Only Boomers love the Commonwealth Charles’s playlist is postcolonial cope

When even fried chicken firm Chick-Fil-A has launched a streaming service, and you can get from viral “Hawk Tuah” video to podcast to blink-and-you-miss-it crypto venture in a matter of months, it seems these days everyone’s a content creator. But the latest such celebrity-turned-podcaster is a whole new level of unlikely: His Majesty King Charles III.

Well, sort of. On Monday, His Majesty released The King’s Music Room, an hour-long programme celebrating music from across the Commonwealth, chosen (we are told) by the King himself. The segues between individual tunes were read, or at least sounded as though they were read, by the King. The show was released to coincide with Commonwealth Day, which is (again, we are told) celebrated in the 56 Commonwealth countries around the world. It was marked in the UK with a ceremony in Westminster Abbey, and is, according to its website, “an opportunity to celebrate the strong unity, diversity and shared values” of the Commonwealth countries.

But what does any of that mean in practice? This is more difficult to establish, especially when my straw poll of acquaintances across the Commonwealth indicated they were no more aware than I had been that “Commonwealth Day” was even a thing. In turn, though, as I listened to Charles’s podcast and pondered it as an event, it’s come to appear a subtler royal comment on this question than it might seem at face value.

The King’s Music Room was an enjoyably eclectic enough listen: a tour through the musical memories of a particularly cultured and well-travelled British upper-class boomer. Though they’re getting on a bit now, there are lots of this type still around in Britain, remnants of a caste that in earlier eras would have made a life somewhere overseas as colonial administrators, traders, or do-gooders. Most have adapted genteelly to the changed world in which they lead their lives, and retain the eclectic, international aesthetic interests of their imperial forebears as a kind of cultural muscle-memory.

Their bookshelves might hold Geraldine Elliot’s collections of African folk tales, alongside Kipling and Macaulay. They would have played Charles’s pick, mid-century South African singer Miriam Makeba, on a tape in the car (probably a Rover) years before Radio 3’s Late Junction launched in 1999. And for many of them, the Commonwealth was self-evidently a good thing, not least propagating that vague sense of international and multicultural fraternity they liked, from which all this nice music and interesting food and culture seemed to flow — just without the uglier aspects of empire.

As a substantial political body, though, what has the Commonwealth actually achieved? Perhaps the thing we can say with most confidence is that it gave Britain’s monarchy something to do, having lost their role as heads of state for a globe-spanning empire. Charles’s mother, the late Queen, handled this transition gracefully, pivoting from Empress to global ribbon-snipper with quiet stoicism. And Charles the podcaster seems to be doing his best to continue in the same vein, promulgating the Commonwealth aspiration to “strong unity, diversity and shared values” through the medium of a world music playlist.

But in crunchier terms, there have always been sceptics — notably, in the Commonwealth’s relatively early days, the Cassandra-in-chief of postwar politics: Enoch Powell. Powell is, of course, known today mainly for the notorious 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech that tainted his legacy forever with the unforgivable sin of racism. On this basis, we might just dismiss his Commonwealth scepticism as an early sign of general animus against foreigners. But as Aris Roussinos has noted, Powell’s views on domestic politics have long overshadowed his insights on international affairs. In particular, he was a foreign policy realist: that is, he viewed geography, resources, relative power and national interest as more salient guides to what states can and should do, than questions of values. And it is this outlook, which fell out of fashion following the war in favour of a more utopian, internationalist approach, which forms the basis for his scepticism about the Commonwealth.

In one 1964 speech, Powell dismissed the idea that British voters gave much credence to the idea of “belonging to a Commonwealth” formed of every country once colonised or protected by, or otherwise connected to Britain. For Powell, this idea always had too many internal contradictions to achieve much. He noted that of its constituent states, “a number of these countries are antipathetic to one another”, while many show a visible, public “antipathy to Britain”. Brits, on the whole, don’t take this antipathy personally, Powell thought. But “it is difficult after all this to be told that all these countries form with us a great Commonwealth which is the world’s best hope for international and inter-racial cooperation”.

Powell didn’t buy it, and didn’t think the British electorate did either. Nor, it has seemed more recently, do many Commonwealth countries. The Union Jack has been steadily disappearing from national flags since the end of the empire. Others, meanwhile, seem to sense an opportunity to shake down relatively wealthy Britain, via historic guilt: Keir Starmer has come under sustained pressure from leaders of several Commonwealth members to pay reparations to former colonies for slavery. Elsewhere, it is unclear what if any contribution membership of the Commonwealth has made to smoothing the uneasy relation between (say) India and Pakistan, or the ongoing and vexed negotiations over whether it should be Britain or Mauritius who controls the Chagos Islands.

But as Powell also noted, this Commonwealth was not and never aimed to be any kind of defence or even trade alliance. It flourished mainly in the context of Pax Americana, as a kind of sentimental afterglow of the empire that Pax replaced and helped to dismantle. And now, as well as expressing the Commonwealth’s overt aspirations to vague unity and cultural diversity, King Charles’ podcast can be read as a diplomatically complex response to the decision by America herself, under Trump, definitively to abandon sponsorship of Pax Americana.

His Majesty is in an invidious position here. He is under pressure from pro-Ukraine voices in Britain to snub the President following cooling US support for Zelensky’s war against Putin. Canadians, meanwhile, are outraged by repeated US expressions of interest in annexing Canada — a Commonwealth country of which, nominally at least, Charles III remains the head of state. But he is also obliged to stay out of politics. Thus, despite some Canadians calling on the King to “stand up to” Trump, he has refused to comment on these annexation threats.

And indeed, Charles might retort to the stander-uppers: what would “standing up” achieve? Recent polls suggest that more than half of Canadians already feel their country should cut ties with the monarchy; perhaps these felt only vindicated. Charles’s obdurate silence in the face of possible Trumpian expansionism cannot have endeared him to the remaining loyalists. And yet, as commentators have noted with varying degrees of approbation and alarm, the Trump administration has made clear its decision to pivot from internationalism to foreign policy realism of a kind that would have been immediately intelligible to Enoch Powell. And from a realist perspective, what matters is hard power and spheres of influence. You don’t “stand up” to anyone unless you’re willing to follow through. And, here, Charles has nothing. Trump knows this: the fact that his proposal to annex Canada simply ignored the Commonwealth, and Canada’s links to Britain, suggests he has assessed both these and concluded accurately that they are essentially irrelevant to his doing whatever he wants.

So, with American sponsorship of a “rules-based international order” now replaced by apparent American sponsorship of a muscular international anarchy, we must ask: absent pax Americana, can the Commonwealth even survive? And if so, what for? If this entity has a future at all, it might be in the caucus recently endorsed by some Canadians for mutual support, in response to Trumpian policy: a sharp contraction from the current 56-nation Commonwealth into “CANZUK”, an alliance of Canada, New Zealand, Australia and the UK.

Such an alliance might, after a fashion, thread the needle between the grim Powellist realism invited by the unfolding contemporary geopolitical picture, and the residual British tendency to keep one eye always on the horizon. Powell himself acknowledged “compelling ties of blood and sentiment” with these scattered states; ties that surely don’t obtain to the same degree with (say) Kenya, saving perhaps in the dim recollections of those few surviving colonial boomers born there before the Emergency. So per Powell, ethnic and historic factors argue for closer links; meanwhile, the territories themselves are far-flung enough to perhaps gratify that Anglo wanderlust.

But though such ties (and, often, literal extended family connections) might combine with Commonwealth history to argue for closer alliance, would Britain’s legacy ruling caste accept this? It’s a fairly safe bet that many of those colonial boomers, and some of their children too, would recoil from the ethnocentrism of Powell’s formulation. We might infer from King Charles’s playlist that he would be among the recoilers: his choice of tunes grants no particular favour, after all, to the CANZ components of a would-be CANZUK.

But if the content argues overtly for a pluralistic “soft power” and greater Commonwealth of international cultural diversity, the choice of format quietly acknowledges that the real enabling soft-power context for all such statements rest outside his control. The recording wasn’t released on the BBC — let alone the run-down old imperial broadcaster, the BBC World Service, which recently announced that it would cut 130 jobs in a cost-saving exercise. No: the royal playlist dropped on Apple Music, an American corporate titan that, unlike the BBC, has genuinely global reach. And the King’s choice of platform discreetly acknowledges this key backdrop to many contemporary upheavals including, arguably, the Trumpian revolution: the fact that digital media is now a — perhaps the — key vector for “soft power”. Whether or not America wishes to sustain a hard-power Pax Americana, its soft-power digital domination is almost total: the lion’s share of digital media is currently American.

The King’s choice of platform, and even of final playlist entry, discretely acknowledges this reality. Beyoncé is not a Commonwealth artist — she’s American. And when we put all this together, we can read The King’s Music Room as a statement with overt and covert sides, addressing multiple aspects of his diplomatic conundrum.

On one side, his obligation to speak to, celebrate, and acknowledge an impossibly broad and internally fractious greater Commonwealth, whose rationale for assembling has long since faded and whose existence always tacitly relied on America keeping the peace. On the other, the King’s politically far more sensitive obligation to sustain good relations with an America that has lost interest in keeping that peace — and for that reason needs more emollient handling than ever, just without offending a Commonwealth some of whose members now view America as hostile. It is not an easy feat.

As an artefact, The King’s Music Room squares that circle with a grace that would not have shamed the late Queen. But as a balancing-act, we have to wonder how long it can be sustained. Should King Charles slip, we can only hope there is a CANZUK there to catch us.

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