What’ll the speech do to the election campaign?
Or is this just an irrelevance?
So there we have it. The hardy annual ritual of the Queen’s Speech when David Cameron and Gordon Brown have to walk alongside each other as they progress from the House of Commons to the House of Lords.
There was a time when this was a much bigger news event than it is today because it was the event that saw the revelation of the legislative programme. Mr. Brown has downgraded it a touch with his now annual announcement a few months earlier doing what amounts to the same thing.
With so little time between now and the election the big issue is what it will do the political environment? My guess is not a lot.
We are going through a very tedious period at the fag end of a parliament and possibly a government.
This afternoon we start the Queen’s Speech debate. Last year, in a break with tradition, Mr. Brown announced his mortgage protection scheme – something that hadn’t been in the formal announcement and rather pre-empted the official speech in terms of new coverage. Will he do that again?
I think he will have something up his sleeve so he can grab the headlines. It worked well last year so why not do it again like with having Sarah do the introduction at the party conference? I guess, though, that Cameron will have a pre-planned response for that eventuality. We shall see from about 2.30pm