The King was chipper at the Beda on Thursday last week. He emptied a watering can over a newly planted Seville orange tree in the college garden and was all smiles and handshakes with assembled staff and dignitaries. The press, standing behind a cordon a few yards away, could not make out if he said anything to the tree.

So why was the King received last week with a tailored prayer service, rather than the genial Ostpolitik the Vatican employs with officials from other nominally rivalrous regimes? The UK could in turn treat the Pope like the potentate of a dubious but influential principality. Yet both parties recognise the need somehow to acknowledge, if not accept, the other’s pretension to supremacy.

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