When our mourning for Elizabeth II comes to an end attention will have to turn to the arrangements for the coronation of the new King, Charles III. Royal ceremony is something that Britain does well and it invests it with a character of unchanging tradition – but in fact much that seems time-honoured is revised and updated.
The Coronation ceremony cries out for such revision: it is impossible to imagine that the proceedings of 1953 could be repeated without substantial change. This paper on the Next Coronation, a revised version of one I wrote in 2018, builds on work by the Constitution Unit at University College London to make proposals better fitted to the 21st century where in a secularised society the Church of England in particular is far diminished from its previous pre-eminent position.
