My government won’t deny homeless people a tent after all…

The most revealing aspect of this depleted King’s Speech? All of the unpleasant bills that this ailing Conservative administration was too timid to keep in, says Tom Peck

The King took 11 and a half minutes to read the speech at this year’s state opening of Parliament (Kirsty Wigglesworth/PA)

There is a substance, as goes the saying, that cannot be polished. But it can, so goes the rejoinder, be rolled in glitter.

And not merely glitter, it transpires. That thing, we now know, can also be studded with the very grandest diamonds on the planet. It can be cloaked in scarlet and ermine, and gazed upon by high commissioners from every corner of what was once the empire.

It can have a quill dipped into it and be transcribed onto vellum parchment, to be read out by a King. But it is still what it is, that thing. If anything it becomes even more so. It is not concealed beneath the veneer of high flummery but accentuated.

The empty verbiage of political sloganeering is bad enough when it’s merely daubed in 8ft-high letters behind a party conference stage. But there are few more potent ways for the ridiculous to bring down the sublime than to gather together a band of page boys in ruffs and stockings, and make them stand behind the Cap of Maintenance and the Sword of State, and then have His Majesty read out the following: “My government will take long-term decisions to change this country and build a better future.”

This King’s Speech, this last desperate roll of the dice for a government very much on notice, contained fewer bills than any other in a decade, and that includes the long, mad, all-consuming years of Brexit, when absolutely nothing happened.

There was the plan for a new, independent football regulator. There was a new “legal framework” for self-driving cars, and a ratchet-style, ever-increasing age limit on smoking. (The young pages of honour to the King’s right managed to maintain a look of dignified solemnity, as they were told that they would be the first generation who would never be allowed to buy a cigarette.)

What was more telling was what wasn’t there. The weekend’s discourse was captured by yet more performative cruelty from home secretary Suella Braverman. But by Tuesday, evidently somebody had worked out that it would not look great to have a king, sitting on a throne in seven, quite possibly eight, figures-worth of headgear, announcing a ban on tents for homeless people.

Which is not to say they didn’t find other ways to humiliate him. King Charles has spent all his life campaigning on environmental and conservation issues, and here he was, announcing new measures to grant more oil and gas licences as “part of a plan to achieve net zero by 2050”.

From the Lords’ reporters gallery, opposite the throne, you can just about hear the ceremonial triple thud of rod on wood, when the Commons slams the door in Black Rod’s face and she, or he, then begs their permission to enter. They’ve been acting out this pantomime for three and a half centuries, but it serves a clear purpose. It is an annual reminder of who is in charge. That the Lords, and the King himself, sit at the commoners’ pleasure, not the other way around.

But they scarcely need bother anymore. The Lords is very much its own advert for who’s in charge. There are still the banks of tiaras. You only need to gaze down and see 30-year-old Charlotte Owen, shooting the breeze in a fur collar and scarlet cloak, despite, from what I can tell, not having done a single thing of note or value in all her very short life, to know that. The Lords, via her, will bear witness to Britain: The Chaos Years for as long as she or it still exists.

Opposite her sat Stewart Jackson, Baron Jackson of Peterborough now. When he lost his seat in 2017, he responded to his sudden liberation by immediately going on Facebook to start telling former constituents what he thought of them, one of whom he called a “thick chav”. Still, he’s in the House of Lords now, from where the only way to lose your seat is to lose your life, so at least such unpleasantness can’t happen again.

In previous years, Michelle Mone of Mayfair has often appeared. Today, a day after she spoke about her connection to a “VIP lane” PPE company that was awarded £200m by the Tory government, and which is now the subject of a fraud investigation, she looked to have decided that the glare of the public spotlight was a little too bright for her.

Much was made, in the build-up, about this being King Charles’s first King’s Speech and probably Rishi Sunak’s last. But the rest of the hangers-on might be on shorter notice than they dare consider.

Like many Labour and liberal leaders before him, Keir Starmer wants to scrap the House of Lords. To see them all honourably gathered together in their eternal dishonour is to realise that what was once a job too daunting for the likes of both Blair and Lloyd George has been made remarkably easy for him.