The Privy Council has acquired two more members, proving that Britain’s most distinguished response to a straightforward appointment is to give it a title large enough to require its own entrance music.
On 10 June 2026, the Prime Minister’s Office announced that the King had approved new appointments to His Majesty’s Most Honourable Privy Council. The announcement named Lucy Rigby KC MP, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, and Rhun ap Iorwerth MS, First Minister of Wales.
This is serious constitutional business, which is why the announcement arrives with the emotional temperature of a filing cabinet that has just been told it handled a form correctly. There is no trumpet blast in the official wording. No ceremonial smoke. Not even a suggestion that anyone had to build trust by lowering a colleague through a window.
The Privy Council has a name that makes an ordinary sentence feel improperly dressed. It does not merely announce two appointments. It surrounds them with capital letters, possessive grandeur and enough formal language to make a reader check whether the page has quietly become a corridor in a museum.
Lucy Rigby and Rhun ap Iorwerth already hold serious public offices. The announcement does not need to turn them into characters in a costume drama. Yet the constitutional machinery adds a small velvet curtain to the moment, as if public service might not count until somebody has placed it beside a very old looking chair.
That is the delicious contradiction. Modern government depends on people doing practical work, answering questions and making systems function. The language of appointment, meanwhile, appears determined to make the process sound as though a herald has been dispatched across the kingdom to locate the authorised ink.
The institution is not being mocked for recognising public service. It is being mocked for the ceremonial weight placed around that recognition. Britain can take two working politicians, approve their membership and still make the sentence sound like the opening of a treasure hunt in which the prize is another official sentence.
The red dispatch box has remained calm. It understands the national method perfectly. When the state wishes to demonstrate authority, it gives the paperwork a grand title, waits for everyone to nod and then loses the form that proves the nod happened.
Source: GOV.UK.
