There have been eight jubilees in British royal history, says Dominic Sandbrook in UnHerd, “and the story has always been the same”. Before the big event “everybody predicts a humiliating fiasco”. Then at the last minute “millions of strange people come crawling out from beneath their rocks”, Union Jacks in hand, and have an absolute blast. The first was George III’s golden jubilee in 1809. It all went tremendously well but proved “something of a last hurrah” for the king himself. He went mad a year later, and “spent the rest of his days endlessly weeping and tying and untying handkerchiefs” – which, incidentally, is how most Guardian columnists will be spending this weekend.

“All the cameras have left for another war” is the devastating line from a poem by the Polish writer Wislawa Szymborska, says Christina Lamb in The Sunday Times. I was reminded of it recently in a restaurant in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro when I ran into three fellow journalists. All long-time Afghan hands, we were still “in shock” at Britain’s bungled evacuation last summer. When the Taliban seized Kabul on August 15, “Boris Johnson, Dominic Raab, then foreign secretary, and Sir Philip Barton, the Foreign Office’s top civil servant, were all on holiday”. As his department struggled to implement a poorly planned evacuation, Barton did not think it necessary to return until 11 days later.