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The Observer
|April 27, 2025
At 6.29 on a cloudy September morning in 2022, the last person in The Queue stepped through the entrance to Westminster Hall.
Over five days about 250,000 people had queued to see Elizabeth II lying in state, and the authorities timed it perfectly for Chrissy Heerey, a serving member of the RAF, to cross the threshold with a minute to spare.
It didn’t happen by chance. A small team from the Cabinet Office had spent hours crunching data to advise stewards of how quickly to let people through so everyone got their turn.
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