London’s upper crust is so over the royals – POLITICO

LONDON — As King Charles III arrived in Westminster Abbey for his coronation on Saturday, a 40-something woman in a red skirt stood up across town and raised her champagne flûte in a desperate attempt to generate a bit of enthusiasm.

“Chin-chin!” she shouted.

“God save the king,” the party surrounding her muttered with subdued enthusiasm.

We were in western London in one of the city’s most exclusive private clubs, a 40-acre oasis of manicured tennis lawns, croquet and rugby pitches.

I wangled my way into the club’s Polo Bar, hoping to get a feel for how the U.K.’s privileged feel about their new monarch and the state of the institution writ large.

The bar, decorated with fading sporting prints, engraved silver trophies and a bronze bust of a polo player midswing, looked more like the living room on a country estate than a watering hole. The room, with sweeping views of the surrounding lawns, was packed for the coronation, which played out on two large television screens.

The demographic here — wealthy whites — was decidedly unrepresentative. But that was intentional: With a waiting list of more than 30 years (“dead man’s shoes”), the club is a cultural biotope, making it the perfect place to take the famously reserved British establishment’s pulse.

Or so I thought. Halfway through the coronation ceremony I began to doubt whether they even had one. While I knew the people here weren’t the type who would stand for hours in the drizzle on the Mall waving the Union Jack, I was struck by a sense of ambivalence, bordering on ennui that pervaded the bar. Most people here appeared to be observing the ceremony more out of a sense of duty than devotion, more interested in chatting to their friends than following proceedings at Westminster Abbey.

One member remarked on how old Charles looked as he sat on the throne in full regalia, holding the sovereign’s orb in one hand.

“Charles will probably live to be 100,” a different man wearing a gold signet ring on his pinkie posited. “You go when you go,” his companion responded with disinterest.

I’d traveled to London on Friday, expecting to find the city full of bunting and frivolity. Given the spectacle of coronations past and that seven decades had passed since the last one, I was sure the city would be brimming with anticipation. What I encountered instead was indifference. After the Queen’s jubilee last year and the outpouring following her death, the Brits I met appeared royaled-out.  

“Most people don’t care about the coronation,” a fellow passenger on the Eurostar said as we waited in the security queue, politely explaining to another Yank the difference between a British republican and American Republican.

Train staff were handing out paper crowns in honor of the big day, but the only people who seemed to be wearing them were tourists, especially my fellow “septics.”

Several British friends told me they were boycotting the coronation in silent protest.

“The royal family infantilizes us,” one told me over dinner in Soho.

But when I asked him and other critics whether they wanted to get rid of the monarchy, they all said no.

That contradiction is rooted in part in fear of the unknown. While just three in ten Britons consider the monarchy to be “very important,” the lowest proportion on record, only a quarter of the population wants to abolish it altogether. With the U.K.’s politics in seemingly perpetual disarray and the economy in the doldrums, the monarchy looks like an island of stability. Though it may be beset by scandal and intrigue (as ever), the royal family offers a welcome distraction from the real world.

Back at the club, I joined some regulars for lunch in a cavernous banquet hall. After the Archbishop of Canterbury placed the crown on Charles’ head and declared “God save the king,” most people in the dining room followed suit and stood, though not all. One woman had draped the Union Jack over her shoulders as her husband, an aging dandy wearing red shoes and corduroys, snapped photographs. Nearby, two men discussed the merits of a new ETF.

By now, the ceremony was winding down and most of us had had enough of the hocus pocus at Westminster Abbey (not to mention too much wine). A debate started at my table over whether the grenadiers’ furry hats were really made of bearskin or beaver (the former).

A bigger concern was the Coronation Quiche. Charles and Camilla declared a spinach quiche the signature dish of their coronation.

One of my lunch companions had dark memories of a gooey Quiche Lorraine from his time at public school.

“I used to stuff it into the pockets of my trousers when they weren’t looking,” he confided.

I took the plunge anyway, biting into a cold pie crust to discover his skepticsim was well founded.

I decided to move on. As I left the grounds, some of the clubgoers were suddenly enthralled with the pageantry of the military processions and flyovers.

“Look at that!” one said with giddy pride, as the television cameras swept along the pageant of red-coated soldiers, horsemen and flags. “No other country does that!”  

I jumped on the tube in search of a different perspective and better food.

Stepping off the Underground in East London, there was no trace of the coronation. The neighborhood where I emerged, Whitechapel, has a large Bangladeshi population (it was also the scene of some of the murders attributed to Jack the Ripper).

I walked down one of the main streets, past a motley collection of storefronts, offering “Islamic goods,” mixed martial arts classes and organic food, telltale signs of gentrification. When I ventured into the Lahore Kebab House, a local restaurant, the television was tuned not to celebrations surrounding the coronation, but to a documentary about baboons.

Abdil, an office worker who emigrated to the U.K. a decade ago from Somalia, said over a bowl of chicken curry that he decided to sleep in instead of watching the ceremonies.

“It’s not fair,” he said. “So many people were trying to demonstrate against this and the government said ‘no.’ They blocked everywhere.”

(A few hours before the coronation, police arrested leaders of a prominent republican group planning a protest.)

Abdil and his fellow diners said most people in their communities were lukewarm on the monarchy. They believed in democracy and that “no one should be above the law.”

Given the changing demographics of the country, it seems inevitable that affinity for the monarchy will continue to diminish.

Even so, for this Anglophile, a Britain without the monarchy remains unimaginable. The institution is simply too tightly woven into the country’s traditions and identity. And even if support for the royals in London and other urban centers is waning, it remains stronger in the countryside.

Besides: Royals are a boon for tourism. What about all the Americans who fly across the Atlantic yearning for a whiff of Camelot?

I asked one of my royal-skeptic friends earlier how the country could survive without the mystique of the monarchy.

“That’s the problem,” he acknowledged. “We have nothing else left.”