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The Breakfast Debate

Discussion in 'Leeds United' started by ellandback, Mar 16, 2017.

  1. ellandback

    ellandback Well-Known Member
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    Good Morning Everyone,

    Danish striker Martin Braithwaite has inadvertently linked himself to Leeds Utd via twitter.

    The 6.4m rated Toulouse striker sent the following tweet:-

    Martin Braithwaite‏Verified account@MartinBraith
    Check out my new house guest.. have you got something to do with this @LUFC?
    please log in to view this image
    please log in to view this image
    #lufc #peacocks #nickname



    25-year-old Danish striker Braithwaite, who joined current club Toulouse from hometown club Esbjerg fB in August 2013, posted the above picture to his personal Twitter feed, tagging Leeds United directly and hashtagging the club’s traditional nickname as a reference to the bird wandering about on his lawn.

    Whilst Braithwaite, whose 11 goals and three assists this season takes his Toulouse total to 39 goals and 13 assists, was likely just displaying his wide knowledge of Leeds United, that hasn’t stopped Leeds fans jumping on the post with pleas aimed at the club itself.

    Ever heard of him???

    God thing our nickname is not the red herrings? <doh>




    How many points would you expect us to get from our next two games.

    Home v Brighton

    Away v Reading?

    Would two draws be sufficient?

    The next game is away to Brentford; another tricky tie!

    Would you expect us to win there?
     
    #1
  2. Doc

    Doc Well-Known Member

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    We could easily come away with 9 points from those games, but just as easy to come away with none, so hoping for the best as we all know there will be more thrills and spills in the top 8 this season. if Fulham move into the top 6 they move into 3rd best goals ratio and we drop to 4th. i can guarantee Brighton & Newcastle will lose again and draw again at least once. How I would love us to pick up maximum point to the end of the season as we would get an auto spot
     
    #2
  3. ristac

    ristac Well-Known Member
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    Morning all, the problem with a point from each is it could mean Reading get four points from the next two games and Wednesday 3, Fulham 6

    If that did happen table would read
    4) Fulham 68
    5) Leeds 68
    6) Reading 68
    --------------------------
    7) Wednesday 65

    I think we need to get a win from next two, 4 points fantastic, 3 points good, two points just about acceptable, this one is going down to the wire.

    Our next 5 games are very hard, three away, two home and facing 3 teams in the top 6 Or 4 in top 8
     
    #3
  4. Paul Hopkins

    Paul Hopkins Well-Known Member

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    6 points would be great, but i'd settle for 4
     
    #4
  5. w.c.dukenfieldesq

    w.c.dukenfieldesq Well-Known Member

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    As I post there is a magpie in my garden but I have no plans to join Newcastle. morning all.
     
    #5
  6. Eireleeds1

    Eireleeds1 Well-Known Member

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    Morning all. Id settle for three. Having said that Ive given up on trying to predict results. Its become pointless in this division.Fulham hammer barcodes away and then cant defend a lead against Blackburn for one more minute. I just hope that whoever loses the Reading Wednesday game tomorrow, lose a few more and make life easier for us
     
    #6
  7. BoggersMOT

    BoggersMOT Well-Known Member

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    Morning all. Hoping for 6pts from the next two games, but 4 would suffice.
     
    #7
  8. ristac

    ristac Well-Known Member
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    The pressure is certainly getting to all of them, Brighton do concede goals away from home, it's a long trip up for them and they are watching Newcastle with an eye on the title and over their shoulders at Huddersfield possibly snatching an auto away from them. A packed ER it's not going to be easy for them, I fancy we will get something from this game.

    In a way there is more pressure on Brighton, we are resigned to battling out a top 6 they are fighting for top whilst fending off Huddersfield
     
    #8
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  9. bucks_is_leeds

    bucks_is_leeds Jonny big spuds
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    No more predictions for me. Crazy league. But a very enjoyable season <ok>

    Morning all
     
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  10. BoggersMOT

    BoggersMOT Well-Known Member

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    Much to everyone's delight, we're on our way. Trade deals & a choice as to who comes to the UK rather than be told who we have to accept on the way. Buckle up. It'll be a bumpy ride. But the future is bright.
     
    #10

  11. LeedsinYork

    LeedsinYork Well-Known Member

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    Thanks for that Mr Farage but I don't think I believe you.
     
    #11
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  12. BoggersMOT

    BoggersMOT Well-Known Member

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    Time will tell Mr York.
     
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  13. MIGHTY

    MIGHTY Del-Boy

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    don't you think you will batter them ?
     
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  14. bucks_is_leeds

    bucks_is_leeds Jonny big spuds
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    <laugh>
     
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  15. MIGHTY

    MIGHTY Del-Boy

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    go on say it you know you want to <whistle>
     
    #15
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  16. patb

    patb Well-Known Member

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    #16
  17. ellandback

    ellandback Well-Known Member
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    Thought he had signed a contract a couple of weeks ago, but that must have just been his trial. Believe he's a centre back <ok>
     
    #17
  18. Chippy / Glory

    Chippy / Glory Senior Member

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    For when Pontus walks out in the summer. <whistle>
     
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  19. ellandback

    ellandback Well-Known Member
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    Operation London Bridge: the secret plan for the days after the Queen’s death

    She is venerated around the world. She has outlasted 12 US presidents. She stands for stability and order. But her kingdom is in turmoil, and her subjects are in denial that her reign will ever end. That’s why the palace has a plan.

    In the plans that exist for the death of the Queen – and there are many versions, held by Buckingham Palace, the government and the BBC – most envisage that she will die after a short illness. Her family and doctors will be there. When the Queen Mother passed away on the afternoon of Easter Saturday, in 2002, at the Royal Lodge in Windsor, she had time to telephone friends to say goodbye, and to give away some of her horses. In these last hours, the Queen’s senior doctor, a gastroenterologist named Professor Huw Thomas, will be in charge. He will look after his patient, control access to her room and consider what information should be made public. The bond between sovereign and subjects is a strange and mostly unknowable thing. A nation’s life becomes a person’s, and then the string must break.

    There will be bulletins from the palace – not many, but enough. “The Queen is suffering from great physical prostration, accompanied by symptoms which cause much anxiety,” announced Sir James Reid, Queen Victoria’s physician, two days before her death in 1901. “The King’s life is moving peacefully towards its close,” was the final notice issued by George V’s doctor,Lord Dawson, at 9.30pm on the night of 20 January 1936. Not long afterwards, Dawson injected the king with 750mg of morphine and a gram of cocaine – enough to kill him twice over – in order to ease the monarch’s suffering, and to have him expire in time for the printing presses of the Times, which rolled at midnight.

    Her eyes will be closed and Charles will be king. His siblings will kiss his hands. The first official to deal with the news will be Sir Christopher Geidt, the Queen’s private secretary, a former diplomat who was given a second knighthood in 2014, in part for planning her succession.

    Geidt will contact the prime minister. The last time a British monarch died, 65 years ago, the demise of George VI was conveyed in a code word, “Hyde Park Corner”, to Buckingham Palace, to prevent switchboard operators from finding out. For Elizabeth II, the plan for what happens next is known as “London Bridge.” The prime minister will be woken, if she is not already awake, and civil servants will say “London Bridge is down” on secure lines. From the Foreign Office’s Global Response Centre, at an undisclosed location in the capital, the news will go out to the 15 governments outside the UK where the Queen is also the head of state, and the 36 other nations of the Commonwealth for whom she has served as a symbolic figurehead – a face familiar in dreams and the untidy drawings of a billion schoolchildren – since the dawn of the atomic age.

    For a time, she will be gone without our knowing it. The information will travel like the compressional wave ahead of an earthquake, detectable only by special equipment. Governors general, ambassadors and prime ministers will learn first. Cupboards will be opened in search of black armbands, three-and-a-quarter inches wide, to be worn on the left arm.

    The rest of us will find out more quickly than before. On 6 February 1952, George VI was found by his valet at Sandringham at 7.30am. The BBC did not broadcast the news until 11.15am, almost four hours later. When Princess Diana died at 4am local time at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris on 31 August 1997, journalists accompanying the former foreign secretary, Robin Cook, on a visit to the Philippines knew within 15 minutes. For many years the BBC was told about royal deaths first, but its monopoly on broadcasting to the empire has gone now. When the Queen dies, the announcement will go out as a newsflash to the Press Association and the rest of the world’s media simultaneously. At the same instant, a footman in mourning clothes will emerge from a door at Buckingham Palace, cross the dull pink gravel and pin a black-edged notice to the gates. While he does this, the palace website will be transformed into a sombre, single page, showing the same text on a dark background.

    Screens will glow. There will be tweets. At the BBC, the “radio alert transmission system” (Rats), will be activated – a cold war-era alarm designed to withstand an attack on the nation’s infrastructure. Rats, which is also sometimes referred to as “royal about to snuff it”, is a near mythical part of the intricate architecture of ritual and rehearsals for the death of major royal personalities that the BBC has maintained since the 1930s. Most staff have only ever seen it work in tests; many have never seen it work at all. “Whenever there is a strange noise in the newsroom, someone always asks, ‘Is that the Rats?’ Because we don’t know what it sounds like,” one regional reporter told me.

    All news organisations will scramble to get films on air and obituaries online. At the Guardian, the deputy editor has a list of prepared stories pinned to his wall. The Times is said to have 11 days of coverage ready to go. At Sky News and ITN, which for years rehearsed the death of the Queen substituting the name “Mrs Robinson”, calls will go out to royal experts who have already signed contracts to speak exclusively on those channels. “I am going to be sitting outside the doors of the Abbey on a hugely enlarged trestle table commentating to 300 million Americans about this,” one told me.

    For people stuck in traffic, or with Heart FM on in the background, there will only be the subtlest of indications, at first, that something is going on.Britain’s commercial radio stations have a network of blue “obit lights”, which is tested once a week and supposed to light up in the event of a national catastrophe. When the news breaks, these lights will start flashing, to alert DJs to switch to the news in the next few minutes and to play inoffensive music in the meantime. Every station, down to hospital radio, has prepared music lists made up of “Mood 2” (sad) or “Mood 1” (saddest) songs to reach for in times of sudden mourning. “If you ever hear Haunted Dancehall (Nursery Remix) by Sabres of Paradise on daytime Radio 1, turn the TV on,” wrote Chris Price, a BBC radio producer, for the Huffington Post in 2011. “Something terrible has just happened.”

    Having plans in place for the death of leading royals is a practice that makes some journalists uncomfortable. “There is one story which is deemed to be so much more important than others,” one former Today programme producer complained to me. For 30 years, BBC news teams were hauled to work on quiet Sunday mornings to perform mock storylines about the Queen Mother choking on a fishbone. There was once a scenario about Princess Diana dying in a car crash on the M4.

    These well-laid plans have not always helped. In 2002, when the Queen Mother died, the obit lights didn’t come on because someone failed to push the button down properly. On the BBC, Peter Sissons, the veteran anchor, was criticised for wearing a maroon tie. Sissons was the victim of a BBC policy change, issued after the September 11 attacks, to moderate its coverage and reduce the number of “category one” royals eligible for the full obituary procedure. The last words in Sissons’s ear before going on air were: “Don’t go overboard. She’s a very old woman who had to go some time.”

    But there will be no extemporising with the Queen. The newsreaders will wear black suits and black ties. Category one was made for her. Programmes will stop. Networks will merge. BBC 1, 2 and 4 will be interrupted and revert silently to their respective idents – an exercise class in a village hall, a swan waiting on a pond – before coming together for the news. Listeners to Radio 4 and Radio 5 live will hear a specific formulation of words, “This is the BBC from London,” which, intentionally or not, will summon a spirit of national emergency.

    The main reason for rehearsals is to have words that are roughly approximate to the moment. “It is with the greatest sorrow that we make the following announcement,” said John Snagge, the BBC presenter who informed the world of the death of George VI. (The news was repeated seven times, every 15 minutes, and then the BBC went silent for five hours). According to one former head of BBC news, a very similar set of words will be used for the Queen. The rehearsals for her are different to the other members of the family, he explained. People become upset, and contemplate the unthinkable oddness of her absence. “She is the only monarch that most of us have ever known,” he said. The royal standard will appear on the screen. The national anthem will play. You will remember where you were.

    hen people think of a contemporary royal death in Britain, they think, inescapably, of Diana. The passing of the Queen will be monumental by comparison. It may not be as nakedly emotional, but its reach will be wider, and its implications more dramatic. “It will be quite fundamental,” as one former courtier told me.

    Part of the effect will come from the overwhelming weight of things happening. The routine for modern royal funerals is more or less familiar (Diana’s was based on “Tay Bridge”, the plan for the Queen Mother’s). But the death of a British monarch, and the accession of a new head of state, is a ritual that is passing out of living memory. When she dies, both houses of parliament will be recalled, people will go home from work early, and aircraft pilots will announce the news to their passengers. In the nine days that follow (in London Bridge planning documents, these are known as “D-day”, “D+1” and so on) there will be ritual proclamations, a four-nation tour by the new king, bowdlerised television programming, and a diplomatic assembling in London not seen since the death of Winston Churchill in 1965.

    More overwhelming than any of this, though, there will be an almighty psychological reckoning for the kingdom that she leaves behind. The Queen is Britain’s last living link with our former greatness – the nation’s id, its problematic self-regard – which is still defined by our victory in the second world war. One leading historian, who like most people I interviewed for this article declined to be named, stressed that the farewell for this country’s longest-serving monarch will be magnificent. “Oh, she will get everything,” he said. “We were all told that the funeral of Churchill was the requiem for Britain as a great power. But actually it will really be over when she goes.”

    when Princess Elizabeth was on holiday with her parents in Cape Town. She was 6,000 miles from home and comfortably within the pale of the British Empire. The princess sits at a table with a microphone. The shadow of a tree plays on her shoulder. The camera adjusts three or four times as she talks, and on each occasion, she twitches momentarily, betraying tiny flashes of aristocratic irritation. “I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service, and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong,” she says, enunciating vowels and a conception of the world that have both vanished.

    It is not unusual for a country to succumb to a state of denial as a long chapter in its history is about to end. When it became public that Queen Victoria was dying, at the age of 82, a widow for half her life, “astonished grief … swept the country”, wrote her biographer, Lytton Strachey. In the minds of her subjects, the queen’s mortality had become unimaginable; and with her demise, everything was suddenly at risk, placed in the hands of an elderly and untrusted heir, Edward VII. “The wild waters are upon us now,” wrote the American Henry James, who had moved to London 30 years before.

    The parallels with the unease that we will feel at the death of Elizabeth II are obvious, but without the consolation of Britain’s status in 1901 as the world’s most successful country. “We have to have narratives for royal events,” the historian told me. “In the Victorian reign, everything got better and better, and bigger and bigger. We certainly can’t tell that story today.”

    The result is an enormous objection to even thinking about – let alone talking or writing about – what will happen when the Queen dies. We avoid the subject as we avoid it in our own families. It seems like good manners, but it is also fear. The reporting for this article involved dozens of interviews with broadcasters, government officials, and departed palace staff, several of whom have worked on London Bridge directly. Almost all insisted on complete secrecy. “This meeting never happened,” I was told after one conversation in a gentleman’s club on Pall Mall. Buckingham Palace, meanwhile, has a policy of not commenting on funeral arrangements for members of the royal family.

    And yet this taboo, like much to do with the monarchy, is not entirely rational, and masks a parallel reality. The next great rupture in Britain’s national life has, in fact, been planned to the minute. It involves matters of major public importance, will be paid for by us, and is definitely going to happen. According to the Office of National Statistics, a British woman who reaches the age of 91 – as the Queen will in April – has an average life expectancy of four years and three months. The Queen is approaching the end of her reign at a time of maximum disquiet about Britain’s place in the world, at a moment when internal political tensions are close to breaking her kingdom apart. Her death will also release its own destabilising forces: in the accession of Queen Camilla; in the optics of a new king who is already an old man; and in the future of the Commonwealth, an invention largely of her making. (The Queen’s title of “Head of the Commonwealth” is not hereditary.) Australia’s prime minister and leader of the opposition both want the country to become a republic.
     
    #19
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  20. ellandback

    ellandback Well-Known Member
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    Coping with the way these events fall is the next great challenge of the House of Windsor, the last European royal family to practise coronations and to persist – with the complicity of a willing public – in the magic of the whole enterprise. That is why the planning for the Queen’s death and its ceremonial aftermath is so extensive. Succession is part of the job. It is an opportunity for order to be affirmed. Queen Victoria had written down the contents of her coffin by 1875. The Queen Mother’s funeral was rehearsed for 22 years. Louis Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India, prepared a winter and a summer menu for his funeral lunch. London Bridge is the Queen’s exit plan. “It’s history,” as one of her courtiers said. It will be 10 days of sorrow and spectacle in which, rather like the dazzling mirror of the monarchy itself, we will revel in who we were and avoid the question of what we have become.

    The idea is for nothing to be unforeseen. If the Queen dies abroad, a BAe 146 jet from the RAF’s No 32 squadron, known as the Royal Flight, will take off from Northolt, at the western edge of London, with a coffin on board. The royal undertakers, Leverton & Sons, keep what they call a “first call coffin” ready in case of royal emergencies. Both George V and George VI were buried in oak grown on the Sandringham estate in Norfolk. If the Queen dies there, her body will come to London by car after a day or two.

    The most elaborate plans are for what happens if she passes away at Balmoral, where she spends three months of the year. This will trigger an initial wave of Scottish ritual. First, the Queen’s body will lie at rest in her smallest palace, at Holyroodhouse, in Edinburgh, where she is traditionally guarded by the Royal Company of Archers, who wear eagle feathers in their bonnets. Then the coffin will be carried up the Royal Mile to St Giles’s cathedral, for a service of reception, before being put on board the Royal Train at Waverley station for a sad progress down the east coast mainline. Crowds are expected at level crossings and on station platforms the length of the country – from Musselburgh and Thirsk in the north, to Peterborough and Hatfield in the south – to throw flowers on the passing train. (Another locomotive will follow behind, to clear debris from the tracks.) “It’s actually very complicated,” one transport official told me.

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    The funeral procession of the late King George VI in 1952. Photograph: Popperfoto
    In every scenario, the Queen’s body returns to the throne room in Buckingham Palace, which overlooks the north-west corner of the Quadrangle, its interior courtyard. There will be an altar, the pall, the royal standard, and four Grenadier Guards, their bearskin hats inclined, their rifles pointing to the floor, standing watch. In the corridors, staff employed by the Queen for more than 50 years will pass, following procedures they know by heart. “Your professionalism takes over because there is a job to be done,” said one veteran of royal funerals. There will be no time for sadness, or to worry about what happens next. Charles will bring in many of his own staff when he accedes. “Bear in mind,” the courtier said, “everybody who works in the palace is actually on borrowed time.”

    Outside, news crews will assemble on pre-agreed sites next to Canada Gate, at the bottom of Green Park.(Special fibre-optic cable runs under the Mall, for broadcasting British state occasions.) “I have got in front of me an instruction book a couple of inches thick,” said one TV director, who will cover the ceremonies, when we spoke on the phone. “Everything in there is planned. Everyone knows what to do.” Across the country, flags will come down and bells will toll. In 1952, Great Tom was rung at St Paul’s every minute for two hours when the news was announced. The bells at Westminster Abbey sounded and the Sebastopol bell, taken from the Black Sea city during the Crimean war and rung only on the occasion of a sovereign’s death, was tolled 56 times at Windsor – once for each year of George VI’s life – from 1.27pm until 2.22pm.

    The 18th Duke of Norfolk, the Earl Marshal, will be in charge. Norfolks have overseen royal funerals since 1672. During the 20th century, a set of offices in St James’s Palace was always earmarked for their use. On the morning of George VI’s death, in 1952, these were being renovated. By five o’clock in the afternoon, the scaffolding was down and the rooms were re-carpeted, furnished and equipped with phones, lights and heating. During London Bridge, the Lord Chamberlain’s office in the palace will be the centre of operations. The current version of the plan is largely the work of Lieutenant-Colonel Anthony Mather, a former equerry who retired from the palace in 2014. As a 23-year-old guardsman in 1965, Mather led the pallbearers at Churchill’s funeral. (He declined to speak with me.) The government’s team – coordinating the police, security, transport and armed forces – will assemble at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. Someone will have the job of printing around 10,000 tickets for invited guests, the first of which will be required for the proclamation of King Charles in about 24 hours time.

    Everyoneon the conference calls and around the table will know each other. For a narrow stratum of the British aristocracy and civil service, the art of planning major funerals – the solemnity, the excessive detail – is an expression of a certain national competence. Thirty-one people gathered for the first meeting to plan Churchill’s funeral, “Operation Hope Not”, in June 1959, six years before his death. Those working on London Bridge (and Tay Bridgeand Forth Bridge, the Duke of Edinburgh’s funeral) will have corresponded for years in a language of bureaucratic euphemism, about “a possible future ceremony”; “a future problem”; “some inevitable occasion, the timing of which, however, is quite uncertain”.

    The first plans for London Bridge date back to the 1960s, before being refined in detail at the turn of the century. Since then, there have been meetings two or three times a year for the various actors involved (around a dozen government departments, the police, army, broadcasters and the Royal Parks) in Church House, Westminster, the Palace, or elsewhere in Whitehall. Participants described them to me as deeply civil and methodical. “Everyone around the world is looking to us to do this again perfectly,” said one, “and we will.” Plans are updated and old versions are destroyed. Arcane and highly specific knowledge is shared. It takes 28 minutes at a slow march from the doors of St James’s to the entrance of Westminster Hall. The coffin must have a false lid,to hold the crown jewels,with a rim at least three inches high.

    In theory, everything is settled. But in the hours after the Queen has gone, there will be details that only Charles can decide. “Everything has to be signed off by the Duke of Norfolk and the King,” one official told me. The Prince of Wales has waited longer to assume the British throne than any heir, and the world will now swirl around him at a new and uncrossable distance. “For a little while,” wrote Edward VIII, of the days between his father’s death and funeral, “I had the uneasy sensation of being left alone on a vast stage.” In recent years, much of the work on London Bridge has focused on the precise choreography of Charles’s accession. “There are really two things happening,” as one of his advisers told me. “There is the demise of a sovereign and then there is the making of a king.” Charles is scheduled to make his first address as head of state on the evening of his mother’s death.

    Switchboards – the Palace, Downing Street, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport – will be swamped with calls during the first 48 hours. It is such a long time since the death of a monarch that many national organisations won’t know what to do. The official advice, as it was last time, will be that business should continue as usual. This won’t necessarily happen. If the Queen dies during Royal Ascot, the meet will be scrapped. The Marylebone Cricket Club is said to hold insurance for a similar outcome if she passes away during a home test match at Lord’s. After the death of George VI in 1952, rugby and hockey fixtures were called off, while football matches went ahead. Fans sang Abide With Me and the national anthem before kick off. The National Theatre will close if the news breaks before 4pm, and stay open if not. All games, including golf, will be banned in the Royal Parks.

    In 2014, the National Association of Civic Officers circulated protocols for local authorities to follow in case of “the death of a senior national figure”. It advised stockpiling books of condolence – loose leaf, so inappropriate messages can be removed – to be placed in town halls, libraries and museums the day after the Queen dies. Mayors will mask their decorations (maces will be shrouded with black bags). In provincial cities, big screens will be erected so crowds can follow events taking place in London, and flags of all possible descriptions, including beach flags (but not red danger flags), will be flown at half mast. The country must be seen to know what it is doing. The most recent set of instructions to embassies in London went out just before Christmas. One of the biggest headaches will be for the Foreign Office, dealing with all the dignitaries who descend from all corners of the earth. In Papua New Guinea, where the Queen is the head of state, she is known as “Mama belong big family”. European royal families will be put up at the palace; the rest will stay at Claridge’s hotel.

    In the House of Lords, the two thrones will be replaced by a chair and a cushion bearing the golden outline of a crown

    Parliament will gather. If possible, both houses will sit within hours of the monarch’s death. In 1952, the Commons convened for two minutes before noon. “We cannot at this moment do more than record a spontaneous expression of our grief,” said Churchill, who was prime minister. The house met again in the evening, when MPs began swearing the oath of allegiance to the new sovereign. Messages rained in from parliaments and presidents. The US House of Representatives adjourned. Ethiopia announced two weeks of mourning. In the House of Lords, the two thrones will be replaced by a single chair and a cushion bearing the golden outline of a crown.

    On D+1, the day after the Queen’s death, the flags will go back up, and at 11am, Charles will be proclaimed king. The Accession Council, which convenes in the red-carpeted Entrée Room of St James’s Palace, long predates parliament. The meeting, of the “Lords Spiritual and Temporal of this Realm”, derives from the Witan, the Anglo-Saxon feudal assembly of more than a thousand years ago. In theory, all 670 current members of the Privy Council, from Jeremy Corbyn to Ezekiel Alebua, the former prime minister of the Solomon Islands, are invited – but there is space for only 150 or so. In 1952, the Queen was one of two women present at her proclamation.

    The clerk, a senior civil servant named Richard Tilbrook, will read out the formal wording, “Whereas it has pleased Almighty God to call to His Mercy our late Sovereign Lady Queen Elizabeth the Second of Blessed and Glorious memory…” and Charles will carry out the first official duties of his reign, swearing to protect the Church in Scotland, and speaking of the heavy burden that is now his.

    At dawn, the central window overlooking Friary Court, on the palace’s eastern front, will have been removed and the roof outside covered in red felt. After Charles has spoken, trumpeters from the Life Guards, wearing red plumes on their helmets, will step outside, give three blasts and the Garter King of Arms, a genealogist named Thomas Woodcock, will stand on the balcony and begin the ritual proclamations of King Charles III. “I will make the first one,” said Woodcock, whose official salary of £49.07 has not been raised since the 1830s. In 1952, four newsreel cameras recorded the moment. This time there will be an audience of billions. People will look for auguries – in the weather, in birds flying overhead – for Charles’s reign. At Elizabeth’s accession, everyone was convinced that the new queen was too calm. The band of the Coldstream Guards will play the national anthem on drums that are wrapped in black cloth.
     
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