Queen Opens Parliament Amid Paper’s Salvo

The jewels in the imperial crown dazzled, grown men knelt before Queen Elizabeth II, and Prince Philip firmly clasped his sword.

There is nothing like the state opening of Britain’s Parliament, a carefully choreographed Merrie England ceremony that leaves foreigners agape or a-giggling.

Queen Elizabeth reads out the government’s program in the House of Lords every year, surrounded by a sea of red robes worn by members of the unelected upper chamber of Parliament and sparkling tiaras donned by some of the male peers’ wives for the occasion.

But this year, the pomp and circumstance was preceded by a front-page splash in the Guardian newspaper Wednesday calling for a referendum on whether Britain should continue to have a monarch at all once the 74-year-old queen goes.

“Tell her to read the Guardian!” cried republican member of Parliament Dennis Skinner in the House of Commons as members of the elected chamber headed to the state opening ceremony.

But Skinner’s advice did not reach the royal ears in the Lords, where the queen sat solemnly on her throne. “My Lords, pray be seated,” she said before her speech.

Someone stumbling into the hall by accident might have thought he or she had wandered into a theatrical club or a costume ball in a medieval chamber. The House of Lords was built in Victorian times but made to look much older.

The current Labor government may have expelled most of the aristocracy from the Lords in 1999, but the pageantry goes on, observed now by a largely appointed chamber.