It was a wintry and ominous November Tuesday. A crowd of 50 or 60 republicans waited outside Westminster for the state opening of parliament. “Not my king”, read their big, yellow banners. Even if you didn’t care about the existence of the monarchy one way or another, there was something ineffably sad about the whole fandango. King Charles, pushing 75, was about to perform this duty as king for the first time. He was charged with reading out unhinged oil and gas policies that directly threatened the only thing he has ever publicly cared about – the environment. Figurehead of the country, or the puppet of a hooligan regime?
Maybe, at the moment, those two things are the same. Only one of the protesters, a woman in her early 60s who declined to give her name, had zero sympathy: “He should have the guts to speak his mind,” she said, in a meld of anatomical metaphors.
