This is an excerpt from this week's Behind the Headlines newsletter, which you can receive for free every Friday by clicking here. This week our newsletter comes from chief political reporter Judith Duffy.
I’ve covered very few royal events in my journalism career. The first involved spending a dull morning trailing round after Princess Anne while she visited Summerlee Museum in Coatbridge. From memory, I don’t think we got to ask any questions and had to keep a "respectful" distance.
The other occasion was the wedding of Zara Phillips and Mike Tindall when I spent hours in a media "pen" near Holyrood Palace to watch a fleet of royal cars briefly whizz past. Eventually deciding to head back to the office to file my copy, the shortcut I took down a (what turned out to be closed off) road at the back of the palace resulted in being confronted by two armed police officers demanding to know what I was doing.
This week a visit to St Giles’ Cathedral to witness the Scottish service celebrating the Coronation of King Charles turned out to be less dramatic for me – but not so much for the monarch. Inside the church, the cries of "Not My King" could at first be heard only faintly. But as I reported in The National, as the service progressed the protests could be heard loud and clear – particularly at key moments such as during the presentation of the Honours of Scotland.
There were 10 journalists there to observe proceedings. We wouldn’t be expecting front row seats but you might think we would be in a position where, well, we could at least see what was going on during the service.
Instead, we were tucked in a corner behind two large pillars facing the congregation. I caught sight of the bobbing heads of the royals as they walked in, but other than that I had to rely on a TV screen sited to my left to try to work out what was going on just a few feet away. Unhelpfully the images didn’t sync with what we could hear, adding to the bizarre experience.
So I spent some of the time staring at the back of a man armed with an actual bow and arrow, wondering whether I was actually still in the year 2023.
Shockingly we still don’t know how much the recent events for King Charles have cost the public purse. I have tried to find out the bill for the Coronation in London through Freedom of Information (FOI) legislation, but it was declined on the grounds the information would be released “soon”. We’re still waiting.
Other FOI enquiries did establish that one element - moving the Stone of Destiny to London for the occasion - had cost nearly £50,000. The bill was paid by Scotland’s heritage agency, a public body.
Meanwhile it took a long email exchange to find out the Scottish Government would be footing costs for the event in Edinburgh last week. A note right at the bottom of a press release about the £22,000 specially commissioned Elizabeth sword alerted me to the fact the Government had paid for it – even though it was so vaguely worded and I had to check to confirm.
That prompted questions about who exactly was paying for all this and how much was it costing? The reply was each organisation involved in managing and planning the event. It took another question to establish that included the Scottish Government. It also said it was not possible to calculate the bill until after the service had taken place.
When it comes to spending of public money on the royal family, getting hold of such information shouldn’t feel like, well, getting blood out of a Stone of Destiny. Rest assured, we’ll keep on trying.
