The big one: Bonfire Night eats it. Halloween is followed five days later by 5 November — an actual British commemoration of an actual attempted regicide, with burning effigies of a real executed man. Britain has two consecutive festivals of costumed misrule and only the imported one gets sweets. For Henry that's a gift: he is the wrong monarch on the wrong night. Guy Fawkes gets a bonfire, a national arson, and a rhyme that begins "remember, remember." Henry gets a foam axe from Poundland. The competitive grievance writes itself, and it's structurally the ceiling joke again — beaten by someone who did less.
Halloween is Celtic in origin and was British long before it was American. Samhain; Scotland and Ireland kept it continuously while England largely dropped it for Bonfire Night; it went to America with Scots and Irish emigrants and came back in the 1980s looking like a film. So the standard British complaint — "it's an American import" — is wrong, and Henry is one of the only people alive who could say so with standing: it was here, it left, it came back fat and commercial and unrecognisable, which is also his entire situation. That's the strongest thematic hook in the list.
Guising, not trick-or-treating. In Scotland children traditionally had to perform — a song, a joke, a poem — to earn the sweets. Payment for a turn. A man who spent three years learning that a room must be earned would have a violent opinion about the English version, where the goods are handed over for a costume alone. "You have not done a TURN. Where is the turn? In Scotland there is a TURN." That fits your inspection scene better than anything I put in the draft.
Turnips, not pumpkins. The original lanterns were carved swedes and turnips — genuinely harder, genuinely more frightening, and remembered by anyone Scottish or Irish over fifty as a miserable childhood labour. Pumpkin is the American softening.
Apple bobbing / dooking, and the mischief-night traditions that survive regionally (Mischief Night, 4 November, in parts of Yorkshire and the North West) — where the disorder is the point and no sweets are involved at all.
Devon's Punkie Night, Somerset's mangold lanterns, and the fact that some churches counter-programme with "light parties."
My recommendation: swap the guising point into the inspection — it gives Henry a legitimate historical objection rather than a whim, which is how his best material works — and keep Bonfire Night in reserve for the campaign's November stretch, where an effigy of Henry being burned somewhere in Sussex while he is polling at 31 per cent is a better scene than anything Halloween offers.
SOURCE: henryviii.UK