Will Charles be the first multicultural monarch?
The Queen turned 80 on 21 April this year, and while she may finally have been prevailed upon to scale back on her public duties, she remains — as anyone who saw her during her visit to the Baltic States last week knows — in robust good health.
Alex Galloway, the Clerk of the Privy Council, has however deemed this a prudent juncture to dispatch a circular letter to all the 500 or so members of Her Majesty’s Privy Council to ensure that he has up-to-date land and mobile telephone numbers and email addresses for each of them should he ever need to relay urgent information. The phraseology that the career civil servant employs in his letter is studiously matter-of-fact, but his purpose is abundantly clear: he has in mind the arrangements that will need to be put in place when the sovereign dies. And, as he well knows, time will be of the essence: it is a requirement that an Accession Council — comprising all the members of the Privy Council — be convened within 24 hours of the Queen’s death to agree and sign the Proclamation of Accession.
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