The Coronation of Their Majesties King Charles III and Queen Camilla
By VT - Michael Shrimpton -May 5, 20231193
VT's Michael Shrimpton gets Our Readers Ready for the Royal Coronation
Excitement is building in the UK and throughout the Commonwealth ahead of tomorrow’s Coronation of Their Majesties King Charles III and Queen Camilla. One nutter, presumably working for GO2, tried to spoil things for everyone by lobbing a few shotgun cartridges over the wall at Buckingham Palace and a handful of Chinese assets in the Commonwealth realms have been muttering about referenda to become banana republics, but the great event is going ahead.
It will be a snip at just over £100 million, far less than the boost to GDP. (Pubs alone are expecting to take in an extra £120 million this weekend.)
The emotional impact of the King swearing to uphold the Laws and Customs of His Realm is going to take some people by surprise. Very few people still alive can recall the last Coronation, of Queen Elizabeth II, on June 2nd, 1953.
The Anglican service will be magnificent, despite attempts to ‘modernise’ it, that is to say, muck around with it. The language of the Book of Common Prayer has never been bettered and frankly, it’s a mystery why people keep trying!
The media have finally cottoned on to the fact that the Queen Consort is properly referred to as ‘the Queen’. Even the BBC has finally started referring to Queen Camilla by Her correct title. Queen Elizabeth II, when She ruled that the Duchess of Cornwall would become Queen Consort, wasn’t intending that She be referred to as ‘Queen Consort Camilla’! The wife of the King is the Queen. The husband of a Queen Regnant, like Elizabeth II, is the Prince Consort, although HRH Prince Phillip was never referred to as such, nor did he insist upon it, being the modest man that he was.
What happens when we have a gay Monarch with a husband can safely be left for the time being, although I suspect that the husband would be titled ‘Prince Consort’. Tomorrow therefore sees the Coronation of Their Britannic Majesties King Charles and Queen Camilla.
Camilla by the way is a lovely name. We’ve never had a Queen Camilla before and I think it’s rather nice. The Queen has been a tremendous support for the King and is becoming more popular by the day, as indeed is the King.His charm, His patent decency, His devotion to His kingdom, and His work ethic have impressed everyone except the half-crazed nutters, no offense intended, in Republic, who want to change the name of the country from the ‘UK’ to the ‘UR’. They claim 5,000 members, by which they probably mean 2,500, of whom half are probably crackheads, no offense intended.
The nutter
Republic is probably rushing to sign up David Huber, the man who threw shotgun cartridges into the Palace grounds on Tuesday. He’s been detained under the Mental Health Act, although that’s unlikely to prevent Republic from signing him up since half the committee is probably detained under the Act as well, again no offense intended.
As always with violent attacks upon members of the Royal Family or the Royal Palaces the question is ‘for whom was Huber working’? He was unlikely to have paid for his rail fare himself and may well have been supplied with the shotgun cartridges. It’s not actually that easy for nutters, sorry people with mental health issues, to acquire ammunition in England, in fact, it’s even more difficult than in Massachusetts.
Suspicion centers on Germany’s GO2. Unfortunately, the investigation, such as it is, has been placed in the hands of the Metropolitan Police, who with respect aren’t much saner than Huber. Like the FBI the Met are in the grip of the manic lone gunman theory.
They have so far parted company from reality that they still think that President Kennedy was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald! When a frustrated motorist accidentally ran over the foot of a demented Just Stop Oil protestor who was blocking the King’s Highway earlier this week the Met pursued the innocent driver, not the criminal protestor who was preventing him from passing along the highway upon his lawful occasions! The idiot protestor’s foot didn’t even need to be amputated.
Apparently, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, a crank called Sir Mark Rowley QPM (we didn’t exactly warm to each other when we met, at RUSI, some years ago), believes in manmade global warming. I don’t mean that he’s pushing the crackpot theory for reasons of political convenience.
I hope that I am not doing the man an injustice, but it’s rumored that he actually believes in it. What he thinks the Sun does is anybody’s guess. (Should anyone in the Met be reading this the Sun is that great big yellow thing up in the sky – it warms the planet and climatic variations are largely a consequence of variations in solar output.)
The weather
The weather forecast for tomorrow isn’t that good, I’m afraid. If you’re planning on joining the vast crowds lining the route of the Coronation processions to and from Westminster Abbey I would advise bringing a brolly! The rain is unlikely to dampen the enthusiasm of the crowds, however, any more than it did when Queen Elizabeth was crowned all those years ago.
Since the Coronation is intended to be, and will be, a triumph of Good over Evil, do not be surprised if the sun bursts through when Their Majesties appear on the balcony of Buckingham Palace. There is something magical about monarchy, which boring old republics (like Sudan) just can’t match. It is after all a spiritual and religious, as well as State, occasion.
The flypast may be grounded, I’m afraid. Modern aircraft can take off and land in all kinds of weather, but if the cloud height is below 1,000 feet there won’t be much point in having a flypast, and 1,000 feet is pretty much the minimum safe altitude over London these days. The owners of the Shard wouldn’t thank the RAF if their prize skyscraper ended up a few stories shorter!
I suspect that the flypast will go ahead but without the Spitfire. The Spitfire’s highly aerodynamic thin wing (it could dive faster than a Me262) meant that the undercarriage retracts outwards. This in turn meant a narrow track and a low crosswind take-off limit, of 15 knots. Careful thought might need to be given to runway selection if the Spit is to get off the ground.
This is where I came in with the Palace by the way. In 1995 I organised a flypast by the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight over my then village of Watermead on VE Day afternoon. I was in touch with the control tower at RAF Northolt and was aware that the winds were marginal for the Spit. In the events which happened the wind died down and we got our Spit.
Her Majesty however didn’t and She noticed! The MOD then tried blowing smoke up Buckingham Palace, never a good idea at the best of times. They told the Palace that the Spit was grounded with engine trouble, which in turn prompted an inquiry in my direction from the Vice Lord-Lieutenant of Buckinghamshire, that lovely man the late John Paterson, as to how I had ended up with a Spitfire and the Queen hadn’t!
The truth of course that the MOD had been too cheap to open up another airfield on a Sunday with a better-aligned runway. The Spit was grounded in the morning because the winds at Northolt were around 20 knots. Her mighty Rolls-Royce Merlin engine was giving full revs, and made a magnificent sound over Watermead that afternoon!
Please don’t write in and ask how I managed to wangle the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight for my little village on VE-Day afternoon. All I can say is that a very nice Marshal of the Royal Air Force, who happened to be a personal friend of the Queen Mother and Prince Philip, was involved. The local radio station, Mix 96, was gobsmacked, indeed they didn’t believe it until the aircraft hove into view in perfect formation, with Michael on an airband radio, Bomber Command veterans out in force, and a brass band playing the Dambuster’s March.
The coaches
Their Majesties will be using two coaches tomorrow, the Diamond Jubilee State Coach, which is modern, with air-conditioning and hydraulic suspension, and the Gold State Coach, which is 260 years old and not quite as smooth a ride. For air-conditioning Their Majesties will have to wind down a window, I’m afraid. Heating is by a hot water bottle. The Diamond Jubilee State Coach was actually built in Australia, the brilliant inspiration of Jim Frecklington, a friend of a friend.
Coronation robes
The Forces of Good, represented by the Palace, won a significant victory this week over the Forces of Evil, represented by the Cabinet Office, no offense intended.
As I point out in my VT Radio interview, The King Charles III Coronation Show, the Cabinet Office originally insisted on peers being dressed down, in business suits (!).
Peers of the Realm should of course wear Coronation robes at a Coronation. The Cabinet Office was no doubt desperate to do down our beloved King and Queen and downgrade the event. If the Cabinet Office had their way of course the King and Queen would be crowned in a parish church in Slough by the local vicar.
Sadly, the Cabinet Secretary was not sent to the Tower, no offense intended. Oddly enough no Cabinet Secretary has ever been sent to the Tower, indeed regrettably only one has ever been executed, and that without ceremony. (Ceremonial executions are so much more fun, and make for better television.)
Her Royal Highness the Princess Royal, Princess Anne, very helpfully torpedoed the idea of a slimmed-down monarchy as effectively as HMS Conqueror torpedoed ARA General Belgrano, in a with respect excellent interview on Canadian TV this week. Although widely attributed to the King the idea in fact originated in the Cabinet Office. As the Princess pointed out there are few enough members of the Royal Family as it is.
The answer of course is to restore the King’s income from the Crown Estate and stop asking Him to subsidise the Treasury, who only blows the money on fripperies like unnecessary quangos and unwanted EU regulations anyway. The Royal Palaces should be transferred to the King’s ownership and maintained out of the Crown Estate, which not being run by the Civil Service and is well-run and highly profitable (£312 million in 2021).
The new Royal Yacht
Now that we are out of the EU and can afford it, in honor of Their Coronation the government ought to buy Their Majesties a new Royal Yacht. It has been pointed out to me that my idea of a 600-foot yacht was a little unambitious, as some millionaire somewhere already has one that size!
I therefore suggest that we go for an ocean-going, 750-foot yacht, of say 20,000 tons standard displacement, with twin funnels and three teak masts, powered by high-pressure steam turbines, capable of say 30 knots, clean, in temperate waters. She should be the height of elegance (essentially a scaled-up Britannia, which was an austerity yacht) and have both vehicle and helicopter hangars, with a facility whereby vehicles could be driven straight onboard. Her captain should be a Rear-Admiral and she should be crewed, as before, by the Royal Navy. Naturally, she would have retractable gun turrets and missile launchers for defense, with underwater 24” torpedo tubes.
Her name? How about HMY King George VI and Queen Elizabeth? The net cost? Nothing. Britannia brought in more in trade deals than she ever cost to run. The new yacht shouldn’t cost more than £750 million to build anyway and would be a showcase for Britain’s shipbuilding industry. They’ll be glad of the work on the Clyde.