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Robert Hardman has narrated this article for you to listen to.

We are familiar with the perfectly sensible convention that monarchs should not fly with their heirs. But should they also be discouraged from foraging for their prime ministers? While researching my new book and film on the King, I was at Balmoral to see the visit of the Sunaks. At one point, the King vanished into the grounds of Birkhall to pick mushrooms for his guests, who also included Sir Nicholas and Lady Coleridge. It’s a favourite form of royal relaxation (the King was picking Birkhall mushrooms on the day the Queen died). When I mentioned this to a privy counsellor last week, he was troubled. He pointed to the ghastly tale of Nicholas Evans, the late author of The Horse Whisperer, who also went picking mushrooms in the Highlands a few years ago, plucked the wrong sort and four people ended up fighting for their lives. ‘Just think. One mistake and we could have lost the King, the Queen, the Prime Minister and the Provost of Eton at a single sitting,’ he said. Fortunately the King knows his onions – and his mushrooms, too.

This week’s accession of Frederik X of Denmark was particularly interesting given our own recent experience. Sunday’s event was similar and yet so different. There was genuine public love for the great Margrethe II, as there was for Elizabeth II, but she is very much still with us, so the mood was not mournful. She had simply decided to abdicate at the age of 83 (having always said – to me and others – that she never would). It made the exercise feel more functional and secular (which it was), rather than something spiritual. Frederik wore no crown. Though Denmark has one, it only comes out at a monarch’s funeral. Understandably, no one was keen to see it.

Actual crownings are vanishingly rare, though Charles III did see one as Prince of Wales in 1997, the coronation of King Letsie III of Lesotho. It was held in the baking heat of the national football stadium, and went on for more than four hours. ‘Don’t worry,’ the Prince told us on the plane afterwards, when someone asked if he had been taking notes. ‘I’ll keep it short.’ And so he did. It transpires his officials joined forces with Lambeth Palace and spent a whole evening going through every frame of 1953 over a TV dinner of (what else?) Coronation chicken. They got it down to below two hours. The future King William wants to go further. His target: an hour and ten minutes.

Coronations remain under the aegis of the Earl Marshal, as do state funerals. The former allow for plenty of planning. The latter, clearly, are in the hands of the Almighty. The success of Operation London Bridge owed much to the diligence of the present Duke of Norfolk. Whereas his father’s plans had not extended beyond ‘five sides of foolscap’ and an unshakeable belief, having led the Guards ‘over the Rhine’ in 1945, that all would be well, the 18th Duke took a different approach. Eddie Norfolk had been drafting and redrafting plans ever since inheriting in 2002. As he put it to me: ‘It was like constantly revising for a physics A-level, but never knowing when the exam was going to be.’ History has awarded him an A*.

His father, Miles Norfolk, did make one important decision, however. He felt the monarch’s funeral operation needed a name. Looking around for inspiration, he spotted a painting of London Bridge. Every member of the royal family now has a ‘bridge’ designation. The Queen’s former comptroller, Sir Malcolm Ross, came up with a brilliant one for Margaret Thatcher. He proposed ‘Operation Iron Bridge’, until a humourless police chief intervened. ‘Only royals get bridges,’ Ross was told.

I am surprised by the lack of fanfare for next Monday’s big anniversary: the centenary of Britain’s first Labour prime minister. In his superb new book The Wild Men, Dr David Torrance reminds us that Ramsay MacDonald and his colleagues had one great fear about the King, as they tried to craft a government: that the King was afraid of them. Twice, the Welsh trade unionist Jimmy Thomas sought reassurances from the King’s private secretary, Lord Stamfordham. On New Year’s Day 1924, he even turned up at Windsor to ask ‘point blank’ if the King was ‘alarmed at the prospect of a Labour government’. Stamfordham assured Thomas that the King ‘never doubted their patriotism or loyalty’. In the end, of course, George V was close to tears in 1935 when MacDonald retired, telling him: ‘You have been the prime minister I liked best.’

Another big anniversary looms this year. I have been on the French coast this week ahead of 80th commemorations of D-Day to inspect work on the new ‘Winston Churchill Education Centre’ for the magnificent Normandy Memorial at Ver-sur-Mer. Overlooking Gold Beach, it looks as if it has been here for years. In fact, it’s virtually new. Every other Allied nation had long had a memorial here but shamefully there was nothing for the 22,442 who fell in the summer of 1944 serving King and country. Then a handful of veterans approached Nick Witchell, the BBC royal correspondent who has driven the project from drawing board to building site to great monument. He is about to retire from the BBC after 47 years, but he intends to spend even more time ensuring that this sacred spot is secure and solvent long after the last veterans have gone. Nick has had his scoops and his moments on camera over the years. Few journalists, though, have righted a great national wrong on this scale, and in their own time./>