Peter Flanagan: 'Charles' crowning comes at a time of acute societal unease around the UK with the apparatus of the state limp and dysfunctional...'
THE FIRST TIME I met someone from the aristocracy was in my university’s student comedy society. When he told me that he was a British Earl, it seemed too ridiculous to be true. He might as well have told me that he was a French knight, or a German Abbott, or an American gigolo.
The Earl wore a tweed jacket and a flat cap and hurled stale bread at the “peasants” in the front row. Still in character, he then told jokes about life as a member of the landed gentry with only the thinnest sliver of irony. I found it hilarious, to be honest. Colonialism is just ancient history, and my funny friend wasn’t even born at the time. Right?
Neither is the privilege enjoyed by the benefactors of colonialism today – rather it is a living, breathing injustice. Money rolls downhill, from one heir to the next. Poverty has a terrible tendency to beget itself, too. The New King There is a sense now that the jig might be up. While the streets of England are being diced with bunting ahead of Charles’ coronation, the new King plainly lacks the goodwill enjoyed by his late mother.
The old argument that the monarch is effective as a ceremonial brand ambassador for the UK is getting tired. We’ve seen large brands use figureheads as mascots through time, but they’d be retired quickly if it turned out their ancestors owned slaves, or that they’d cheated on their pregnant wives, or that their brother was chums with a notorious billionaire paedophile.
Apologists for the crown will point out that it was King George III who signed the abolition of the slave trade back in 1807. But if a mob boss goes straight after a career in extortion, violence and robbery, what use is his contrition if he doesn’t give over his unearned fortune to the families of the victims? There remains a core constituency of fervent monarchists in middle England for whom Charles’ coronation will be a grand, emotional occasion.
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