Tomorrow’s spectacle is better understood as poetry than in the severely rational terms of democratic theorists who accept no need for religion and ritual.
Blair said that he wanted Britain “to be a young country again”. It wasn’t one then and isn’t one now. There is a fittingness in King Charles being the oldest monarch ever to take our throne.
In these days of her Platinum Jubilee, we give thanks both local and ceremonial for her faithful service to her people.
In looking to the monarchy’s future, we follow in his footsteps. He was its original moderniser in our times.
All three PMs did about as well as anyone could in the circumstances, and all three, so far as one can see, are doomed.
A new biography of the ruthless, devious, vulgar, brilliant newspaperman who in 1940 became Minister of Aircraft Production.
It is an extremely tough task to prepare to be a constitutional monarch, or indeed to take on the actual role.
Commentators who think Elizabeth II has not done much to preserve the monarchy tend not to have imagined what another monarch might have been like.
Far from being a reactionary as sometimes caricatured, he was always compassionate and open-minded, as well as brave.