The King must choose between globalist elites and his people
So, Charles III has begun his reign with a curate’s egg coronation: the good elements came down from the ritual of Edward II, the bad omissions and intrusions from his deluded advisers. Some of the innovations were completely naff. The King’s refusal to wear knee-breeches (will he now also abandon them at state banquets?) was extended to his pages of honour, who wore 18th-century gold-laced coats complemented by 19th-century trousers – the kind of solecism one expects in a Hollywood film, not at the greatest of British pageants.
If it was necessary to employ a gospel choir, reflecting American culture rather than British, why could they not have been soberly attired in academic-style robes, as such choirs often are, instead of flashy white suits, and sung from an immobile posture, on a sacred occasion, instead of gyrating as if in a cabaret? Justin Welby’s much-derided invitation to the public to swear fealty to their television screens was an embarrassed attempt to fill in the void created by the exclusion of the hereditary peers, the crass innovation that, more than any other “modernisation”, spoiled the occasion.
At the coronation of Elizabeth II, a solid phalanx of peers in ermined coronation robes donned their coronets at the moment the crown was placed on the Queen’s head – a breathtaking spectacle. This time, the inclusive coronation excluded the people who, after the King and the bishops, are most integral to the ritual. There were plenty of peers present, but of the life-rent, party-hack variety, wearing their off-the-peg parliamentary robes, in a ceremony that gave too much prominence to politicians.
If the hereditary peers, who are also in many cases the stewards of our architectural and rural heritage, are excluded from the greatest ceremony of state, since that same ceremony is the ultimate celebration of a hereditary monarchy, then the King is sawing off the branch on which he is seated. The peers are an essential component of the constitution; excluding them, their traditional homage and their symbolic coronets diminished the occasion.
The rumour is that the King did not want to appear extravagant, but the peers cost nothing: they attend at their own expense and supply their own robes and coronets, if they are allowed to. The public has the intelligence, though the elites may not think so, to calculate that the revenue from the Coronation – £450m extra consumer spending in London alone – more than compensates for the cost of the ceremonial and business lost through an additional bank holiday.
They are also intelligent enough to query why a country spending more than £100m on the white elephant HS2 and more than £2bn a year on hotel accommodation for illegal immigrants cannot splash out, once in 70 years, on an event that defines its heritage and national identity.
Why, too, was the congregation reduced from 8,000 in 1953 to a paltry 2,000 in 2023? The abbey looked half empty. Whatever the “elfinsafety” claims, Westminster could safely accommodate at least 5,000 people. Why, too, were prompt cards so much in evidence, in contrast to 1953? Could some of the participants not be bothered to learn their lines. The incongruity of a woman sword-bearer was accentuated by Penny Mordaunt’s vintage Aeroflot senior stewardess uniform, striking a jarring note among so many formal robes. Could she not have worn a long dress, rather than intrude 21st-century costume into the heart of the ceremony, sometimes even obscuring our view of the King?
The armed forces, as usual, behaved impeccably. So, surprisingly, did the discredited Met, removing disruptors before they could indulge in dangerous tactics. It is ironic that when the police, for once, got it right and performed well, politicians are blasting them for their supposed attack on democracy. Yes, there is a peaceful right to protest, but leftist groups no longer attempt to exercise it. As Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion fanatics routinely demonstrate, the days of making a point by standing with banners proclaiming a grievance are past.
The police credibly claim that republican extremists were planning to disrupt the procession route, throw paint over the participants and, most seriously, panic the horses with rape alarms. The carnage that could be caused by one terrified cavalry horse is sobering to imagine, but the fatalities among the spectators, including children, if a panic-driven stampede trampled them would have been a national tragedy. Then the cry would have been: “Where were the police?”
For all the golden robes and jewelled accessories, the most impressive moment came when the King, dressed in a plain white shirt, knelt before God to prepare himself for his anointing. That climactic moment was spoiled too, by the innovators, substituting for the dignified golden canopy of tradition a bizarre NHS screens-round-the-bed or windbreak-for-changing-behind-on-the-beach contrivance, as unnecessary as it was incongruous. Global feedback shows that all the moments that most impressed overseas viewers were precisely the timeless traditional elements.
So much for the pros and cons of this not entirely satisfactory coronation. But behind the controversies lurks a more sobering, even depressing, consideration. This was the occasion when the King, garbed with simplicity in the plain white colobium sindonis that St Edward the Confessor would have recognised, solemnly bound himself to serve his people and defend their rights. But can we rely on him to do so?
Is he not already hopelessly compromised by his engagement with the globalist elites? Can a king who, as Prince of Wales, spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos as recently as 2020, claim to defend the rights and liberties of the British people? There is no worse enemy of freedom than the WEF. Its dream, the Great Reset, is ordinary people’s nightmare. We do not have a climate emergency, but we do have a net zero crisis. When the imposition of costly but inefficient heat pumps and of unaffordable electric cars, along with escalating green taxes and energy bills make life in Britain intolerable, on whose side will our King be?
Can he effect a necessary transition? Can globalist Prince Hal transform himself into patriotic Henry V? Will he even want to? The next decade threatens turmoil on this island unexampled since 1642. The elites’ deluded fantasies could eventually provoke disorder. The whole panoply of elitist objectives, 15-minute cities, digital currencies issued by central banks to abolish cash (meaning that every transaction could be monitored by government and other institutions, and even vetoed on woke grounds, as already practised by banks refusing to process tobacco-related payments), facial recognition technology, surveillance on a North Korean scale, biometric identity systems, all constitute a blueprint for a dystopian, totalitarian society.
“You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy,” claimed one of the WEF ideologues. That aspiration is shared by WEF “chairperson” Klaus Schwab, the sinister fruitcake heading this crusade to take the vast majority of humanity back to a condition below mediaeval serfdom. The objective, betrayed by that phrase, is to abolish private property – except, of course, for the entitled ones, the elites who campaign endlessly for Net Zero while their private jets build up a carbon footprint of immense proportions.
We are long past the stage where projects such as the Great Reset can be dismissed as “conspiracy theories” or “fake news”: the conspiracy is out there, in full view. The leak of the coronavirus from Wuhan fortuitously furnished an ideal opportunity for a trial exercise in control of people’s movements through lockdown. In retrospect, however, it may not have been so helpful: it alerted the public to governments’ willingness to abuse power, so that it is questionable whether such mass restriction of movement could be enforced again.
Where will the King stand on such issues when they come to a head? With his people or with the WEF, the EU and the IPCC? The most provocative issue at the moment is the pseudo-Conservative government’s claims to aim at controlling immigration while actually encouraging it. “The small boats” has become a pathetic Tory mantra when trying to placate public opinion. Last year, arrivals by small boats, which amounted to just 299 in 2018, totalled 46,000.
Legal migration is a bigger worry, with net arrivals exceeding half a million last year and the Government indulging crony capitalists with ever more permissive visa regimes. Meanwhile, Britons wonder why it is impossible to see a GP, when the answer is that immigration-driven enlargement of the population has paralysed the entire healthcare system.
The Government is trying to fool the public on a core issue of well-being; the local election results suggest it may not be succeeding. And amid this controversy it is revealed that the King, while Prince of Wales, had a disagreement with Boris Johnson over his Rwanda deportation policy for illegal immigrants. What royal priorities does that suggest?
There is trouble ahead – big, bad trouble. The public has had enough of wokery, whose aim is the destruction of the family and of the nation, trashing its history, heritage and freedom of speech. Very soon, if it is not conceded, the public will unilaterally take back its freedom of expression, since the supposedly Tory government refuses to repeal Labour’s Equality Act 2010, the seedbed of censorship and woke impositions, just as it has made it impossible to control immigration by refusing to leave the ECHR.
The King’s private sympathies in all these matters could be overlooked, if he behaves with scrupulous constitutional propriety; but the nagging knowledge that he is not in sympathy with his subjects on many crucial issues is bound to damage the bond between him and his people when such matters become red-hot contentions between the electorate and the elites.
The power of the elites is fragile and, in the medium term, doomed. The Brexit referendum and the follow-up public riposte to Remainers at the 2019 general election demonstrated that. It could just take something as relatively minor as Liberal Democrats securing a proportional representation electoral system as the price of cooperation with the incoming Labour government to change the electoral map dramatically. Then truly representative parties such as Reform, Reclaim and the more sophisticated organisations that would succeed them would have no difficulty in destroying the legacy parties.
If that were to happen and, as with Brexit, the electorate were to abolish Net Zero, the woke gags on free speech, the unelected government by Stonewall, the Northern Ireland Protocol, the dystopian AI and other biometric intrusions into privacy and all the further impositions of the globalist elites, the future would beckon invitingly. It is a pity that the British people cannot be confident that their King is whole-heartedly with them in those aspirations.
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