Difficult to find in Britannia conscious opponent of the monarchy. You have to look for the radical left, i.e. in the Labor Party and the national left parties in Scotland or Wales. We tease our friend Alex and ask him exactly how he will honor the new kingbut Alex thought Jeremy Corbyn poured wine on him in the 2019 campaign program. And he laughs when we tell him that the rest of us will drink beer for him Charles. In other words, it’s not like in Greece, where if you call the 1974 referendum unfair, you’ll be put on junta stakes. People here are relaxed. But the British monarchy is not like the Greek. In fact, the British monarchs did the same as the Glicksburgs, but 150 years earlier. Then they stopped.

The Protestant King George III prevented Prime Minister William Pitt from proceeding with measures to free the Catholic Irish and forced him to abdicate (except that, due to their inflexible stance, the British ended up losing Ireland from the Union as well). But that was in 1800, not 1965.

Now the king is a painless national symbol. At our neighboring school, the children had a picnic in the yard on Thursday to celebrate the coronation. The headmistress asked them to wear instead of aprons (they are required in British schools) blue, red and white or whatever. No one accuses the school of being pro-monarchist, and convenience stores don’t fly flags with Karolos’ face, only right-wing flags. Everyone puts. In far-left areas of London, where Labor MPs won 50% and 60% of the vote, neighbors asked the council for permission to block the road and hold street parties.

The new king is an occasion for a national holiday, as we celebrate March 25, with a very distant, subtle echo of a political charge. However, unlike March 25, there is a bit of glam going on here, i.e. a plastic glass with prosecco on the street in the park, they say, we are all aristocrats. It’s a little sad to borrow someone’s greatness, but one day is also possible.

The new king is an occasion for a national holiday, as we do on March 25, with a very distant echo of political overtones.

There is also an empirical relation of people to the palace. Almost everyone’s monarchy clicks with irrelevant memory. Australian but British Nick Cave, who attended the enthronement (and recently explained in detail why he considers himself a centrist), said in his regular correspondence with his subscribers that he cried at Elizabeth’s funeral because he mostly remembered his mother, who loved the queen.

Where would our own centrist Nikos Portokaloglou write something like that about Glicksburg and his own mother? He will keep the soles on the Rubicon until his music box is broken.

And the last, especially for Charles, who grew up antipathetic to the royal family. The government recently turned to him for help in repairing Britain’s relationship with the EU, which had been soured by Boris Johnson. The new agreement bears the title of the royal family (Windsor), and Charles himself officially met with Ursula von der Leyen shortly after it was signed, infuriating ultra-conservative nationalists. Well, the new king not only carried out the political intervention that we saw two hundred years ago, but also carried it out at the behest of the government and in accordance with the prevailing popular mood that wants normalization of relations with the EU.

So the British monarchy is not so simple. Its relationship with society is complex and simply cannot be read along the non-existent dividing line between backward palace and progressive society.

Mr. Timios Tsallas is a journalist based at a think tank in London.