AS

I recovered from the 11 hours I spent queuing to see Her Majesty’s lying-in-state, I thought I should ask the ‘Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport’, which organised the queue, why it had made it so needlessly strenuous.

This was hard to start with, as the Ministry’s published press office telephone number doesn’t work. But I used my wits, and got through in the end. And after a good-natured conversation with ‘sources’, I found that they could not really explain the various useless things they did, from wristbands that nobody checked, to pointless forced marches between metal fences.

My suspicion remains that they just don’t trust people to behave any more, and presumed that if we weren’t labelled, badgered, searched and surveilled, we would push and shove and get out of hand. They are, quite simply, wrong.