Royal News

[poliphilo]

Wimbledon the other day was largely given over to a love-in with the Queen. Notable people- some of them intrinsically much more notable than she is - for example Roger Federer and Venus Williams- were lined up to touch the gloved hand and receive the gracious words. I could hardly bear to watch. I know this is a minority position, but I find the spectacle of one human being bowing and scaping to another human being profoundly dispiriting. I am a democrat to my bones.

Meanwhile, Prince Charles' interference in the affair of the rebuild on the Chelsea Barracks site is being aired in the High Court. At one level this is a story about very rich people inconveniencing one another and really none of my business. On the other it's about Charles expoiting the cringe reflex that almost everyone- including Qatari sheiks- feels in the presence of British royalty- to impose his Betjemanesque taste in architecture on the world at large. It's an unfair exploitation of his position- and goes outside the terms of our gentleman's agreement of a constitution in which the royals are accorded symbolic status- and as much fawning as they can eat (which in Charles' case is an awful lot)- in return for their absolute neutrality. Charles regularly oversteps the mark- and needs to be told to stop.

Comments

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I quite agree. There's something viscerally upsetting about the sight, to me. I suddenly feel quite alien from the majority of people, who (or so opinion polls and personal experience tell me) are either in favour of, or at least, indifferent to, the monarchy, and think that the whole pompencircumstance that goes with it lies somewhere on the spectrum between "one of the things that makes us British" and "reaffirmation of the natural order as set out in the unexpurgated version of 'All Things Bright and Beautiful'".

It actually feels slightly infantile, as if we'd all decided that on one day of the year we were going to wear nappies and eat Cow & Gate Banana Mush as "a tribute to the ideals of childhood".

[veronica-milvus.livejournal.com]

There was a poll on LJ a few weeks ago that asked "What do you do to celebrate your country's independence?" and I said "I don't think Britain is independent, it is still in thrall to Wiliam the Bastard and his Norman Barons". This bowing and scraping is so horribly feudal, it's time we let her bog off to Sandringham and invented something better.