King Charles III has views and passions, but his
first job is to reform the monarchy’s image
Simon
Jenkins
He will be a very different monarch to his mother. He
should use that to his and the nation’s advantage
Thu 8 Sep
2022 20.01 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/08/king-charles-iii-monarchy-mother-nation
King
Charles intends to reign – he would say serve – precisely as did his mother.
His entire life has been spent in the shadow of her performance, and he has
been tutored at every turn in the role of the occupant of the throne. He knows
that the nation has regarded the Queen as the apotheosis of constitutional
monarchy. His is unlikely to be a long reign, and he will not want to betray
his mother’s legacy.
At that
point, any similarity between King Charles and Queen Elizabeth may well end.
The reason is simple. The job of monarch today may be formulaic, indeed
near-robotic, but it is nonetheless conducted by human beings. Charles may
execute the ceremonies required of him impeccably. He is practised in the
tedium of public duties, and shares his mother’s capacity to moderate ritual
with humour. Maturity has also diluted the risks of misbehaviour and gossip
that attended his youth and unhappy first marriage. But mother and son are very
different personalities.
This may
matter only in the margins of the constitution, in the dealings that a king has
of constitutional necessity with his prime minister and with the machinery of
parliament. He is bound to respect the nonpartisan obligations of monarchy,
enshrined in custom and practice at least since the Hanoverians. The days are
gone when the monarch might exercise discretion in “choosing” or “inviting” a
prime minister most likely to enjoy parliamentary support.
This
terminology can still deliver crises. The last occurred in 1963, when the
Conservative party lacked a formal procedure for selecting a leader and a
number of candidates put themselves forward to succeed the sick Harold
Macmillan. In the event, he was well enough to recommend Lord Home as his
successor, but this did not save the Queen from seeming to approve a secretive
and oligarchic transfer of power.
Subsequent
tensions have usually involved hung parliaments, as in 1974 under Edward Heath
and in 2010 under Gordon Brown. Both were resolved through negotiations with
palace officials under conventions of custom and practice. A different crisis
arose when Boris Johnson in 2019 tried to involve the monarch in an illegal
proroguing of parliament, to be overturned not by the monarch but by the
supreme court. In all these cases protocol kept the monarch aloof from
controversy. But Charles may well feel entitled to play a more active role.
Different
problems may well lie elsewhere, in the obvious fact that Charles is a public
figure of strong opinions, on almost every subject under the sun. He makes no
secret of his views on topics as diverse as climate change, agriculture,
alternative medicine, conservation and modern architecture. As always, he
insisted that his opinions were personal and not “monarchical”. But they were
still opinions.
In 2014
Mike Bartlett’s play King Charles III portrayed Charles as refusing, on a point
of conscience, to give royal assent to a bill passed by parliament ending press
freedom. He claimed royal prerogative, a power customarily delegated to the
prime minister. This presented the prime minister with a crisis: either pass an
“illegal” bill or demand Charles’s abdication in favour of a more compliant
William. In the play, the latter occurred. A similar crisis hit Belgium in 1990
when King Baudouin refused to sign a pro-choice bill and was allowed to
abdicate for a day. Bartlett’s plot must at least have caused Charles a shiver
of recognition.
The monarch
holds a weekly audience with the prime minister in conditions of absolute
confidentiality. Charles might reasonably regard this as an open opportunity to
bombard a hapless premier with his reaction to events. He may be no more than
conversing with the most powerful person in the land, but that in itself is a
position of influence. Charles is a man of intellectual passion, a regal David
Attenborough. Both men regard not just the British nation but Planet Earth as
facing catastrophe and Charles may see that as overriding constitutional
niceties.
The danger
is the near certainty of leakage. It is of the palace being constantly besieged
by accusations of political lobbying and interference. There will always be a
body of opinion that feels the Queen was over-fastidious in “reigning until
death” and should at some point have retired with dignity. Charles is not young
and is not the Queen. He will be ever vulnerable to the appealing presence of
his son William, high in profile and hovering in the wings.
Where the
new monarch could unquestionably make a mark is in reforming the image of
monarchy. Where Elizabeth was a stickler for tradition, Charles is known to
want to relax and “informalise” the throne. He is rumoured to want to move out
of Buckingham Palace, turning it into a royal office block and museum and
keeping Clarence House as his London home. A popular gesture would be to merge
the palace’s extensive private gardens with Green Park and form a verdant
corridor from Whitehall to Kensington Palace.
Charles
would also be well advised to dismantle much of the flummery that grew up round
the concept of a royal family under his mother. There may need to be an heir to
the throne, but an extended family need not enjoy – or more often endure – a
publicity and lifestyle unknown to most royal families elsewhere in Europe.
Turning her offspring and relations into a stage army of celebrities was a
mistake, and one Charles could usefully discontinue.
The British
monarchy is a curiosity of history. It has supplied the state and its imperial
legacy, the Commonwealth, with a figurehead of remarkable stability. Its
hereditary basis is defensible only in being elemental and in remaining
scrupulously impotent. The monarchy is simply the expression in human form of
national cohesion and supposed reverence. But it retains that stability and
reverence through avoiding controversy. Britain’s new king is an ostentatious
controversialist. At very least, his reign is unlikely to be dull.
Simon
Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
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