Monday 8 May 2023

Not My Thing


"Look, stranger, at this island now"...
Down by the Itchen water meadows

So, did you manage to avoid the coronation? It seemed surprisingly easy, actually, around here. Provided you didn't turn on the TV or radio, life went on as normal. Nobody knocked on the door, to request and require the pleasure of our company at some hideous bunting-strewn tarmac picnic, mainly because there weren't any taking place within at least a two-mile radius. It poured with rain most of the day on Saturday, which must have helped, although there has been very little evidence of royalist fervour in the streets round about, anyway. A subset of the same houses that do Christmas lights in the front garden every year did string up a few plastic flags, but that was it.

By contrast Sunday was surprisingly hot and sticky, and we drove out to the Hockley Viaduct to check on the safe arrival of the swallows that nest beneath the M3 where it crosses over the Itchen Navigation. I saw no evidence anywhere of the dreaded street-parties, despite the ability of the media to stumble across isolated covens of Daily Mail readers wearing knitted crowns and union jack bowlers, and partying like it's 1953: "The royals aren't what they were, but what is? That Meghan? Words fail me. Mustn't grumble, though... Lovely cake, Doreen, nice and moist...  'Scuse fingers!" What with the drubbing the Tories took in the local elections, you might almost imagine that some profound change has been taking place in our national psyche. We'll see. Apathy is not the same thing as a demand for change. Besides, Charles and Camilla were never going to be a popular double-act: in the hearts of even the most fanatical royalists, the embers of suspicion around the highly-convenient death of Diana in 1997 smoulder on.

Mind you, I couldn't resist taking a peek. Penny Mordaunt in costume as a flight attendant on Valhalla Airways was brilliant, I thought, and Prince Louis in his mini Dr. Evil outfit is clearly shaping up to be the next right royal rebel. Somewhere out there is a five-year-old Epstein avatar, and their destiny has been written by the Fates: resistance is futile. But as for the rest of it: bleugh... I have a visceral dislike of that sort of carry-on, and I started making up facetious little poems in my head, mainly with rhymes for "Camilla" ("vanilla", "filler", "caterpillar", "scintilla", and so on). Listen, Chas 3.0, I'm so not going to accept a knighthood for services to blogging, so let's get that straight from the get-go.

More seriously, the disgraceful Metropolitan Police behaviour around anti-monarchy dissent must have seemed like a proper cunning plan to some Top Cop, but was, in effect, entrapment: hey, let's give permission for a demonstration in one particular place, then arrest anybody that shows up there before they so much as unfurl a banner! But this was so egregiously unfair and disproportionate that it will have lost yet more of whatever little public respect remains for the Met, although probably not as much as the shooting dead of two dogs on the same day. Now that, to the average Brit, is definitely a step too far down the road to a police state: Oi, coppers: no!

I have to say, though, that the slogan NOT MY KING is fairly ridiculous. "Not in my name!" made a certain amount of sense in relation to the Iraq War, although it always struck me as weirdly deluded, in an entitled, middle-class kind of way. It might as well have been "I say! Steady on, now!". But "not my king"?  Oh, yes he is... You might as well shout "Not my hapless Tory government!" Well, I've got news for you. It was somebody's hapless Tory government that rushed through the anti-protest legislation that ended up with you handcuffed in the back of a police van on Sunday. Some things cannot be wished away, simply because nobody asked you.

So would a Starmer-led government repeal the Public Order Act 2023? You do have to wonder: power does funny things to the people who crave it. After all, I'm still waiting for the anti-trade union legislation of the Thatcher years to be be taken off the books, despite three subsequent majority Labour governments...

Arrest that horse!

2 comments:

Martin said...

Against my better judgment (or was it idle curiosity?) I watched with my daughter. The whole thing had a weird vibe to it. I mean weirder than it usually gets when a couple past three score and ten runs riot with the dressing up box. Charles and Camilla looked totally bored but too inhibited to yawn, unlike Louis. Still, some would say a bargain at £100m. A historical pageant at Aldi prices.

Mike C. said...

Martin,

I thought the crowns were too silly to be true. They must have velcro inside.

Mike