After the pomp and circumstance of the White House and the diplomatic acrobatics on Capitol Hill, King Charles and Queen Camilla landed in New York, the second stop of their four-day visit to the USA for the 250th anniversary of America’s independence.
A quick meeting at Ground Zero preceded by a joke with the anti-Trump mayor Zorhan Mamdani inaugurated the visit: “I would ask Carlo to return the Koh-i-Noor”, the always affable Zohran told journalists, giving a dig at the sovereign whose hand today he had, perhaps against his will, to shake in the name of the victims of the September 11 massacres, 67 of whom were citizens of the United Kingdom.
Accompanied by former mayor Michael Bloomberg as president of the massacre museum, Carlo and Camilla placed a wreath of white flowers (peonies, lilies and white daffodils) on the balustrade of the massacre memorial, and then exchanged quick jokes with relatives and rescuers and with the authorities including Mamdani. It is not clear whether the one about the Koh-i-Noor, confided to the journalists at City Hall, was a joke or whether the mayor actually mentioned the issue of the diamond which was stolen in the mid-nineteenth century from a young Indian prince to be given to Queen Victoria and now exhibited among the Crown Jewels in the Tower of London. What is certain is that Zohran’s family history – he was born in Uganda to ancestors part of the Indian diaspora in Africa – is deeply intertwined with the British colonial past: under the Empire many Indians like his ancestors were brought to East Africa as workers, traders and administrators, occupying an intermediate position between Europeans and local African populations.
After Ground Zero (the second visit by a British sovereign after Elizabeth in 2010 but Charles had never been there) the royals went their separate ways amidst imposing security measures.
He headed to Harlem to meet the young people of a non-profit (Harlem Grows) that provides zero kilometer food to local communities. She stopped at the New York Public Library to which she donated a specimen of the little kangaroo Ro, an inseparable friend of Pooh bear and the other animals of the Hundred Acre Wood which are one of the attractions of the Library and this year celebrate their first century of life.
However, nothing was planned with the victims of the pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein in whose network of power, relationships and exploitation of women the king’s brother, Andrea Mountbatten, was entangled: despite pressure from the brother of Virginia Giuffrè, the woman who committed suicide who revealed that she had been forced by Epstein to have sex with the then Prince Andrew, Buckingham Palace justified the denial to avoid interference with the ongoing judicial investigations.