Nightmare Abbey

We have more insight into the mind and disposition of Charles Windsor than any of his predecessors. He can’t help himself: the memos, the speeches, the books. Harmony, his 2010 traditionalist manifesto, ranges from architecture to the movement of the planets to the benefits of population control. It has some signal omissions: democracy does not trouble its pages. Politics appears only as an unfortunate and overweening distraction from what really needs doing – farming, mostly – in accordance with the Natural Order of Things.

It was perversely funny that a few days in early May gave us – nearly back-to-back – two awkwardly different faces of power in Britain. On Thursday, a tranche of English voters trudged to the polling stations to vote in local elections. Their councillors will take charge of bodies that are poorer, weaker and stretched much thinner than they were a decade ago, many of their statutory services frayed nearly to extinction. They were elected in a system which has introduced new barriers to voting and become less representative (the supplementary vote system for directly elected mayors has been scrapped and replaced by first past the post). Turnout in some places was as low as 22 per cent.

On Saturday, many more people (over 18 million) switched on their TVs to watch their monarch – descended from Wotan on his Saxon side, though that claim isn’t much stressed these days – process in ermine, silk and diamonds to be invested with ancient symbols of power, temporal and spiritual, and then hide from view to be anointed by the senior primate of the state religion. After the grovelling, thousands of troops processed in armed celebration. Somewhere beyond the cordon, the Metropolitan Police arrested a few republicans for precrime. Commentators purred that this, after all, is what Britain does best.

The Crown, its supporters argue, is a living symbol that can project an ideal of national unity, duty or social order precisely because it is above the sordid fray of everyday politics. Were you fully signed up to the traditionalism promoted by the Temenos Academy (patron: HRH the Former Prince of Wales), you might claim that both institution and ritual answer a spiritual hunger in a faithless age; those closer to earth might reach for a bit of half-remembered Bagehot, stressing the ‘dignified’ rather than ‘efficient’ part of the constitution. Local government may touch every part of a citizen’s life, but the Crown touches the soul.

On the other hand: politics may be sordid, but did you see the specimens gathered in the Abbey? Prince Noncealot skulking around in his silks; a smattering of jetted-in Gulf absolutists (don’t mention the slaves, or leave them alone with any journalists); a few Walter Mittyish deposed royal families; the occasional garden-variety torturer or exiled despot. You needn’t have an accountant’s soul to wonder if there might be a better way to spend £100 million in a nation that can’t – or won’t – feed all its children. As for living symbols, it’s worth recalling that the primary meaning of the Crown, for much of history and most of the globe, was that its arrival at your doorstep meant your life was about to get harder and poorer in inventive and startlingly brutal ways.

Thinkers who dream of a rationalist politics purged of myth often find popular susceptibility to symbols and stories frustrating. But myth is hard to escape, not least because quite a few political concepts – sovereignty, for instance – can begin to lose their purchase without it. Still, the changes to the coronation ritual suggest that myth has been a little rejigged by politics. There was pointedly less Protestant suprematism and imperial dominion than last time; Orthodox and gospel choirs enriched the English choral foundation. A Hindu prime minister read the epistle; half a dozen Catholic bishops took part; representatives of other faiths got a special greeting. Queen Camilla forewent the Koh-i-Noor. Charles emphasised service, a word that royals cherish for its constructive vagueness. He tailored the myth to the world, and to his own multicultural preferences, a matter on which he is distinctly more open than many of the Tory politicians in attendance. (As his mother’s worldview always carried the imprint of prim 1940s austerity, Charles’s carries that of the 1960s, both in his sincere interest in other cultures and his reaction against the decade’s late radicalism.)

If this looks like a thin veneer of change over a celebration of stasis, then it is in keeping both with Charles’s ideological tradition and with the state of the country over which he rules. There are plenty of queasy details about the traditionalist milieu that Charles finds stimulating, but its fundamental intuition is that modernity is an unnatural, desacralising catastrophe and human beings would be much happier returning to their cultural repositories of traditional knowledge, which aligns with the fundamental order of the cosmos. This may seem an innocuous enough credo – not a million miles from some secular thinking on alienation – until you start to follow its implications: the division of human beings into distinct cultural-religious dispensations, the preference for mystery over knowledge, the bleaching of human history – with all its hybridities, misfirings, detours and sheer mess – into the unstained simplicity of cosmic order.

Worst of all may be the rancid implication that the social order is a given natural phenomenon and you really would be happier learning your father’s trade, not getting above your station, neither moving nor really changing, knowing your place in an inane and endless reproduction of unjustly distributed sameness. Nice enough if you’re a king, less thrilling if you’re a subsistence farmer. Or, as Charles put it in 2003, in a private whinge against ‘social utopianism’, people think they could be ‘infinitely more competent heads of state without ever putting in the necessary work or having the natural ability’. Which does he think he has?

Torpid stasis is at least the national mood. The local elections, edged out of the headlines by the coronation pomp, ought at least to have prompted some joy that Tory rule – which seemed at moments over the last decade that it would endure for ever – will end at the next election, and many of the amoral ghouls currently in government will lose their seats. A genuinely disastrous night for the Conservatives, who lost more than a thousand council seats, seemed to indicate that the electoral coalition on which they have recently relied was falling apart at both ends, aided by the gradual exfiltration of liberal graduates from prohibitively expensive cities, the return of some ‘red wall’ voters to Labour, the pressing economic and healthcare disasters, and a spot of opportunistic nimbyism by local parties.

Conservative losses were magnified by grassroots tactical voting, partly grounded in a sense that non-Tory parties were sufficiently interchangeable that anti-Tory animus dictated the decision. It’s hard to say with confidence whether Starmer will achieve a majority or head a minority government (formal coalition seems improbable), but it is much harder to imagine Sunak in Number 10 after this parliament ends. Yet it is also difficult to discern much elation at the prospect of his departure.

The rapid closure of ideological space at the centre of British politics is part of the reason it feels less than thrilling; voters are right to think that distinctions between non-Tory parties are fairly minimal. Starmer and his team, who have gradually become more explicit in their emulation of Blair-era strategy, have been less clear when it comes to what they are actually going to do about any of Britain’s enduring crises (health, housing, wage stagnation, rotten public realm) other than profess that they can solve them. Starmer’s duplicitous track record and inclination to the traditional sins of Labour politics – authoritarianism and conformism –do not inspire confidence. The void where a political vision should be does not inspire hope. Few on the left, save perhaps some implacable rump Corbynites, believe that a Labour government will be no better than a Conservative one. But fewer still could look honestly at the scale of Britain’s problems and believe that it will be adequate.

The sight of Charles III processing through Westminster Abbey with orb and sceptre should have made it clear, if it wasn’t already, that we can’t simply distinguish between the dignified and efficient parts of the British state and leave it at that. Britain’s institutions are made in the image of its monarchy, and inculcate monarchical habits of thought in its leaders and courtier-like servility in its press and officials. Most of us assume its establishment is riddled with corruption masquerading as merit. It treats power as the noble concession of an ordained force rather than the common construction of its people, given by a consent that can be withdrawn. Its fused executive-cum-legislature is notoriously hard to restrain, which strengthened the wrecking hand of Thatcher and her imitators; its political parties mirror its vitiated democracy in their internal structures. Blair once convinced voters of his belief that Britain is a young country, an improbable lie which he sold deftly. It seems closer to the truth, as someone else put it longer ago, that ‘the tradition of dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living.’