God Save The King

Ben Wildsmith, Royal Correspondent 

When are they going to do something about God Save The King? It’s hard enough for King Charles to project a sense of secure continuity to his troubled people without having to rescue the gig from the Grenadier Guards’ shoegazing dirge before he starts.

Does any other melody plunge the heart into such immediate and profound despond? Its inert droning suggests a ticking clock in the silence of an elderly relative’s front room as you endure a parentally enforced visit instead of seeing your friends on a Sunday afternoon.

It is dry fruit cake and weak tea; The One Show of national anthems next to Cymru’s Breaking Bad banger of a choon. It needs taking out the back of the palace and smothering in a guardsman’s busby.

Core message

His Kingliness looked well, considering recent health problems, and his core message of dialogue amongst faiths remains relevant and worthy of repetition. Again, he made a point of including the faithless in this appeal, which strikes me as the sort of thing that’s going to cause him trouble in the future.

Charles, you see, is the absolute OG of woke. He was talking to trees and diluting the primacy of established religion before Gary Lineker had enraged his first retiree.

Wanting to be ‘Defender of the Faiths’ (plural) is one thing, but including atheists under that umbrella leaves the royal personage prone to accusations of pandering.

In the Tory paradigm of British patriotism, Charles’ Neil-the-hippie tendencies were protected by the prime directive to conserve an established way of doing things. Yes, the heir to the throne probably believed in fairies at the bottom of the garden but that was fine, so long as his eccentricities didn’t interfere with the flow of hierarchical privilege.

With the implosion of Tory Britain, however, the new monarch’s position seems less insulated than ever before. Ironically, the Labour Party which should, as per instructions on the tin, be a problem for monarchy, is anything but.

The party’s perennial quest to win the hearts of nasty bigots causes it to risk rupturing itself in supplication if royalty is so much as mentioned.

God knows how many Union Flags the party possesses but you rarely see any of its cringing representatives without one in shot.

Farageism

The problem for the king, and everyone else, is Farage. It’s becoming clear that Farageism, which in its UKIP expression was overtly jingoistic and UK-specific, has now revealed itself as a constituent part of the wider MAGAverse.

For Nige & co, leaders are anointed by dollars accrued, social media numbers, and military strength.

Victor Orban of Hungary is closer to royalty in that world than any cod-philosophical, supposed possessor of magic blood.

Elon, Victor, Nige, Vladimir, Narender, Xi, and Donald deal in the sort of absolute power that Charles’ ancestors enjoyed.

They won’t be shy in shooting down his liberal notions if it works for them.

Get a better tune, Charles, you’re going to need it.