London cheered, Liverpool jeered

There was bunting everywhere, but no one to look at it. Our normally busy street was deserted. No pedestrians were dodging traffic – there was no traffic and there were no pedestrians.

All the would-be drivers and pedestrians were either in or around Westminster, or else glued to TV screens. They were watching Britain doing what only Britain can do: stage a great political pageant linking heaven and earth.

What we saw yesterday was a coronation mass, complete with all the liturgical elements including the Eucharist. God was at the centre of the proceedings, and it was in his name that Charles III was crowned.

When the head of state is anointed, rather than appointed or elected, a country’s backbone doesn’t start at the neck and end at the coccyx. It starts, stays and ends in eternity, which makes the country stand upright and tall.

One is tempted to say that Charles and Camilla were almost bit players in the grand spectacle. “I came to serve, not to be served,” said the King, correctly identifying the role in which he is cast: not the master, but a servant. To his people and his God.

One could quibble about a few false notes here and there. The multicultural makeup of the realm was overemphasised. I could have done without American-style gospel singers, for example – nothing wrong with the genre, but it seemed out of place next to William Byrd and even Handel.

Better composers than Andrew Lloyd Webber could have been found for the musical centrepiece, and I would rather have seen someone other than Penny ‘Thunder Thighs’ Mordaunt carrying the sword. Yes, I know Penny was institutionally entitled, but warrior queens have been somewhat out of fashion for 2,000 years. And she doesn’t quite cut it as Boadicea anyway.

But these are minor gripes belying a great sense of relief. All my worst fears were laid to rest by that bravura performance. After all, no one minds it when a great musician hits a wrong note or two. It’s the overall sublime effect that counts. And for those two hours Britain was at her best, which, in the historical scheme of things, was as good as any country has ever been since the time of, well, Boadicea.

And then it was back to reality, as it’s crystallised in Liverpool. Their football team played a match later that afternoon, and the Premier League had decided that God Save the King would be sung at all grounds on Coronation Day.

So it was in Liverpool, but the singers’ lips were moving wordlessly. Whatever sounds they were making were drowned by jeers, boos and whistles synchronised into a disgusting din by thousands of morons.

On the day they should have felt proud to be British, they felt enraged. The Britain celebrated in Westminster isn’t their country. They don’t love it, they don’t respect it, they owe it no allegiance. They hate everything it represents, including – especially? – the reassertion of its links with eternity.

Those barnyard noises weren’t a statement of republican convictions. That, though sorely misguided, would have been some sort of positive statement coming from reason. But reason had been left outside the stadium. Only visceral hatred remained.

It wasn’t spontaneous. Those Scousers came armed with posters, such as the one above and ‘Not my king’. Their crime against British civility was premeditated, which isn’t like saying it had been thought through.

I noticed a long time ago that today’s lower classes seem to believe that Britishness, and certainly Englishness, is quantifiable and defined by class. I’ve heard people comment on my wife’s patrician diction by saying: “She’s very English.” I tried to find out what they meant – after all, how can anyone be more or less English? You either are or you aren’t, aren’t you?

They’d invariably look at me with the condescension of someone to whom a higher truth had been vouchsafed. The lower down the social scale you descend, the less English you become.

So what do they become, if not British? A deracinated, anomic wad of humanity, trained in the art of class war and hardly anything else. The Britain on show in Westminster yesterday isn’t their country. It’s their enemy launching an offensive to be warded off.

“Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws…”

When Disraeli wrote this in 1845, that confrontation was already very much in evidence. But at least those two nations met in one church every Sunday. Once a week they were reminded of the ultimate oneness of the nation before God – the ultimate brotherhood of all men. As they moved through the week that understanding attenuated, but there was still enough left to last until next Sunday.

Take that away, and the alienation Disraeli spotted turns into hatred bottom to top and contempt top to bottom. That’s the stuff of which revolutions are made, and we all know what they bring.

What we are left with is hope – that yesterday’s London is a fairer reflection of Britain than yesterday’s Liverpool. That the moving ceremony in Westminster was testimony to unity, not to seething discord. That it was the cheers and not the jeers that were the voice of real Britain.