I would like to thank the Guardian for its recent reporting about the monarchy. In contrast to one of your readers complaining about your “unrelenting attacks” (Letters, 27 April) on the institution, I have found huge solace in seeing my views expressed at long last.
The recent research that reveals a general decline in people thinking that the monarchy is very important is not reflected adequately in the mainstream media. Republicans and others who are concerned about the increasing wealth disparity in the UK are made to feel unpatriotic by most media outlets.
Frances Ryan makes the astute point that there is little to be proud of in a country that thinks it is acceptable to spend £8m of our taxes on funding portraits of the new king (As a billionaire king is crowned, he urges us to do some charity work. Welcome to Britain, 28 April).
Not only does it popularise the notion that it is fine for this gross and ever-increasing inequality to exist, but the whole spectacle of pomp and ceremony looks to me like a sad and broken little nation trying desperately to pump up its global image.
Cass Witcombe
London
• Regarding your recent coverage of the coronation and the cost of the crown, our local food bank supported about 760 people last week out of a population of about 10,000 in the local area. In recent years, the food bank has used grants from the national lottery to support its activities, but recent applications for funding have been unsuccessful. They have been told that much of the funding is going to events celebrating the coronation.
While it is a massive indictment of our government that so many people are driven to need this help, it is also a sad reflection of how out of touch our monarchy is, that the coronation of a man worth £1.8bn will indirectly result in so many people going hungry.
Jonathan Holt
Camelford, Cornwall
• Re Norman Baker’s article about the cost of the coronation to taxpayers (Now we know how fabulously wealthy Charles is, why can’t he pay for his own coronation?, 29 April), I myself feel angry when I think that we are paying for this “huge candy-floss PR event”. Early last month, an inquest into 87-year-old Barbara Bolton’s death heard that she died after suffering from profound hypothermia. Hospital notes recorded that she had deliberately not put her heating on “for fear of high energy bills”. Something doesn’t feel quite right. Probably because it isn’t.
Su Hardman
Woodbridge, Suffolk
• We are sure that many of his subjects will applaud the magnanimity of our gracious sovereign in creating an opportunity for the common people of these sceptered isles to swear their allegiance to his majesty, alongside the peers of his realm. May we suggest that it would be most fitting to use the new national phone alert system to notify those serfs and peasants who sadly may be working, and so unable to watch the ceremony, of the appropriate moment to pause in their labours, bend the knee and tug their forelocks in homage too?
John and Debbie Shepherd
Westleton, Suffolk
• I always enjoy reading Gaby Hinsliff, and this piece (Charles is the king of apathy, not our hearts – he risks it all by asking for more, 2 May) was no exception. But I have to disagree with her reason for not being a republican – that she was “too worried about who we’d get as president”. She’s obviously thinking of a President Trump, or perhaps President Johnson. But it doesn’t have to be like that.
Trump resulted from the US tradition founded in 1776, and too little has changed since then. The fathers of the republic simply replaced the monarch, then the norm in Europe, with an elected head of both state and government. Since then a number of European and other republics have developed in which the president is only head of state, and above party politics and government, but is the ultimate guardian of the constitution.
Thus when Boris Johnson went to the late Queen with his outrageous proposal to prorogue parliament, she, following long-established convention, could only agree. A president would have refused to endorse it as unconstitutional, or at least referred it to the supreme court to adjudicate on it. The American model is obsolete; now promoted only by would-be autocrats. There are better models for us to follow.
David Martin
Glasgow
• I was interested to read Larry Elliott’s article (From Elizabeth II to Charles III: how the UK economy has changed, 4 May). My parents were among the first in our neighbourhood to own a TV and they invited several neighbours in to watch the coronation in 1953. I was four at the time and my mother made sure that I watched Muffin the Mule first. My parents were republicans, but evidently wanted to show off their new purchase.
Julie Norton
Cwmllynfell, West Glamorgan
• I am a social democrat and a monarchist. I believe in the need for significant intervention by the state to address economic and social inequality; I also believe in the value of a constitutional monarchy as a symbolic and emotional focus for national unity. I don’t believe there is any contradiction between these two positions, and I don’t think I’m the only one.
It would have been nice to have seen my views reflected somewhere in the Guardian’s coverage of the coronation. Instead, its reporting has been characterised by a tone of self-righteous and sneering contempt for anyone who values the constitutional status quo. This is unlikely to convert anyone to republicanism.
Julian Bell
London
• The merit of the monarchy, aside from the virtues and faults of individual monarchs, is that it enables us citizens to remain loyal to the state, as most of us are, while loathing the government, as many of us do.
Robert Cooper
London
• Lukewarm and pragmatic monarchist as I am, I have to say that the cascade of articles in recent days informing us, with increasing incandescence, that our royal family is, well, a monarchy, and does the kind of things that monarchs do, such as having a lot of money and owning a great deal of expensive stuff, is starting to get on my nerves.
However, I promise you that all will be forgiven if this means that, come the weekend, we will be spared 20-page souvenir pull-out sections full of breathless coverage of the minutiae of the ceremony, pictures of street parties, discussions of the fashion choices of people I’ve never heard of and articles about quiche, and your reporting will be confined to … say … a generous two pages and a suitably grumpy editorial. Have we a deal?
Rachel Savage
Sturton-by-Stow, Lincolnshire
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