by The reincarnated monarch compares Parliament’s summer adjournment to his own historical approach to inconvenient advisors
Good evening, good evening, settle down, I am told the bar closes promptly at eleven and I have already died once this millennium and have no particular wish to test whether the process repeats itself here in Camden on a Tuesday.
I read this week that the House of Lords has risen for summer recess, adjourned since the twenty-third of July, not due back in session until the first of September. A full five weeks, friends, of not having to sit in a chamber listening to men in robes disagree with you. I confess I found this news almost unbearably nostalgic, for I too once enjoyed rather extended breaks from difficult colleagues, though my own methods of achieving such breaks were, in fairness, considerably more permanent than a scheduled recess.
On The Matter Of Taking A Proper Break From One’s Advisors
Five weeks. Five entire weeks these lords get to simply not attend to matters of state, to go to their country houses, walk their dogs, forget entirely that Parliament exists. I once achieved something rather similar with an entire Privy Council, though admittedly my version required considerably more paperwork, several convenient charges of treason, and did not, strictly speaking, allow the gentlemen involved to return refreshed in September. Different eras, different approaches to work-life balance, I suppose.
A Word On The Current Heatwave
I am further told this nation currently endures a heatwave peaking around thirty-six degrees, and that the common Briton responds to this news primarily by complaining extensively while doing absolutely nothing to prepare, a pattern I recognise from my own court’s approach to literally every crisis I ever presented them with. I stood in full velvet at considerably worse temperatures without the modern convenience of complaining about it on a telephone, and you do not hear me boasting about it constantly, except for right now, in this specific sentence.
The Closer
I shall leave you with this. Parliament rises, the nation swelters, and I, a five-hundred-year-old king doing open mic comedy in Camden, remain somehow the most consistently employed person in this entire country this particular week. Progress, friends, is not always a straight line, but I do think we can all agree that a proper summer recess is, at minimum, considerably kinder to one’s advisors than my own historical approach ever was. Mind the heat, mind the fire exits, and if you see a Lord on his August holiday, do give him my regards. He has earned it, in a way none of my own councillors ever quite managed to.
An Encore Nobody Asked For
One more thing, before the sound man cuts my microphone as is apparently customary once a comedian has overstayed his allotted seven minutes, a fate I am assured is considerably less permanent than the one that befell me at Tower Hill, though I am told it feels similarly abrupt to the performer experiencing it. I have given this recess matter further thought whilst waiting in what I believe is called “the green room,” though it was, in fact, a stockroom containing crisps and, mysteriously, a single traffic cone nobody has yet explained to me.
It occurs to me that the modern Parliament’s relationship with its own summer break is not unlike my own relationship with marriage, both institutions periodically require a full and complete adjournment before anyone involved can be trusted to return to the negotiating table with any genuine goodwill remaining. I simply achieved my adjournments through considerably more dramatic means, involving foreign cardinals and the occasional entirely new church, whereas modern Lords apparently just go to Tuscany. I do sympathise with the impulse either way.
Let me leave you with this, and then truly I am done, for I can see the promoter miming, with real conviction, the cutting of a throat, which I confess still gives me a small private shudder no comedian without my particular biography would fully understand. Every institution eventually learns that its members require a genuine break from one another to function at all. I learned this the hard way, across six wives and considerably fewer chancellors than I started with. Parliament, apparently, learned it rather more gently, with a scheduled five-week recess and, I am told, quite a lot of gin. Good night, mind the heat, and enjoy your own August recess, whatever inconvenient colleagues you may be temporarily escaping from.
