Key Highlights :
1. The coronation of King Charles III and Queen Camilla provoked some fairly extreme views. This was hardly surprising. The royal family is more than an institution, it is also – if you wish it to be – a symbol of the real Britain. This applies whether you think the real Britain good or bad.
2. The middle was, I think, a splendid place from which to observe the coronation. What a pleasure it was to revel in the beauty and weirdness of this remarkable event.
3. More than 2,000 people – from heads of state to Ant and Dec, via Nick Cave and Jay Blades – gathered in Westminster Abbey to watch strangely-dressed people perform arcane rituals. They waited patiently while screens were erected around the new King so that he might be anointed – in private – with oil carried in the beak of an eagle cast from solid gold. They lost themselves in music of such power that it shattered the screen of my television into a billion tiny pieces and filled every cubic millimetre of my body.
4. Those who took the time to let us know, via social media, they most certainly would not be watching, missed the sort of event the BBC covers best. It was an occasion so grand in scale that to have looked the other way seems perverse.
5. Why wouldn’t you have wanted to bear witness to such a historic moment? Seriously – what more interesting thing was happening? As was the case during the funeral of the late Queen, I found the coronation unlocked doors to my past. King Charles will carry different associations – negative or positive – for all of us. For me and, I’m sure, many others with half a century or more on the clock, he is the royal who reveres our comic heroes, the fan of the Monty Python’s Flying Circus, the “grovelling little bastard” whose love of Spike Milligan is a redeeming quality of some magnitude.
6. And so, while I watched Charles and Camilla travel to the Abbey in their gold carriage, I could hear my late grandfather, Jimmy, angrily denounce the Pythons as “punk” (even by the 1980s, Jimmy used the word as if he was still in the ‘50s) while my dad, Hugh, and I exchanged amused glances.
7. And I couldn’t hear that without then hearing Dad, standing at my bedroom door, singing to wake me for swimming on a Saturday.
The angry republican offers us two simple options - to see the whole stinking pantomime for what it is, or to consider ourselves grovelling wretches, willing to abase ourselves before a man worthy of scorn. The staunch monarchist asks whether we are noble supporters of a tradition that makes our nation great or traitors. But between those two extremes sits a middle ground, and it is from here that we can observe the coronation and revel in the beauty and weirdness of the event.
It takes a lot of energy to maintain opposition to the monarchy over decades, and frankly many of us don't have the stamina for it. To challenge the concept of monarchy is to shoot at the wrong target - inequality is not exacerbated by the royal family, but by politicians. Prince Charles has done more to improve the lives of young people across Britain than any number of senior political figures ever have.
The rights of those who feel the monarchy is an anachronism are every bit as legitimate as the rights of those who camped out for days in hope of catching a glimpse of the new King and Queen. Support for the monarchy, if it is to endure, cannot be enforced.
So, when considering the alternative to a King Charles III, it is important to consider the prospect of presidential candidates who would unleash the cheapest, nastiest populism on the road to victory. Would you rather have an unelected head of state who keeps out of politics or would you like to open the door to President Nigel Farage or Boris Johnson? Against that prospect, give me the grumpy fellow in the ridiculous robes, any day.
