Windsor Castle’s Waterloo Table gleamed under the chandeliers, hosting a state banquet for US President Donald Trump’s second state visit to the UK. The guest list – a pantheon of billionaire tech moguls including Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Apple’s Tim Cook and OpenAI’s Sam Altman – revealed the event’s true nature: a celebration of obscene wealth, cloaked in diplomatic pomp. 

The combined personal worth of two dozen of the richest attendees was $274 billion, with an average of $11.4 billion per person – over 67,000 times the median Briton’s wealth. Their companies, boasting a market capitalisation of $17.7 trillion, surpassed the combined value of every publicly listed UK company. 

As King Charles III and Prime Minister Keir Starmer toasted the “special relationship,” Scottish poet Carol Ann Duffy’s poem “State/Banquet”, penned by outrage for the occasion, exposed this parasitic display, condemning an elite that thrives on inequality while divisive tactics, echoing Marx’s 19th-century critique, scapegoat the marginalised.

Duffy’s “State/Banquet” opens with scathing irony: 

How it glitters and shines, 

The Grand Service,

among the rocks and the rubble, 

laid out on a breezeblock horseshoe table, 

six crystal glasses per setting.

The “Grand Service,” silver coated in gold and polished by eight servants over three weeks, mirrors the $274 billion amassed by the 24 guests. The poem’s “rocks and rubble” evoke the societal decay ignored by this elite, while the “breezeblock horseshoe table” mocks their artificial grandeur. As “concrete dust in the air seems glamourised” and “uplifting flags of democracy” wave over ruins, Duffy frames the banquet as a grotesque farce as millions in both nations face hunger.

The menu was a monument to excess, as Duffy catalogues:

fillet of Dover sole filled with salmon mousse,

served on a bed of leeks with white wine sauce.

Poached Sandringham venison with truffles to follow,

then Key Lime Pie.” 

The wines included a 1945 vintage port nodding to Trump’s presidency and a 1912 champagne marking his mother’s birth year. A Transatlantic Whisky Sour, topped with pecan foam and a star-shaped biscuit, joined dishes like Hampshire watercress panna cotta and Norfolk chicken ballotine. 

Starmer, a pescatarian, savoured turbot. Duffy’s “Yum-yum” sneers at this decadence, a stark contrast to the 44 million Americans and one in six Britons relying on food banks, their plight ignored.

The speeches dripped with self-admiration. Trump, reveling in the “highest honour” of Windsor, called America the “hottest country in the world” and hailed the “eternal” US-UK bond. 

King Charles lauded a relationship “tested time and again,” while £31 billion in AI and tech investments underscored the corporate agenda. Yet Duffy’s poem pierces this veneer: “Let the trumpets sound on the bombsite / as the great and the good pick their way through.” The “bombsite” evokes austerity’s wreckage – food banks in Manchester and Detroit stretched thin – while the “great and the good” feast, their fortunes built on monopolies and exploitation.

Duffy’s final image is harrowing: “a famished child peers through a bullet-hole in a wall.” This child, a symbol of the marginalised, watches the elite gorge while hunger scars both nations. Meanwhile, food banks reported record demand: UK charities distributed 3 million emergency parcels annually, and US pantries serve millions monthly. 

The poem’s “bullet-hole” suggests structural violence, mirrored by protests outside Windsor decrying Trump’s Epstein ties and Starmer’s complicity, carefully sidelined as Trump’s itinerary avoided central London to dodge “Trump Not Welcome” demonstrations.

This spectacle embodies Karl Marx’s 19th-century critique of capitalism’s divide-and-rule tactics, when British elites pitted English and Irish workers against each other to forestall resistance. In September 2025, the strategy persists. 

Far-right protests in London scapegoat migrants for economic woes, while Trump’s rhetoric fuels animosities against Black communities and refugees. These narratives deflect blame from the true culprits: the wealthy, whose collective wealth embodies systemic theft. The banquet’s tech-heavy guest list, including Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, reflects the ascendance of tech capital. These moguls, courted for investments, profit from data monopolies and precarious labour while governments bow to their influence.

The banquet’s corporate tilt, a shift from Hollywood stars in past visits, underscores this power shift. Toasts celebrated £31 billion in deals, the elite’s wealth – amassed through tax evasion, deregulation, and worker exploitation – mocked the precarity of ordinary citizens. 

In the UK, real wages have stagnated; in the US, 60% of households live hand to mouth. Duffy’s “uplifting flags of democracy” are a cruel irony, concealing a transatlantic bond of exploitation. The $274 billion amassed by 24 guests could fund food security for millions, yet it sits idle, a monument to greed.

Duffy’s poem exposes this parasitic act, its “rubble” and “bombsite” revealing the ruins of inequality beneath the elite’s glittering façade. The “famished child” embodies the 13 million UK children in poverty and 20 million US households facing food insecurity. 

Marx’s insight remains apt: by stoking racism and xenophobia, the ruling class fractures solidarity, ensuring the poor fight each other rather than the system. The billionaires and politicians at Windsor, their laughter choking the air, profit from this division, their toasts masking a pact of mutual enrichment. The banquet’s gold-plated excess stands as a stark symbol of this abyss – a gilded farce thriving on the wounds of the many, while the “famished child” demands a reckoning that echoes beyond the trumpets’ sound.

Inderjeet Parmar is a professor of international politics and associate dean of research in the School of Policy and Global Affairs at City St George’s, University of London, a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, and a columnist at The Wire. He is an International Fellow at the ROADS Initiative think tank, Islamabad, and author of several books including Foundations of the American Century. He is currently writing a book on the history, politics and crises of the US foreign policy establishment.

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