Yesterday saw the World Health Organization declare the end of the global health emergency attributable to COVID-19. Today, for the UK at least, the focus shifts from a virus with a corona to, well, just the corōna.

Later, we’ll see the first United Kingdom Coronation of the century; of the millennium; of my lifetime. Or, as The Economist has it, ‘a man in London is about to be given a hat.’

Inevitably, this has made me reflect on my feelings about monarchy, which are not as straightforward as one might suppose.

Firstly—obviously—no-one would support the creation of a monarchy today. It’s absurdly anachronistic. It grants power and responsibility through birthright, it is the definition of antidemocratic, and symbolises limits on social mobility that hold us all back. Even with some elements of primogeniture having been removed, it is a system fundamentally rooted in gender inequality, perhaps never more obviously underlined than on a day when the wife of a son of a Prince Regent is crowned Queen.

Yet, I wouldn’t support an alternative. As long as the family are willing to continue to deliver the function, then having a head of state that none of us can choose, trapped in an endless stalemate of not being able to do anything meaningful without risking abolition, seems like a suitably British fudge. The system is obviously absurd and indefensible, and those—perversely—are its virtues. Instead of abolishing a symbol of inequality and suppression, let’s spend our effort on tackling inequality and suppression.

And yet, I do support disestablishment. It is absurd that monarchy gives us a state religion. It is profoundly wrong and demonstrably divisive that we have 26 English Bishops as automatic representatives of that religion in our legislature. This is the bit of monarchy that has a practical effect on all our lives, and if we’re going to abolish something, abolish that.

And this is the moment to do it. The 2021 census showed Christianity to be a minority religion in this country. Today, we anoint a King as Supreme Governor of the Church of England, alongside a Queen with whom he did not share the sacrament of marriage. Let him be the last. Let him call himself the ‘defender of faith’ rather than ‘the faith’ if it pleases him. Let’s finally separate church and state.