The woman standing behind the King’s left shoulder, who entreats him for permission to publish his “gracious speech.” She looks younger and has a higher voice than Liz Truss, so I don’t think it’s her.
Penny Mordaunt, the Lord President of the Privy Council. Her actual job is Leader of the House of Commons, the Cabinet Minister responsible for overseeing day-to-day business in the Commons. She has only just been appointed.
Fantastic for her that what is likely the biggest moment of her career happened just days after she was appointed.
Until recently, she was in the running to succeed Boris Johnson as prime minister.
I’ll be damned, she’s actually two years older than Truss even though I thought she looked younger. FML I’m a terrible judge of age.
Exactly, and that’s why this occasion, while pompous and ceremonial, was hardly the biggest moment in her career. She’s a senior member of the Conservative Party.
To provide some background, the Lord President of the Council is one of the many sinecures in British politics: Offices which are very ancient and high-ranking on paper and in terms of protocol, but which have lost most of their original functions. In the case of the Lord President of the Council, that function is to preside over meetings of the Privy Council (and the Accession Council that met yesterday to proclaim Charles was a special session of the Privy Council). But since the entire purpose of the Privy Council is to rubberstamp drafts that the government has prepared, presiding over it is not very time-consuming. However, the position still brings with it membership in the Cabinet, so it is basically available for the Prime Minister to award to a party colleague whom he or she wishes to have in the Cabinet, but without responsibility for a government department.
The Privy Council meeting at which Penny Mordaunt was due to complete the process of being sworn in to her current position was actually the first sign that something was amiss. The Queen was going to attend virtually, but had to cancel on the advice of her doctors. She was dead not 24 hours later.
Sidenote: William is a lefty!
(Physically, not politically. 
)
So how was she sworn in?
The BBC played a clip of the point when it became known in the House of Commons that things were seriously amiss. Keir Starmer was making comments at the table, and very discreetly one of his front-benchers ducked down, and went behind him; you could just see a bit of her red dress.
Apparently one of the front-benchers on the government side had urgently gestured to her to come over to talk; they had just got word.
The Speaker made his “thoughts and prayers” statement a minute or two later.
I don’t know that she has been yet (ditto for Liz Truss). The relevant thing to her taking the job is that the Queen expressed her will and pleasure that she be appointed. The oaths etc. come later, as schedules allow. Sometimes weeks later IIRC.
The monarch doesn’t have to be present for the Privy Council to transact business. However, since its work is now just an occasional formality, rubberstamping decisions already taken by the Government, they usually arrange it so that the monarch does preside to do the metaphorical rubberstamping.
I don’t think this is exactly true. The Privy Council can’t do business on its own, without the monarch; decisions of the Privy Council are formally those of the monarch made in council (hence the term “order-in-council”), not of the council as a collective body. It’s possible for counsellors of state (who are all members of the royal family) to deputise for the monarch, but this is exceptional.
Charles could have sworn her in right before the ceremony. He was king the moment Her Majesty died. All of this stuff is the formalities to let everyone know that he truly is the monarch, not some Jacobite pretender in Bavaria.
Truss has two teenage kids. Mourdaunt doesn’t.
That said the thirties and forties are a weird age, some people look younger others don’t.
When the Privy Council had real political power, it often met and took decisions without the monarch being present. It would have been impractical to have done otherwise as it met several times a week and the monarch sometimes wanted to do other things.
True but it’s usually combined with the Leadership of the Commons (since both jobs involve managing the Government’s legislation through - which makes the holder important to have in Cabinet.
It’s quite amusing that she got the front stage job on this occasion while the PM who beat her was relegated to a secondary “turn up and sign!” role.
And quite fun to try and identify the milling Privy Councillors. Several times I was thinking “I thought s/he was dead”.
I would have thought the “Privy Council” was a small group of perhaps twenty, but according to Wikipedia, there are 718 members.
The full Privy Council has not met, as such, for several centuries. The Lord President is mostly a nothing-job, but once in a reign they get to do something.
Technically the Cabinet is just a sub-committee of the Privy Council.
Canada’s Privy Council is not quite as big, but since members are appointed for life the list does grow quite long. Former PM Jean Chrétien is our longest serving PC member at 55 years.