A new monarch and a new Prime Minister can offer a break from orthodoxy - Bernard Ingham

We have a new monarch, a new Prime Minister, a new Cabinet - and all the old problems hidden behind a wall of mourning at the passing of the second Elizabethan age. Even the militant trade unions called off strikes as a mark of respect.

The world is marvelling at the smoothness of the process and many see it as testimony to the profound value of a constitutional monarchy.

But before I look to the future, you may find instructive my relationship with Buckingham Palace in 24 years in the Civil Service. It was minimal and did not begin until I went to No 10 in 1979. Invitations to garden parties and occasional drinks with the Palace press office followed and I was a guest on board the Britannia, tied up in Nassau for the 1984 Commonwealth conference.

And that was about it apart from a card from the Queen on our diamond wedding anniversary in 2016.

Except that I was also involved in the manufactured constitutional crisis of 1986 when the Sunday Times informed us the Queen was fed up with the Government’s economic policies and the rifts it was causing in the Commonwealth with its approach to South African sanctions.

It was the easiest crisis I ever handled. I told all and sundry: “We are not saying a word. The PM regards her relationship with the Queen as entirely confidential”.

Later I said it would have been a strange Queen who was not concerned about her subjects’ unemployment. Mrs Thatcher certainly was. As for South Africa, the argument was not about ends – the abolition of apartheid – but means: sanctions or persuasion.

I doubt whether the Sunday Times’ tale had any more substantive basis than gossip. So what’s new?

Well, we are entering new territory after 70 years of remarkable stability under the late Queen. King Charles has had the longest apprenticeship in history, knows the ropes and has dedicated himself to the nation’s service. I have long characterized him as the thinking man’s royal. He cares for our heritage, has a social conscience, even if he gets carried away by the threat of global warming, and an international outlook.

He could be invaluable in the coming years in holding the UK together. The former Prince of Wales and Duke of Rothesay, integral parts of his apprenticeship, equip him well for helping to preserve the union.

He is also a Commonwealth man. It may be that some of its 56 member-nations wish to become republics but others are queuing up for membership, including those who were never part of the British Empire. What a testimony to Britain’s genius for political evolution.

We need to cherish the Commonwealth if we are to save it from China’s stealthy colonisation campaign. History beckons the King in his first week as monarch. Instinct tells me that his mother’s son will not be found wanting.

And so history beckons for Liz Truss, newly installed in No 10. Even as she learned the Queen was dying, her first act was boldly to borrow up to £150bn on top of the Covid bill of £400bn to protect people from soaring energy prices. At the same time she scrapped the timid opposition to oil and gas exploration on land and in the North Sea. We are at last getting an energy policy worth the name.

She is quickly proving she has a political mind of her own – as you would expect from a Tory PM who got there via a left wing home, the Liberal Democrats and voting to Remain as late as 2016. She now seems to have found her home on the radical, practical Right of politics.

Her first act revealed her political nous. She knows that Britain cannot be put right in the two years left before a general election and accordingly will extend the time before we return to a balanced budget. Her job is to show progress before the election and so avoid a fate worse than death – a fractured Labour Government, assuming its current vacuous state prevails.

Our monumental national problems will not be solved by orthodoxy but by radical action that will test Ms Truss’ resilience, nerve and will. In King Charles she has a counsellor and friend. He is part of our much needed reform and reconstruction that arises not from the failure of the second Elizabethan age but the absurd follies of her sillier subjects.