In the dark hours after midnight, the quiet that envelops Westminster Hall is felt rather than heard. Like any great seat of power — for that is what the hall has always been, despite its cathedral-like stained windows and monumental stone walls — it is never really silent. Even in the smallest hours there are scurrying feet carrying messages, the tread of security patrols or the trudge of weary parliamentarians heading for the taxi queue. In such a vast space, such sounds become unfocussed, or muffled, like funeral bells in days of old.
Tonight, Westminster Hall is the scene of something unique and powerful in the British constitution: a stone cauldron where religion, politics, raw populism and that gunpowder-potent force, the public mood, all come together in a vigil for the longest-serving monarch this country has produced, whose crown gleams through the gloom where Philip Larkin might have reflected “in whose blent air all our compulsions meet, are recognised, and robed as destinies”. Already, the two-mile queues of mourners are evidence that an old magic has come alive again and something profound and significant is aflame in the heart of weary, cynical London.
