Royal wedding

Thursday

Peter Hoskin

The Royal Wedding by numbers

From our UK edition

I know, I know, it's deeply unromantic to anticipate tomorrow's Royal Wedding through the prism of opinion polling. But as no one ever said that a political blog has to be romantic — and as there are some quite noteworthy findings among all the data — we thought we'd put together a quick round-up for CoffeeHousers. So here goes: 1) The guest list. There has, I'm sure you've noticed, been quite some hubbub over the fact the Gordon Brown and Tony Blair haven't been invited to the wedding — especially in view of the Syrian ambassador's invitation, since withdrawn. But some new polling from YouGov — highlighted by PoliticsHome — suggests that the public agree with the twin snub for our former PMs.

Thursday

James Forsyth

Ed Miliband will hire tails for the Royal Wedding

From our UK edition

If you’re fed up with stories about what politicians will wear to the Royal nuptials, look away now — for I can confirm that Ed Miliband will wear a morning suit on the 29th of April. Miliband takes the view that a Royal Wedding is no time for gesture politics.   A Labour spokesman told me this morning that, "This wedding should be all about William and Kate. This is their big day. It is now clear that the appropriate thing is to wear a morning suit and that is what Ed will do."   But Miliband doesn’t actually own a morning suit. He will now be heading down to Moss Bros to rent one.    I hear that we’ll find out that Nick Clegg is deciding what he’ll be wearing today.

Monday

Peter Hoskin

Cameron takes it to the councils

From our UK edition

Ignore what your council is telling you. So says no less a personage than the Prime Minister of our country, speaking at one of his freewheelin' roadshow events this afternoon. Cameron may have been referring specifically to the red tape being wrapped around Royal Wedding street parties, but it's still a pretty pugnacious point for a PM to make. Here's the full quotation, courtesy of the superb PoliticsHome: “I hope people are able to join in and celebrate and I am very much saying today that if people want to have a street party, don't listen to people who say 'it is all bureaucracy and health and safety and you cant do it.

Saturday

Melissa Kite

Wedding belles

From our UK edition

The pedants who say fly-on-the-wall documentaries are cheap, meaningless television could not be more wrong. They are the postmodernist answer to David Attenborough, the Life on Earth de nos jours. Anyone who doubts this should watch My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding on Channel 4 (Tuesdays, 9 p.m. and, if missed, on 4oD). Not since meerkats exploded on to our screens have television cameras transported us into such a rare and fascinating habitat. Those uptight commentators whingeing about the antics of the gypsies entirely miss the point. Does one watch Attenborough and afterwards complain that ‘this daft meerkat fell asleep on its feet and toppled over’? No. Personally, I felt utterly privileged to be able to witness a girl in a wedding dress inlaid with flashing light bulbs.

Thursday

Ed Holmes

Protecting the silent majority – and the Royal Wedding

From our UK edition

David Cameron made significant waves yesterday both at Prime Minister’s Questions and in a Sun article about reforming Britain’s antiquated trade union laws.  He was responding to a favoured tactic of the new wave of militant trade unionists: threatening action at times that most inconvenience or imperil the safety of the general public.  We have seen this with the FBU’s dispute (over Bonfire Night), Unite with British Airways (over the Christmas period), and the RMT with London Underground (again, over Christmas).  Some union leaders now seem prepared to ruin what should be the two biggest highlights on our national calendar: the Royal Wedding in April and the Olympics in 2012.

Wednesday

Peter Hoskin

Dave and Boris, united in anger

From our UK edition

A potent Tory tag team in the Sun today, as David Cameron and Boris Johnson join pens to take on the unions. The tone of their article is as blunt as anything we've heard from them on the matter, particularly the Prime Minister. "Let's call these threats what they are," it says about the prospect of strikes during the Royal Wedding and the Olympics: "nothing more than headline grabbing to score political points". And it continues to deliver a warning to union bosses: "you can try to drag this country back to the 1970s, to a time when militants held our country to ransom, but you will not succeed." It's not all frontal assault, though. There's a subtler vein of divide-and-conquer in all this.

Saturday

Rod Liddle

From here until the royal wedding, it’s sewage all the way

From our UK edition

I hope you are looking forward to the tsunami of industrial effluent which is coming your way in the first quarter of the new year. You will not be able to avoid it, unless you are Helen Keller. One way or another, Wills and Kate are going to get you. Or, more properly, their agents of misrule are going to get you, the meeja, with their tele-photo lenses and their hacked mobile phone accounts, and their rubber gloves for rummaging through dustbins and their long sharp noses for filth and discord and their deep gullets and unquenchable thirst for vapid, pointless liquid excrement. If you were being charitable you might argue that the principle victims in this deluge of unmitigated bollocks are the happy couple — which is true, of course.

Saturday

Amanda Foreman

How to marry a prince

From our UK edition

The turbulent but often triumphant record of Britain’s royal weddings is full of lessons for Kate and William The popularity of the monarchy has been slowly improving since the Queen’s ‘annus horribilis’ speech in 1992. But the vital spark needed to win over the country was missing. Not even the Queen Mother’s 100th birthday could fully repair the damage caused by years of controversy and embarrassing revelations. It is only now, with the engagement of Prince William to Kate Middleton, that the monarchy has a real opportunity to remake itself for the 21st century. But first, the handlers and planners for the royal event need to learn from history. Good intentions are not enough.