To celebrate her accession to the throne, Elizabeth II chose a dish called coronation chicken, which is still sometimes eaten in homes and some restaurants, made with chicken, mayonnaise, sultanas, cinnamon, curry powder and mango jam, eminently carnivorous and with very colonial ingredients, which were intended to celebrate the diversity of the Commonwealth. Carlos III has designated as his coronation recipe a bland quiche based on spinach, green beans and tarragon, vegetarian but not vegan. Sign of the times.
On the eve of D-Day, and amid blistering media coverage that has relegated the Russian bombing of Ukraine, the war in Sudan and Britain’s own cost-of-living crisis to second place, interest is only to rise. and the enthusiasm for the coronation of the man who has been king since last September. But in any case, they are incomparably fewer than those that inspired the same event in 1953, in a country fresh out of the war, where the rubble of the Luftwaffe bombing raids had not yet been completely removed, there were ration cards and it was the first time something like this was broadcast on television. It was like a catharsis, the symbol of the arrival of happier times.
Things are different now. Elizabeth was a young queen who had volunteered to drive ambulances and remain in London in the midst of Nazi attacks, earning popular sympathy. Carlos is a tall 74-year-old man about whom almost everything is known (including his sexual life), the dysfunctional leader of a dysfunctional family, whose affair with Camila (current queen) precipitated the end of his marriage to Diana, respected, but not inspires neither much affection nor great passions.
60% of the British, according to the latest survey, support royalty, 26% would prefer a republic and the remaining 14% have no opinion. Those over 65 are fervently monarchists, but among those under twenty-four, only one in three are. And in the middle is a majority that recognizes the anachronism of the institution but thinks that it works for this country, so it’s better not to get into eleven-yard shirts with experiments who knows how they would turn out.
An issue that squeaks – now more than ever with inflation and millions of subjects depending on food banks for their subsistence – is the wealth of the Windsors, and in particular Carlos, with a fortune estimated by The Guardian newspaper at 1,300 millions of euros, between castles, farmlands, biscuit factories, jewelry, luxury cars, art, racehorses, office blocks, hotels, golf courses, various investments… Even the cricket field is theirs. Oval, in South London, and part of the seabed off the English coast. The crown receives from the State, for its operating expenses, 98 million euros per year (around one and a half euros per head), which on paper might not seem like much. But a widespread censorship is that he transmits his fortune from father to son without paying anything in inheritance taxes, when the rest of the mortals have to put down 40%. When Elizabeth asked for a new royal yacht to replace the Britannia, the Conservative government told her no way.
Carlos is not Isabel, and 2013 is not 1953. Tomorrow the flags will fly, chocolate bars and mugs with the effigy of the new king will be sold, 62 million pints of beer will flow, the pubs will have their August, three thousand parties will be held and it will look like the whole world (or the world as seen from the northern hemisphere) is waiting for the coronation on television, and it will certainly be a great show. But 60% of the British still said yesterday that they have nothing against it, but that they are personally interested in “little or very little”, and that there are more important things in their lives. Enthusiasts tend to be older, male, and white. The indifferent, young people, women and members of ethnic minorities, for many of whom the monarchy is, among other things, synonymous with colonialism, racism, classism, nepotism and inequality. One and a half trillion euros in cobalt, diamonds, gold, platinum, oil and gas from Africa and Asia move on the London Stock Exchange. Every British government in recent times, regardless of what they pay lip service to, has promoted friendly dictators and encouraged their corruption. Elizabeth II has not been taken into account, probably because she could not do anything about it, the disintegration of the empire and the loss of the colonies in East Africa, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Pakistan, Hong Kong… Carlos III he is the head of an increasingly irrelevant Commonwealth, in which Barbados no longer recognizes the English monarch as head of state, and Jamaica and Australia trail behind.
Carlos wants to be “modern” and frugal, and that nobles do not swear allegiance to him but, from their homes, millions of ordinary subjects. But he will wear crowns on his head with two and a half kilos of pure gold and 2,568 diamonds. To those who are not doing well in life, who are quite a few and more and more, it seems that the hundred million that the ceremony will cost could be used, for example, to raise the salary of nurses.
