King Charles’ balcony show will miss two major players

Sean O’Grady, The Independent

For a nation much in need of some harmless Ruritanian distraction, the coronation of their majesties King Charles and Queen Camilla, as we must learn to call them, can’t come soon enough.

In case you’ve not yet saved the date, it’s set to get going on Saturday 6 May, and there’ll be an additional special bank holiday on Monday 8 May. British citizens, or subjects as perhaps we should say, will be encouraged to do some voluntary work that day, though there will be plenty of other unrelated amusements, such as a crunch football match between Fulham and Leicester City at 3pm.

It’s going to be an odd occasion. Back in 1953, at the time of the Queen’s coronation, the UK was still a power in the world — atomic, industrial, geopolitical.

The Empire, or most of it aside from the Indian sub-continent, remained, and the British still ruled areas of Africa, the Caribbean, Malaysia and Cyprus — just think of that! The Commonwealth was a far closer and more active force in national life than today. And the very notion of Scottish independence was confined to a few sentimental eccentrics (I make no further comment).

Efforts to build “Europe” into some sort of economic or political entity was looked upon with benign indulgence (again, no further commentary is required). Her Majesty’s armed forces numbered 868,000. We even had free prescriptions and university education, albeit limited to a tiny few.

Obviously, Britain in the 1950s was an ossified, bigoted, and painfully repressed society, but it felt more like a self-confident Global Britain than the anxious post-Brexit version of today.

The grandiosity of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation, with all its real and sometimes invented ancient ceremonials therefore seemed right and fitting to many. It doesn’t immediately appear to be appropriate today.

We may congratulate ourselves that, behind as we now are in the world, we can still do tradition, pomp and ceremony, albeit with an underlying feeling of unease about the rest of the world seeing Britain as a quaint kind of living museum.

Still, any excuse for a party, eh? And with it some acrimonious rows about the royal family and the sturdy protesters of the British republican movement making their own declarations that Charles is “not my king”. We wouldn’t have it any other way.

Charles — not yet “Charles the Wise” but shrewd enough — is going to use the occasion to celebrate the UK’s (and Commonwealth’s) contemporary multicultural, multiracial and multi-faith character.

He’s also going to use the traditional post-crowning balcony appearances to signal the slimmed-down monarchy of tomorrow. Only the “working royals” of the new reign will be on show, plus a few of the older figures coming to the close of their careers with The Firm, as a thank you from Charles.

The fab 15 are thus split into two cohorts. The first eleven are: Charles and Camilla; William and Kate, Prince George; Princess Charlotte; Prince Louis; Princess Anne and her husband Tim Laurence; Prince Edward, now Duke of Edinburgh, and Sophie. The old retainers comprise the Duke of Kent and Princess Alexandra and the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester.

That’s actually a much larger royal group than appeared in 1953 or in 1937, but the style and active personnel of the new reign will be presented as a “team” for the first time.

Hopefully, the deferential royal commentators will help you to tell which Kent is which, and become that little bit more familiar with the vast Mountbatten-Windsor family tree; but also that little bit more conscious of the members of the House who are destined to take a lower profile role – Prince Andrew and his family, plus Harry and Meghan and theirs.

The “working” royal family the king wants to create is one that, possibly apart from himself and Camilla, is run on less extravagant lines, is less visibly spoiled, and less personally controversial in its private life and values, and thus more able to command broad public consent for the institution to sail majestically on for at least a few more decades in the twenty-first century.