Lowri Griffiths on Royal Visits, Street-Level Monarchy Enthusiasm, and the Specific North London Position on Constitutional Questions

Reported by Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.

By Lowri Griffiths | BigSmokeBroke.com

My neighbour Diane — who is sixty-seven, retired, and has an opinion about everything within a four-street radius that she delivers with the velocity and precision of someone who has been paying attention to the neighbourhood for thirty years and has no patience for people who have not — baked a Union Jack cake when King Charles visited New York last week. Not because the King visited New York, specifically, but because she had been planning to bake a Union Jack cake for the next royal occasion that presented itself and the New York visit was the occasion that presented itself. The cake was Victoria sponge. It was, she told me, very good. She gave me a slice. It was very good.

The North London Position on Royalty

North London’s relationship with the monarchy is, to put it gently, nuanced. We contain within our borough boundaries a proportion of republicans, committed monarchists, people who are theoretically republican but find the King personally sympathetic, people who are theoretically monarchist but found the late Queen’s death hit them harder than they expected given their theoretical monarchism, people who have strong views about the Diamond and its ownership (Diane is in this category, having watched the New York coverage with particular interest in the Koh-i-Noor question that Mayor Mamdani raised, which she described as “fair enough”), and a large proportion of people who have not formed a view because they have been busy and the constitutional question does not require resolution before Tuesday.

I am, for the record, Welsh, which gives me a specific relationship with the English monarchy that is more complicated than both simple republicanism and simple monarchism and that I find difficult to explain to English people without sounding either aggrieved or earnest, both of which are things I am trying not to be. What I can say is that I found the Mamdani moment — the Mayor of New York telling the King of England to give back the Koh-i-Noor at a 9/11 memorial wreath-laying ceremony — genuinely enjoyable in the way that moments of unexpected directness in otherwise scripted diplomatic occasions are enjoyable. The wreath was laid. The pleasantries were exchanged. The diamond remained in the Tower of London. Everyone went home. But the moment happened, and moments like it accumulate into the historical record of who said what about the things that happened to whom, which is the level at which these questions eventually matter.

What Royal Visits Actually Are

King Charles’s visit to New York included the 9/11 memorial ceremony and various diplomatic engagements appropriate to a state-adjacent visit, and was covered with the mixture of genuine news content and ambient ceremonial padding that royal visits generate as a category. The genuine news content — the diamond moment, the Hormuz Summit co-chaired with the Prime Minister, the meeting with UN officials — was real and significant in the ways that diplomatic visits can be. The ambient ceremonial padding — the photographs, the walkabouts, the handshakes with officials whose names I cannot now recall — is the performance of the monarchy as an institution rather than its substance.

The institution performs these functions — representing Britain internationally, projecting continuity, generating the specific kind of media attention that political visits do not generate — with a degree of effectiveness that republicans do not always acknowledge and that monarchists sometimes overstate. Britain sends its King to New York and New York pays attention in a way that it would not pay attention to a state visit from the Prime Minister, who is the person who actually makes policy decisions but who generates approximately a third of the coverage. The monarchy’s value as a diplomatic and cultural projection tool is real and measurable in column inches and broadcast minutes, and the question of whether that value justifies the institution’s cost and the constitutional complications it involves is a question that different people answer differently based on their prior commitments about the appropriate relationship between birth and political authority.

Diane’s Cake

Diane is a monarchist in the uncomplicated sense: she likes the King, she liked the late Queen, she thinks the institution provides stability and continuity that elected alternatives would not, and she expresses this view by baking a Union Jack Victoria sponge when the King does something that reminds her he exists. This is a perfectly reasonable position, expressed through a perfectly excellent cake, and I hold it against Diane not at all. We disagree about the constitution. We agree about Victoria sponge. The slice she gave me was two centimetres thick and had exactly the right jam-to-cream ratio. According to the Royal Family’s official website, King Charles continues to represent Britain through official engagements. According to Diane, the next cake occasion is the King’s birthday in November, and she is already thinking about the flavour. I live in hope of another invitation. Some things about North London are simply good.

Lowri Griffiths writes about London, politics, and cake. Her homepage is at The London Prat.

For more London lifestyle and politics, visit NewsThump.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/