“King Charles III has been crowned at London’s Westminster Abbey, on a day of ancient ceremony and military spectacle that drew on a millennium of the nation’s history. Global leaders and foreign royalty on Saturday attended the event at the Abbey – scene of royal coronations since William the Conqueror was crowned in 1066 – at the start of a day of celebrations. The ceremony, the first since Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953, was attended by about 2,000 guests. King Charles was crowned at 12.02pm to the cry “God save the King”. His wife, Queen Camilla was crowned shortly afterwards.” – FT
Sketches:
>Today: ToryDiary: Our survey. Testing degrees of confidence in the future of the monarchy.
“The sense of continuity remains fundamental. As Edmund Burke put it, a society is a “partnership” between the living, the dead and the yet unborn. The King, his predecessors and eventual successors embody this partnership and the solidarity on which democracy is founded. A leading French political historian has commented that while elected presidents create division or remain nonentities, the British Crown has a unique capacity to connect people with their history, a role “indispensable to legitimising democratic government”. The Coronation shows that the United Kingdom is not just a chaos of factions. Nor is it simply a huge shopping mall, a “UK plc”.” – Sunday Telegraph
Editorial:
“Senior Tories are demanding immediate tax cuts to save the party after last week’s local elections mauling. They called on Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to act “within days” to help kickstart his fightback against Labour in time for next year’s general election. The Conservatives lost more than 1,000 seats including crunch battleground councils in parts of the Red Wall. Tory MP John Redwood told the Sun on Sunday: “The Prime Minister should announce tax cuts on Tuesday – straight after the Coronation bank holiday. “He has got to get on with it. He has got to cut taxes and promote growth.”” – Sun on Sunday
“In the past month Sunak undertook just four campaign events, and many cabinet ministers failed to manage even that. One CCHQ insider said: “It’s been a challenge to get ministers out there. Ultimately it comes down to No 10 needing to crack the whip going forward. If ministers aren’t out there in the last 18 months before a general election, then questions need to be asked.” MPs felt this was an attempt to shield Sunak from inevitably bad results — and an approach designed to protect him at the cost of others. “They kept Rishi away because they didn’t want him to have to own the results,” a Tory source said.” – Sunday Times
“The blunt reality is that ever since Brexit, the Conservative Party has tried to be all things to all voters while satisfying none of them. In the aftermath of the referendum, as I warned the party at the time, it faced a clear choice. It could either seize the moment and rebuild itself around an entirely new electoral coalition and political geography. Or it could cling to a broken status quo and be destined for defeat. It chose the latter. As anybody who has ever sat in a focus group will tell you, there was simply no way on earth many of the professional middle-class graduates, young Millennials and even younger Zoomers in the big cities, university towns and liberal enclaves were going to vote for the Tories in 2024.” – Matthew Goodwin, Sunday Times
“A senior Labour MP has predicted the party will not need to go into coalition after the next general election, despite results from this week’s local elections showing they could be short of an overall majority. Labour gained 536 seats and took control of another 22 councils as it became the largest party in local government for the first time since 2002… However, analysis by Sky News’s Michael Thrasher has found that if the results were repeated at next year’s general election it would put Keir Starmer’s party 28 seats away from having a majority in the House of Commons.” – The Guardian
More:
“Britain’s FBI was drafted in by Scottish police to help with their investigation into the SNP’s finances, it can be revealed. Officers from the National Crime Agency, which leads the fight to cut serious and organised crime, were commissioned several months before Nicola Sturgeon’s husband, Peter Murrell, was arrested. The specialist team were asked to assess the progress of the investigation, bringing a fresh pair of eyes to the evidence collected, and identify any possible lines of inquiry. The officers, likely to have been financial crime experts, conducted a “peer review” of the operation over several weeks between October and December.” – Sunday Times