Today’s reburial wasn’t about Richard III. It was about Benedict Cumberbatch

We should have known it. Today’s reburial isn’t about Richard III. It’s about Benedict Cumberbatch. Isn’t everything these days, somehow about Benedict Cumberbatch? I have a theory that he’s the one who really punched Oisin Tymon, and poor Clarkson is just taking the rap. Jeremy Clarkson, Richard III, both cruelly maligned blokes. They’ll be banning nepoticide at the BBC next.

But back to The Batch. An hour ago, Cumberbatch popped up as the star attraction at the Richard III’s reinternment at Leicester Cathedral, to read a poem newly written for the service by poet laureate Carol Anne Duffy. This whole affair is beginning to feel uncomfortably like a Narnia reenactment weekend, with Cumberbatch a slick Talking Otter amid the baubled knights in armour. The Batch, we are told, is King Richard’s second cousin sixteen times removed. As the University of Leicester’s geneticist Turi King points out, about seventeen million of us are even closer relatives, but since we’re all now experts on Plantagenet case law concerning agnatic primogeniture, perhaps someone’s found that Benedict has particular form of descent, like the seventh son of a seventh son, bestowing on him the ancient office of Lector Lutra at Royal Reinternments.