| Life Bill Ralston
The royal nuptials have cemented the Windsors’ claim on Kiwi a‚ections.
It was early Sunday afternoon and my wife padded past me with a bottle of bubbly and a plate of last night’s cold roast pork, heading for the bedroom where there is a television set. A mate rang from Wellington and reported that his wife and two daughters, with bubbles but without pork, had just done the same thing. Curious, I decided to investigate.
The wedding of Harry Windsor and Meghan Markle, recorded from the night before, was on screen. Amal Clooney, looking like a bright ray of sunshine, bobbed along towards the service with an upstaged George in tow. I sat down. Two-and-a-half hours later, it was over.
One of the TV commentators suggested a billion people were watching. If so, I was one of them, albeit 12 hours late to the party. What makes the wedding of someone famous you do not know so fascinating? Possibly it was the fairy-tale pageantry. Not many brides and grooms get to leave the church in an open carriage escorted by a troop of the Household Cavalry through crowded, cheering, streets.
Possibly it was simply getting a chance to gawp at the stars at the ceremony. There was a smiling Oprah in a big hat and sunglasses. A po-faced Victoria Beckham with a grinning David. Fergie was being Fergie and her gauche daughters snickered in the royal pews at the American clergyman’s revivalist preaching.
Bishop Michael Curry’s enthusiastic sermon to the young couple was a warm blast against the chilly atmosphere of high-church Anglicanism, much to the shock of many there who seemed to fear a sudden explosion of “Hallelujahs” from the rest of the congregation. Curry’s exhortations left heavily pregnant Zara Tindall, Harry’s cousin, open-mouthed in shock. It was fun watching the collision of US culture and British reserve.
The public curtain fell as some of the guests headed off to a first reception, and then a second at Frogmore House later in the evening, where, presumably, a tipsy uncle would have behaved inappropriately and a couple of cousins would have had a drunken fight. Although those assumptions may be coloured by weddings I have been to.
The day after the event, on TVNZ, Jeremy Wells and Hilary Barry suggested it was the power of shared experience that drew viewers to the spectacle. I checked my Twitter feed, a viperous collection of journalists and the over-opinionated. Surprisingly, the royal wedding comments were largely benign.
The next day, news stories broke, seemingly based on rumour, that the happy couple would tour this country later in the year. Harry and Meghan would save the royal family, said a couple of hyperbolic headlines. But does it need saving? The public reaction to the wedding suggests otherwise.
There is a small republican movement here but it is doomed for the next couple of generations by the surprisingly popular idea of reigns by Prince William and his son George, even if the concept of King Charles is regarded with some suspicion.
The problem with a republican New Zealand is that our head of state would almost certainly be a retired politician, put out to pasture to feed off the taxpayer. How many of us would prefer, say, a President Winston Peters to the nonthreatening head of an English family safely stored on the other side of the world? Not me.