnificent backdrop that was her inspiration for Pemberley in Pride and Prejudice, and who can forget the infamous scene of Mr Darcy emerging from the lake in the BBC version?

There have been quite a few BBC adaptations, but of course she is referring to the 1995 version where Darcy is played by Colin Firth. I have not yet gotten around to reading the book or watching any of its adaptations, but immediately this line pinged something in my head. I was sure I’d read somewhere, many years ago, that this is an example of the Mandela Effect — that the infamous scene that none can forget was never actually in the episode!

Happily I didn’t need to go through the entire series on iPlayer because the Lake Scene is the subject of multiple YouTube videos, including at least two by the BBC itself.

Sure enough, we see him jumping in, then him swimming beneath the surface, then cut to Bennet in Pemberley’s garden, then to Darcy walking along the grassy hills still damp. The actual moment of his emergence from the water is not included.

Just three months ago there was a YouGov article describes this as a prime example of collective false memory: Their study showed 49% remembered the scene happening even though it didn’t. The televisual non-event is so famous that there was even a giant fibreglass statue of Firth erected in Hyde Park in 2013.

I wonder if anyone at Clarence House had to check Her Majesty’s speech in advance of the event. This is the sort of thing which should have been caught and corrected before it went public.

Trump at Windsor and Chequers

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The 47th President of the United States has now completed his much-anticipated second state visit to Britain. Here are my observations on it.

Time and Place

This time the state visit was at Windsor Castle instead of Buckingham Palace. Trump himself said that this was because Windsor was better. While most (including the royals themselves) would agree that Windsor is the superior setting by most metrics, the real reason for the change of location is that Buckingham Palace is undergoing major renovations so won’t be available for these kinds of events for some time. Trump had previously visited the castle on his Official (not state) visit in 2018.

There had been some speculation about the idea of the second state visit being held in Scotland rather than England. The King’s letter to him in February even speculated he could come to Balmoral, but this did not come to pass. Trump did make a visit to Scotland this summer while the monarch was also there, but it was a private rather than a political visit and the two men did not meet.

The timing of the visit was a little tight, as it was sandwiched between the Duchess of Kent’s funeral and the Queen’s Reading Room Festival. The Duke & Duchess of Edinburgh were not present due to clashing commitments — commemorating Independence Day in Papua New Guinea, then representing Britain at a business summit in Japan.

Ceremony and Security

What made this visit a little surreal is that, due to the intense unpopularity of Donald Trump among most of the British population and the scale of protests against him, this was the paradoxical phenomenon of a state visit done almost in secret. There were no “public-facing” events, with the foreign visitor instead being flown in his own presidential helicopter directly from Stansted airport to his ambassador’s residence, then to Windsor Castle, then to Chequers, then to Stansted again, thus avoiding the public roads (although his motorcade was still driven there without him in it).

What particularly stood out here was the carriage ride: For the state visitor to be pulled by horse through the streets of Windsor (or the Mall in Westminster) is a standard part of the tradition — witness Macron two months ago, the sovereigns of Japan and Qatar last year, and even Vladimir Putin in 2003 — but the enormous additional security requirements for American leaders had previously rendered this impractical. The solution here was for the carriage ride, like everything else, to happen entirely within the castle grounds. There were still soldiers lining the route, but no cheers from adoring crowds (or, more likely, jeers from abhorring crowds instead). The emptiness of the background gave the scene a visual quality reminiscent of much of the COVID years, especially Prince Philip’s funeral.

Other Parts

The First Lady had a tour of the Windsor Castle library with Queen Camilla, followed by a Scouts Squirrels event with the Princess of Wales. Her facial expressions throughout these events are noticeably different to when she is pictured with her husband.

Attire

As the state banquet was at Windsor, naturally the royal men were wearing the Windsor uniform while everyone else wore white tie. The King & Queen wore the sash of the Order of the Garter, as did the Duke & Duchess of Gloucester, the Prince of Wales and the Princess Royal, while the Princess of Wales and Sir Tim Laurence wore that of the Royal Victorian Order. Trump’s chest was noticeable for its lack of adornment, which is a little odd as he seems exactly the sort of person who would most covet medals and sashes. There was no exchange of honours between the two heads of state, which one would normally expect to see here if it hadn’t been done already.

I also spotted that, when first meeting each other, the sovereign and the president both wore ties the same colour as the hats worn by their respective consorts, which was a nice touch.

Music

We had copious renditions of God Save The King and The Star-Spangled Banner. I was a little surprised we never heard the presidency’s own anthem Hail to the Chief. Protocol aside, it would have been more artistically-apposite to have that one paired with the royal anthem while the national anthem was paired with something like Rule, Britannia!

Progress and Politics

Having completed his Dignified stay at Windsor, the President then moved to Chequers for the Efficient part of the visit. The British and American governments produced a Memorandum of Understanding regarding cooperation on advanced information technologies and, most intriguingly, nuclear energy. That last one is something that Britain has direly needed for a while, though the other parts have yet to fully escape the realm of folly.

Photographs

One of the main perks, for me at least, of having a US Government visit to the UK is that there will be a series of official photographs released into the public domain. I was a little disappointed on this occasion to see that the White House Flickr account didn’t publish any photographs of the visit, while the State Department only published one of Marco Rubio meeting Yvette Cooper on the runway. The collection on Wikimedia Commons is mainly made up of images found on White House Twitter and Instagram feeds. The White House YouTube channel also uploaded some nice long videos of the key events (albeit with a banner over much of the screen). There is less clarity on these platforms as to the copyright status, and it may later turn out that they are commercial photographs rather than government ones, in which case they will have to be removed. The Downing Street Flickr account published three dozen photographs of the event at Chequers but the only one from Windsor was the group shot shown above. This means there are no free photographs of the state dinner itself, so these will have to be sourced from screencaps of the aforementioned videos.

The Future

Already there have been further news articles hinting that Trump intends to invite Charles & Camilla to Washington D.C. next year, on a reciprocal state visit coinciding with the 250th anniversary of the United States’ independence. That should be interesting to see!

UPDATE (22nd September)

The White House Flickr account has now released an album of the state banquet with 27 photographs at time of typing, as well as 83 of the arrival ceremony and 48 of the Chequers conference, which sure makes my life a lot easier.