I must say I enjoyed last week’s social media dialogue over Jonathan Yeo’s chaotic new portrait of our King, which the 53-year-old star painter began before his subject came to the throne in September 2022. What I enjoyed especially about it is that it wasn’t easy to predict anyone’s individual reaction based on their politics.

My own feed is naturally full of fellow monarchist weirdos, and many of them seem to have liked that the picture itself — made for the hall of London’s Worshipful Company of Drapers — is impressively weird. Others were suspicious, perhaps half-expecting to hear that the overwhelming stormy redness of the portrait was a coded critique of royalty, or perhaps even that there might be mixed-media shenanigans involving literal blood.