Earlier this month, the World Health Organisation announced that the “global health emergency” caused by the Covid-19 pandemic was over.

It warned, however, that although the world’s weekly Covid death rate had dropped from 100,000 in January 2021 to just 3,500 today, this was no reason for complacency.

More than three years on from the start of the crisis, and after as many as 20 million deaths, the WHO stressed that it wasn’t sending the message that Covid-19 was no longer anything to worry about.

Nevertheless, this news came as a great relief to many people across the world, not least in the United Kingdom, where millions were lining the parade routes and preparing street parties that weekend to celebrate the coronation of His Most Royal, Regal, and Majestic Majesty King Charles III of the Ancient and Noble House of Windsor (and the Castle too).

This was the second piece of news that week that might have been expected to boost the smooth flow of those patriotic festivities.

A few days earlier, a controversial new law had come into force, which gave the police draconian powers to prevent disruptive protests. True to their reputation for undue zeal, London’s Metropolitan Police made use of this legislation to enforce more than fifty arrests on the day of the coronation itself, in a strategy which a number of their critics described, perhaps somewhat hyperbolically, as a “totalitarian crackdown”.

That action included the arrests of three members of Westminster Council’s night safety team, who’d been caught handing out rape alarms – items that officers thought could have been used to frighten the horses deployed as part of the royal pageant.

One young woman, dubbed in the press a “royal superfan” and in town for the day to cheer the king, was arrested and detained for thirteen hours after being mistaken for an anti-fossil fuels protester.

Since then, the police have also been forced to apologize for the arrests of half a dozen members of a prominent Republican group, who had been found on the morning of the coronation in possession of a set of luggage straps – straps which officers claimed to believe could have been used unlawfully to tie protesters to things and thereby get in the way of ceremonial stuff taking place.

(That may not be the exact legal terminology invoked, but it seems about as fastidiously correct as the justification for the arrests.)

Given that the new law prescribed arrest for any potential miscreant with the equipment needed to “lock on” and thus disrupt the flow of traffic if, say, superglued to a major highway (including, for example, being in possession of a pair of handcuffs), it seems fortunate that the police officers patrolling the coronation didn’t all end up arresting each other, or indeed themselves.

These police actions and the law making them possible have been roundly criticized by many public figures, including a former police chief and a prominent Tory MP.

While some of the nation’s more feverish monarchists may have been as pleased by this clampdown on lawful protests as by the declaration of the end of the Covid emergency, as they partied away beneath their union flag bunting, I must confess, on a more personal note, that I didn’t share any such sense of joyous relief.

This was for two reasons. The first was that as a staunch Republican, I was woefully immune to the waves of royalist enthusiasm that swept the nation.

The second reason was that, even as the Archbishop of Canterbury had hesitantly attempted to fit St. Edward’s Crown onto the grizzled head of the new sovereign, I happened to be isolating at home with a mild case of Covid-19.

There are those among the ultra-royalist contingent – you know, the ones who camp out for a week just to catch the merest glimpse of a Windsor wave – who’d say it served me right.

So, no coronation celebrations for me: just my first direct experience of coronavirus. This was perhaps some kind of a divine judgment against my refusal to accept a jug-eared German’s God-given right to reign over us. I wouldn’t like to rule it out.

Coronavirus is of course named after the crown of spikes that characterize its microscopic structure.

There are those who’d suggest that the crowned heads of Europe represent a similar blight upon the face of modern democracies – but I wouldn’t want to go quite so far.

The results of an opinion poll published shortly after the coronation showed that around half of young British people believe that the monarch should be replaced by an elected head of state.

(Though we may of course feel, in the month that Donald Trump was found guilty of sexual assault, that a presidential system is no panacea in itself...)

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News from Nowhere: King and Country

At the same time, a similar proportion of UK youth said they believed that King Charles should break with his late mother’s tradition of political neutrality and be allowed to campaign on the issues that matter most to him.

This view was shared by 38 percent of all respondents, regardless of their age or other demographic factors.

This is perhaps a reflection of the fact that, throughout his adult life, Charles has been known for his tendency to speak his mind, and that, at times, his opinions have been pertinent, especially in relation to environmental concerns. (Though his views on architecture and aesthetics have been rather less progressive.)

There is of course an extraordinary degree of hypocrisy in the idea of a super-rich individual who has never experienced hardship in his life, and indeed who lives an existence of conspicuous and wasteful luxury, posing as a champion of the rights of the poor and the dispossessed.

One might therefore feel uncomfortable to read recent reports that he’d last year had a furious argument with Boris Johnson about the then Prime Minister’s plans to deport asylum-seekers to central Africa.

Some might welcome his perspectives – because they may happen to agree with them. Yet to do so inevitably sets a dangerous precedent.

This is, after all, a man whose great uncle once hung out with Hitler and whose own brother also notoriously befriended some deeply disreputable characters.

His second son hasn’t always been known for the sensitivity of his public statements. Nor indeed was his late father.

There are clearly hazards in accepting the views of senior royals as if they were gospel.

Indeed, even a chance remark allegedly let slip by his mother in a private conversation was weaponized by the right-wing media in support of 2016’s Brexit campaign.

Perhaps she’d been wise to do her best on most such occasions to bite her tongue.

After all, the fact that we might find one or two decent apples in an otherwise rotten barrel is no reason to hand unaccountable powers of political influence to a bunch of inbred dolts, the unfortunate products of centuries of patronage and privilege.

This month, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the former head of the British Army, and other assorted priests and peers expressed to the House of Lords their outrage at the UK government’s latest plans to prevent illegal immigration.

Again, people may agree with what they were saying, while at the same remaining profoundly opposed to the structures of political authority through which the voices of those unelected individuals have been granted highly privileged degrees of influence.

To prevent the rise of autocracy, it remains vital that political power is consistently and constitutionally accountable to the people through transparent democratic processes.

In modern states, such power should never be based upon those accidents of birth which are superstitiously supposed to underpin antique hereditary rights.

Indeed, one might imagine that the commitment of any constitutional monarchy to uphold and defend such democratic principles (principles including the political neutrality of the sovereign and their people’s right to peaceful protest against their existence) would paradoxically prove to be their crowning glory.

Yet we also know from the reputations of King Victor Emmanuel III and Pope Pius XII that the silence of those national and religious leaders who choose to keep out of politics can with hindsight be judged as tantamount to acts of cowardice and complicity with the most terrible crimes.

His continuing involvement in the world of politics would for Charles III prove an extraordinarily hazardous balancing act. But, with the ongoing viability of life on our planet at stake, it may well be a risk he’ll find himself willing to take.

The consequences of such interventions, unintended and unforeseen, may yet prove explosive.