Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s continued uncertainty over attending King Charles’ upcoming landmark coronation has been labelled a ‘convenient smokescreen’ to mask over bigger issues with the event.
Writing for The Toronto Star, commentator Sarah Laing pointed out how King Charles’ popularity has taken a significant hit despite his otherwise uneventful ascension to the British throne, and how the incessant speculation focusing on Harry and Meghan could just be to gloss over his unpopularity ahead of the coronation.
Laing questioned: “Is all of this breathless drama over whether Meghan and Harry will be at the coronation simply a convenient smokescreen, a sideshow at the Sussexes’ expense?”
“Without the distraction, after all, coverage might focus instead on the existential questions currently facing the monarchy, which an event like the coronation, in all its ancient pomp and archaic tradition, just highlights,” she explained.
Laing went on to add: “Questions like, for example, the validity of an inherited position in an era when the divide between the fabulously wealthy and the rest of us gets deeper by the day, or the blurred division of religion and power represented by the fact that Charles will also be named head of the Church of England as the same time he’s crowned head of state.”