“My government’s legislative programme,” His Majesty intoned to the members of parliament assembled before him, “will be mission-led.” Imagine waiting a lifetime for the chance to read a line like that. He could be forgiven for considering abdication, especially if Keir Starmer has tried to use one of their audiences to explain the concept.

It was all painfully civilised

As the King spoke in the House of Lords on Wednesday, back in the Commons a dribble of MPs who had accepted there was no room for them sat chatting. One of the new Labour MPs put a bare foot on the bench and applied a plaster to it. A couple of rows behind her, another colleague had his eyes shut as he rocked gently back and forth, clearly deep in meditation on the implications of the Sustainable Aviation Fuel (Revenue Support Mechanism) Bill. Mission-led government must be a tiring business. Though we think he’s a Scot, so he may still be getting to grips with sleeping on the overnight train. Across the aisle, there was business being done, as Priti Patel engaged a fellow Tory in conversation, presumably explaining that, when you look at some of the other leadership options, she’s not so bad.

The King having finished, Speaker Lindsay Hoyle returned to the Commons, paused at the bar of the House, and bowed. MPs usually do this to him, but his chair was empty, so it’s not clear to whom he was bowing. As the press sit directly behind him, I’m going to assume it was to us. Behind him were Starmer and Rishi Sunak, chatting happily. Angela Rayner and Oliver Dowden joined them, and the four stood together in the middle of the chamber, laughing about something. It was all painfully civilised.

That mood continued in the afternoon debate. Before it began, there was just time for  Geoffrey Cox, parliament’s highest-paid MP from his earnings as a barrister, to take the loyal oath. “I will swear on the King James Bible,” he announced in his rich basso profondo, to a sigh of pleasure from his Conservative colleagues.  “I swear by Almighty God that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to His Majesty King Charles, his heirs and successors, according to law,” he intoned. “So help me God.” Parliament really is getting a bargain: if you wanted to hear that much from him in most other contexts, it’d set you back a couple of grand.

On the opposition benches, we could see Reform’s Richard Tice and Lee Anderson, but no Nigel Farage. Perhaps he was already on the way to Milwaukee to suck up to Donald Trump. The people of Clacton knew what they were getting.

There ahead of him was Liz Truss, whose unimprovable Twitter bio reads simply: “Sunday Times bestselling writer. Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.” She had already issued a denunciation of the King’s Speech, saying it would lead to “further economic stagnation and cultural decline”. Building, by implication, on the economic stagnation and cultural decline delivered by the governments of which she was so prominent a part.

What do we have to do to stop Truss from commenting on British politics? Anyone else, turfed out of government and then out of parliament, might take the hint. But Truss is impervious to anything so subtle as simply losing one of the safest seats in the country. She had, we would later learn, written to the Cabinet Secretary to complain about her disastrous mini-Budget being described by the government as a “disaster”. As has been noted elsewhere, she should really be writing to her MP about this.

Let’s see what happens when they hit choppy waters

It was Sunak’s job to respond to the King before Starmer. When he opened the folder containing his speech, we could see a photo taped on the inside cover, which I’m pretty sure is the picture of his family on holiday last year. It was a gracious speech, with a good joke to new MPs about his own meteoric rise and fall: “Before you know it, you have a bright future behind you, and you’re left wondering whether you can credibly be an elder statesman at age 44.”

He finished with an attempt to argue that he had, contrary to popular understanding, left a golden economic legacy. This was a little undermined when he went on to point out that it was unfair for Labour to complain that things were worse than they had expected, because the country’s problems had been well known. It’s hardly my place to advise the Conservatives, but I’m not sure there’s much mileage in the slogan “Everyone knew we left this place in ruins.”

And then we got to Starmer. He opened by quoting Joe Biden’s call to “lower the temperature of our democracy”. A promise to make things boring is pretty much the code our new prime minister lives by.

The new consensus-driven politics was never going to last, of course. It ended just before a quarter to four, when Starmer, who had to this point been generous to Sunak, denounced the last King’s speech as one that showed a Conservative Party “content to push aside the national interest as they focused almost entirely on trying to save their own skins.”

But now this was all going to change! There would, our new prime minister promised, be “no more wedge issues, no more gimmicks, no more party political strategy masquerading as policy.” Well, maybe. Let’s see what happens when they hit choppy waters. In the meantime, if the text of the King’s speech is any guide, there will at least be plenty of jargon.