King’s coronation: Why are the Crown Jewels so controversial?
The Crown Jewels have been protected at the Tower of London since the 1660s, but their history remains controversial.
Known as the nation’s treasures, the Crown Jewels consist of over 100 items and over 23,000 gemstones, the Historic Royal Palaces website says.
A significant part of the Royal Collection, the Crown Jewels includes items such as orbs, sceptres and crowns – some of which the King and Queen held and wore during the coronation at Westminster Abbey.
The Cullinan diamond – the largest diamond ever found – is just one of the many diamonds that will be in the spotlight during the coronation ceremony.
It again entered the public eye when cuts of the original diamond sat atop the royal sceptre and in Queen Camilla’s crown, where it was substituted for the even more controversial diamond, the Koh-i-noor.
Here’s a look back at its history – and why those two jewels, in particular, are so controversial.
Who was Thomas Cullinan?
Thomas Cullinan, a businessman who worked in South Africa, is known for giving his name to the largest diamond ever discovered in the country.
He moved to Johannesburg in 1887, where he first became a bricklayer and after earning some money, he found an interest in sales and business.
In 1897, Cullinan moved to Parktown, where he discovered the Premier diamond fields a year later.
Cullinan soon became the co-founder of what came to be The Transvaal Chamber of Industries – a mining-industry employer organisation.
He continued to grow in his career and in 1910, Cullinan was knighted for his work in the diamond industry.
How did the diamond end up in the UK?
According to the Cape Town Diamond Museum, the diamond was first discovered at the Premier Mine in Pretoria, South Africa, by Fedrick Wells in 1905.
The Cullinan diamond was only a fragment of an even bigger stone that was still not yet discovered – it weighed 3,106 carats (621.2 grams).
The stone was carefully sent off to England and to keep it safe, detectives from London were asked to send out replicas and decoys in public to throw off potential thieves.
After the Anglo-Boer War, the South African Transvaal government bought the diamond from Cullinan and later presented and gifted it to Britain’s King Edward VII in 1907.
What are Cullinan I and Cullinan II?
The Imperial State Crown which contains the Cullinan II diamond
The diamond was then entrusted to what is now known as The Royal Asscher Diamond Company.
King Edward VII invited the Asscher brothers to London to discuss cutting the diamond into different pieces.
The original diamond was “the size of a human heart”, the Royal Asscher website says.
After months of careful planning and studying, it was decided that Joseph Asscher who founded the company would cleave the Cullinan into nine major stones and 96 smaller stones.
There were two diamonds amongst those that weighed the most.
These were known as the Cullinan I and Cullinan II.
King Edward VII of England. Pic: AP
Cullinan I became known as the Star of Africa and Cullinan II became known as The Lesser Star of Africa.
In 1910, after King Edward’s death, King George V had the Cullinan I and Cullinan II set in the sovereign’s sceptre and Imperial State Crown respectively.
The 96 smaller stones were given to the Asschers as their fee for cutting the diamond.
‘The diamond’s gift in 1907 was controversial’
As the royals prepare their Crown Jewels for the upcoming ceremony, the question of right and wrong surrounds them – with growing calls for the royals to return the cuts of the diamond to their homeland.
Dr Matt Graham, a senior lecturer in African history at the University of Dundee, said: “The journey of this diamond [The Cullinan] from South Africa to the monarchy is part of imperial networks, empire, and colonial rule, where resources from across the world were extracted for the benefit of Britain.
“There are demands within South Africa for reparations and the return of the gem because it is a powerful symbol of empire.”
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A brooch containing Cullinan cuts was on display at Buckingham Palace in 2012. Pic: Reuters
After the death of Queen Elizabeth II, both the Cullinan I and II were placed on display.
While the late Queen was laid to rest, criticism arose of the late monarch for never formally apologising for Britain’s colonial past in South Africa.
And so, the Cullinan diamond remains wrapped in the timeline of colonial history, which raises the question of whether the cuts of it should return to the land where the original stone was found.
Last year, activists in South Africa also petitioned for the cuts to be returned and placed in a South African museum instead.
Professor Saul Dubow from the faculty of history at the University of Cambridge told Sky News the Cullinan diamond was controversial, but it also played a role in the dispute within “white politics”.
He said: “The diamond’s gift in 1907 was controversial, but it was principally a matter of dispute within white politics, specifically, about the gift as a gesture to win the support of the Crown and British Liberal opinion in the aftermath of the Boer War.”
Queen Mary’s Crown, which will contain cuts of the Cullinan diamond when it is worn by Camilla at her coronation, is seen in 1952
Professor Dubow said the hope at the time was that “this would facilitate reconciliation between English and Dutch-speakers. Further Cullinan stones were gifted to Queen Mary by the new South African government of Louis Botha and Jan Smuts – both of whom had fought against British imperialism – on the achievement of independence from Britain in 1910.”
He continued: “Political union was indeed achieved at the cost of black South Africans. But it is hard to see a direct connection between the gift of the diamond and the loss of African rights.
“Some campaigners are now arguing that the diamond should be restored to Africa because it came out of African soil and that the colonial government had no right to give it away in the first place.
“The crown’s designation of the Cullinan as the ‘Great Star of Africa’ may thus be an unintentional hostage to fortune!”
What is the Koh-i-noor diamond and why is it controversial?
Earlier this year, Buckingham Palace released a statement confirming the Koh-i-noor diamond would not be worn by the Queen Consort.
The East India Company seized the historic treasure in 1849 when it was presented to Queen Victoria and became part of the Crown Jewels.
The Koh-i-noor diamond, also known as “Mountains of Light” in Persian, has also been the centre of controversy over the years with political and legal disputes regarding its original owner.
In 2016 the All India Human Rights and Social Justice Front, a non-governmental organisation, filed a lawsuit seeking its return.
However, Solicitor General Ranjit Kumar told India’s Supreme Court in New Delhi it was given to Queen Victoria in 1850 by a 19th-century Sikh king.
“It was given voluntarily by Ranjit Singh to the British as compensation for help in the Sikh Wars. The Koh-i-noor is not a stolen object,” he said.
But the debate of ownership and its painful past continues to this day.
A spokesman for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party reportedly said last year – before the decision was made to remove it: “The coronation of Camilla and the use of the crown jewel Koh-i-noor brings back painful memories of the colonial past.
“Most Indians have very little memory of the oppressive past. Five to six generations of Indians suffered under multiple foreign rules for over five centuries.
“Recent occasions, like Queen Elizabeth II’s death, the coronation of the new Queen Camilla and the use of the Koh-i-noor does transport a few Indians back to the days of the British Empire in India,” he added.
The King’s Coronation
King Charles III crowned with St Edward’s Crown
Queen Camilla was crowned with Queen Mary’s Crown – reset with cuts of the Cullinan diamond – which was originally commissioned for the coronation of Mary of Teck as Queen Consort at the coronation of King George V in 1911.
Queen Camilla crowned with Queen Mary’s Crown
The King was crowned with the St Edward’s Crown, a solid gold crown set with precious stones. The crown weighs 2.23kg (nearly 5 lbs).
The grand event will be celebrated on Saturday 6 May 2023, across the weekend, with 2,000 guests set to attend the ceremony at Westminster Abbey.
There will also be processions, a concert, and nationwide lunches to commemorate the historic crowning ceremony.
To find out more about what’s happening across the weekend – you can see full details here.
The UK-US trade deal has been signed and is “done”, US President Donald Trump has said as he met Sir Keir Starmer at the G7 summit.
The US president told reporters in Canada: “We signed it, and it’s done. It’s a fair deal for both. It’ll produce a lot of jobs, a lot of income.”
Sir Keir said the document “implements” the deal to cut tariffs on cars and aerospace, describing it as a “really important agreement”.
“So this is a very good day for both of our countries – a real sign of strength,” the prime minister added.
Mr Trump added that the UK was “very well protected” against any future tariffs, saying: “You know why? Because I like them”.
However, he did not say whether levies on British steel exports to the US would be set to 0%, saying “we’re gonna let you have that information in a little while”.
Mr Trump also praised Sir Keir as a “great” prime minister, adding: “We’ve been talking about this deal for six years, and he’s done what they haven’t been able to do.”
He added: “We’re very longtime partners and allies and friends and we’ve become friends in a short period of time.
“He’s slightly more liberal than me to put it mildly… but we get along.”
Sir Keir added that “we make it work”.
As the pair exited a mountain lodge in the Canadian Rockies where the summit is being held, Mr Trump held up a physical copy of the trade agreement to show reporters.
Several leaves of paper fell from the binding, and Sir Keir quickly stooped to pick them up, saying: “A very important document.”
Sir Keir Starmer picks up paper from the UK-US trade deal after Donald Trump dropped it at the G7 summit. Pic: Reuters
The US president also appeared to mistakenly refer to a “trade agreement with the European Union” at one point as he stood alongside the British prime minister.
Mr Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs on countries in April. At the time, he announced 10% “reciprocal” rates on all UK exports – as well as separately announced 25% levies on cars and steel.
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In a joint televised phone call in May, Sir Keir and Mr Trump announced the UK and US had agreed on a trade deal – but added the details were being finalised.
Ahead of the G7 summit, the prime minister said he would meet Mr Trump for “one-on-one” talks, and added the agreement “really matters for the vital sectors that are safeguarded under our deal, and we’ve got to implement that”.
Whitehall officials tried to convince Michael Gove to go to court to cover up the grooming scandal in 2011, Sky News can reveal.
Dominic Cummings, who was working for Lord Gove at the time, has told Sky News that officials in the Department for Education (DfE) wanted to help efforts by Rotherham Council to stop a national newspaper from exposing the scandal.
In an interview with Sky News, Mr Cummings said that officials wanted a “total cover-up”.
Politics latest: Grooming gangs findings unveiled
The revelation shines a light on the institutional reluctance of some key officials in central government to publicly highlight the grooming gang scandal.
In 2011, Rotherham Council approached the Department for Education asking for help following inquiries by The Times. The paper’s then chief reporter, the late Andrew Norfolk, was asking about sexual abuse and trafficking of children in Rotherham.
The council went to Lord Gove’s Department for Education for help. Officials considered the request and then recommended to Lord Gove’s office that the minister back a judicial review which might, if successful, stop The Times publishing the story.
Lord Gove rejected the request on the advice of Mr Cummings. Sources have independently confirmed Mr Cummings’ account.
Education Secretary Michael Gove in 2011. Pic: PA
Mr Cummings told Sky News: “Officials came to me in the Department of Education and said: ‘There’s this Times journalist who wants to write the story about these gangs. The local authority wants to judicially review it and stop The Times publishing the story’.
“So I went to Michael Gove and said: ‘This council is trying to actually stop this and they’re going to use judicial review. You should tell the council that far from siding with the council to stop The Times you will write to the judge and hand over a whole bunch of documents and actually blow up the council’s JR (judicial review).’
“Some officials wanted a total cover-up and were on the side of the council…
“They wanted to help the local council do the cover-up and stop The Times’ reporting, but other officials, including in the DfE private office, said this is completely outrageous and we should blow it up. Gove did, the judicial review got blown up, Norfolk stories ran.”
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Grooming gangs victim speaks out
The judicial review wanted by officials would have asked a judge to decide about the lawfulness of The Times’ publication plans and the consequences that would flow from this information entering the public domain.
A second source told Sky News that the advice from officials was to side with Rotherham Council and its attempts to stop publication of details it did not want in the public domain.
One of the motivations cited for stopping publication would be to prevent the identities of abused children entering the public domain.
There was also a fear that publication could set back the existing attempts to halt the scandal, although incidents of abuse continued for many years after these cases.
Sources suggested that there is also a natural risk aversion amongst officials to publicity of this sort.
Read more on grooming gangs:
What we do and don’t know from the data
A timeline of the scandal
Mr Cummings, who ran the Vote Leave Brexit campaign and was Boris Johnson’s right-hand man in Downing Street, has long pushed for a national inquiry into grooming gangs to expose failures at the heart of government.
He said the inquiry, announced today, “will be a total s**tshow for Whitehall because it will reveal how much Whitehall worked to try and cover up the whole thing.”
He also described Mr Johnson, with whom he has a long-standing animus, as a “moron’ for saying that money spent on inquiries into historic child sexual abuse had been “spaffed up the wall”.
Asked by Sky News political correspondent Liz Bates why he had not pushed for a public inquiry himself when he worked in Number 10 in 2019-20, Mr Cummings said Brexit and then COVID had taken precedence.
“There are a million things that I wanted to do but in 2019 we were dealing with the constitutional crisis,” he said.
The Department for Education and Rotherham Council have been approached for comment.
Flawed data has been used repeatedly to dismiss claims about “Asian grooming gangs”, Baroness Louise Casey has said in a new report, as she called for a new national inquiry.
The government has accepted her recommendations to introduce compulsory collection of ethnicity and nationality data for all suspects in grooming cases, and for a review of police records to launch new criminal investigations into historic child sexual exploitation cases.
Politics latest: Yvette Cooper reveals details of grooming gangs report
Baroness Louise Casey carried out the review. Pic: PA
The crossbench peer has produced an audit of sexual abuse carried out by grooming gangs in England and Wales, after she was asked by the prime minister to review new and existing data, including the ethnicity and demographics of these gangs.
In her report, she has warned authorities that children need to be seen “as children” and called for a tightening of the laws around the age of consent so that any penetrative sexual activity with a child under 16 is classified as rape. This is “to reduce uncertainty which adults can exploit to avoid or reduce the punishments that should be imposed for their crimes”, she added.
Baroness Casey said: “Despite the age of consent being 16, we have found too many examples of child sexual exploitation criminal cases being dropped or downgraded from rape to lesser charges where a 13 to 15-year-old had been ‘in love with’ or ‘had consented to’ sex with the perpetrator.”
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Grooming gangs victim speaks out
The peer has called for a nationwide probe into the exploitation of children by gangs of men.
She has not recommended another over-arching inquiry of the kind conducted by Professor Alexis Jay, and suggests the national probe should be time-limited.
The national inquiry will direct local investigations and hold institutions to account for past failures.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said the inquiry’s “purpose is to challenge what the audit describes as continued denial, resistance and legal wrangling among local agencies”.
On the issue of ethnicity, Baroness Casey said police data was not sufficient to draw conclusions as it had been “shied away from”, and is still not recorded for two-thirds of perpetrators.
‘Flawed data’
However, having examined local data in three police force areas, she found “disproportionate numbers of men from Asian ethnic backgrounds amongst suspects for group-based child sexual exploitation, as well as in the significant number of perpetrators of Asian ethnicity identified in local reviews and high-profile child sexual exploitation prosecutions across the country, to at least warrant further examination”.
She added: “Despite reviews, reports and inquiries raising questions about men from Asian or Pakistani backgrounds grooming and sexually exploiting young white girls, the system has consistently failed to fully acknowledge this or collect accurate data so it can be examined effectively.
“Instead, flawed data is used repeatedly to dismiss claims about ‘Asian grooming gangs’ as sensationalised, biased or untrue.
“This does a disservice to victims and indeed all law-abiding people in Asian communities and plays into the hands of those who want to exploit it to sow division.”
Read more:
Officials tried to cover up grooming scandal, says Cummings
Why many victims welcome national inquiry into grooming gangs
Grooming gangs scandal timeline
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From January: Grooming gangs: What happened?
The baroness hit out at the failure of policing data and intelligence for having multiple systems which do not communicate with each other.
She also criticised “an ambivalent attitude to adolescent girls both in society and in the culture of many organisations”, too often judging them as adults.
‘Deep-rooted failure’
Responding to Baroness Casey’s review, Ms Yvette Cooper told the House of Commons: “The findings of her audit are damning.
“At its heart, she identifies a deep-rooted failure to treat children as children. A continued failure to protect children and teenage girls from rape, from exploitation, and serious violence.
She added: “Baroness Casey found ‘blindness, ignorance, prejudice, defensiveness and even good but misdirected intentions’ all played a part in this collective failure.”
Ms Cooper said she will take immediate action on all 12 recommendations from the report, adding: “We cannot afford more wasted years repeating the same mistakes or shouting at each other across this House rather than delivering real change.”
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper responded to the report. Pic: PA
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said: “After months of pressure, the prime minister has finally accepted our calls for a full statutory national inquiry into the grooming gangs.
“We must remember that this is not a victory for politicians, especially the ones like the home secretary, who had to be dragged to this position, or the prime minister. This is a victory for the survivors who have been calling for this for years.”
Ms Badenoch added: “The prime minister’s handling of this scandal is an extraordinary failure of leadership. His judgement has once again been found wanting.
“Since he became prime minister, he and the home secretary dismissed calls for an inquiry because they did not want to cause a stir.
“They accused those of us demanding justice for the victims of this scandal as, and I quote, ‘jumping on a far right bandwagon’, a claim the prime minister’s official spokesman restated this weekend – shameful.”
The government has promised new laws to protect children and support victims so they “stop being blamed for the crimes committed against them”.
It is also launching new police operations and a new national inquiry to direct local investigations and hold institutions to account for past failures.
There will also be new ethnicity data and research “so we face up to the facts on exploitation and abuse,” the home secretary said.
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