The ardent crowds gathered in the London drizzle presumably got exactly what they had come for, but among the coronation’s garish costumes, impenetrable rituals and perfectly timed salutes and processions, there lurked an unavoidable sense of anticlimax. There he was, hanging on to his orb and sceptre: a very familiar, remarkably glum-looking 74-year-old man, sitting atop a very damaged institution, honoured with a ceremony based on a national religion that no one really follows any more, in a country whose collective mood is not exactly cheerful.
No one needs any reminders of why this is: living costs remain impossible, more strikes loom and the cliche of a country where nothing works perpetually rings true. It is easy to think of the UK – or, more specifically, England – as somewhere that is simply stuck. In that context, as royal rituals always do, the coronation spectacularly served its purpose, presenting nostalgia, continuity and deference as virtues rather than vices.
But the events of the past few days have also provided reminders that this may not be the hidebound, small-c conservative country that its elites and establishment still imagine it to be. By their very nature, societies are always changing – and underneath its outward sullenness and stalemate, ours seems to be entering a very interesting phase indeed.
Woven into the coverage of the crowning of Charles III, let us not forget, there have been acknowledgments of drastically altered circumstances. Among 18- to 24-year-olds, only 36% want to keep the monarchy, down from more than 70% 10 years ago. Nearly 60% of us are either “not very interested” or “not at all interested” in the royal family. According to the National Centre for Social Research, the belief that that the monarchy is “very important” has reached its lowest levels since data collection began 40 years ago.
The most telling signs of change, perhaps, are the widespread – and, as ever, underreported – indifference that greeted the coronation, and a rising sense that the monarchy’s delusions and denials can no longer be sustained. Even those who watched the ceremony would have been well aware of those tensions: TV coverage may have stuck to the kind of dutiful scripts it perfected in the 20th century, but people’s phones were surely full of posts and comments about Harry and Meghan, and the odorous presence of the Duke of York.
And then there is what happened last week at England’s polling stations, many of which were draped in union jack bunting in preparation for the crowning of the king. The story of the local elections had two distinct halves: Labour’s gains in and around the so-called red wall and in such bellwether places as Swindon – and startling anti-Tory revolts across what was once called middle England.
On East Hertfordshire district council – which serves such radical hotbeds as Ware, Buntingford and Bishop’s Stortford – the largest party is now the Greens. The same party now has outright control of Mid Suffolk, where the number of Tory councillors fell from 16 to six. Among the councils the Tories lost to the Liberal Democrats were the royal borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, Stratford-upon-Avon and Surrey Heath, the political back yard of Michael Gove.
Some of this, self-evidently, is down to the Tory disgrace and chaos of the past few years, and the continuing crises that bite into people’s everyday lives. With wins for the Lib Dems, that party’s shameless habit of trading on whatever local complaints are available – such as housebuilding in the green belt – should not be discounted. But many of last week’s results also highlighted a backlash against Brexit from remain-supporting voters aghast at the Tories’ journey to the hard right, and a deeper story about how much England is changing, with potential consequences that go way beyond politics.
I first wrote about all this five years ago, when the Lib Dems beat the Tories in Kingston upon Thames and Richmond, and there were sudden Conservative losses to Labour in the affluent(ish) Manchester borough of Trafford. Since then, the Conservatives’ fortunes have faded in such places as Tunbridge Wells, St Albans, the counties of Surrey and Oxfordshire, and more. The idea of shires, suburbs, county towns and cathedral cities as largely Tory areas is weakening fast – something self-styled Conservative modernisers were starting to understand back in the days of David Cameron and George Osborne, but which their party has since completely forgotten.
This highlights a misapprehension that sits at the heart of not just our politics, but of our culture. We still have an idea of a great chunk of the middle class that is at least 40 years out of date – as reflex Tories, with often brazen prejudices, royal memorabilia in a corner cabinet, a love of golf, and a lovingly tended Rover saloon parked in the drive. But the reality is now rather different. Suburbia in particular has seen what my Guardian colleague Hugh Muir has called “the growing movement of visible minorities into the heartlands of Englishness”.
There and elsewhere, people fret about the climate crisis and pride themselves on buying organic food. Because so many of them have been to university they are a lot less deferential, and possessed of a broadly liberal outlook: not quite the kind of cutting-edge views about human liberation that might cause some people to call them “woke”, but an aversion to bigotry and nastiness, and a belief in the kind of live-and-let-live attitudes that, on a good day, look as if they may soon become the norm.
In response, what does the Conservative party offer them? To many of the voters walking away, its culture war rhetoric and anti-immigration posturing could not sound more tin-eared. Worse still, Conservative politics now feeds off media outlets that present the right of politics as a mess of resentments and hatreds. The highlights of GB News’ coronation coverage have included the historian David Starkey claiming that Rishi Sunak is “not fully grounded in our culture” and a presenter calling him “a heathen prime minister”.
As Tory MPs crowd on to the channel, it suggests that Conservatives are part of the same political family: the kind of people who hate the Sussexes, loathe “globalists” and dream of a monocultural England that is long gone. Many probably are, but this will not play terribly well in many of the places the Tories are losing.
The royal family, I dare say, has a slightly better idea of how to ensure its own survival. But this is a turbulent time for the UK’s ruling-class institutions, and both the monarchy and England’s natural party of government share a handful of obvious problems. Both depend on networks of power and privilege that are increasingly exposed. They are estranged from the young, and have a common air of pomposity and entitlement that sits awkwardly with the new middle class, along with a seeming inability – or refusal – to understand big social changes and what they demand.
Their visions of a backward-looking, deferential country, moreover, are fading fast. The past few days have made those failings even more vivid – and amid our endless national problems, that realisation feels like a real ray of hope.
• John Harris is a Guardian columnist
