William Lloyd

May 22, 2024 | newstatesman.com | Will Lloyd |William Lloyd

“His values are like our rivers,” Tom Baldwin sagely explained to Nick Robinson and Amol Rajan recently on The Today Podcast, “which bend into the folds of a landscape.” The lads were discussing Sir Keir Starmer in terms that might have been improved. Generally, rivers tend to find the path of least resistance. And these days British rivers tend to stink with sewage. Nobody, at least not consciously, was suggesting that Starmer is full of shit. You can excuse Baldwin for being a bit knackered.

Apr 10, 2024 | newstatesman.com | Will Lloyd |William Lloyd

Nobody in Britain owns more haunted homes than the National Trust. The most unsettling is not some Devonshire abbey or a Palladian mansion set in Capability Brown parkland. It’s 24 Cheyne Row, an unremarkable 19th-century terraced house in Chelsea not far from the King’s Road. When Thomas Carlyle moved there from rural Scotland in 1834, Chelsea was a sullen slum next to a stinking Thames.

Mar 22, 2024 | newstatesman.com | Will Lloyd |William Lloyd

The Princess of Wales has cancer. It only adds to the sense that these are locust years for the House of Windsor. Not an annus horribilis but a succession of them. Crisis after crisis, illness after illness, death after death. Prince Harry is a podcaster in the United States. Prince Philip is dead. Prince Andrew is still, excruciatingly, alive. The King is being treated for his own cancer and his Queen is about as popular with the public as a case of the shingles.

Mar 20, 2024 | newstatesman.com | Will Lloyd |William Lloyd

It was the latest unorthodox move in a career defined by originality. A small, unobtrusive, somewhat disappointed-looking woman stood in the Northern Irish sunshine with the wind blowing through her auburn hair. This was Sue Gray on 20 May 2021. With her was Gareth Gordon, BBC News’s Northern Ireland political correspondent. Gray was doing something unheard of for a senior civil servant – or for that matter, any grade of civil servant – before or since.

Mar 12, 2024 | newstatesman.com | Will Lloyd |William Lloyd

Listeners to the Today programme on the morning of 11 March had their porridge interrupted by frightening news. The House of Windsor, already facing down illnesses and a brace of erstwhile princes, was besieged by “conspiracy theories”. The problem, according to the veteran BBC correspondent Graham Satchell, was a photo released by the Princess of Wales the day before, on Mothering Sunday.