Coronation

Editorial in the Guardian today about the importance of the rite of Coronation (which in England is a sacrament of the Anglican Church).

At least they are ackowledging that the ritual of Coronation is something they have to come to terms with.

The editorial seems to be more or less lifted from an article by Simon Jenkins in yesterday's Guardian, and is full of errors.  For instance, the oath is a relatively minor part of the ceremony.  The important part is the Anointing (the clue is in the gold canopy and the switching off of the television cameras).

Also the statement "the monarchy exists because parliament wills it" is not true.  Parliament exists because the monarchy wills it.  This is the undeniable political and constitutional position.  Whoever wrote the editorial on page 44 is either ignorant of the British constitution or deliberately trying to mislead people.  And what has happened to the Guardian's fact-checking if a howler like this is allowed to appear in print?  Also the idea that politicians should be given more power over the constitution when they have proved themselves to be mostly venal and corrupt and dishonest is ridiculous - parliament is the institution that needs reforming, not the monarchy.

There are other errors on the subject.

On page 16 Zoe Williams writes such a grudging article about the sixtieth anniversary of the Coronation that one wonders why she bothered.  It's not as if she attacks the institution of monarchy.  Damning with faint praise can be a lethal technique when practised by an expert, but Zoe Williams' effort is so feeble that she ought to be advised to stick to her normal style.

However towards the end of the Zoe Williams article is a glaring error:

Twenty five years after 1953 is 1978.  There were no public celebrations of the Coronation in 1978.  Zoe Williams and her vox populi interviewee are thinking of the Silver Jubilee in 1977. 

Of course, one is aware that lefties can't count (are numerically illiterate), but this is another mistake that should have been picked up by fact-checking.

But who cares.  This is the Guardian and their role is to be the Bad Fairy at the party.  When the next Coronation comes along, and follows the format of all previous Coronations the popular adulation will be on such a scale that the Guardian will be forced into another of their "we'll have to think again" admissions (as they famously had to do on the day after the Golden Jubilee in 2002).

What bothers me is that the generally intelligent and sincere staff at the Guardian should be seriously proposing to vandalise an ancient cultural ceremony that has taken place following the same ritual and in exactly the same place for nearly a thousand years (and is now unique, since no other European monarchs are crowned - all of them now have an investiture).

Would these people propose modernising Shakespeare's plays?  Would they want Salisbury cathedral demolished and rebuilt in a modernist style?  Would they want atonal sequences introduced into Mahler's third symphony?

So why do they propose altering the wonderful cultural survival that is a British Coronation?

To do so would put the perpetrators on a level with the vandals who destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001.