Is anyone else thinking the optics are off: royals in a golden coach whilst the UK is in a cost of living crisis?

[MsPinkMarshmallow]

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11456933/Prince-Princess-Wales-greet-South-African-president.html

People are struggling to heat their homes, feed their kids and pay their mortgages but the royals are in the Mall in a golden carriage and giving state banquets.

Can't we just get rid of the lot of them?

It's not the gold coach!

Very misleading thread title

Ha ha.

It's her job, whether you think it's worthy or not. It's still her job.

I checked and she doesn’t have a job, hasn’t since she left part-time at Jigsaw or whatever it was. Maybe she did admin at Party Pieces in the breakup era, I forget. It’s a slim CV up until she became unemployed but I wasn’t paying too much attention.

You forgot the nannies and the private tutors. Really easy to homeschool if someone else is doing it for you.

I don't understand your angst. Surely carriages pulled by horses are cheaper amd more eco friendly to run than cars.

Banquets are given to all visiting dignitaries and heads of state in every country in the world. Do you think France don't do entertainment in the Elysee Palace? 🙄

Gold coach already exists so what would be saved by using a lorry pulling a trailer instead ala your average carnival float? Let's have a bit of a party for God's sake ☺️

That's not the Gold Coach.

They used the Irish State Coach

The wags on that billion pound yacht are getting my goat too

I really don't have a lot of time for the royals but I don't get how this is anything unusual.

They are totally disconnected from reality, always have been and always will be.

Its a state visit. The pomp is for the guest, not the home team.

Yup it feels very wrong. I'd be keeping a low profile right now if I were a royal and toning the ceremony right down.

Yes, it's diplomacy 101

Hence my question above about who to snub with the first HoS official visit that's not full honours

Every foreign head of state paying a formal state visit to London knows the form and would expect it (with an understandable deviation from staying at Buck House due to the renovations at the moment). To decide to scale it back to be more in keeping with the cost of living crisis would almost certainly be seen as a insult to President Ramaphosa personally and to South Africa more generally. I suspect that it might also be seen as a racist move to treat a Black African Head of State with less formality than was dished up to the Trumpster a few years ago.

We have the coaches and the horses and the guardsmen are on the payroll anyway so we might as well use them. Personally I liked seeing the photographs of Ramaphosa clearly enjoying waving from the coach and looking at the artefacts from the Royal Collection at the Palace and getting his phone out to take a picture of Churchill's memorial slab. It also suggests that he appreciated the welcome and the effort that went into his itinerary and that there's a chance of a continued good relationship with South Africa.

I was there when William and Kate arrived at The Corinthia and when they left with the President of South Africa (and his entourage). It was completely by accident because I left a nearby Construction site via a rarely used fire exit and ended up bang slap where they arrived 😀. The Policeman was just as surprised to see me emerging but had no choice but to let me stay because they arrived 2 minutes later. Very exciting, I was thrilled to see them 😀. Totally unexpected but fab.

The optics haves always been off with the RF. They should have never risen to power in the first place. There stronghold just serves as a daily reminder how elitist the UK is.

Can you pinpoint the moment when the RF 'rose to power'?

The Irish State Coach - the black shiny one with the gold bits on?

Not 1649 😂

Sometimes I wish that the sodding optics and the sodding lived experiences and the sodding working families would all go and throw themselves into the death pit for cliches, and if I knew how to put an acute accent on that e in cliches I would have.

Preach it sista!

This is the Gold Coach. I'd have been prety surprised if they rolled that one out, however important the visitor

Are you racist or are you the sort who would be the first to complain that it was racist if we snubbed the black president of an African nation by not using a nice carriage for a state visit? Because you must be one, the other, or extremely daft OP.

Yes the optics are probably off but ‘it was ever thus’ I think is the expression!

Auction off completely daft things like gold coaches

You know it's not real gold, right? just wood painted with gold leaf? you sound like the person on twitter who was ranting at the time of HMQ's death that it should be melted down.

Nothing about my post implies I think it’s real gold. It still has auctionable value as “fancy thing the royal family have titted about in”. People will buy all kinds of shite – look at the Joan Didion estate sale! They paid thousands for blank notebooks!