MANDEL: This royal subject pays no homage to the new king

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Nope, can’t do it.

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Can’t muster much interest, let alone enthusiasm, for this coronation spectacle. Can’t forget. Can’t unsee. Can’t pretend to care.

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The mystery needed to conjure this royal fantasy was stripped away long ago by this man who would be king; we know only too well that he’s just a flawed human being like the rest of us.

So King Charles III, “divinely appointed by God” to rule over us? Please.

Dubbed the Twilight King, the oldest new monarch in British history has waited in the wings his entire adult life for this moment. The crown finally became his, of course, once his late great mother died in September but the coronation at Westminster Abbey will make it official, with the ancient pomp, circumstance and deeply Christian rites it has carried for centuries.

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It will be a resplendent show, no doubt about it. No one can pull off pageantry like our British cousins.

Much has changed, though, since Queen Elizabeth II was anointed seven decades ago with holy oil. The reverence for the monarchy then was inherent and unquestioned. And it must have been easy to accept the fresh-faced, earnest princess who vowed to devote her life to service even as she mourned her beloved father. The new young queen was a blank canvas upon which her subjects could project their magical beliefs about who she was and who she would be.

Queen Elizabeth fulfilled that role with admirable dignity and grace. And silence. You couldn’t help but respect her and her crown. That goodwill and affection, though, hasn’t transferred without reserve to her eldest son.

First off, the idea of inherited privilege just doesn’t fly the way it used to. By what virtue does Charles III command the throne? Because he was born first and waited so patiently?

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Or as author Otto English tweeted, “In essence, the coronation boils down to this. A hereditary billionaire riding in a solid gold coach to an abbey, where a diamond-encrusted crown will be plonked on his head — at taxpayers’ expense — in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis.”

We are supposed to be impressed that this is a scaled-down ceremony by a modern king — why there’ll only be 2,000 guests at his coronation compared to his mother’s 8,000! It will clock in at one hour instead of three! It will include leaders from other faiths who will offer their blessings! The procession will be much shorter — only 1.3 miles long compared to Queen Elizabeth’s three!

There is another major, less positive, difference. Unlike his beloved mother, there is no mystique to this monarch. As his 74 years have played out in public, not to mention with the help of a popular Netflix series, we’ve come to know far too much.

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We know that he yearned to be a tampon, we know he’s prone to tantrum when handed a leaky pen, and insists on his servants squeezing an inch of toothpaste on his toothbrush. And yes, we know that he’s an adulterer.

True, Charles is hardly the first or last to cheat in his marriage and those of us still loyal to the memory of Diana have been told repeatedly to get over it. Ancient history and all that. So let’s talk about something more recent, shall we?

How about the chicanery of having his wife elevated to Queen?

Remember when the besotted lovers married in 2005, Charles assured an unreceptive public that his unpopular former mistress would never take the title originally promised to the late Diana. Camilla would only ever be known as Princess Consort.

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Years of PR massage followed as his courtiers spit and polished her image while Charles hammered away at his mother until the Queen proclaimed her acceptance: ‘It is my sincere wish that, when that time comes, Camilla will be known as Queen Consort as she continues her own loyal service.’”

And then surprise, surprise, came the official hand-painted invitation for “The Coronation of Their Majesties King Charles III and Queen Camilla.”

In the coronation’s first-ever Homage of the People, the Archbishop of Canterbury plans to “call upon all persons of goodwill” from across the realm “to make their homage, in heart and voice, to their undoubted King, defender of all.”

This subject, for one, will pass, thanks all the same.

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