Poor King Charles. And yet, on the other hand, daft King Charles: he’s served a 50-year apprenticeship for this gig. You’d think he’d have learned, sometime between the invention of the moving image and now, that when all eyes are upon you, if you tell your wife you’re bored, people are going to notice. “But I’m in my gold coach!” he must have thought. “In my gold coach, no one can hear me whinge.” And so, fatefully, he said to his queen: “This is boring.”
He spoke for the nation. There was his grandson, yawning his damn head off outside Westminster Abbey. There was his wife, on the balcony for the historic wave, unable to really focus on the crowds in front of her because she was too busy shepherding her swarm of ceremonial minions, probably more grandchildren, plainly too bored to remember where they were supposed to stand. People in the crowd – and these, you had to assume, were the most fervent royalists the nation could produce – did not seem that wild. A small group of protesters on their way out of Trafalgar Square seemed more exercised about the arrests that had been made earlier in the day than they were about the monarchy itself. I agreed with them; the anti-protest bill probably is more consequential than the existence of a working royal family, but still.
Over the entire coronation period, I saw one person with fire in her eyes: at midnight the night before, a woman was trying to get into the broadcasters’ enclosure at the back of Buckingham Palace. “I want to see my palace!” she was shouting at some extremely patient security guards. “It’s my king, and my palace!” I suspected the influence of some prosecco, but also, I like a scene and I still had a pass, so I nearly gave it to her. “If you go 50 yards that way,” said a guy in hi-vis, “you’ll have the same view and actually be a bit closer.” “OK, then!” she said, with a flourish.
It might have been the lacklustre weather, but counterpose the other great nepo story of the year – Succession – and there’s the real answer: the Windsors were lacking the element of surprise. If you want all eyes upon you, popcorn ready, your atmospheric stock price making the world seasick, you need to leave your heirs genuinely mystified as to who should succeed you. Charles’s ascension to the throne was the slowest punchline in history. “Day of Destiny” said headlines across the world, but if the concept of destiny had ever meant a spectacle so predictable, so drawn out, so utterly unspectacular, it would never have made even a footnote in the annals of literature.
The Roys and the Windsors differ in other respects – one is fictional, the other allegedly real, so the Roys have better dialogue, although give King Charles a few more spins in his gold coach and we’ll find out what he’s really thinking. Beneath these superficial distinctions, they give off the same vibe of deep unhappiness. The winners in the great game of wealth transfer look alternately bored and overwhelmed by it, cheated of the great inferno of injustice that seems to light up the losers from within. I personally have nothing against Prince Harry, and I actively worship Shiv. But I am awestruck by their ability to remain outraged by a situation that has been in place since they were born.
They were never going to get the top job, yet to read Harry’s Spare or see the fathomless disappointment play across Shiv’s eyebrows, you’d think it was delivered to them as fresh news every morning. In a rare moment of stating the bleeding obvious, recent episodes of Succession walked the viewer through the truism that too much money is bad for the soul. It’s bad whoever you are, but if you’re the schmuck who didn’t earn it, only inherited it, it’s worse: you cannot imagine life without it; you cannot believe in it as a reward for your personal qualities, not really; all you can do is fret about losing it and resent those who have more.
So that was my take-home from the weekend: life is no picnic for the nepo babies either. Hats off, everyone – 100 million quid well spent.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
