In early May, I notice that the London apartment building in which I sometimes stay has sprouted flags on two of the balconies. The red cross of St George on a white background is usually displayed by England supporters when the team is playing an international football match, and I find myself wondering what the fixture could be in the middle of the final, multi-cornered brawl to the end of this year’s Premiership. Then I notice that the flags are accompanied by a bunting of small Union Jacks, which are not usual for football matches. The penny drops — this display is not for football; it’s for Charles’s coronation (which took place on May 6). I look at the vast expanse of balconies across the housing estate architecture and count again: precisely two apartments have put up the flags, the rest of the barandas are the usual brown-grey, impassive, and indifferent to the crowning ceremony of the new monarch.

Over the next few days in London and Oxford, I look out for more celebratory flags in people’s houses and find very, very few. Friends who I speak to remark on the huge tsunami of indifference towards the gala costume ritual about to take place around Buckingham Palace and Westminster Abbey. Indifference is one word for it, but on reading and watching the news what becomes clear is there is also a stronger reaction to the coronation better described by the words, outrage and revulsion.

Great Britain is falling apart. The absolute harakiri-disaster of Brexit was followed by the blows of Covid and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Running the government at this time have been amoral, heartless and clueless clown characters of the Tory Party — Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Priti Patel, Liz Truss, Kwasi Kwarteng, Dominic Raab, Jeremy Hunt. Suella Braverman (aka Cruella Slaverman) plus sundry other absurdos. Rishi Sunak, for his many flaws, looks comparatively saner and more competent, but that’s not saying very much — he is widely seen as the inoffensively patterned wallpaper covering up a crumbling Tory wall. Over the last few months, all sorts of workers have gone on strike around Britain, most recently school and college teachers and the nurses who hold up the collapsing National Health Service. Ordinary people in Britain are hurting on all fronts; towns and cities in one of the wealthiest countries of the world are now dotted with food banks handing out free meals to the poor; because of under-funding, in the aforementioned NHS (the same health service that was supposed to receive millions every week as a direct benefit of the United Kingdom leaving the European Union — now proven to be one of several Brexiteer lies), the waiting times for treatment have become crazily long and people are getting more and more ill; the prices of fuel have gone up, forcing people to live in freezing conditions with unchecked landlords baying around the lower-end rented accommodations.

In the middle of all this, Charles the King had made a decision to be crowned in an elaborate public ceremony funded by the taxpayer to the estimated tune of £250 million. It’s a no-brainer that this money should have gone where it’s critically required, starting with the desperately depleted NHS. Investigations into the wealth of the royal family have also revealed mind-boggling figures going into billions: with their land-holdings and investment portfolios, the royals could have paid for this coronation several times over if, indeed, the obscene expenditure was somehow to be justified. If there was any hope that Charles would be less of an insensitive or tone-deaf monarch than the ones who preceded him, it was dashed when the plans for the coronation were revealed and then duly executed.

In the lead-up to the big day, several protests were manifested. At Anfield, Liverpool Football Club’s storied ground, when they started to play “God Save the King” on the PA system before a Premiership match to mark the forthcoming occasion, the fans stood up and en masse roared out a counter-song. The tune was that of “She’ll be Coming Down the Mountain” but the words went: “You can shove your coronation up your a--e!” On the day itself, people gathered at Trafalgar Square and other places in the country to protest against the coronation and the very continuation of monarchy. This not being India or some other disintegrating democracy, there was widespread outrage when the police erected barriers to obscure the protesters and arrested people for wearing t-shirts saying, ‘Stop the Oil’ or waving placards saying, ‘Not My King’.

In the meantime, other kings and queens from around the world had made their way to London for the ceremony and could be seen walking into Westminster Abbey along with representatives of non-royal governments. Among the glittering pantomime costumes and arrays of self-awarded medals was the somewhat curious sight of the first minister of Scotland, Humza Yousaf, in a tartan kilt complete with sporran. Leo Varadkar, the Taoiseach of the Republic of Ireland, came in a normal suit and, of course, (our) Rishi stood at the lectern and read a passage from the Bible (‘despite being a Hindu’as some commentators felt obliged to point out).

The guessing was that ‘our Rishi’ was probably more grateful for the distractions provided by the Coro-tamasha than anybody else. The day before the anointing of King Charles III, the results from country-wide local elections had hit the screens. Sunak and Suella-Cruella’s Tory Party had not only suffered the huge losses that had been predicted for it but had also unexpectedly lost councils in the middle of traditional Tory strongholds. Charles and his posh guests may have clawed their party out of the grim and grey landscape of Britain but the other England, the one of the endless food queues and hospital waiting times, had made its presence felt at the ballot box.