The King’s Speech is supposed to be the landmark moment in the life of parliament.
It is the occasion for a prime minister to set down his or her mission for government, and outline the laws they will pass to try to achieve their goals.
But this year, the moment will belong to King Charles III, rather than Rishi Sunak, for two reasons.
First is the sheer symbolism of the new monarch delivering the first King’s Speech in over seven decades.
An epoch-making moment, it reminds us all in the most formal of settings, laced with symbolism, that we have passed from the first Elizabethan era to the new Carolean age.
Second is the reality of Mr Sunak’s predicament.
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His first King’s Speech in power will be less about landing a vision and more about holding position, for this is a prime minister running out of time and with little space to push through new ideas.
Running out of time because very little can be done between now and an election when it comes to enacting new laws.
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And even if Mr Sunak can get legislation onto the statute book, there isn’t time for that to make a material difference to voters before a general election.
He is also a prime minister constrained by a resistive rump in his party who he is not willing to take on.
Running out of ideas, because what we expect to see in the King’s Speech is hardly a grand plan for government.
Image: While King Charles will deliver the speech, it will be the policy plan of Rishi Sunak that will be under the microscope
Mr Sunak is instead going for a combination of new laws to create dividing lines with Labour ahead of the election (including annual oil and gas licensing, and strike laws), seeing through policies being worked up by predecessors (such as leasehold reform) and the odd Sunak initiative (banning tobacco sales for anyone born on or after January 2009 and longer jail sentences of violent offenders).
Talk to his team and they frame the King’s Speech as a “continuation” of what the prime minister has sought to put in place from the summer onwards – his tilt at long-term decision making as they put it, rather than a “wow moment”.
One senior insider said: “The King’s Speech isn’t a conference speech or an Autumn Statement. There isn’t a new shiny policy.
“It’s not going to be a wow moment, but it’s a continuation of travel of where we have been going and delivering, rather than focusing on polls day to day and week to week.”
Instead, Number 10 argues that the programme for government backs up the prime minister’s commitment to long-term decision-making; through growing the economy – be that energy security, regulatory frameworks for tech; strengthening society with legislation on smoking, reform on leaseholds and dealing with antisocial behaviour; more action on crime and safety and focusing on our national interest, be that around climate change, artificial Intelligence or security.
King’s Speech live: Watch our special programme on Sky News, hosted by Sophy Ridge, from 10.30am today. You will also be able to follow the event live via the Politics Hub on the Sky News app and website.
But some colleagues believe the sum of parts in this speech doesn’t add up to much and certainly not a cogent vision for a country losing patience with the Conservatives.
“There’s not much in here on cost of living,” says one senior colleague who laments that Mr Sunak didn’t do more on housing – planning and green belt reform – ahead of the general election to show voters he really is a candidate for change.
“It would have been bold, but it got shoved in the too-hard-to-do box,” said the former senior minister. “A load of colleagues – 50 even 70 – would be against it, but when you have Labour and Starmer nimby bashing, you’d have got it through with Labour votes and send a message to under 40s that we are serious about helping them.”
And there are pockets of Mr Sunak’s backbenches, MPs looking to Canadian Tory leader Pierre Poilierve as inspiration, noting that his decision to turn the Conservatives into the party of housebuilding has revived the centre right’s fortunes and brought younger voters.
But Mr Sunak does have his eye on an election in a different way, as he uses the King’s Speech to try to lay traps for Labour, to draw dividing lines between the government and the opposition over thorny issues that have the potential to ignite in voters’ minds – be it around net zero and environmental policies (think the row over ultra-low emission zones) or strikes.
On the former, the government will legislate for annual North Sea oil and gas licensing rounds to highlight the PM’s “pragmatic, proportionate and realistic” approach to net zero, in contrast to Labour, which has said it will honour existing licenses but has ruled out granting new ones.
Number 10 figures believe these dividing lines showcase Mr Sunak’s values while also putting Labour on the spot about theirs.
But Labour insiders tell me they are “not worried” about the attacks.
“If they want to talk about their track record on energy bills and strikes, we’d be very happy,” says one figure close to Sir Keir Starmer.
Another senior party figure said this approach just showed how out of touch the Tory party is.
“Finding dividing lines for us? Do they seriously think that is how voters want to see the government run the country?
“Sunak’s meant to be the change? Where’s the change? Where are the answers to the big challenges facing the country on the cost of living and the NHS. It’s just more of the same. It doesn’t deal with the things voters care about.”
Even as Westminster chews over the content of the speech, while taking in the spectacle, I suspect the country has tuned out.
Because in the political backdrop to Tuesday’s pageantry, the problems are piling up for the prime minister.
It is the grisly details of the COVID inquiry revealing a government that was woefully unprepared and ill-equipped to tackle the pandemic at a moment of national crisis.
There are serious questions being raised as to whether the Conservative Party failed to act on rape allegations surrounding an MP and instead paid for an alleged victim to receive treatment in a private hospital.
The prime minister said on Monday that the allegations were “very serious” as he urged anyone with evidence of criminal acts to talk to the police.
There is the Daily Mail’s serialisation of former cabinet minister Nadine Dorries’s book on the downfall of Boris Johnson again throwing into sharp relief party infighting, while disquiet grows among some MPs about the home secretary’s provocative language, be it around protest marches or the homeless.
All of it has turned the public off, say some Conservative MPs, who fear that, whatever Mr Sunak does now, he won’t be able to get voters to tune back in.
This is his first King’s Speech – and it’s hard at the moment to see how it won’t end up his last.
Donald Trump has acted for his country and I will act in Britain’s interests, Sir Keir Starmer has said after the US president imposed 10% tariffs on UK goods.
The prime minister told business chiefs at an early morning meeting in Downing Street: “Last night the president of the United States acted for his country, and that is his mandate.
“Today, I will act in Britain’s interests with mine.”
Mr Trump announced sweeping tariffs on countries around the world, with the UK getting off relatively lightly with 10% tariffs – branded “kind reciprocal” by the president – compared with China, which will have to pay 54% tariffs and 20% for the EU.
A previously announced 25% tariff on British car imports to the US came into effect at 5am on Thursday.
Sir Keir said the government is moving “to the next stage of our plan” after negotiations failed to fend off any tariffs ahead of Wednesday’s announcement.
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He promised any decisions “will be guided only by our national interest, in the interests of our economy, in the interests of businesses around this table, in the interests of putting money in the pockets of working people”.
Image: Sir Keir Starmer hosted business leaders in Downing Street on Thursday morning. Pic: Simon Dawson/No 10 Downing Street
“Clearly, there will be an economic impact from the decisions the US has taken, both here and globally,” he told the business leaders.
“But I want to be crystal clear: we are prepared, indeed one of the great strengths of this nation is our ability to keep a cool head.”
Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds told the Commons on Thursday the government is considering retaliatory measures and requested British businesses let him know what the tariff implications will be for them.
An “indicative list of potential products” that could be targeted was later published, with 8,364 categories covering about 27% of UK imports from the US.
Earlier, Mr Reynolds told Wilfred Frost on Sky News Breakfast his “job is not done” when it comes to negotiating a trade deal
Mr Reynolds refused to say if the tariffs might cause a global recession and said the UK has safeguards in place to ensure it is not flooded with goods that would have gone to other countries.
“We’ll take any powers we need to protect the British people and the British economy from that,” he said.
“What we have directly within our power, alongside that is, of course, the ability to negotiate a better deal in the national interest for the UK. That’s been our approach to date and we’ll continue with that.”
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Moment Trump unveils tariffs chart
UK will be template for other nations’ deals
The business secretary also suggested if the UK is successful in negotiating a deal with the US “there’ll be a template there” for other countries to “resolve some of these issues”.
He reiterated statements he and the PM have made over the past few days as he said: “America is a friend, America’s our principal ally.
“Our relationship is an incredibly strong economic one, but also a security one, a political one as well.”
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6:39
Sky’s Ed Conway examines how economies across the world are impacted by tariffs
Government ‘very slow’ to start talks
Conservative shadow home secretary Chris Philp told Sky News the government had been “very slow” to start negotiating a free trade agreement with the US, and they should have started when Mr Trump was elected in November, even though he did not get sworn in until the end of January.
He said the UK being hit by a lower tariff than the EU was “one of the benefits of Brexit”.
However, he said the 25% tariff on car exports to the US is “very, very serious” and the global impact is “bad news for our economy”.
Relief in Westminster – but concessions to Trump to come
It has been quite a rollercoaster for the government, where they went from the hope that they could avoid tariffs, that they could get that economic deal, to the realisation that was not going to happen, and then the anticipation of how hard would the UK be hit.
In Westminster tonight, there is actual relief because the UK is going to have a 10% baseline tariff – but that is the least onerous of all the tariffs we saw President Trump announce.
He held up a chart of the worst offenders, and the UK was well at the bottom of that list.
No 10 sources were telling me as President Trump was in the Rose Garden that while no tariffs are good, and it’s not what they want, the fact the UK has tariffs that are lower than others vindicates their approach.
They say it’s important because the difference between a 20% tariff and a 10% tariff is thousands of jobs.
Where to next? No 10 says it will “keep negotiating, keep cool and calm”, and reiterated Sir Keir Starmer’s desire to “negotiate a sustainable trade deal”.
“Of course want to get tariffs lowered. Tomorrow we will continue with that work,” a source added.
Another source said the 10% tariff shows that “the UK is in the friendlies club, as much as that is worth anything”.
Overnight, people will be number-crunching, trying to work out what it means for the UK. There is a 25% tariff on cars which could hit billions in UK exports, in addition to the blanket 10% tariff.
But despite this being lower than many other countries, GDP will take a hit, with forecasts being downgraded probably as we speak.
I think the government’s approach will be to not retaliate and try to speed up that economic deal in the hope that they can lower the tariffs even further.
There will be concessions. For example, the UK could lower the Digital Services Tax, which is imposed on the UK profits of tech giants. Will they loosen regulation on social media companies or agricultural products?
But for now, there is relief the UK has not been hit as hard as many others.
More than 400 pages of thousands of goods that could be affected by reciprocal tariffs against the US.
Everything from fresh domestic ducks to sea-going dredgers makes the cut; most symbolic, however, are iconic American items like jeans, motorcycles and whiskey.
Would Donald Trump stand for a levy on Levi’s? It’s not the first time this battle has played out.
At the time, the UK, then an EU member, followed suit.
But as the UK tries to carve its own path outside the bloc, vindicated by the baseline 10% tariffs imposed instead of the EU’s rate of 20%, the aim is to avoid retaliation.
The government want us to know “all options are on the table” – but that is not how they want this to play out.
“This is not a short-term tactical exercise,” the prime minister said this morning.
Despite the business secretary’s best efforts during his recent trip to Washington to try to secure a UK tariffs carveout, no deal was reached in time.
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How will tariffs hit working people?
Mr Trump wanted his big bang, board brandishing moment; carveouts for certain countries would have softened the impact of his speech.
But with 90-plus countries on the tariff billboard, how far along the queue is any UK deal?
And how much are we willing to give? Will the sensitive subject of chlorinated chicken be on the table? What of the agreement to cut taxes on big tech companies that Mr Trump wants?
Lots of questions. The day after the surreal night before is too soon to know all the answers, but this is about politics as much as it is about economics.
As the prime minister launched Labour’s local election campaign in Derbyshire today, he talked about potholes, high streets and school meals. Every question I heard was about tariffs.
Decisions made across the Atlantic are looming large. Tariffs may not directly sway many votes in the local elections, but the consequences for Rachel Reeves’s fiscal headroom and the amount of money she has to spend, or save, will have an impact before too long.
There is a certain steel about a mother who has lost a child.
It’s hard to put your finger on, but perhaps after going through hell you re-emerge made of a different material to the rest of us.
Figen Murray has been utterly relentless after her son Martyn Hett was killed in the Manchester Arena terror attack at an Ariana Grande concert in May 2017.
When she worried that politicians’ support was wavering last year, she walked 200 miles from the place Martyn died to Downing Street – and needed a hip replacement after.
And on Thursday, Martyn’s Law – rules to better train staff and safeguard venues against terrorists – was passed by royal assent, finally becoming law.
I sat down with Figen just before she went into Number 10 Downing Street to meet the prime minister, and she told me after six years of campaigning, the moment “feels surreal”.
She continued: “The Manchester attack was a wake up call. But it also made question, who are these people who do these things? Why are they doing it? What are governments doing about it? And I realised the only way I could get the answers was to educate myself – so I did a masters in counter-terrorism.
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“I’ve recognised that people were radicalised. When you were a newborn baby, you were innocent but somebody poisoned your mind.
“There are people who try to groom young people into their ideology, and I want them to recognise where these people operate, the tricks they use, the things they say and how they can recognise themselves or others in the process of being radicalised and how to get out.”
Image: Martyn Hett
She also supports the initiative to show the Netflix drama Adolescence in schools: “I think it’s absolutely important that young people see that programme and they learn more about it. It’s a good thing and I’m hoping they’re taking it further.”
There will be a debate – certainly – about the financial impact the legislation will have on venues, but the legislation has been welcomed by safety campaigners.
Emma Kay, co-founder of personal safety app WalkSafe which geo-fences events and stadiums, said: “The passing of Martyn’s Law is hugely progressive move that will keep young people safe on nights out.
“Our research has shown that 63% of women prefer to visit venues with safety initiatives in place. People want safer experiences and to know their friends and loved ones arrive home safely.”
When I sat down with Figen, I asked her how Martyn would feel today.
“Knowing Martyn, the party animal he was, he’d throw the biggest party ever,” she said.
“He was full of life and lived life not just at 100 miles an hour, but 200 miles an hour.
“You would definitely know when he came through the door, and he had an incredible ability to make everyone feel that they are the most important person in that moment in his life. And I really miss that.”
You can watch Sophy Ridge’s full interview with Figen Murray on the Politics Hub at 1900 on Sky News.