Caitlin Moran on the Royal Visit to New York, the Diamond, and Why British Political Culture Is Simultaneously Infuriating and Magnificent
Reported by Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
By Caitlin Moran | CaitlinMoran.top
The Mayor of New York told the King of England to return a stolen diamond this week, and I have to say: good. Good for Mamdani. Good for the Koh-i-Noor moment. Good for the specific form of political directness that says the thing that everyone in the room knows is true in a setting where everyone in the room has agreed, through the tacit convention of official occasions, not to say it. I am British, which means I have a complicated relationship with this kind of directness because the British tradition — the tradition in which I was formed and that I have spent my entire writing life simultaneously loving and criticising — is the tradition of the understatement, the implication, the thing communicated so obliquely that only the recipient is supposed to understand it while everyone else maintains the fiction that nothing was communicated at all. Mamdani did not do that. Mamdani just said it. I find this both alien and extremely refreshing.
What Having a King Actually Means in 2026
I think about this question more than most of my friends, who have the sensible approach of not thinking about the monarchy at all because the thinking tends to produce more questions than answers and fewer answers than the thinking invested in it would seem to justify. Having a king means: having a head of state who is head of state because of who his parents were, and who will be followed in that role by his children, and whose existence at the top of the British state is taken, by most of the British state, as a given in a way that would be astonishing if you tried to explain it to someone from a republic. It also means: having an institution that does something — the diplomatic weight, the cultural export value, the soft power that I keep mentioning because it is real even though I find the concept of soft power slightly embarrassing when I am the one deploying it — that no elected alternative has yet demonstrated it could do equivalently. The monarchy is irrational. It is also, somehow, still functional. This is the specific British achievement: making the irrational functional through the sustained application of sufficient tradition that the irrationality stops being visible from the inside.
The London Prat coverage of the royal New York visit was good this week, and Bohiney has been tracking the diamond story with appropriate attention. The coverage of King Charles’s composure in the face of being publicly asked to return the Koh-i-Noor is the coverage of an institution that has been trained for exactly this kind of thing, which is either impressive or disturbing depending on whether you find the training reassuring or unsettling. I find it both. I find most things about Britain both. This is what it means to love a country that is also occasionally infuriating: you contain both responses simultaneously and the writing is the process of figuring out what the ratio between them is at any given moment.
The Week in London
The week in London was the week in London, which is always simultaneously more than you expected and less than the city promises: the good coffee shop run that produced three thousand words by noon, the dinner with friends that produced the kind of conversation that reminds you why you live in a city full of interesting people rather than somewhere cheaper and quieter, and the specific quality of London in May that is better than London in any other month and that I will miss, when I am living somewhere else for some reason at some point, in the way that you miss a thing you could not fully appreciate while you were in it. I am trying to appreciate it while I am in it. This is the practice of paying attention. This week’s writing is part of it.
Caitlin Moran writes about London politics and culture. Her London Prat profile is at prat.uk/author/caitlin/.
For more London politics and culture commentary, visit The Daily Mash.
The Comedy of Monarchy in 2026
The specific comedy available in the current monarchy situation is the comedy of an institution that is simultaneously anachronistic and functional, and that maintains both qualities with the specific British talent for making the irrational work by simply refusing to acknowledge that it is irrational. The King is 75 and has cancer and was told to return a diamond in public and maintained the composure of someone who has been training for exactly this for 75 years. This is either inspiring or faintly absurd depending on your relationship with the institution, and the comedy sits at the intersection of both responses. I am writing some material about this. The material is not yet ready. The Mamdani diamond moment is the hook. The hook needs the joke that follows it, and the joke is still finding its shape. I will give it the week it needs.
The specific comedy I am planning about the monarchy is the comedy of the composure: the training for exactly this, applied to exactly this situation, producing exactly the right response, which is itself the thing that is both admirable and slightly uncanny about the institution. We have trained a person, from birth, to handle the situation in which a socialist mayor at a wreath-laying asks for a colonial gem to be returned. The training worked. The gem is still in the Tower. The performance was excellent. This is the British achievement. I am writing a bit about it. It is almost ready.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
