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.