The Coronation of King Charles III is over - and a magnificent performance it was, from the Edwardian cadences of Parry's I Was Glad to the couture of Princess Kate, Penny Mordaunt and the Garter robes. The ceremonies went well. Very well.
Too well.
I don't support the monarchy, but I had thought that a case could be made for the Coronation as a great national event that would bring people together in a way that was free from party politics. The excess of the ceremonies would be the whole point - self-ironic camp. We revel in this kitsch and don't take it seriously. We're the nation that produced Monty Python. We're not Americans.
But it didn't work. There was something off.
The ritual and spectacle didn't quite mask the reality of a state and nation in decline. The disjunction was ultimately too obvious. In the middle ages, a coronation was a demonstration of power. Yesterday, the ceremony gestured discreetly but embarrassingly to the feebleness of the modern British state. A Britain which is diminished by Brexit, staggering along as those who really run the country are unable to keep it functioning amidst economic stagnation and looming recession. The smart marching soldiers might serve as a painful reminder of the underfunding of the real army. The lavish resourcing might point to a contrast with those who find themselves on picket lines striking for their livelihoods. The minute-perfect timing might have seemed a bit too perfect for those waiting for NHS operations. When Republic protestors were arrested by the police, the real story was not uniformed fascists suppressing dissent, it was just the Met being the Met: dimwitted officers of another badly-run public service reminding everyone of their desperate need for reform and leadership.
And the sea levels continue to rise.
This is not a cheap point about spending a hundred million on a king in an age of food banks, as if having a president would suddenly make Britain parsimonious about spending money on state events (it hasn't worked for France, America or India). It is about a more general air of unreality. Yesterday came too close to going through the motions.
The aesthetics were triumphalist, but there was a ghost at the feast. The artificiality was too disconcerting - symbolised, perhaps, by Liz Truss turning up as if she'd been a real Prime Minister, or by the Commonwealth heads of government who marched into the Abbey straight from planning their republic referendums. There was an underlying elegiac mood.
This was not the start of a new reign but the end of an era. It was the final celebration of a certain kind of monarchism and a certain kind of Britain. In 1953, people were still living in a fool's paradise. Talk of a "New Elizabethan era" still meant something. We'd won the War, don't you know. Churchill was back in Number 10, like some ham actor who returns for an ill-judged sequel. The collapsing of the Empire still hadn't become too obvious, and no-one had yet heard of the EEC. Britain in 2023 is a very different proposition. There were well-meaning gestures toward multiculturalism - and there was real power in a Hindu PM reading from the Bible, and in Black and Asian aristocrats attending the King - signs of real substantial changes in British society which can't be dismissed as tokenism. And yet in some sense those were the elements which most served to emphasise the theatricality of the proceedings. The rituals combined to make us ask, Who are we, really? It is a question that has not gone away since 2016, and it can't be avoided like it was 70 years ago. When the Queen was buried, there was more in that coffin than Elizabeth Windsor.
We live in serious times; grim times, even. Yesterday came dangerously close to suggesting that we are not a serious country. The Britain revealed by the coronation was not a proud resurgent Brexit nation or a cisheteropatriarchal imperial despotism. It was a second-rate country which just isn't very good.
