First Minister spends half-term with King Charles at royal sleepover

It’s the half-term holidays in Scotland, and First Minister John Swinney is having a bit of an unusual break.

He’s spending the night at Windsor Castle as a guest of King Charles. And he won’t be alone: the Prime Minister, Keir Starmer and the First Ministers of Wales and Northern Ireland will also be there, with a dinner planned on Wednesday evening.

First Ministers of Scotland regularly have private audiences with the monarch, just like Prime Ministers do, so there’s nothing strange in that.

But these are normally one-to-one affairs. It isn’t clear why this unofficial summit of UK leaders has been planned, and we’ll never know what they discuss – conversations with royalty generally remain private.

But it’s yet another sign that King Charles is taking a bit more of an active role in political life than his predecessor, the late Queen Elizabeth.

Earlier this week, the King held a rare joint visit with the Prime Minister and deputy prime minister to a town that he had built on his Duchy of Cornwall land.

Architecture and the built environment have long been among the King’s passions since before he took the throne, and Downing Street has made it known that housing has been a regular topic of discussion between the King and the Prime Minister.

Not everyone is happy about more active royal engagement in political life, and both Starmer and the King have had their share of criticism for taking part in this week’s joint event.

Whatever your views, it will be an extraordinary gathering around the Windsor Castle kitchen table: Labour, the SNP, Sinn Fein and royalty. It’s a good story for the butler to tell, even if the rest of us never hear it.