My Prophecy Department notes: My fears for the Coronation, first published in Standpoint Magazine January 2020

It must have been around 1960 when I first saw the power of monarchy over the English mind, as it once was. It was a summer weekday afternoon, bright and windy, on Portsmouth Hard, that ever-scruffy patch of pavement, bus-stops and tidal cobbles where Pompey meets the sea.

 

Suddenly, as if a giant hand had gathered them, people - mainly women - began hurrying towards a spot near the great gate of the Naval Dockyard. Within less than a minute a craning, twittering crowd had gathered. I, aged e...