‘This is deliberate’: James O’Brien challenges the ‘enormous queue snaking through London’

James O’Brien has challenged the need to have such a long queue to see Her Majesty’s coffin, suggesting there is a better way it could have been handled.

“This is deliberate, I don’t know that we’ve dwelt upon this fact enough,” he said.

“There is absolutely no question that they could have conducted the ticketing in a way that didn't involve an enormous queue snaking all the way through London.”

James pointed to possible alternative options such as applying online and turning up in hour-sized slots.

The presenter blamed the Establishment saying: “Somebody somewhere has very deliberately conceived a plan to have hundreds of thousands of people snaking through London visibly, publicly, and performatively queuing to pay their respects to the late Queen.”

His comments come after the ability to join the long line of mourners had been paused for six hours and is set to reopen at around 4pm today.

“Why have they done it like this?”

The presenter said that although he is “absolutely fascinated by it" the more he thinks about "the very deliberateness" of it the more "manipulated” he feels.

“The more I think, hang on a minute, it's wonderful that hundreds of thousands of people want to walk past the Queen’s coffin, but they really don’t have to do it in a way that involves people queuing up for eight, nine, ten hours or more, they really could have done it in a way that meant people would queue up for no more than an hour or two.

“You know they could have done" he concluded: "So, why didn’t they?”