Although it cannot be stated publicly, Labour and the Conservatives have much common cause in Scotland now. They won’t stand down in each other’s favour at the next election; but expect ‘paper’ candidates in constituencies where one is much stronger than the other and the Nationalist is vulnerable. Wavering SNP supporters can be divided into welfare drones (who have benefited under the SNP to the detriment of spending on health and schools), and ‘tartan Tories’, social conservatives who hoped that Kate Forbes would be SNP leader. Labour courts the former, the Tories the latter. Both parties pray that Humza Yousaf, the new First Minister, remains in office. He is the gift that keeps on giving. The biggest task for Sir Keir Starmer is to get out from under the weight of Gordon Brown on the subject. Brown led the original thrust for devolution in the 1990s. His political aim of thus entrenching Labour power collapsed utterly, yet he still thinks he knows how to dominate his native land. Eighteen months ago he launched Labour’s paper A New Britain, which advocated federalism, including in England. Sir Keir supported it but is gradually realising that the loss of Westminster control over tax in Scotland would weaken a Labour government’s power there and thus encourage an SNP revival. Unionism trumps left/right ideological differences. 

Scotland under the SNP has, oddly, been more lavish towards monarchical ceremony than the government is Westminster. The SNP leadership is mostly republican, but it does not want to frighten off the royalist vote. This difference is affecting the coronation in a tiny way. Traditionally, the chief heralds, the Kings of Arms, wear (as befits their description) small crowns for the ceremony. There are four of them – Garter, Clarenceux, Norroy and Lord Lyon. The last is the chief Scottish herald. This time, in the spiritless spirit of modernisation, it was planned that the Kings of Arms would not wear their crowns for the ceremony, in line with the decision to deprive the peers of their coronets. But then it turned out that Lord Lyon’s crown had been expensively restored for the occasion with Holyrood’s blessing. So all the Kings of Arms will wear their crowns after all. 

Lord Lyon is clearly a powerful figure north of the border. Dr Joseph Morrow has an almost Wolseyan plurality of roles. He is a judge. When he sits in his heraldic court he wears, for complicated historical reasons, an earl’s robe. He is also a clergyman (an honorary canon of St Paul’s cathedral, Dundee, and former chaplain of Glamis castle), sometime grand master mason of the Grand Lodge of Scotland, Squadron Colonel of 2 (City of Dundee and Highland) Signal Squadron and a former Labour councillor. His other relevant judicial experience is that he used to be the president of the mental health tribunal for Scotland. Lord Lyon’s crest is ‘A dexter hand Or holding a dagger erect Purpure hilted and pomelled Or’. 

If the symbol of a beacon is ‘not a good look’, as the chief executive of the Brecon Beacons national park puts it, and must be jettisoned as ‘a direct response to the climate emergency’, how far will this principle go? In the United Kingdom, there are at least five towns or villages which contain the word Beacon, including Beaconsfield, Beacon’s Bottom and, in Devon, plain Beacon. If links to fossil fuels must be extirpated, that should also include 19 towns and villages with coal in their names, including Coalville, Coalbrookdale, Coalisland and Coal Pool. Environmental logic demands nothing less. But such changes, ‘direct response’ though they may be, will lack global impact. Time to snuff out the Olympic flame, surely, and the torch held aloft by the Statue of Liberty. Holman Hunt’s ‘The Light of the World’ depicts Jesus holding a presumably fossil-fuelled lamp. I hope Keble College, Oxford, in whose chapel the painting resides, will see what a bad look this is. Couldn’t someone tweak the picture so that Our Lord carries an LED instead?  

This week in Westminster Hall, MPs stood up for the sheep of Dartmoor. In February, the MPs complained, the sheep’s owners received, without warning, letters from Natural England threatening the eviction of their stocks from the moor. There is a psychological study to be done of which creatures the green movement adores or abhors. It loves beavers, raptors and foxes, ignores the needs of grouse and songbirds and hates sheep. Appearing recently before a Commons select committee, the chairman of Natural England, Tony Juniper, referred disparagingly to pheasants as ‘non-native’. True, in that pheasants came over with the Romans, but the same could be said of beech trees, rabbits and brown hares. I accuse Natural England of trying to create a ‘hostile environment’ for certain long-standing and well-assimilated immigrant groups against which it has a prejudice.  

Rishi Sunak’s recent interview with Paul Goodman for the Conservative Home website ended endearingly. Asked about his religion, the Prime Minister said with a shy smile that a statuette of ‘Lord Ganesh’ stands beside him in his office. He had put it on his desk when he became chancellor and brought it with him when he moved to 10 Downing Street. Given how ignorant the British are about other faiths (and, indeed, all faiths), I wondered whether half-listening viewers would have picked up on who this Lord Ganesh was. Could he be a life peer (Lord Ganesh of Neasden?) recently ennobled so that he could bring his economic policy expertise to the work of government and parliament? Mr Sunak spoke of him with a respectful familiarity rather as Mrs Thatcher used to refer to Milton Friedman. Lord Ganesh is actually the Hindu god of beginnings, the bringer of good fortune, remover of obstacles: a most comforting tutelary deity for a prime minister to have.