• As Private Eye 1582 points out – the cover of which was spot-on – the new King has a few decisions to make about the size and nature of his household, who will stay and who will not from the old regime, what arrangements he will make for the problem members of his immediate family (Andrew and Harry) and who he needs to shed now that he is Charles III rather than a seemingly perpetual heir-in-waiting.

One thing that he probably won’t have to worry about immediately is any debate as to the continued existence of the monarchy. To misquote Churchill’s remark about democracy, it is the worst method of selecting a head of state apart from all the others. Any new arrangement – and the lord knows how such a divided country could ever decide it – would surely lead to a situation where presidential influence would insidiously intrude into political life. Then we’d need to agree a constitution, documents which are often held up as the supreme guarantor of liberty but which are often anything but. Who would draft it? Who would appoint the person or people ro draft it? Who would appoint the people to appoint the person or people to draft it? Would we need a referendum? Asking what question? Decided by whom? And so it goes on.

Of all the parts of the machinery of the legislature – the other two parts being the government-dominated House of Commons and the bloated anachronistic compromise of the House of Lords – only the monarchy works in exactly the way it is meant to. Changing this can hardly be high on any rational list of urgent fixes. There are many worse problems to solve.

• Yes there are. The cost of living crisis hasn’t yet really started to bite but an event I attended on 21 September in Newbury organised by Steve Masters, a councillor in West Berkshire – not the most deprived part of the country – showed my just how stretched local charities and voluntary groups are: see A community response below.” The government has, after its eight-week pause to elect a new leader, announced a number of measures to help businesses and individuals. Do they go far enough? Some say not. This may change. See also this post on our website regarding regional and local responses.

There there’s Ukraine. Putin is not stupid. He has recently announced that a referendum will be held in the eastern parts of the country to see if these wish to join Russia. The results are unlikely to be negative. This will mean that any attempts to re-take these areas will be regarded as as an attack on Russia itself, in which case any retaliation, including a nuclear one, suddenly becomes logical. So we’ve got that to look forward to, which is nice. He’s also announced a partial mobilisation to get some more boots on the ground, though this doesn’t seem to have received unanimous domestic support.

• The there’s Covid. Well, no, there isn’t. Not really. There was, and it still has its own tab on the BBC website’s homepage, but it’s not a proper actual thing any more, even though people are still dying from it. Sic transit gloria mundi. A year ago, it was front-page news everywhere and we weren’t talking about anything else. But that’s the point, isn’t it? If it’s not front-page news  or top of whatever trending list, we can easily believe that it’s gone away. A Google search might reveal 134m matches in o.8 seconds but of you’re not in the first two or three, forget it.

• Which brings us to the huge elephant in the room that is climate change. Over the last six years there has been in the UK a succession of crises which, without any break between them, have produced more immediately eye-catching narratives. Brexit, Covid, partygate, Ukraine and the cost-of-living crisis are all in their own ways important: but add them together and multiply them by ten and they are still nothing compared to the existential threat from the revenge of the planet. There are two main reasons for this.

The first is that, as suggested above, climate change is not news-sexy. Other things are. An arcane debate about political procedure involving political resignations; a queue of ambulances outside a hospital; the PM at a boozy party during lockdown; a bombed primary school in Ukraine; a crowd of people at  a food bank; a leadership election – these are eye-catching and can also generally be presented in an adversarial light. Each one will have goodies and baddies which makes for a compelling narrative. With climate change, however, the whole human race is the baddie and also the victim, depending on how you look at it. Photos of wildfires, floods and droughts are shocking but don’t tell a story in which we’re invited to take sides. A wetter or dryer or colder period can be remembered from personal experience and so we can convince ourselves that this is just part of a natural cycle of variations. Each catastrophe is considered in isolation and then, once the dials return towards normal, forgotten about. After all, we’re all used to bitching about the weather.

More importantly, combatting climate change requires massive changes to the way we live. A huge number of widely accepted norms need to be ditched if we are to make any real impact on the problems. These are just too massive for us to grapple with, particularly given all the other stuff that’s going on. So far, no government I’m aware of has been able to find the courage or conviction to say that we’re going to have change big-time and that, if we as a country do it first, we may be economically inconvenienced for a long time if others don’t do likewise.

At present, the right thing for the new UK government to do is to re-enable onshore wind turbines, promote solar farms (as a 20-year temporary measure), encourage tidal generation  and invest serious money in investigating  solutions such as cold nuclear fusion  and hydrogen power, all with the aim of having energy solutions which are as sustainable and as local as possible. In fact, the political imperative is keeping enough people warm until the next election, which might involve fracking, more extraction for the North Sea and deals with countries for gas or oil supply which will be only slightly less unreliable than relying on Russia. The infrastructure for providing energy in this way already exists. The new methods are lagging far behind. This is only set to continue when you reflect that Jacob Rees-Mogg has been put in charge of this matter.

• One should always be careful what one wishes for. As I suggested a few months ago, many successors to the mendacious blond philander could prove to be even worse. My fears were then centred on the possibility of the Mysteron Home Secretary Priti Patel  taking over: but Liz “let me try to read that again so it makes sense” Truss hasn’t impressed me greatly so far. Hats off to her, however, for immediately deciding to deal with surely the most pressing issue facing the country and lifting the cap on bankers’ bonuses. That was what was really holding the country back. After all, if bankers are paid more then, as the trickle-down logic runs, we will all do better as the rest of us clean their homes, change their children’s nappies and chauffeur-drive their cars.

There’s also another point of view, expressed in this article in The Conversation, that bankers with higher bonuses were more likely to take risks and that companies which took such a short-terms view suffered more during the 2008 financial crisis.

• Speaking of banks, if you tried to reach me between 8.55 and 11.06 on 22 September than you wouldn’t have been able to as I was on the phone to a high-street bank. I won’t name it because I’m still so incensed that I don’t think it deserves even bad publicity. There were several problems it had recently visited upon me. By far the worse was deciding that one recent transaction was fraudulent and, without contacting me, going into the recipient’s account and taking the money out again. I never knew banks could do this. They can; they do. It also decided to bounce two payments for which there were ample funds and then froze the account – and all this before breakfast. 

The phone conversations that followed were a kind of mental torture. There were long periods spent listening to tinny music and regular assurances of the importance of my call before a connection to an often hard-to-understand person whose manner combined fawning servility and procedural menace; and always the risk (as happened at 9.46) of being disconnected and having to start the whole ghastly business from scratch. No one person was able to do everything I wanted or answer every question, so I needed to get transferred (this happened five times): sometimes to people who could actually help; sometimes not; once to thin air.

Probably the worst aspect was the feeling of utter impotence in the face of an organisation which had both the power and, it increasingly seemed, the desire to make my life as difficult as possible. Of course, many people around the world every day find themselves in this position with regard to their governments, landlords, employers, partners or whoever. All suffering being subjective, however, this insight didn’t provide me much consolation at the time.

Round about 10.35, I was asked what the person whose account the bank had ransacked was going to do with the money. I said that was none of my business nor, frankly,  the bank’s. “But are they going to re-pay it to you?” he perplexingly asked. “The question doesn’t arise,” I replied, “because you’ve already taken the money back out of his account. That’s why I’m calling you.” The man said he didn’t understand what I meant. It was that bad.

Perhaps, I reflected when I hung up at the end of all this and waited for my pulse rate to come down into double figures, this was the latest financial crisis – all the money in the world had vanished, spent on fuel bills, stolen by Putin or paid to senior bankers. The only bit that had escaped was this money I was trying to transfer; and now the bank was trying to take that too. I think from now on I’m going to not bother with banks at all but just keep what’s left of my dosh in a shoebox under the bed…

Across the area