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Making monarchy cheaper is unlikely to sway those who dislike it – and would abolish it – but it risks alienating those who do buy into its religious character or constitutional significance. The better lesson Charles could learn from pageantry’s novelty is this: it was developed at the dawn of the democratic age precisely because it gave the people who loved his great-great-grandfather the sort of spectacle they were asking for.
Charles will not generate much good long-term PR by taking the fun or the majesty away. Not even for having spared us the exquisite irony of Harry performing fealty to him on his knees, as would have happened under the old rite.
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No. Instead, we’re told this will be an inclusive coronation with multi-faith elements and all kinds of other nods to the diversity of modern Britain and the Commonwealth.
I’m sorry, but a coronation is inherently exclusive. The whole thing is predicated on the idea of investing office and authority in a firstborn male simply because he is those things. No other attributes or qualities required.
How do you make that seem fair? Or modern? You can’t.
I’m reminded of the annoying plots of the Daniel Craig-era Bond films which seemed intended to make him seem real (aka “modern”) and gritty. In fact, all they did was destroy the magic within the secret agent fantasy. Gritty, modern Bond was not likeable and all his surliness did was draw attention to the fact that the stories about him were not remotely believable.
My fear is that the King will do something similar to the Crown – and hasten on perceptions of its mundanity more effectively than even Peter Morgan and his eponymous Netflix series.
As Australians, maybe we don’t care: we want to cut the umbilical cord, go our own way, have our own head of state. I have some sympathy with these arguments. But we also ought to acknowledge what will be lost when we do so: our collective connection to that great generational chain, to the antecedents and ancestors back in the Old Country, to values, and rites of passage.
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The King’s cut-price coronation will make that easier: by depriving us of our full fat formalities he does the republicans’ work for them. And the same is sadly true of his wider approach of pandering to critics and highlighting the manifest absurdities of his own gloriously archaic position.
We Australians should make the most of this coronation because it’s likely to be our last.
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