Portrait of the week: Coronation protests, new powers for pharmacists and Labour gains ground

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The day after the coronation, 20,000 attended a concert in Windsor Castle, including the King and Queen. ‘As my grandmother said when she was crowned, coronations are a declaration of our hopes for the future,’ said the Prince of Wales in a speech to the crowd. ‘And I know she’s up there, fondly keeping an eye on us. She would be a proud mother.’ His brother, the Duke of Sussex, had witnessed the coronation from the third row, and left for his family in America immediately after. On television, 20.4 million had seen the King crowned. The Metropolitan Police arrested 64 people, 13 to ‘prevent a breach of the peace’, charging four, two of them for the possession of Class A drugs. The Met said a review found no proof for police suspicions that six protestors arrested were planning to use ‘lock-on’ devices prohibited under the new Public Order Act. But the King and Queen’s carriage had passed yellow placards outside Horse Guards in Whitehall declaring ‘Not my king’.

The government devised a new cadre of barefoot doctors who would be allowed to start practising without a degree; pharmacists in chemists’ shops would also be able to prescribe drugs for earache, sore throats, sinusitis, impetigo, shingles, infected insect bites and some urinary tract infections. It also hatched a plan to make consultations with GPs easier to book, earmarking £240 million for practices to replace old telephones, as though that were the problem. Lawyers in Scotland boycotted a pilot scheme for rape trials with no juries. A barge, the Bibby Stockholm, was towed from Genoa to Falmouth, bound for Portland, Dorset, where the government plans to accommodate 506 asylum seekers in the vessel’s 222 bedrooms.

In the local elections, Labour increased its councillors in the contested councils by 536 to 2,674, bringing 71 councils under its control, an increase of 22; the Conservatives lost 1,061 councillors, leaving 2,296, with councils in its control reduced to 33, a decrease of 48.