I have been thinking about that woman lately, because the son of the woman she was weeping over has come home. Yesterday, Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, returned to Britain after six years in Montecito, California.

Let me declare my interests, or rather my lack of them. I hold no brief for the Sussexes. I have not tried the podcasts. I am dimly aware of the jam. I have sat through small bits of the Netflix series, in which two people who moved to California to escape publicity narrate their private lives to camera for six hours. Nor do I much care for the House of Windsor: an emotionally refrigerated dynasty whose one redeeming feature is a hollow, ironical humor flapping at the edges of an inflexible sense of duty. Asked to choose between Montecito and Balmoral, I would ask to see the wine list.

But the return interests me, and not because of the personalities. It interests me because in tragedy nobody gets out of the house. That is very nearly the definition of the genre. Orestes is raised abroad and comes home to engage in matricide; Hamlet is called back to Elsinore by a dead parent who declines to stay dead; the House of Atreus runs on a curse that no amount of relocation can outrun. I once wrote a book about tragedy, and the sentence in it I stand by most firmly is this: “We are still prisoners of the family, even a queer family.” The Windsors are our House of Atreus, with better catering and worse weather. Harry’s flight to California was never the end of the play. It was the interval, and the strawberries and cream have now been eaten.

In an article for The New York Times, under the headline “Don’t Harry and Meghan Know Better?”, Roxane Gay reads the return as she read the exile: as a parable of race. The monarchy, she observes, has cheerfully tolerated wife-beheaders, a Nazi-sympathizing abdicator and a prince who kept up his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein after the conviction, but it could not abide a black woman. About the tabloids she is simply right: the coverage of Meghan was vile, and the family’s refusal to defend her contemptible. And yet race explains less here than it appears to. The machine that mangled Meghan had already destroyed a white, aristocratic, impeccably virginal teenager called Diana Spencer, and it has chewed through every daughter-in-law fed into it before or since, whatever her color or her postcode. The Firm is an equal-opportunity destroyer of daughters-in-law. Gay ends her article with James Baldwin’s question — “Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?” — and it is the right question with the wrong arsonist. The house was burning long before the Sussexes arrived. What breaks people in that house is not their difference from the family. It is the family.

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England’s blind hope

By Simon Critchley

Which is why Diana remains the far more interesting figure. I was moved by her death and take no pride in admitting it, being the kind of right-thinking soft leftist who can quote Tom Paine from memory after a couple of drinks. But what happened in September 1997 still strikes me as thrilling, and I persist in thinking it was almost revolutionary. For about a fortnight, England stopped being a Protestant country. The shrines, the votive candles, the flowers rotting in their cellophane, the icons of a wronged woman, the pilgrims sleeping out on the Mall, the conviction that grief must be displayed rather than swallowed — this was a populist catholic insurgency, catholic with a small c. It was an eruption of everything the Reformation was supposed to have buried, directed squarely against the stiff-necked Anglicanism of a family whose head is, after all, Supreme Governor of the Church of England. The irrational national feeling on which constitutional monarchy depends — the affect that it exists to capture and sedate — detached itself from the living sovereign and fastened onto a dead woman whom the family had cast out. The Queen was obliged to come down from Balmoral and bow her head to the coffin of her discarded daughter-in-law, more or less on the instructions of the tabloid press. It was the nearest thing to a revolution I ever expect to see in England in my lifetime, and it was conducted entirely in flowers.

Perhaps Diana damaged the House of Windsor beyond repair. The Firm survived, as firms often do, but like a bell with a crack in it: it still rings on the hour, but the note has never been true since. Everything after — the confessional television, the disgraced uncle stripped of his dukedom, the warring sons, the memoir with its frostbitten confidences — is aftershock. Harry is his mother’s heir in everything except the ability to carry it off: the same weaponized publicity, the same faith that feeling trumps protocol, the same slow discovery that the media that loves you is the media that eats you and will kill you.

So why is there no republic? This is the genuinely strange thing. The monarchy has given the British every possible reason to be rid of it, and yet the republican groundswell obstinately fails to swell. The polls barely move; abolition remains the hobby horse of those of us who own a copy of Rights of Man and hum “Jerusalem” in the shower. Personally, I would prefer a republic. But honesty compels a look at what happens to republics. The United States rid itself of George III and then spent two and a half centuries confecting substitute royalty: the Camelot of the Kennedys, the dynastic ambitions of the Clintons, the Obamas’ court in its tasteful exile, and now a president who has gilded the Oval Office like a Bourbon with a credit line. Abolish the monarchy without abolishing the need for one and you get kings anyway — elected ones, who are worse, since there is no constitutional plumbing for removing them gracefully.

Americans desire monarchy more than anyone. I discovered this in Washington DC on the night Diana died. I was there for a political science conference; a Brazilian waiter broke the news over a late dinner, and he had to repeat it three times before I believed him. I then sat in the lobby of the Sheraton until four in the morning, watching CNN try to assemble the story from scraps while respectable, indeed some world-famous, political theorists wept openly around me. The network’s instinct, in the absence of a court of its own, was to ask Tom Cruise for comment. A republic in mourning reaches for the Hollywood aristocracy, which is the only one it has.

The reason is that politics runs on fiction, and there is no unleaded alternative. Hobbes knew this: the state is an artificial man animated by an “Artificial Soul”, and what keeps the many obedient to the few is not force but opinion and imagination, or perhaps just fancy — the stories we seem to need to keep telling. The question is never whether we live by fictions but which ones, and whether we know it. The British monarchy is a fiction that insists it is a fact: as recently as 2023, a 74-year-old man was anointed with holy oil behind a screen while Handel played, and Parliament looked on as if this were normal.

Wallace Stevens dreamed of a supreme fiction — a fiction we know to be a fiction and believe in anyway, with our eyes open. A republic worth having would be exactly that: a crownless constitution held together not by sacred oil but by the revisable consent of people who know they made it up and might therefore make it better. Whether human beings can be governed that way — whether we can live without kings and queens — is an open question, and the evidence of the past decade is not encouraging. We seem to want thrones the way we want sugar, and the diet versions fool nobody.

Meanwhile, the play resumes. Harry comes home like Orestes, though with more limited plans, one hopes, for the family reunion. Like Hamlet, he is called back to Elsinore by a ghost, and his ghost has been visible for nearly 30 years, on tea towels and old mugs. There will be school runs and security disputes and a reconciliation with the crowned father reported by the very newspapers whose destruction Harry has sworn. Nobody gets out of the house. The best you can negotiate is a room of your own in it.

Monarchy, in the end, is not the oil, the orb or the man in the golden coach. It is a stranger weeping on public transport for a woman she never met. Can we live without kings and queens? The truth is, we have never seriously tried.

What did Charles know? The protest was the work of Republic, a pressure group whose aim is the abolition of the British monarchy. In a statement issued later that day, the organization’s head, Graham Smith, said that “it’s inconceivable that Charles knew nothing about allegations against Andrew”. Though the King stripped his brother of various baubles last year, culminating in the loss of his prince title, a cloud of suspicion lingers; the Palace has had to deny that Charles personally contributed to the £12 million settlement paid to the late Virginia Giuffre, who alleged that Jeffrey Epstein trafficked her to the former Duke of York for sex. 

The Andrew scandal has brought about the monarchy’s most exacting test since the death of Diana, but the Windsors’ future may not lie in their own hands. Instead, it depends on the whim of their subjects. After France got in early by lopping off the head of Louis Capet in 1793, a wave of European countries abolished their respective monarchies over the course of the 20th century. For Russia, it took a revolution; Italy and Greece settled for democratic votes on the matter. Republicanism has never been a sufficiently popular position in Britain for a referendum to seem imminent. Yet Britain may still join the ranks of republics, for public opinion is steadily turning on the Royals. Even worse for the Windsors, the trend shows signs of acceleration on both the Left and the Right. 

 “Make some noise for the arrest of Prince Andrew!” Four days earlier, the new Roundheads were gathered in the shadow of Nelson’s Column to celebrate Republic Day 2026. Compère Eshaan Akbar was attempting to rally the hundred or so protesters, who, in response, offered half-hearted whoops, unsure whether to boo the disgraced duke or cheer his downfall. Among the ubiquitous yellow “Not my King” placards were tote bags declaring that “The only kings and queens we need are drag.” An elderly man held in one hand the Irish republican Starry Plough banner, in the other a sign blaming His Majesty for the 1972 Bloody Sunday massacre. One girl, no older than 11, wielded a placard reading: “Save foxes, hunt the King”. A young man dressed as Jesus, barefoot and wearing a realistic-looking crown of thorns, enthusiastically waved a Palestinian flag.

On the evidence of this rally, which was followed by a march on Buckingham Palace, the anti-royal movement had been subsumed into the “Omnicause”. Akbar introduced a musical interlude from Nasty Fishmonger, a four-piece band who play “fist-raising hardcore folk”. They had traveled, naturally, from Bristol. Towards the end of their set, their guitarist shouted: “Down with the Crown, free Palestine, free Iran, free Ukraine and free yourselves.” Robin Wells of Fossil Free London followed them on to stage, where she railed against the broader “polycrisis” of war, climate and the cost of living. 

Linking Buckingham Palace to the atrocities taking place in Gaza might seem like a stretch, until one recognizes that the prevailing depiction of Charles on sections of the British Left is as an imperialist scion. “I don’t know if you know what the Royals did in South Asia,” Akbar said. “It wasn’t good.” He welcomed to the stage the breakfast-show commentator Narinder Kaur, who devoted much of her speech to the “theft” of the Koh-i-Noor diamond from a “10-year-old Sikh king”. She took a surprising jab at “Charles II” for paying off Epstein victims, a hitherto underacknowledged failing of the Merry Monarch. 

Otto English went even further back in time to attack the institution. “Henry VIII was a mass murderer who killed two of his wives,” cried the author. “That gets brushed aside like it’s nothing.” Charles, by virtue of his royal office, has inherited these crimes. The Omnicause, on current form, is the future of activism, bringing together a string of social-justice issues which cohere into a simplified worldview. The monarchy’s ancient crimes, according to this view, map neatly onto present-day racism and wars of expansion, and maybe there’s even room for some protesting about fossil fuels there too.

In The Enchanted Glass, his 1988 study of the monarchy, the Scottish historian Tom Nairn observed that Britain’s “real distinction was to lose an empire without trauma”, suggesting that the eventual move towards a republic would play out similarly. Yet imperial trauma has become a greater threat to the monarchy in the generation since Nairn’s book was published. Caribbean governments have demanded reparations and apologies from the King for his ancestors’ role in the transatlantic slave trade, while support for the monarchy is considerably lower among ethnic-minority Britons than it is across the UK as a whole. At the Republic march, the Nigerian-born writer Kelechi Okafor took the stage to make accusations of imperial displacement: “Because Britain was there, I am here.” 

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Rupert Lowe's Powellite revolution

By Rob Lownie

Not even the King’s noted climate advocacy is a point in his favor for Republic and its supporters. “Charles is a hypocrite,” Graham Smith told me as we walked down the Mall later in the day. “He has one of the biggest carbon footprints in the country.” For others present, the monarch was interchangeable with the Right-wing populists in Parliament. “Especially with Reform winning all those seats,” Akbar said of the previous day’s local election results, “we need to challenge privilege.” 

But are the populists of Reform loyal to Charles? At surface level, support for the monarchy remains high among Right-wingers. According to last year’s British Social Attitudes survey, 82% of Conservative voters and 77% of Reform UK supporters back the Firm. Reform’s “policy brain”, Danny Kruger, told an event last month that the monarchy, far from being mere “ceremonial flummery”, truly “matters to the common life of our country”. On St George’s Day this year, as part of a series of patriotic education initiatives, Reform pledged that, under a Nigel Farage government, every state-funded school in England will have a portrait of the King in “an official communal space”. Another Reform MP, the somewhat blunter Lee Anderson, has previously encouraged republican campaigners to “emigrate”. 

Yet the conservative tradition of reverence for institutions is now in conflict with a new emotional current on the Right. A hybrid of progressivism and liberal proceduralism, many Right-wingers now believe, has taken over public bodies and cornerstones of British culture. The Civil Service, the National Trust, the museum sector: all victims, it would seem, of Lanyard Britain. Charles’s critics on the Right argue that he has taken the Crown further into this “woke” territory.

According to this critique, the Crown’s stated political neutrality is a lie. Since ascending the throne, Charles has pushed for climate ententes with France, lobbied Nvidia’s Jensen Huang about AI regulation, and held meetings with European politicians against the backdrop of his widely reported discomfort with Brexit. The role permits the monarch, as Bagehot wrote, “the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, the right to warn”. Do the King’s actions fall within these bounds?

Such concerns predate the King’s reign. In the Eighties, the ex-minister Norman Tebbit sarcastically suggested that Charles’s sympathy for Britain’s unemployed might derive from his own job status, also warning the heir to the throne against proposing “socialist” solutions to urban problems. For many years, the late Queen’s eldest son characterized himself as a “dissident” working, by way of those notorious spidery memos, against the cynical machinations of Whitehall. A few months before his mother’s death, while the Tories were still in power, Charles called the mooted Rwanda scheme “appalling”. Farage, the man who may yet become Britain’s prime minister, has called Charles an “eco-loony” and labeled his views on climate change “stupid”.

Nevertheless, in the last decades of Elizabeth II’s reign, Right-wing arguments for British republicanism were rare. Only a few Conservative MPs — such as Ken Clarke, George Walden and Anthony Beaumont-Dark — were willing to criticize the Royal Family. Right-of-center newspapers, for all their lurid coverage of toe-sucking and tampon role-play and “Squidgy”, were not inclined to mount substantive challenges on the institution of monarchy. Even Rupert Murdoch, a lifelong Republican, largely played ball.  

Now, however, there are more overt stirrings of dissent on the British Right. Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain project has a distinctly Cromwellian bent, as evidenced by the name of the party’s exclusive members’ club and the leader’s much-mourned pet dog. Restore generates much of its policy from what has loosely been termed the online Right — by no means a unified bloc, but nonetheless an influence on national Right-wing thought. Mainstream conservative commentary often follows the lead of online-Right trends and coinages: neologisms such as “Yookay” and “Boriswave” have transitioned seamlessly, if at a delay of a few months, from X to the pages of the Telegraph. If we can assume that the bugbears of this subculture tend to make it eventually into the briefing notes of Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch, we should take heed of what the cohort is saying about the future of the monarchy. 

In March, a pseudonymous contributor to an influential Substack, Pimlico Journal, made a case for Right-wing republicanism, accusing the King of “multicultural paternalism” and the explicit promotion of “diversity” in his speeches. Elizabeth II, meanwhile, “never saw it fit to comment on the systemic sexual abuse of white British girls by Pakistani rape gangs”. The piece stated that the monarchy was “not just indifferent to, but actively complicit in the obfuscation of crimes against our country and its people of the most serious nature”. Even if one overlooks the ideological biases of individual rulers, the author suggested, “to conflate dynastic patriotism with British nationhood is a grievous political mistake”. 

For J’Accuse, another popular Substack on the Right, the Crown “has been explicitly part of the center-left establishment in Britain for decades”. This has become entrenched under “Woke King Chuck”, whose coronation was “an orgy of diversity and other woke crap”. Where Left-wing Republic campaigners consider the King an avatar of imperial plunder and oppression, the anti-monarchists of the online Right see him as a hapless facilitator of postcolonial surrender. A 2023 J’Accuse article posited that if he were to repatriate colonial-era objects from British collections, it would be an “egregious offense against the British people”. According to this line of thought, “the jewels of Empire are not Chuck’s to apologize for or give away”, as “they belong to the nation”. 

Could a referendum on the monarchy take place during a future Reform or Conservative government? As we walked towards Admiralty Arch, a few steps ahead of a 15-foot papier-mâché dinosaur (Republic’s mascot, Chuck the Rex) and a few behind a man shouting into a megaphone that the Metropolitan Police is full of paedophiles, I put this to Graham Smith. “If the public feeling is there,” he answered, pointing to the 1999 Australian referendum on becoming a republic, which was introduced by John Howard’s Right-wing government. British republicanism doesn’t have to be a unified movement to succeed. For Smith, and for the other protesters on the march, the process towards abolition seemed inevitable. 

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Britain needs King Charles the Weird

By Aris Roussinos

Since the King is 77 years old and has been treated for cancer, focus has turned, unsurprisingly, to the line of succession. Prince William consistently ranks among the most popular members of the Royal Family, and is held up by his defenders as a modernizing influence on the dusty Windsor set-up. Yet when Republic’s activists held up banners reading “What did you know?”, the implication was that the current Prince of Wales has also been guilty through his silence. William is far more political than criticisms of his lack of intellectual curiosity might indicate. In 2021, his allies briefed the press that he felt uncomfortable about the late Queen’s acquiescence to Boris Johnson’s 2019 request to prorogue Parliament. William, they insisted, would “robustly challenge” his prime ministers once he reached the throne. If so, trouble may loom.

But time is not on William’s side. According to polling from earlier this year, only 23% of Britons aged 18-24 support the monarchy. There is little sign that this cohort will become more reverent with age, as support for the Crown only rises to 28% for the 25-34 age group. If Charles’s liberal platitudes are off-putting for Right-wing voters, they equally count for nothing with young progressives who see only hypocrisy in his calls for a fairer world. Immigration-induced demographic changes are also creating a population with less keenly felt ties to the Royal Family. When pride in, or even knowledge of, a shared past is evaporating, what hope does the man on the postage stamps have?

Anti-Windsor feeling can build gradually, and then gradually some more, until, finally and almost noiselessly, the Royal Family ceases to serve as a national ossature. In 2021, Barbados cut ties with the British Crown. The then-Prince Charles, speaking at the ceremony as guest of honor, decried the “appalling atrocity of slavery” and told attendees: “I have heard your voice in the world grow louder.” Other voices will accumulate. Jamaica, independent since 1962, has taken steps since Charles’s accession to become a republic. The Prime Minister of the Bahamas has proposed a referendum on the monarchy. Belize has removed Elizabeth II’s face from its banknotes.

After the Caribbean nations, Australia may decide to hold another vote on its ties to the royals. In an age of Quebec nationalism and resistance to foreign powers, Canada could follow. The Windsors’ kingdom will shrink, leaving Britain as the last major redoubt.

When the real world threatens to close in, the royals retreat into ceremony. On Wednesday morning, as the royal carriage trundled down the Mall, through the hail, a crowd of tourists looked on. They didn’t cheer the monarch, only exchanging murmurs of curiosity. Which one of the figures through the rain-flecked window was Charles? Did he wave? But, before they could answer, the procession had moved on. All that remained was what the royal horses had left behind. The show over, the visitors walked away from Buckingham Palace and towards the next museum on their list.

There would have been a word or two about the importance of community spirit, along with the recklessly controversial proposition that peace is to be preferred to war. Those who have behaved heroically in the past year would have been commended as an inspiration to us all. There would also have been praise for people who serve those less fortunate than themselves, punctuated by a few irritable comments about “this stinking autocue”. People enduring hardship would have been exhorted to persevere in their misery. Kindness and tolerance would have been elevated over conflict and brutality. There might even have been a mention of homelessness, though not of its social causes, or of antisemitism, but not of the fact that massacring Palestinians in their thousands doesn’t help in laying this monstrosity to rest.

The trouble with speeches by figureheads is that the moment they say anything definite they’re likely to be divisive. To avoid splitting the nation into warring factions, you have to keep your pronouncements as bland and vacuous as possible. The Pope, for example, has just denounced war, which isn’t likely to send many generals into a blind panic. Perhaps the King would do better simply to sit there nodding and smiling for five minutes, with the odd wave of the hand or twitch of his bat-like ears.

Or perhaps the whole concept of the speech should be overhauled so that it becomes a practical report on the nation. Charles might point out that two or three potholes still need filling in in Lower Staughton Street in Derby, and that St. Swithin’s primary school in Abergavenny could do with a few more slates on its roof. There’s still a petty thief on the loose in Beeston, Nottinghamshire, and a Mr Worthing of East Grinstead admirably resisted the temptation to ride his bike through a red light. All of this would be unbelievably boring. But so is the speech at present. And at least it would be saying something.

Why do we need a monarch? To symbolize the unity of the nation, some would argue. But the nation isn’t united, and nor should it be. People who are being ripped off and exploited shouldn’t reconcile themselves with their exploiters simply in the name of their shared nationhood. Teachers and pupils in schools which can’t afford to mend the roof shouldn’t feel solidarity with managers thinking of selling one of their several sports fields to a property developer. The idea of national unity is far too convenient for the minuscule elite who actually rule the country. If the King symbolizes the unity of the nation, then it is a bogus one. Most appeals to unity are attempts to displace attention from divisions rather than tackle them. The royals are a family, so the argument goes, and so is the nation. As a conscientious father, the King loves all his children equally, and is prepared to make a handsome profit out of any of them at all.

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By Terry Eagleton

Nations are abstract phenomena, in the sense that nobody has ever clapped eyes on one or taken one for a walk, so it’s arguable that they need some tangible incarnation to persuade people that they exist. (Jesus Christ is supposed to have served this role for God.) And this is what the monarch provides. But so did Hitler. Countries can get along perfectly well without seeing a particular individual as incarnating their very essence. Nobody asks this of the banks or the railways. We continue to shop at Tesco even though there is no Mr Tesco to make us feel that buying a bunch of bananas is more than just a sordidly commercial affair. Tesco don’t fall apart because they have no figurehead to signify their unity. Besides, if there were a King Tesco it would have to be an individual, and the problem with that, as the royal family abundantly shows, is that the defects of the individual are always at risk of undermining the symbolic role he or she performs. King Tesco might turn out to hobnob with pedophiles or sell the possibility of an interview with his partner to a fake journalist for an eye-watering amount of cash.

The best way to avoid this problem is to select individuals for this role who are as boring and low-profile as possible. Kate Middleton fits this bill, as a demure, excessively well-behaved daughter of the Home Counties without an unconventional view in her head, as does her colorless spouse. Downplaying yourself has the advantage of turning yourself into a blank screen on which other people can project their fantasies; but if you press this blankness too far you end up with the likes of the former Prince Andrew, one of whose more minor defects is to look like everyone’s bank manager. The late Queen maintained a reasonable balance between individual personality and symbolic role by intimating that she had quite a bit of the former but was muting it in the name of the latter. She did this, of course, as a form of service to the nation, which these days is the chief rationale for royalty as a whole. It’s a scandalous piece of hypocrisy. As that other scion David Dimbleby lately revealed in his TV series, the Crown pumps an enormous amount of money out of the country, not least in the Duchies, only to present this rip-off as a selfless service. Cutting the odd ribbon is what it gives in return for this barefaced plunder. The King’s swollen retinue of cooks, valets, shirt-buttoners, trouser-zippers, senior sock adjusters, assistant armpit fresheners and so on is all in the service of the common people.

But the royals were always likely to run into headlong collisions with the modern age. One can see this conflict as a shift between two different meanings of the word “cool”. Before Princess Diana arrived on the scene, “cool” in royal circles meant emotionally restrained, as with the kind of public-school off-handedness which remains just an inch or two short of outright insolence. From Diana onwards, however, “cool” came to mean what Robbie Williams would mean by it. Charles is cool in the old-fashioned sense, whereas Harry is cool in the postmodern sense. That culture had begun to penetrate the inner sanctum of traditionalist Britain, and the path was prepared by the likes of Sarah Ferguson, who as a personality has about as much in common with the late Queen as Danny Dyer has with Jeremy Irons. The monarchy needed urgently to modernize, yet modernizing would nearly prove its downfall. All families, however sealed to outsiders, have a chink in their armor known as marriage, through which all sorts of potentially deadly viruses can enter. Had the royals but known it, a particularly lethal strain of infection was on its way across the Atlantic in the form of Meghan Markle.

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Or, to put it another way, sham show business is now up against the formidable resources of the real thing. Real jewels contend with fake ones designed for the big screen. One kind of glamor and mystique is in the process of ousting another. It’s a battle between the values of Holyrood and those of Hollywood, and the latter has a lot more wealth, power and influence than the former. There’s more than the royal family at stake in this confrontation. Britain survived the loss of its Empire with its traditionalist values still pretty much intact. If it had lost Cecil Rhodes, it could still boast of Richard Dimbleby, father of David and suave, unctuous, eminently reasonable voice of the nation.

As for the younger Dimbleby, he’s surely living proof that nepotism isn’t always a form of corruption. No doubt his surname helped him into the BBC, but once established he proved himself at least the equal of his father. Now, though, even settled traditions like the Dimbleby dynasty are under threat from the eternal Now of a consumerist culture — with a series of recent assaults on the BBC just one sign of this onslaught. If it weren’t for his ample girth, Dimbleby would be turning over in his commentator’s box.

There are global forces at work behind this conflict. In a roundabout sense, the Harry and Meghan spectacle is a consequence of Margaret Thatcher. Her reign marked the beginning of the demise of traditional, one-nation Toryism in the face of a deep-rooted capitalist crisis. Yet it’s on this paternalist ideology that the monarchy depends. Throughout Europe, the kind of solid, long-established, cultivated bourgeoisie that Thomas Mann or Marcel Proust would have recognized and applauded has given way to an army of sharks, grifters, financial thugs and high-class swindlers. In royal circles, greed is no longer simply a matter of quietly siphoning off common resources by long-approved procedures but of selling yourself to media corporations. Nothing could symbolize this whole dismal situation more aptly than electing a New York real estate mogul to the most powerful position in the world. There was a time when the political class kept a certain discreet distance from the big capital in the name of which, by and large, it governs. That age is about as unlikely to return as King Arthur.

The split between traditional paternalism and capitalist acquisition runs right down the personality of Prince Harry. A man who remains the very epitome of the service ethic — loyal, honorable, full of military ardor and a passion for the so-called underprivileged — is also the helpless captive of Hollywood. If he’s an enemy of the media, he’s also an exploiter of it. His only alternative to the hidebound conservatism of the Palace is the commodity culture of postmodernity. There’s no middle ground between the stuffed shirts and the stars. Those who, like Jacob Rees-Mogg, are both city financiers and country squires don’t realize that in the long run the former role is scuppering the latter one.

One argument in favor of the monarchy is that it provides a thread of continuity in an otherwise fragmented world. Yet the very concept of continuity has been under fire for several decades now, in contrast to the notion of self-fashioning. Rather than drawing your identity from the past, you make yourself up as you go along. The idea of having only one self is as absurd as having only one handbag. Contemporary culture claims this is just the way identity is. It isn’t going to fall apart because we abolish the monarchy or the House of Lords. It’s in pieces already, and that’s simply how it works. The past is just a great storehouse of styles and images which we can draw on when we need to, but which provides us with no kind of moral guidance. This is a scandalous matter for the political Left, which as Leon Trotsky remarked has always lived in tradition. It’s simply that our traditions are those of the Jacobins, Chartists, Suffragettes and hunger marchers, rather than the Charge of the Light Brigade and the Changing of the Guard.

In the wildflower-rich strip of land behind, past a lazy stream, enclosed by rickety fences, basks a vegetable plot where local children are taught the rudiments of organic gardening by the King’s local foundation. Rocks mark each row, painted with the names of their apprentice cultivators: Ioana, Cosmin, Anastasia. As a placard declares, “Over time, it is hoped that the children will acquire many other skills that are very useful in life, for example punctuality, perseverance, working as a team, being patient and eating more healthily.”

Viscri, where Charles acquired the derelict Saxon farmhouse nearly 20 years ago, is, as Clive Aslet observes in a new book, King Charles III: 40 Years of Architecture, the King’s “Garden of Eden”, an “Arcadia, which represents everything that developed countries have lost, vulnerable to thoughtless modernization of the kind that has done so much to wreck the British countryside over the past 100 years”. It is easy to be cynical, from a distance, at our King playing, if not quite peasant, then prosperous Saxon farmer in his Transylvanian retreat from modernity, like a benign improving landlord, the very model of enlightened feudalism. But in Viscri itself, it is hard not to be swept away by the romance of it. I came here, in the gap between the two rounds of Romania’s presidential election, to write an amusingly dismissive review of Aslet’s glossily-printed, slightly fawning encomium to regal good taste. I leave it half-wishing the King could more strongly exert his will on his own benighted kingdom, ruling the YooKay with a rod of (exquisitely hand-forged, artisanal) iron.

As Aslet notes — in a book whose gentle, cultured tone, befitting Country Life’s longstanding architectural critic, occasionally flares into a pleasingly reactionary dismissal of modern Britain — Charles’s worldview is “based on the premise that the world has taken a wrong turn. We ignore the wisdom of our ancestors,” and instead “have been busily creating dystopias […] whose social consequences will come back to plague us.” Yet, Aslet notes, “there remain places, even in Europe, which are as God intended”. Viscri, for both men, is one of those places: a model of the good life that stands in direct rebuke to Britain’s own “fallen world”.

And indeed, Viscri is a delight: hens and geese waddle along the unpaved central street, sheep graze outside the pastel-painted farmhouses, gypsies trundle fresh-cut hay back from their outlying fields in clip-clopping horse-carts. But it is not removed from modernity either: well-heeled, stout-booted French and German tourists of a certain age patrol the village, snapping portraits of headscarved peasants bringing home their cows, and eating produce from local farms to smooth jazz covers of 2020s pop hits in the pricy village restaurant, beside young hipsters up from Bucharest. The ducks swimming in the brook-cum-drainage ditch may look timeless: but the water runs into the brand-new reed-bed filtration system — Romania’s newest sewage treatment plant — paid for by the King’s largesse. The air hums with the buzz of chainsaws and the whine of trimmers, not the swish of scythes; within the enclosed compounds, families no doubt watch television, argue, get angry on the internet.

It is not a retreat from modernity, but an alternate, even postmodern version of the present: in some ways, a gentle archeofuturism. The King’s aura has brought money into the village: over the tinkling of cowbells, I hear a plummy Englishman tell his guide, “Do you know, on the way up we walked past a chap in a car I went to university with.” But instead of replacing farming, as is the case in much of Greece or Spain, the new tourism income complements it, making the old ways more profitable. The villagers mine their heritage to achieve a prosperity unusual in rural Romania, without cosplaying their traditions. They are not forced into cities, or to the slums of Western Europe, but stay at home, free to remain who they are. As Aslet remarks, “This could provide a better means of improving the economy than conventional growth strategies, which would destroy local diversity and repeat mistakes now being rued by other countries.”

But what of Charles’s own kingdom? In a book primarily about architecture, Aslet is correct to observe that, after decades of mockery, Charles has effectively won the argument. Both the Labour government and Conservatives pay lip service, at least, to the ideas of “gentle density”, walkable communities where a social mix of homes pay homage to local vernacular traditions. Whatever their minor flaws, the developments of Poundbury and Nansledan are infinitely preferred, even by their critics, to the mean-proportioned “Deano Boxes” which blight the land, an unsightly rash far worse than any single carbuncle. The statement architecture of the New Labour and Cameron era, clad in gaudy and combustible paneling, is firmly out of fashion, like the soulless, globalizing worldview behind it. Ornament, in the muted form of the decorative brickwork and glazed Art Deco tiling that decorate expensive new urban developments, is back in.

Even Classicism, in a sober, knowing form, has resumed its place in the sun. Through his London Housing Design Guide, mandating the austere, brick-clad form of stripped classicism that has now become the capital’s inoffensively tasteful 21st-century vernacular, Boris Johnson at least achieved something to partially offset, when history weighs his soul in the balance, his many sins. The architectural journals today applaud works closer to Charles’ tastes of the Eighties than the fashions of the era. As Aslet correctly observes, “The social housing that is now being designed by Peter Barber and Mikhail Riches is infinitely better than the generality of that produced during the post-Second World War decades; it is impossible to quantify how much the Prince’s involvement may have contributed to this improvement but his intervention undoubtedly helped the process along.”

How far we have come: but it is nowhere near far enough. As always, architecture provides a metaphor for other, deeper woes, and the “wrong turn” a broken, demoralized Europe took after the disastrous Twentieth Century shattered our civilization’s confidence. Before the war, Aslet notes, ostensibly about architecture, “Modernism had been a cult, foreign in origin and patronized by intellectuals. After the War, it swept the board.” Architectural Modernism was “not so much a style in architecture as revealed truth”, presided over by a priestly caste certain that the old truths were not just outdated but immoral, doomed to retreat before the advancing tide of progress. The timeworn ways were out, and a Utopian vision was in, ushering the British people into its cold and inhumane framework, whether or not they wished, and whether or not it actually worked.

The nadir, for traditionalists, came during Charles’ own annus horribilis of 1997, when “a ‘New Labor’ government under Tony Blair had come in, with a mission to destroy tradition wherever it was found — in the House of Lords, in rural sports, in organizations such as the Boy Scouts — and rebrand Britain as a young country, under the banner of Cool Britannia.” We live today with the consequences of Blair’s worldview, which increasingly looks as outdated socially — and as rejected by the British people — as its architectural manifestations. As Aslet notes, Charles “had often been right on the big things, making the correct judgment call years before the rest of the world had caught onto them”.

And not just in architecture. Aslet’s book often veers towards court gossip, tracking who is in and out of the King’s favor with a courtier’s amusingly bitchy eye, at a level of cumulative detail that may make the general reader’s eyes glaze over. But one passage — and we assume Aslet includes it for a reason — relates the downfall of Charles’ urban renewal champion, Rod Hackney, for too frankly revealing the King’s inner fears. Hackney’s sin was that he “shared views expressed by the Prince during a private dinner on the train after the Handsworth riots, during which four people died: ‘He is very worried that when he becomes king there will be ‘no go’ areas in the inner cities and that the minorities will be alienated from the rest of the country.’” Charles’ secret anxieties of 40 years ago anticipated current discourse. Yet, stung by fears of media criticism — for having arrived at now widely-held conclusions too early — the King abandoned public interventions in Britain’s urban realm for the safer territories of traditional drawing and Islamic art, “judged to be safe spaces for him to move in”, and of course Transylvania, where the improving hand of a royal patron was welcomed rather than snubbed. Yet Britain has now caught up with Charles — but has Charles kept up with his people?

There is a recent tendency on the British Right, which has entered a period of revolutionary ferment, to reject “Chuck the Woke”. Excessively focused on defusing republican sentiment on the Left — now rapidly becoming a historical irrelevance, across our shared civilization, due to its self-destroying adherence to nonsensical Utopian schemes — the King’s retinue have, it seems, neglected to assuage the growing anger on the politically far more vital Right. It is an anger born of disappointment, even betrayal, more than anything: rather than being an influential voice against the dysfunction of modern Britain, Charles is seen to be captured by it, even celebrating it. There is an old Eastern European saying, which squares the revolutionary anger of the peasantry with their love for their distant monarch, that “the king has bad advisors”: Charles may do well to reflect on it. Much of the King’s appeal has always been his removal from the mood of the times: yet he must be careful the angry mood does not sweep him and his dynasty away.

In Viscri, Charles found an escape from the modern UK. It is hard to blame him, yet it is Britain and its people he should devote himself to first. Instead of hiding from the UK’s dysfunction, surely he should find the courage to challenge it once again. Transylvania’s folk culture is ancient, vibrant and worth preserving from the homogenizing pressures of a crass and ugly modernity, yet so is the culture of his own folk. This “most precious and fragile diversity”, as the King phrases it, is buckling under a worldview that has “suck[ed] out the character, charm and spiritual meaning from every pore of our human experience”. What Charles has achieved in Transylvania is magical, yet it is hard not to leave Viscri with something approaching envy. Don’t his people deserve some of this magic too?

Aslet aims to explain the process by which the King has ceased to intervene in the nation’s affairs. “As one insider puts it,” he says (one wonders who this royal insider could possibly be), “he exists within a machine that is beautifully engineered to suck out all the energy from him. Setting up initiatives to do good and bring people together are fine as long as they don’t go too far. If they do, the machine swings into action to ensure the effort is dissipated.” The King is, we know, unwell, though how much time he has left to bring his vision of a better world into reality is still a matter of whispered speculation. There is something mythic, perhaps, in the ailing king presiding over an unhappy and disordered kingdom. Yet in Britain, just as Charles once wrote of Transylvania, “People are yearning for that sense of identity and belonging and meaning.”

As Prince of Wales, Charles saw much that was wrong with Britain, and foresaw remedies that have only now become mainstream. The times have changed, and so have his people, in a way that may not be apparent in royal seclusion. An analogy can be made, perhaps, with the youth revival in the Catholic church, rejecting postwar pieties in favor of the sacred mysteries of tradition. In the time remaining him as King, if he can focus the love and care applied to backwoods Romania to his own people, re-enchanting his own realm, he might yet claim a place in history as Charles the Great.

The Labour equivalent of such a figure was John Prescott, a man who supported the illegal invasion of Iraq and the shackling of the trade unions, but who did so in a Yorkshire accent which proclaimed him a man of the people. He drove a Jaguar and was touchy about his status, but who cared when he could down a pint of bitter in one go? The British love a lord, but they love a character even more, and Prescott was nothing if not that. Forthright, bellicose and bloody-minded, he catered for the British admiration for those who refuse to be anything but themselves.

English individualism is very different from the American variety. Individualism in the United States is a strenuous, muscular affair, a matter of conquest and dominion, of expanding one’s powers and flexing the will. In England, it’s a more a matter of lovable eccentricity, of doing what you like in quiet defiance of social convention. Individualists in English culture don’t blazon their name on high-risers but stand in pubs with a parrot on their shoulder (I used to know an Oxford don who did just that). They run the London Marathon dressed as washing machines or share their bed with a chimpanzee. If we feel affection for these oddballs, it’s because they vicariously fulfil our own desire to flout social convention while being too timid to do so. It was why so many voters warmed to Boris Johnson, another political jester. It’s also one of the reasons why we like toddlers, who are incapable of doing the conventional thing and are just ruthlessly, spontaneously themselves. The modern mantra “I like to be myself” is appealing because in a world of images and fantasises, so many people feel that they can’t be, or that they don’t have a definite enough identity to express. On the other hand, Saddam Hussein liked to be himself as well. Being themselves is some people’s problem.

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Why we still believe in gold

By Terry Eagleton

If the political establishment indulges such idiosyncratic figures, greeting their antics with a patronising smile, it’s not least because it knows they are basically harmless. The jester may beat the monarch around the head with a bladder of dried peas, but that’s what he’s paid to do. As Shakespeare puts it in Twelfth Night, there’s no harm in a licensed Fool. Prescott’s role was to give Tony Blair political cover. While Blair and his cronies invited the rich to get even richer, the bruiser from Hull was at hand with his blustering, no-nonsense, syntactically chaotic style to make such policies sound as authentically socialist as Keir Hardie. It was as though a creature from a working-class that was rapidly becoming extinct had somehow managed to survive into the modern age, like a wolf boy discovered deep in the forest.

Prescott was so much a one-off, as a solitary plebeian character among a bunch of suave public schoolboys, that (ironically enough) he lent credence to the middle-class liberal myth that the working-class has all but disappeared. Not only the working class, in fact, but social class as such. The dressed-down mateyness of the modern office, where you call the boss Pettikins or Lover Boy, is part of a decentralised, network-based, team-oriented, information-rich, open-neck-shirted capitalism very far from the old social hierarchies and exclusions. Leftists, however, aren’t particularly concerned with whether the CEO wears sneakers to work. They are more struck by the fact that (as The Communist Manifesto predicted) capital today is concentrated in fewer hands than ever before, while globally speaking the ranks of the destitute and dispossessed continue to swell. Class is about property and power, not about whether you pronounce “basin” to rhyme with “bison”. Far from being an outdated notion peddled by a diehard far-Left, it is the dreary reality of everyday life for most citizens of the world. The fact that Etonians learn how to slur their speech, or that the European aristocracy are honoured to hobnob with Mick Jagger, has signally failed to usher in the classless society.

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Elite privilege isn't a product of wealth

By Clive Hamilton

On a global scale, nothing could be further from the truth than the claim that class no longer matters. Most of the mega-cities of the south of the planet are stinking slums rife with disease and overcrowding — slum-dwellers represent one third of the global urban population. The urban poor more generally constitutes at least half of the world’s population. Alongside the garment makers and casual labourers there are hawkers, hustlers, sex workers, food and drink sellers and rickshaw pullers, which is to say an immense layer of unemployed or sporadically employed workers. Taken together, they from the fastest growing social group on the planet. In Latin America, this informal economy now employs over half the workforce.

The original proletariat wasn’t the blue-collar, male, working-class. It was lower-class women in ancient society. The word “proletariat” is derived from the Latin word for producing offspring, meaning those who were too poor to serve the state except by producing potential labourers from their wombs. They had nothing to yield up but the fruit of their bodies. Today, in an era of Third World sweatshops and agricultural labour, the typical proletarian is still a woman. White-collar work, which in Victorian times was performed mostly by lower-middle-class men, is nowadays largely the reserve of working-class women, and it was also women who staffed the huge expansion in shop and clerical work which followed the decline of heavy industry after the First World War.

The concept of social class is linked above all to the name of Karl Marx, who writes of the industrial manual workers he calls the proletariat. Yet as a citizen of Victorian England, Marx was well aware that such workers didn’t constitute the majority of the working-class. By far the largest group of wage labourers in his time were domestic servants, most of whom were women. Even when Britain was famed as the workshop of the world, manufacturing workers were outnumbered by domestic servants and agricultural labourers. So the working class is a much broader category than men who wield hammers or operate machines. What has declined on a global scale is industrial employment. But that doesn’t mean that the working class has disappeared along with it. The middle-class liberals will have to think again.

Today, there is a white-collar working-class as well as an industrial one, which includes a great many technical, clerical and administrative workers. Marx himself noted this expansion in his own age, remarking on how industrial capital was constantly drawing more technical and scientific labour into its orbit. When he writes of “general social knowledge becoming a direct productive force”, he anticipates what some would now call the information society. There’s also been an immense growth in the service, information and communications sectors of the economy. None of this, however, has changed the nature of capitalist property relations. It’s also worth recalling that work in the service sector can be just as heavy, dirty and disagreeable as traditional industrial labour. The legendary shift from the industrial to the post-industrial, or from production to consumption, means, among other things, that those who are exploited now work in call centres rather than coal mines. Labels like “service” or “white-collar” serve to obscure the massive differences between, say, airline pilots and hospital porters, or senior civil servants and hotel chambermaids.

In one sense, the working-class is spreading rather than shrinking. As the philosopher John Gray puts it, “The middle classes are rediscovering the condition of assetless economic insecurity that afflicted the 19th century proletariat.” Many of those who used to be labelled lower-middle-class — teachers, social workers, journalists, technicians, middling clerical and administrative officials — have been subject to a relentless process of proletarianisation, stripped of control of their own working conditions and plagued by financial insecurity. The working-class proper then, can be taken to include both manual labourers and the lower levels of white-collar workers. And this constitutes a massive proportion of the world population, estimated by some economists to be around 2 or 3 billion men and women, the working-class seems to have disappeared rather les successfully than Lord Lucan.

From Peterloo to the Eighties miners strike, the treatment of organised labour in Britain has been for the most part a shameful story. Killed, gagged, deported or imprisoned, vilified by the media and denounced as power-hungry demagogues, the leaders of the labour movement have paid dearly over the centuries for their efforts to win decent wages and working conditions. From time to time, some among their ranks have been incorporated by the political establishment so that they may use their inside knowledge of working people to persuade them to back off from such inconvenient demands. When that fails, one can always send in the police horses. John Prescott has been much praised since his death as a bridge and mediator, a canny power-broker and negotiator, all of which is a polite way of saying that he maintained the style of a working-class militant with absolutely none of the substance.

It is difficult to critique this comment. Not just because he is correct, but because it is unclear precisely what he is correct about. Is it the tedious process of each member having to individually express their loyalty to the Crown? Is it the incongruity of members swearing on this book and that book, to this god and that god, or no god at all? Is it the insistence on continuing to pretend that an MP’s allegiance is most fundamentally to an unelected monarch, to the extent that Clive Lewis had to retake his oath for omitting reference to Charles’s “heirs and successors”?

Perhaps all of the above. How many MPs, especially in this parliament, believe this is where their loyalty lies? How many are genuinely willing to preemptively submit to any future head of state so long as they come from the loins of the former?

I am not anti-monarchy in principle. But I am anti-pretence. A monarch with real power, and commanding real loyalty, is not an automatic embarrassment. But the continued ceremonial propping up of the King as a sort of royal taxidermy of what sovereignty once was is hardly a respectable exercise.

The problem is that the farce is two-tiered. The celebrated paradox of our sovereign parliament affirming its allegiance to the sovereign might be understandable — even enjoyable — if it was approached with a due irony. But our elected officials are supposed to act as if their solemn oath bears genuine resemblance to their political ambitions, complete with a reaffirmation under duress of His Majesty’s, well, majesty.

Who believes this? I doubt the King himself could have such a confused ego. One can only wonder how he felt this week during the state opening of parliament, carrying the 12-foot train attached to his gown through his special entrance into parliament and towards his special golden throne. Perhaps he secretly recognises the clunky absurdity of it all, but then “sacred tradition” has such a chokehold on our government that nobody has likely summoned the confidence to inform him that the emperor is wearing silly clothes.

The loyalty is, I am told, less to the King, and more to the venerable English tradition which expressing loyalty to the King represents. This is no defence. It is in fewer words what I am trying to say. Even those who defend this ludicrous extravagance do so not with allegiance to the truth of the oath, but to its utility. They do not actually believe any of it is real, but think that by forcing our politicians to partake in a humiliating ritual of undisguised make-believe we somehow protect something “ineffable” whose upkeep requires it.

Some dissidents, I should recognise, had the respectable gall to protest: SDLP leader Colum Eastwood, called upon to be sworn in, sandwiched the affirmation between “I’ll read out this empty formula in order to represent my constituents, but it’s under protest,” and, “My true allegiance is to the people of Derry and the people of Ireland”. “Thank you very much,” said His Majesty’s clerk.

Clive Lewis, Labour MP for Norwich South, committed to full-scale treason in saying: “I take this oath under protest, and in the hope that one day my fellow citizens will democratically decide to live in a republic. Until that time, I do solemnly, sincerely, and truly declare and affirm that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to His Majesty King Charles, according to law.”

In sincerely declaring loyalty to the King he wishes to see dethroned, Lewis demonstrates before our very eyes the “emptiness” of the formula described by Eastwood. It is, frankly, a joke. If it were taken seriously at all, even by those who administer the requirement, this oath would have been immediately ruled invalid, and Lewis made to renounce his republican ideals or refused his seat in parliament. This would, of course, be an unthinkable political scandal, but such is the unthinking superficiality of the entire pantomime.

Imagine a groom vowing to take a bride as his lawfully-wedded wife, till death do them part, before saying, “Of course, one day I plan to get divorced.” What could we even make of such a contradictory affirmation? It would make a mockery of the entire ceremony, or at least invalidate the oath. On the small matter of electing our parliamentary representatives, however, anything goes, it seems, as long as one goes through the motions.

Not all traditions are worth maintaining. Until 1998, a member wishing to raise a point of order in the lower chamber was required to wear a hat in order to do so: two opera hats were kept on standby for this reason, until a select committee advised abolishing the regulation, saying: “This particular practice has almost certainly brought the House into greater ridicule than almost any other, particularly since the advent of television.”

Well, the advent of television has also thrust the divine mystery of anointed royalty onto our screens. We can now all see from our living rooms what has for centuries been going on inside the perpendicular Gothic palace, and many of us find it impossible to take seriously.

I may be called an iconoclast. Perhaps an arrogant one, too. But I am not the iconoclast. As C.S. Lewis wrote, it is reality which is the greatest of iconoclasts, constantly rubbing up against and thereby shattering our ideals. The monarch is supposed to serve as an apolitical figurehead, transcending vicious politics and providing a unifying ideal for all Britons to identify with. Yet viewership of these pompous ordeals, not to mention our being privy to the family politics of “Megxit” and the pastimes of a certain Duke of York, among other scandals, now makes it difficult to situate this institution above even the vicious, let alone the controversial.

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By Aris Roussinos

The King’s Speech, wrote the BBC on Wednesday, “is written by the Government, and the monarch delivers it in a neutral tone, to avoid any appearance of political support”. This, I suppose, in contrast to his usual enthusiasm and fiery rhetorical flair. The incessant neutrality of our sovereign strikes today less as refreshing and more as limp, and may be both a cause of and response to the fact that now only 62% of the UK population support his continuation as our head of state.

My principal observation on the monarchy has always been this: when I complain about what I see as the illegitimate influence of hereditary authority over what is supposed to be a democratic government — especially when it takes such an expensive and flamboyant form — I am politely informed that the monarchy doesn’t really have any power to speak of anyway, so I shouldn’t be concerned. When I suggest that therefore we should just do away with the whole charade, I am told that the monarchy is somehow integral to the upkeep of British government.

Quite how it is integral, then, eludes me. But perhaps that is the nature of our compromising (patchwork) and ethereal (unwritten) constitution. Maybe it is an archetypal Chesterton’s fence, and those publicly imagining the abolition of the monarchy (which is still illegal, by the way) are making a grave error. If so, then I think a conservative case can be made for “toning down” the extravagance, at least to its politically important elements; retaining them only serves to overdetermine the inevitability of a future United Republic.

Was Corbyn wrong to condemn these bizarre parliamentary procedures? Once asked by BBC Newsnight about those criticising his “scruffy” sartorial standards in the House of Commons, he replied, “It’s not a fashion parade, it’s not a gentlemen’s club, it’s not a bankers institute; it’s a place where the people are represented.” If we wish to believe that this is true, perhaps it’s time to retire at least the golden throne, even if we can’t quite bring ourselves to retire the man who sits on it.

Congress, as the body tasked with making laws and passing budgets, tends to encounter much less scrutiny and judgement. Nearly all citizens can name the president, but many can’t identify their local congressman: and it’s harder to direct blame at someone you don’t know. As a result, the institution has become a carnival-esque arena for all manner of political grandstanders and bomb-throwers. Surely there has to be a better way?

When faced with its own imbalance between executive and legislative prerogative, the English ruling class in 1688 enacted an institutional coup — the Glorious Revolution — and forged a settlement between king and parliament, concentrating the practical powers of government in the latter while confining the former to a lofty but ceremonial role. This entrenched what Walter Bagehot theorised as the distinction between the “efficient” and the “dignified” parts of the constitution. And it has stood the test of time, not just in the sceptred isle but in many of its ex-colonies, where British institutions, not least among them a Westminster-style parliament, have been shown to be conducive to political stability.

This was the model against which the revolutionaries of 1776 had fashioned their constitutional thinking. However, given the dysfunctional lot of their heirs, should Americans consider, if not an outright importation, then at least a creative adaptation of the British model? One year on from King Charles’s coronation, one can easily imagine an America in which the president serves as a symbolic head of state while Congress is granted the responsibilities of a Westminster parliament.

The idea is by no means new. Indeed, no less than the first president George Washington, widely seen as above partisanship, was feted as a semi-monarchical deity, with Alexander Hamilton viewing “Washington as George II and himself as Robert Walpole”. A generation later, in its battle with “King Andrew” Jackson, the opposition Whig Party also sought to emulate the English example by claiming (fruitlessly) that Congress, and not the presidency, should be the primary organ of national policy, as it was with the House of Commons. In the lead-up to the progressive era, a young Woodrow Wilson called outright for an end to the separation of powers in his 1885 treatise Congressional Government, arguing that the changing needs of the nation demanded a streamlined form of government. Later as president, Wilson, along with his rival and predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt, set the stage for the powerful and expansive presidency that came to the fore in the 20th century.

But confronted today with the above problems, how far could the American presidency be reconfigured in the direction of a constitutional monarchy? Rather than try to answer the question in the abstract, we may focus on the last two presidents, Obama and Trump, as hypothetical model office-holders around whose traits the position may be tailored. After all, these two figures, in their own very different ways, have embodied the mystical and, therefore, monarchical aspects of the presidency more than most of its recent occupants.

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By Terry Eagleton

In Obama’s case, it was during the fleeting (and ultimately illusory) “post-racial” moment heralded by his election as the first African American president in 2008, when the nation’s historic divisions appeared to subside: he seemed to be possessed of a halo not unlike Washington’s. In Trump’s case, his monarchical bona fides stems more from the unshakeable bond of loyalty he inspires in his base, which may fairly be described as sultanic in its intensity; though it is also not unlike that which existed between Jackson (scorned as well as a royal autocrat) and his raucous populist coalition. Evidently, the attribute of total impartiality demanded of a purely apolitical head of state, representing the people as a whole, may be too much to ask for in the present American context.

Perhaps, then, the British monarch is less a viable model for this experiment than, say, the ceremonial heads of state in parliamentary republics like Germany, Ireland and India, where presidents are largely non-political but usually arise from the political class and are nominated by parties. If we cannot imagine Obama or Trump as entirely shorn of partisan affiliation, they might, at least, abstract themselves from it once in office, as the German Bundespräsident or Irish Uachtarán are expected to do. But what exactly would US presidents do if they no longer have to govern? Would any chief executive content himself with cutting ribbons and attending funerals: in other words, with becoming like the vice president?

The answer may lie with our hypothetical office-holders, and their respective mystiques. For what truly unites Obama and Trump, despite all their contrasts, is the fact that they have always been far more effective and compelling as celebrities — that is, as generalised cultural fixtures (not unlike the late Queen Elizabeth) — than they ever were as administrators or party leaders.

Trump captured it best in his pre-presidential career: before he staked his brand with one side of the partisan divide and became a politician, he was simply the tough-talking businessman who appeared in tabloids, talk shows, films and reality TV, as he bought up hotels, casinos, an airline, and a football league. Never mind how successful or not these ventures ended up being: for many, he personified the very spirit of American capitalism, in both its vulgar crassness and gilded splendour. The New York billionaire served as exemplar and guru to other glory-seeking entrepreneurs, who saw their own ambitions realised in him.

By the same token, Obama incarnated the promise of American meritocracy, rising from obscurity to the country’s most prestigious institutions, from the Ivy League to the White House: all the while, he wrote eloquent memoirs that read like the highest expressions of that distinct literary subgenre beloved of the American upper middle class, the college admissions essay, and modelled the prospect of social mobility for young Americans of colour. Nowadays, with lucrative Netflix deals, high-profile interview appearances, and gala charity events, this former president has returned to form as a celebrity, in his post-presidential career.

Their profiles, needless to say, appeal to differing sections of the country: Trump is as natural a spokesman for one as Obama is for another. And herein lies the model an American constitutional-republican monarchy could take: ceremonial presidents who can symbolise the hopes and high aspirations of the citizenry — with the caveat that, in these divided times, there are two separate and opposing value sets to be represented.

The imperative of unity may be advanced under this scheme by having the two figures serve together as joint co-monarchs or consuls, as in Ancient Rome or Sparta, with one each for red and blue America. Their roles would be to set the general direction of the national conversation; to guide the governmental process from a removed distance; and to give voice to the concerns of their respective halves of the country, in ways that may still be broadly political but non-partisan.

Though they would be stripped of their direct powers, they could use their moral authority to nudge the parties in certain directions: after all, both Trump and Obama are most useful when they are able to buck their party’s orthodoxies and to better intuit public sentiment as a result, such as when Trump president warned Republicans against cutting entitlements or when Obama advised Democrats to reject the excesses of identity politics. Best of all is when the two are actually able to agree on something, such as the need for public healthcare in America.

Meanwhile, Congress, in this scenario, would be newly empowered with executive as well as legislative duties, meaning its members would have to form ministries, composed of a prime minister and cabinet, and dependent for its existence on the confidence of the lower house. While the Senate would keep the six-year durations of its terms, the House of Representatives would be relieved of its fixed biennial terms: as it is, there are no stakes for individual members, who are free to threaten government shutdowns without fear of losing their seats (or their salaries), but the possibility of parliamentary dissolution for Congresses that fail to pass budgets should make for a more disciplined body that is better able to carry out its constitutional mandate.

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The mythical masculinity of Donald Trump

By Frederick Kaufman

For the same reasons, once members of Congress are entrusted with the responsibility of managing an executive ministerial portfolio — and once the heads of cabinet departments are made directly answerable to the legislature — Americans will have reason to expect far more from their representatives, in terms of both performance and presentation. This alternative Congress would give far less oxygen to the likes of Jim Jordan, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Ilhan Omar. The overall effect should be a more responsive and legible form of government.

In this America, there would be two kinds of elections: a regular partisan one for Congress and another special one for the co-presidency. For the latter, however, our red and blue consuls won’t have to run against each other, since they will be serving side by side. Rather, we may see the two candidates going on the road together à la Lincoln-Douglas, showing up at diners and country fairs, judging pie contests, throwing first pitches, and talking with ordinary people.

If the one formal meeting between Trump and Obama was any indication, this would no doubt make for a most awkward form of political theatre. Yet it would serve as a much-needed civic lesson for Americans, namely that it is worth putting on a good face for one’s fellow citizens, especially those from the other side of the political divide, no matter how maddeningly difficult it may be. After all, in the absence of kings and courtly rituals, it is this decorum — this patriotic artifice — that will, in Bagehot’s words, “preserve and sustain the reverence of the population” for their form of government.

Is William in fact a serial cheater? Has Kate left him? A clumsily edited family photo poured petrol on an already roaring bin-fire: perhaps in fact Kate is in a coma or even dead? Not even her announcement, via video, that she has cancer has convinced the internet that she is alive and well. Instead, the recording has been picked over for signs of AI fakery, and dissected by doctors on CNN. Someone deepfaked Meghan Markle making the same announcement, to prove it can be done. And even those willing to consider the possibility it is real have seized on the announcement for another round of Covid vaccination discourse, optionally seasoned with 5G and chemtrails.

A great deal of online response to the cancer announcement has assumed a public right to know. Fox News applauded her “new transparency”; others, meanwhile, complained at the lack of openness. Why couldn’t they be honest with the public about Kate’s illness? Why did they have to lie?

Behind all these complaints lurks the Royals’ ambivalent stance on a core aspect of contemporary culture: the co-dependent relationship between digital celebrities and their audiences. If the Prince and Princess of Wales seem paradoxically under fire today, at the very moment you’d expect them to elicit maximum public sympathy, it’s because their actions reveal them to be at best grudging participants in this world. The escalating madness of the Kate truthers is, in other words, a punishment for her own clear lack of interest in playing the influencer game.

If we have developed a co-dependent relationship with celebrities, it is a byproduct of our revealed preference for loneliness. Notwithstanding post-liberal nostalgia about bygone times of rootedness and thick interpersonal connections, if that’s how we wanted to live we would still be doing it. We may lament the modern condition of pervasive atomisation, and worry about the one in five under-35s who has one or no close friends. But at some level, we have made a collective decision to abandon the neighbour surveillance and moral policing characteristic of more rooted life, in favour of relative isolation and, with it, relative freedom.

That is: it’s nice to be known, but also nice to be anonymous enough to do your own thing. This poses a problem, though, for those people (often, though not always, women) whose preferred topic of conversation is mutual acquaintances. For this demographic, celebrity culture has long provided a common set of “characters” for gossip, in a society where the default is not knowing much at all about your coworkers and everyday acquaintances.

If this were true even in the mass-media age, it has grown still more so in the social media one. William’s mother, the late Diana, Princess of Wales, was ahead of her time in grasping both the symbiotic nature of this celebrity ecosystem, and also the way digital culture would transform it from a one-way to a two-way street.

In the Nineties era of Peak Diana, fame was still mediated by the legacy press: the one-to-many broadcast formats such as TV and newspapers. Despite this, Diana had an uncanny ability to sense her audience’s projections, and play to those longings, in a come-here-no-go-away relationship that presciently anticipated influencer culture. Since then, with the shift from broadcast to digital media, this has become explicit: social media optimises for building fame on the basis of interacting with and seeking and validation from strangers, via “parasocial relationships” that afford a synthetic sense of intimacy for audiences, combined with a sometimes powerful mechanism for speaking back to the celebrity. When it’s reported that Taylor Swift ended her relationship with Matty Healy partly because her fans disliked him, the two-way quality of this relationship is clear.

As this form of social engagement has grown more popular, so it has paralleled (and probably driven) a weakening of real-world interconnections. Already in 2013, studies were showing how online life depletes real-world socialising and interconnection. And this accelerated wildly when, in 2020, Covid lockdowns tipped public culture from physical-first to digital-first, forcing almost all of our common life online and sharply constraining our freedom to associate in the real world. Evidence suggests our real-world social lives still haven’t recovered. Unsurprisingly, amid the tatters of social fabric that survived that time, our craving for synthetic gossip has intensified.

As parasocial fame culture has devoured public life, creators in the medium share increasingly grotesquely personal material, feeding a race to the bottom in “pornography of the self”. Those adept at surviving the pressures of this world can reap considerable financial rewards: think of the Kardashians, for example. But it’s a double-edged sword. If Diana’s life anticipated influencer culture, her death was an equally prophetic warning about the Faustian nature of the dynamic, and the often punitive consequences of embracing symbiosis with an audience.

Pity the influencer, for example, whose private life falls out of kilter with their public persona: take the outrage occasioned by Oprah Winfrey when, after serving as a public face for Weight Watchers since 2015, she revealed she has been using the weight-loss drug Ozempic to manage her figure. And worse punishment still attends those influencers who allow the illusion of intimacy to slip in other ways. When Jordan Cheyenne accidentally published a video of herself in 2021 entreating her toddler to cry for the camera, the blowback she received was less for exposing her family life to the public, than for ruining the illusion of access to her real, unfiltered life.

Like Diana, then, or her other son Harry, many public figures today both invite the public gaze while also making a show of protesting at its intensity, not to mention its dark side. And especially in the United States, many now view highprofile royals merely as a subset of celebrity culture. So is the Royal Family really a legitimate feeding-ground for the content machine? Is baring all for the camera the right thing to do? Perhaps the role of constitutional monarchy is so depleted today that they might as well embrace their fate as regular celebrities.

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What is King Charles hiding?

By Mary Harrington

Against this, we might argue that royalty is the precise inverse of fame, and its aura long precedes the modern fame engine. Certainly, monarchs have long understood the importance of visibility — but also of mystery. Elizabeth I deliberately made a meme of herself, travelling her kingdom on an annual Queen’s Progress surrounded by emblems that created a dazzling sense of her omnipresence. Elizabeth II also understood the importance of royal appearances, declaring: “I have to be seen to be believed.”

In modern times, too, the Royal Family has acceded to — arguably even embraced — a measure of symbiosis with at least the legacy press. Until recently, though, Britain’s relatively fierce libel laws plus the threat of exclusion from the Royal Rota system controlled legacy press reporting. But the globalisation and digitisation of the news cycle has seen Royal coverage from the wilder US media landscape routinely bleed into the UK, creating a dissonance that has fuelled the digital madness. And as the digital Eye of Horus has grown ever more international, Charles III has signalled a need for clear limits to visibility, insisting on screening the most sacred part of his coronation.

The mix we see from the Prince and Princess of Wales is carefully controlled public appearances combined with near-total lack of personal disclosure. It suggests they too grasp this tradition, and share Charles’s prudent resistance to baring all for their immense would-be online fandom. I don’t blame them for this, especially at a time of family illness when all but the most unhinged internet truthers must surely accept that they have more than enough on their plate. But their reticence about Kate’s illness has occasioned not sympathy, so much as a lunatic mix of hostility and conspiracy theories.

Even the lack of information on Kate’s whereabouts has merely fed into a vast alternate reality game, in which the humanity of its notional subjects comes a distant second to the pleasure of participating in a huge whodunnit. Why? I suspect that this is because their refusal to seek social-media validation reveals something uncomfortable about how dependent most of us now are on parasocial connection.

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We are parading our virtue

By Mary Harrington

The Waleses, that is, have spurned the public twice over. Firstly, by refusing to give of themselves, as gossip-substitutes for an atomised population who would hate village life if they tried it but who still crave the social lubricant of village gossip. And secondly, in declaring through their actions that they themselves still have a real-world community to turn to in times of trouble, and as such have no need of validation from internet strangers.

That is, in withdrawing from public life to weather illness in the family among friends and family, they have stated clearly that, unlike much of their would-be fanbase, they still have a (figurative) real-world village. They have exposed the bottomless pit of collective loneliness and need that underlies the gossip industry — while flaunting their own lack of dependence on its synthetic digital replacement.

No wonder the rumours have grown ever more vengeful in tone. For a growing proportion of the population, the internet is real life now, and those parasocial connections are the real connections. The message is clear: Kate must volunteer herself willingly for sacrifice on the altar of fandom. And if she doesn’t, she’ll be offered up against her will, as punishment for not being lonely enough.

Princess-baiting is a traditional sport for the British press — think about how Sarah Ferguson was treated — but in the Noughties there was a particular savagery in the media’s attitude to famous women. This was the era of “Crazy Britney” and “Slutty Paris” and “Trainwreck Lindsay”, when no gossip could be too vicious and boundaries only seemed to exist in order to be breached. As girlfriend of the next-king-but-one, Kate was in for a rough ride.

In part because of that media environment, but perhaps more out of fear that Kate would attract a similar circus to the one around Princess Diana, her personal life was aggressively defended by the palace from very early on: in 2010, she received an estimated £10,000 payout from a photo agency over privacy invasion. In 2012, British outlets reportedly turned down topless paparazzi photos of her. A French magazine ran them, and five years later, Kate was awarded €100,000 in damages.

As a princess, she appealed to us because she was closer to being a “regular girl” than any of her predecessors. People could be as snobby as they liked about her “new money” parentage, and William’s friends allegedly were, but you could hardly say that picking spouses from the upper classes had been a storming success for the generation above. But despite her status as a commoner, as a public figure, every effort was made to keep her in the closest possible thing to fairytale seclusion.

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By Julie Burchill

Since Kate entered hospital for “abdominal surgery” on 14 January, those carefully guarded borders have become a liability. Only three photographs of her have emerged in as many months: two fuzzy paparazzi shots of her being driven by her mother and husband, and a portrait with her children issued for Mother’s Day. That last was intended to quiet the manic conspiracising around Kate’s three-month absence from the public eye. Instead, it turned into a week-long PR disaster after photo agencies issued a “kill notice” over obvious and inept manipulation.

In response, an already suspicious public entered a red-string fever. There was greenery in the background: did that mean the picture was actually from last year? (Look outside: it’s been a mild winter and an early spring.) Had Kate’s face been montaged in from another photo shoot? (Only if the royals have access to more advanced editing software than anyone else in the world, in which case you’d imagine they would have got the small matter of Charlotte’s cardigan sleeve correct.)

But this frenzied and dubious speculation feels less gratuitous when you remember that the royals really are concealing things. Wild theories rush into the void established in the name of “privacy”. Meanwhile in America, where UK privacy law holds no sway and the royal rota access system is irrelevant, the media freely wades into gossip and rumour that the British press can only prissily hint at. This week, for instance, Stephen Colbert gave a salacious rundown of the “Rural Rivals” situation on The Late Show. All we can do as onlookers is await information.

Kate’s predicament is specific to being a princess, but its origins lie in Noughties tabloid culture. Her brother in law, who received probably the hardest treatment of anyone in his generation of royals, dealt with it by eventually skipping the country. Kate, lacking that option, remains caught in a public image that’s been irrevocably shaped by that decade of coverage.

At least by the time she was engaged, the “Waity Katie” story had been reinvented as a triumph of feminine grit. The couple had briefly broken up before reconciling, and in a Telegraph profile of the princess-to-be, this was characterised as “Miss Middleton [making] it clear to him she would not be taken for granted”. Was it sexist? Manifestly. But royalty — an institution based on breeding and legitimacy — has the sexism baked in, despite our recent experience of living under a queen. And the longer Kate demonstrated her dignified resilience, the more truth you could say there was in the caricature.

Nonetheless, she won, and the media’s change of heart became complete: Kate was now to be protected and cherished at all costs. When Hilary Mantel wrote a critical essay about the Princess’s public image, the British press lost the run of itself entirely. The Mail called it a “venomous attack”, the Sun a “bizarre rant” (both, remember, had been pushing “Waity Katie” stories just a few years earlier). Yet if you look back at what Mantel actually wrote, it’s barely contentious at all:

“Kate seems to have been selected for her role of princess because she was irreproachable: as painfully thin as anyone could wish, without quirks, without oddities, without the risk of the emergence of character. She appears precision-made, machine-made, so different from Diana … Diana was capable of transforming herself from galumphing schoolgirl to ice queen, from wraith to Amazon. Kate seems capable of going from perfect bride to perfect mother, with no messy deviation.”

Being thin and biddable were the exact things that people liked about Kate. It was why she could later be cast in competition with Meghan: if Meghan was all LA pushiness, Kate was the epitome of home counties stoicism. It’s why, until her recent vanishing, press coverage was relentlessly fascinated with her skinny royal legs: “Very pale, very slender, both fine-boned and finely-toned,” salivated the Mail in November — at which point, given she was only a few weeks away from major surgery, it might be reasonable to assume that she was already seriously unwell.

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The tragedy of becoming a woman

By Sarah Ditum

Kate’s disappearance fascinates precisely because it is the “messy deviation” she was never supposed to commit. Depending on your class politics, she was either a sappy Cinderella, gratefully happy for her elevation; or a girl Gatsby who had scrambled her way into the gilded centre and intended to enjoy all its benefits. In neither version was she ever likely to represent an existential threat to the system she was now attached to.

Royalty, though, is a contact sport played with the whole body, and now Kate’s body has betrayed her. For all the pomp and dignity attached to the monarchy, there’s a robust physicality to the job. Traditionally, bedchambers would be the heart of royal business — a king would entertain his most powerful guests in the same place where he slept and fucked. In the Tudor court, the most esteemed role was the Groom of the Stool — that is, the courtier who helped the king to shit.

This is not an environment where “privacy” can mean quite what it does for other people, and even in our modernised monarchy, the last queen recognised that she had to be “seen to be believed”. The Waleses have attempted, ineptly, to replicate the modern way of doing celebrity — carefully issued press shots, their own curated “behind the scenes” footage designed to present a deeply stage-managed kind of “intimacy”. But what washes for Beyoncé will not wash for a princess, when the public instinctively feels a constitutional claim on the royal body; and anyway, even Beyoncé had to make an album about her husband cheating on her when the rumours started running too hot.

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Harry, the Prince of PR

By Sam Leith

The clumsy photoshop of the Mother’s Day picture matters because it underlines the suspicion once articulated by Mantel: that Kate is simply too good to be true. An image of perfection substituted for a real woman, while the real woman seems to have been whittled into a cypher. Even when we could see her, she was somewhat difficult to believe in. The bargain of hereditary monarchy is that the flesh is traded for power — not symbolically, but actually, particularly for the queens and princesses whose wombs will carry the line. The longer Kate is out of view, the easier it becomes to wonder whether that’s a trade anyone should humanely be asked to make.

The barriers set up to protect her — or at least, to protect her image — were designed for the last era when the press was truly powerful. Now Kate must navigate the full force of being internet famous, caught between the physical demands of the royal body and an online version of herself that, insubstantial as it is, can be recruited to the wildest kinds of viral fictions. If Diana was the People’s Princess, the last week has made Kate into the Crowdsourced Princess — a much weirder and much less enjoyable role to play.

The image of the sick king runs back thousands of years in the human psyche. We find it first in ancient fertility cults and vegetation ceremonies, and later in the Grail legend. It crops up in the romances and popular drama of medieval England, and lies behind the most famous of modern poems, T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”.  At the centre of the myth is a sovereign who has suffered an obscure wound, perhaps in the genitals, perhaps self-inflicted. Or maybe he has simply grown too old and infirm to rule, like an early version of Joe Biden. In some legends, the king is wounded as a punishment for illicit sexual passion, though it isn’t clear whether this includes falling in love with the wife of a Guards officer.

The result of this regal impotence is that Nature’s powers fail and the land is lain waste. The springs of new growth will be unlocked only when the monarch is restored to health by the arrival of the Quester, a courageous young Galahad who will either heal the old man, resurrect his dead body or take his place as ruler. In some versions of the myth, the king is either starved to death, strangled or slain by his own relatives. Brawling within royal families isn’t confined to the present.

For the past two millennia, one particular image of the sick king has fascinated the world: Jesus Christ, the crucified God. Astonishingly, a large sector of the human race worships a God who was scourged, humiliated and tortured to death. This was no perfect, all-powerful deity but a failure, at least in the eyes of what St John darkly calls the world. It’s even doubtful in what sense Jesus can be seen as a king. His life is less an example of sovereign power than a critique of it. It serves to expose the fact that all authority is finite and fragile, all monarchs are damaged ones. The words supposedly attached to his cross — “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews” — are less a solemn announcement than a piece of mockery on the part of the Romans who executed him. Since Nazareth was in the stagnant backwater of Galilee, and since Galilee was a by-word for rural idiocy at the time, the idea that a king might arise from this region seemed as improbable as a Duke of Barnsley.

In any case, Jesus makes no unequivocal claim to kingship in the New Testament. In a satirical smack at royal ceremony, he rides into the nation’s capital on the back of a donkey, not in whatever was the equivalent of a limo in first-century Palestine. He had comrades, not courtiers. It’s certainly hard to see him as the Messiah, a figure the Jews thought of as a militant national leader who would liberate the nation by routing its enemies. Far from vanquishing Israel’s foes, Jesus ends up as their helpless victim.

Even so, Christianity retains the insight that the only good king is a dead one, or at least one who is fatally flawed. Unless God enters into a solidarity of suffering with his creatures in the person of Jesus, exchanging power for weakness, he won’t be able to transform that defective human stuff from within. Weakness, then, is a precondition for success, death of new life. And the same goes for fertility cults and vegetation ceremonies. Unless Nature dies, unless the land is laid waste, there can’t be any regeneration, which is to say that winter is a necessary prelude to spring. The concept of the injured king is an attempt to come to terms with this truth.

For the mind which creates such narratives, there is a set of secret affinities or magical correspondences between the human and the natural. When Macbeth murders his king, storms are unleashed and horses eat each other. The modern mind, by contrast, sees a strict opposition between these two domains, one as absolute as the opposition between life and death. The human is the realm of living spirit, while Nature is dead matter to be manipulated. Since we ourselves are spirits who are partly made up of matter, this fissure runs all the way through human beings. It becomes impossible to explain how these two dimensions of us can fit together — how an immaterial thought, for example, can result in a material action. Hence the dualism which dominates so much modern Western thinking.

A number of factors have helped to undermine that way of seeing, of which one of the most important is climate change. It is now frighteningly clear that the human species and the sphere it inhabits are as inseparable as the two sides of a sheet of paper. There are indeed correspondences between the mind and the world. The ancient myths were true after all. But these correspondences aren’t benign and harmonious, as so many have believed in the past. Instead, the greed and acquisitiveness of humanity are reflected in the turmoil and devastation of Nature. There is a symmetry between the modern human spirit and its material home, but it is a symmetry of disorder. And there’s no gallant knight on hand to ride to the rescue.

There is an ancient tradition that the king is a kind of fool, which reaches a magnificent climax in Shakespeare’s King Lear. How does this equation between the two figures work? For one thing, you have to be a fool to want to be king. Anyone with that much power is bound to be the object of envy and aggression: uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. In some tribal societies, the hapless individual who is about to become chief is symbolically beaten up, or sometimes not so symbolically.

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The wounded king, however, is often seen as semi-divine, and so in a sense is Charles. It’s part of royalist ideology to regard this balding, bat-eared, petulant character as God’s representative on earth. Rather as God sustains the universe in existence, so the king sustains the nation. But he is also the representative of the people, and so marks the point where God and people meet. Members of Parliament represent our particular needs and interests, but the monarch represents us in our pure identity as British subjects, regardless of what form this may assume.

The only problem with this is that there is no such thing as a pure British identity, so that the monarchy rests on an illusion. There’s no part of you or me that is a British subject and nothing else. There are both positive and negative ways of being a member of the nation, but being a member of the nation isn’t a good thing in itself, any more than being 5’10” or freckled is a good thing in itself.

If the sovereign sustains the nation, and God sustains the sovereign, then society would seem to rest on the firmest of foundations. Yet one of the great discoveries of the modern era is that we can do without this metaphysical underpinning, rather as a young child learns to do without its blanket. Democracy means that we aren’t resting on anything but ourselves. There are no longer any eternal assurances or supernatural guarantees. Instead, we take our lives in our own hands, sort things out among ourselves and make things up as we go along. Monarchy is for those who still need a blanket or a Big Daddy. It is a flawed conception, just like the sick king himself.

And yet, this reminder of our King’s frailty, at 75, also stands for a broader transformation now afoot: the Boomerdämmerung, or twilight of the Baby Boomers. In old Norse mythology “Ragnarok”, translated by the German composer Richard Wagner as Götterdammerung, or “Twilight of the Gods”, is a time of cruel weather, moral chaos, and monsters rising from all points of the compass. Mountains will fall, the seas will rise, and the world-serpent will come ashore, as the gods clash in one final, world-ending battle.

But there is hope. This fateful time, for ancient Germanic legend, is a period both of terrible destruction and also of renewal: the Götterdammerung may see Valhalla aflame, but in its aftermath the world will be rebuilt anew.

Wagner used this motif as a backdrop for the final opera in his four-part Ring Cycle, an adaptation of an old Germanic myth first performed in 1876. It premiered just a few years after the fateful 1871 union of Germany: a transformation that tipped the first geopolitical domino that would culminate in the cataclysm of two World Wars.

Living through the era from the Ring Cycle to Yalta must have felt itself like a kind of Götterdammerung. Certainly, the first generation born after its 1945 resolution were determined to build a wholly new world, amid the ruins of the old. A demographic bulge group, conceived and born amid the relief, reunion, and rebuilding that consumed Europe after the two wars, the Boomers threw out the old sexual codes, dismissed pre-war European culture as stuffy and “square”, and scorned anything that smacked of nationalism, patriotism, or old high European culture as dangerously Hitlerish. In place of all that, they dreamed of new, sunlit Valhallas, freed from the dark gods of industrialised wartime destruction.

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By Aris Roussinos

The culture they bequeathed us — what today is denounced as the “Boomer Truth Regime” — worshipped transformation, freedom, youth, and the future. Tradition and heritage was a drag. We were all on a path toward ever more individual self-realisation. But it was two-edged.

In her 2021 book Boomers, Helen Andrews argues that in each case, this generation – from Steve Jobs to Camille Paglia and Aaron Sorkin – set out to liberate us, but “what they passed on to their children was worse than what they inherited”.

Jobs sought to free our inner rebels, but created instead the stultifying world of social media; Al Sharpton turned social justice into a shakedown geared toward making well-off liberals feel good about their opinions; Paglia profited from an academic rigour whose abandonment she helped to legitimise.

These arguments will be familiar to anyone of my age and younger, who looks askance at the generation that benefited from free university education and affordable housing, and has since presided over an era in which both have become something more like Ponzi schemes. Today the university system the boomers bequeathed us is a monolithically Left-wing and increasingly academically flaccid visa factory; housing, meanwhile, is a piggy-bank for those that have and a pipe-dream for the rest.

But the consternation that has greeted news of King Charles’ ailing health should remind us that not all boomers are created alike, or indeed all boomerism. It’s easy to dismiss this generation, with its optimism and sheer good fortune, as one characterised principally by the self-absorption and wanton destructiveness Andrews skewers in the figures she profiles. But even leaving aside the fact that the boomers are all our parents and grandparents, I don’t greet our approaching Boomerdämmerung with glee.

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By Esme Partridge

Andrews can say, with some justice, that many boomers have not just failed to preserve and pass on the legacy they received to their own progeny, but actively consumed that cultural and economic seed-corn for their own selfish pleasure. “Spending the kids’ inheritance” is so common and celebrated among boomers it even commands an acronym (“SKI-ing”), how-to books and celebratory articles.

But there are boomers and boomers. Much of the social fabric in my small town is held together by boomers. They show up to church. They donate their time to committees, volunteer for the council, make cakes for coffee mornings, and pick up litter. Small-town boomers are unfailingly polite, kind, generous, and public-spirited. In keeping with this spirit, boomers volunteer at much higher rates than younger generations: over 50% of those aged 65-74 do so at least once a year.

Nor is this the only store of cultural capital that threatens to expire with the boomers. As murmurs of concern grow louder over a supposed competence crisis — whether or not this is driven by “diversity” hiring practices — they are now exiting the workforce at accelerating rates. It appears, too, that they are often doing so without passing on their skills to younger generations.

What will life be like once they’re gone? In the 1988 comedy Funny Farm, the character Mickey says dismissively of an unstable river crossing: “That ain’t a bridge. It’s termites holding hands”. That is: burrowing insects have hollowed out a once-sturdy piece of woodwork, and are maintaining its semblance only by clinging to one another, meaning the slightest hint of pressure will cause that solid-seeming form to collapse into powder.

And the Boomer Truth Regime is now taking on a similar character. Something once unshakeable is now so fragile that — for better or worse — it’s only the tenacity of the very creatures that caused that fragility which still holds it together. The world’s only superpower, for example, the regime surely most closely identified alike with boomer self-discovery and boomer post-nationalism, faces a Presidential election this year. And both front-runners are boomers: men older than King Charles, and yet clinging to power with every ounce of their remaining vigour.

What they’re now preserving is, ironically, a regime implacably hostile to the idea of preservation. The Boomers scorned the prewar order of patriotism and tradition. They gave us a regime of unlimited self-expression, post-national governance, and individual freedom. And it was all mythologised via the narrative of Good vs Evil that grew up around the Second World War. But as the boomers’ grip on power begins to falter in earnest, so we’re witnessing a steadily accelerating re-evaluation of the Boomer Truth Regime origin-story, the Ragnarok of that war.

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As the wolf Fenrir shakes off his chains, and the mountains and oceans of Boomer Truth begin to shudder and boil, this re-evaluation of our past will also grow more febrile. Even those of us who chafe under Boomer Truth may not like the form this takes. One central pillar of that truth regime, for example, has always been a definition of the good relative to absolute evil as epitomised by Hitler and the Nazis, with the Holocaust as its central exhibit. But today, one in five young Americans thinks the Holocaust is a myth. That proportion among boomers, by contrast, is close to zero. The same stark generational shift can be seen in the rising proportion of young people who support a strongman leader.

Only a fool or ghoul would try and speculate on how our political landscape will evolve once the boomers are gone. But I suspect we’ll miss them bitterly: for though some aspects of boomerism undermined their own postwar settlement, boomers are also now the main force holding that settlement together.

King Charles surely epitomises this dual aspect of boomerism. A staunch Traditionalist and admirer of the anti-modern thinker René Guénon, he is criticised by some for being too backward-looking — while also (for example in his expressed wish to serve as “defender of all faiths”) standing accused by others of destructive progressivism and betraying the Church of England. Most likely though, as with boomers in the aggregate, he’s both: classically boomerish in his simultaneous ironclad confidence in the persistence of tradition, and certainty that traditions can and should be remixed at will in the name of progress.

Subsequent generations understand more clearly that this faith is often misplaced. Skills may be lost in generational transition, cultural reserves may be exhausted, carefully-accumulated inheritances may be frittered (literally) on cruises or (figuratively) on self-discovery and “modernisation”. But the true extent of the loss will, most likely, only become apparent as the ineluctable Boomerdämmerung approaches.

I wish King Charles a speedy recovery and a long reign yet. But in the end, as the Old Norse seeress reminds us, not even the gods can escape the cycle of death and rebirth. The growing frailty of the boomers feels like a chill wind of mortality, blowing around my own middle-aged vitals. But it blows an even more chilly wind of mortality around the world the boomers created, and whose increasingly brittle form is now fracturing at an accelerating pace.

While such animus is out of step with mainstream opinion, it’s clear that the coronation has lost its romance and even its meaning among much of the wider public. Two-thirds of respondents tell YouGov pollsters that they either don’t care very much or don’t care at all about the ceremony. Only 9% of Britons said they care “a great deal”, and that cohort tends elderly.

Modern Britons may well ask: why do we find ourselves locked into a ritual — a religious ritual, to be precise — inherited from the ancient past? Even if some share the Christian faith that underpins rituals like the coronation, can’t they practise that faith privately, without the need for a solemn, state-sanctioned ceremony involving bishops, priests, crowns, sceptres, and holy oils? Why do we need public ritual at all?

All this is a tragedy, because old rituals like the coronation can play a deeply salutary — and even progressive — role in societies otherwise wracked by modern capitalism’s cruel, arbitrary hierarchies. We human beings do all sorts of things that have no functional value in themselves but that help us communicate symbolically. We shake hands. We exchange rings. We are wired, it seems, for ritual: a pattern of words and actions characterised by formality, rigidity, and repetition. The closest analogous human behaviour, according to many anthropologists, is children’s games.

In the middle of the last century, a husband-and-wife team of British anthropologists travelled to Africa in an attempt to scientifically understand the ritual process. Specifically, they sought the meaning of religious rites among traditional tribes; ultimately, it awakened them to the indispensability of ritual for decent societies.

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Victor Witter Turner was born in 1920 in Glasgow. As a teenager, under the tutelage of an Anglican priest, he was drawn to mystical traditions. But by the time “Vic” entered university and married, he had become a card-carrying Communist. His wife, “Edie”, had also embraced Marxism early on, because it was a worldview “wrung clean of religion”.

In the late Forties, the couple discovered Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa in a public library. It inspired Vic to study anthropology: he was thrilled by the thought of living hand-to-mouth in remote places, and drawn, too, to the “neat social systems among indigenous islanders” that seemed to exist “like an organism with its own social structural laws”. He worked under Max Gluckman, the legendary leader of the structural anthropology movement based at the University of Manchester, who dispatched Vic to central Africa to study “chieftainship politics”.

Ritual, of course, was central to defining the individual’s roles within the “neat social systems” in which he was interested. For example, many tribal peoples mark the passage from childhood to adulthood with highly elaborate rites, whereas in the modern West, childhood often merges imperceptibly with adulthood, leaving it to each individual to figure out what it means to “come of age”.

Many anthropologists then dismissed tribal ritual as the unintelligible mumbo-jumbo of a “simpler” people. But in 1951, Gluckman sent Vic a telegram urging him to switch to researching the religious practises of the Ndembu people of south central Africa. Edie came along. The Turners’ time among the Ndembu convinced them that such supercilious attitudes were false. “In matters of ritual as of art,” Vic would write years later in his seminal 1969 text, The Ritual Process, “there are no ‘simpler’ peoples, only peoples with simpler technologies than our own. Man’s imaginative and emotional life is always and everywhere rich and complex.”

Zambia, where the Turners encountered the people, was then a British colony known as Northern Rhodesia. Nevertheless, the Ndembu welcomed the foreign couple’s attempts to understand their rituals, even inviting them to participate. The Turners studied the Isoma, a rite that treated women suffering from infertility. The central action of the ritual involved the afflicted woman and her husband walking in the nude several times between two holes, one identified as “cold” and the other “hot”, representing both the grave and the birth canal. In this way, the ritual reconciled the once-warring communities of the living and the dead.

The Dutch-German anthropologist Arnold van Gennep, whose ideas the Turners borrowed, taught that every rite involves three stages. First, a separation, when the subjects are removed from the social structure. Next, the liminal stage, when the subjects become indeterminate, ambiguous, outcast even: during the core action of the Isoma, the afflicted couple no longer occupy their symbolic roles as husband and wife; their nakedness signifies that they are more like new-borns, or the dead. Finally, there is a reaggregation, when the subjects return to the social structure, either in a new condition — a boy emerges as a man after the extreme trials of the coming-of-age ritual — or merely restored to their prior condition — the afflicted couple now “healed” by Isoma.

The Turners focused their analysis on the middle stage. As Vic explained, liminal beings “are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial”. To become liminal is to assume a transcendent vulnerability; it is the condition of Christ on the Cross. The humiliation of the liminal subject, for the Turners, fostered communitas, a state apart from the structured hierarchies we inhabit most of our lives. Communitas, a primordial state beyond rank and class, reminds us that the high and mighty have their status only in relation to the low, and “he who is high must experience what it is like to be low”.

Before he assumed power, a Ndembu chieftain had to undergo ritual humiliation at the hands of a mythic figure known as the Kafwana; coded female, she was associated with the land and the people who tilled it, those who weren’t politically or militarily strong but who nevertheless possessed a sacral power. Among other things, the chieftain-to-be had to absorb a barrage of insults and criticisms from other villagers; once installed, he didn’t dare hold it against the people. In this way, the religious ritual taught the chieftain that he was first and foremost a servant.

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By humbling himself, and dispensing with his normal privileges, the one undergoing the ritual must recognises what Vic called “humankindness”: “a generic bond between men.” Without it, the hierarchical community has no qualms about excluding and even destroying the weak. Far from locking people into the past, then, ritual allows them to confront present and future challenges. Ritual, in this telling, humanises societies.

On the surface, the coronation of King Charles and Queen Camilla is about as distant as can be from the chieftainship ritual of the Ndembu people. But the rite’s underlying structures are are shockingly similar. The Anglican ceremonial adds several layers of Christian symbolism, not to mention genteel ornamentation — all of which softens the liminal humiliation of the king-to-be and his bride — but the fundamental process is the same.

First, there is the separation of the ritual subjects — Charles and Camilla — from humdrum British reality. This is marked by their carriage ride to Westminster Abbey. Next comes the liminal stage, where Charles’s face is literally covered by Anglican churchmen, using a canopy of golden cloth, known as the anointing screen. The covering shields the most sacred element of the ritual from prying eyes, but it also means that Charles is erased as an individual.

The core action of the liminal stage is the anointing of king’s hands, breast, and head with oil. In the Bible, such oils are the mark of the self-sacrificing King of Kings: Jesus is anointed before he is to undergo his passion, death, and burial. Once the screen is removed, the anointed king will kneel at the high altar while the archbishop recalls how “Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God … was anointed with the Oil of gladness above his fellows.” Thus Charles, as a Christian statesman, is united with the sacrifice of Christ. He is giving up something, trading his personality for that of the sovereign, dutybound to serve the commonweal.

Finally, there is Charles’s reaggregation: he re-enters society with elevated status, symbolised by the crown and sceptre. But again, this occurs only after he has ritually identified himself with society’s victims — indeed, with the anointed Victim. All this marks him out as the servant-ruler of the British people, rather than merely a king.

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Today’s economic hierarchies tell the winners that they owe their status to no one and nothing but their own “meritocratic” efforts. This isn’t, in fact, true: study after study demonstrates that social mobility has stalled, especially in the Anglosphere. But it makes for particularly obnoxious elites: if they owe their status to no one, then they also have no obligations to society’s losers. Against such a backdrop, Britain’s traditional monarchic rituals, not least the coronation, are a very different, and much-needed, account of what the high owes the low.

When we glimpse the communitas lying beyond everyday structures — when we leave behind profane everyday reality to play the solemn, cosmic game of ritual — we are possessed by a vision of what society could or should look like. Here, the mighty chieftain submits to the lowly Kafwana. Here, the omnipotent Son of God consents to be humiliated. And His Majesty the King consents to follow the mortified god-man, even into the tomb.

I was devastated on hearing this news. Not because I doubted the Prince’s right to pass judgement, however harsh, on one of his subjects. On the contrary, I would gladly have submitted to a torrent of vile abuse from the royal tongue, feeling it to be no more than his prerogative. If he had officially announced that I was a despicable worm, and was to be treated as such throughout the kingdom, my loyalty would have remained unshaken.

Even so, I couldn’t help being shocked. It was like discovering that God couldn’t stand the sight of me, or that the Pope threw up whenever my name was mentioned. Hearing Charles’s words made me feel like a shadier version of A.A. Milne’s Christopher Robin. “Do you think the King knows all about me?” he asks his nursemaid plaintively, to which she replies with the consoling lie: “Sure to, dear, but it’s time for tea.” It was clear that the Prince knew all about me as well, but more in the way that MI5 or HMRC might. This didn’t bring me the sense of cosmic security one imagines young Christopher felt. It was as though his nursemaid had replied: “She sure does, honey, and she thinks you’re a right prat.”

I assumed that it was my political views, rather than the cut of my jacket or my reluctance to ride to hounds, that Charles found distasteful, and it was this which disturbed me most. I had imagined that royal persons like himself were set above the political realm, impeccably even-handed in their treatment of Tories and Trotskyists. It’s true that he had sent his sons to Eton, but I’d assumed that this was because they might be knocked around a bit at the local comprehensive.

Was it possible that I had spent my life so far sunk in delusion? Fragments of memory floated up, stray anomalies to which I’d shut my eyes: the Queen Mother’s pathological hatred of Germans, Princess Margaret’s comparison of the Irish to pigs, the Duke of Edinburgh’s genial racist gaffes, the vast private wealth of the lot of them. Might there be a pattern here? Even back then, Prince Andrew no longer seemed to radiate the aura of mystery and enigma I had felt about him before. However hard I resisted, it was becoming impossible to avoid the conclusion that the royal family are not politically neutral.

Christopher Robin’s words reveal a certain insight. The idea of sovereignty involves the fantasy of being known by an omniscient power, one which despite searching you to your depths continues to love you unconditionally. The usual word for this is God, but a more familiar term is parent, and the monarch is the ultimate mummy or daddy of us all.

The fiction is that the King knows all his subjects from the inside, but this doesn’t mean that his knowledge of them is stretched so thin that he can’t know any of them in particular. Like Bill Clinton, the sovereign can talk to everyone in a crowded room as though they’re the only person present. It’s natural, however, to think that the King might not have such intimate knowledge, which is why there’s a certain anxiety in Christopher’s question to Alice the nursemaid. If God or the King is transcendent enough to know and love everybody, doesn’t this involve a detachment which means they can’t love or know anybody? How can you be both intimate and all-seeing?

Trying to solve this contradiction is the point of those folktales in which the king moves among his people incognito, observing them at close quarters but in disguise, and thus with no threat to his majesty. He becomes a fifth columnist in his own kingdom. What if the sovereign is so distant that the people feel bereft, abandoned, as the British seem to have felt when the Queen refused to mourn Princess Diana? The Sun’s headline at the time, “Where Is Our Queen?”, can be translated into one fearful infantile howl: “Mummy!”

There’s a problem, however, about parental love. Parents are like political authorities because they are supposed to care for all of their offspring/citizens alike, and in the case of parents to do so unconditionally. You can see this in action whenever someone is accused of a serious crime. All his relatives will flock spontaneously to his support, testifying that no more loving son or big-hearted brother ever trod the ground. “He can’t have done it!” they insist to the press. “I mean, I know him. I’ve known him ever since he was born!” The fact that the Boston Strangler was also known to others is strangely overlooked. I myself am a father, but if one of my children were accused of murder, I wouldn’t automatically assume that they were innocent. All murderers have fathers. Everyone is capable of losing their cool and doing someone in. There’s no inconsistency between being a loving son and wielding a machete.

The idea of sovereignty, then, is both consoling and unsettling. To be accepted by an authority inconceivably greater than yourself is for your identity to be grounded and confirmed. The sovereign gazes benignly at you, and you gaze gratefully back. You have been plucked out of the common herd and invested with special status. You are, in a word, UnHerd. The relationship is, of course, unequal: God or the monarch can know you, but you can’t know them in return, because they are transcendent beings shrouded in mystery. You can only know that you are known. Yet you are also aware that this special relationship is also true of everyone else, in which case it isn’t true of you. If everyone is special, nobody is. And this is one reason for the anxiety which authority engenders.

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Real democracies, which is to say republican ones, don’t work like this. They are the only political form which doesn’t need to invoke a legitimating power external to the people themselves. Instead, the people legitimate themselves, in their everyday speech, action and law-making. This lends them an unusual authority, but it breeds uncertainty as well. It means that political society is founded only in itself, with no pre-written script or divine agenda, and this feels close to a sense of groundlessness. Democracies have to make things up as they go along, more like experimental theatre than Shakespearian drama. “The people” sounds like a firm enough foundation, but in reality the people are divided, diverse and keep changing. This is why democracy is the kind of politics suitable to modernity — to a sense of societies as historical rather than eternal, and men and women as self-fashioning rather than determined by tradition.

Being known, meanwhile, isn’t always pleasant, as “that dreadful Terry Eagleton” would suggest. If there’s the benevolent King who is acquainted with what Christopher Robin has for breakfast, there’s also Big Brother. Sovereignty isn’t far from surveillance. “Thou God seest me” can mean “Stop that sinfulness because He’s watching!” as well as “Isn’t it nice to know that God watches over me?”.

The 19th-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham designed a prison with a central watchtower and a circle of surrounding cells. The warders didn’t have the divine ability to supervise all of the prisoners all of the time, but they could take a look at any of them whenever they wanted to; and since the inmates didn’t know when they were being scrutinised, this was equivalent to being surveyed all the time. In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault uses this as an image of the surveillance state long before we actually were watched all the time. It’s no longer true, to adapt Abraham Lincoln’s celebrated saying, that you can watch some of the people all of the time, or all of the people some of the time, but you can’t watch all of the people all of the time.

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Democracies work as long as we all agree they should do so. Ironically, however, the same is true of the monarchy. It survives only as long as we maintain the collective fiction that, for example, a young fogey turned old fogey notorious for his fussiness, petulance and self-indulgence, with no claim on our allegiance other than a genetic one, should be revered in quasi-religious fashion. In fact, we know well enough that being king is a job that almost anybody could do, as long as you can walk, smile, shake hands, cultivate a concerned look and do what your courtiers tell you. Manchester United could take it on in turn, with each player doing the job for a year or so.

If Christopher Robin displays a degree of wisdom, so does the child who proclaimed that the emperor had no clothes. Or rather the Emperor is nothing but clothes — only his outward trappings and ceremonial garb. Coronations are solemn charades in which we agree to suspend our disbelief in myth and divine order in order to assuage our fear that, as democrats, we may be standing on nothing more solid than ourselves. As with the currency, it’s our faith in something intrinsically valueless that makes it work. We need an Other, and the Windsors are on hand to provide it. In the days when the monarch had real authority, he or she would dress up in finery partly to dazzle their subjects, but also, as Edmund Burke argues, to cloak and soften the brutality of their power. Kings were men in drag, draping the ugly phallus of their dominion beneath alluring feminine garments.

In the end, however, it doesn’t work all that well. Royalty is meant to represent an oasis of stability and continuity in the increasingly fluid, unstable, unpredictable environment we know as market society. What’s happened instead is that the moral behaviour of that world has now invaded the inner sanctum of the royal family itself, with its litany of break-ups, cock-ups, publicity wars and dysfunctional relationships. It’s worth keeping this in mind as our democracy bows to an unelected head of state.

It still feels strange to say the King, impossible to utter it without savouring the phrase as if in quotation marks: no other British title quite embodies the same tension between the lost magic of the realm and the banalities of modern public life. Replacing the careworn grandmother embodying the post-war diminution of the British state, our new king, part Athonite mystic, part pampered dandy, remains a mystery.

Just like the juxtaposition of Extinction Rebellion’s pagan eco-mysticism with the box-ticking, bell-ringing passive-aggressiveness of Sunak’s cycle cavalry, the King represents two divergent paths for Britain’s future. To supporters like myself, inclined to hail him — partly seriously and partly ironically — as a post-liberal figurehead, a champion of small family farms and a lost way of life, the King may still signal a renaissance of sorts. To his detractors, he represents all that is wrong with the 21st-century establishment. Some view him as the herald of top-down bureaucratic eco-austerity for the masses while the elites preserve their wealth and contentment; others see his recent capitulation to the race grifters and betrayal of a loyal family servant as evidence of all that is most destabilising and harmful about modern British life. There are two kings within Charles waiting to be crowned, just as there are two rival Britains struggling to be born.

The Queen’s funeral, with its sombre pomp and reassertion of the power and majesty of the state, could be interpreted as a rejection of modern Britain as much as the great festive events of her later life proclaimed a celebration of who we are now. What rich stores of symbolic meaning, then, await us at the coronation?

The sheer strangeness of this event, its apartness from modern Britain, is the essence of its meaning. When our king is anointed as God’s chosen in the great stone sepulchre of the British people, we will witness something strange and literally magical. So divorced from modernity as to be almost incomprehensible, we will witness, like puzzled anthropologists, the ancient rituals of our own lost British tribe. The choice of music, of court dress and of religious benedictions that will attend this descendant of both Vlad Dracul and Mohammed, in this most Catholic ceremony of a Protestant country, are rich fodder for grandstanding and debate. All politics, all power, is at heart symbolic, resting on ancient foundations like a modern church on ancient monoliths: only once or twice in our lifetimes will the state draw back its robes and reveal her hidden mysteries to us.

How is Charles to rule and bring this strange duality, the ancient and the modern, into public life? For decades, he was mocked as an eccentric, a weirdo who talked to his plants and praised the rustic hardships of traditional peasant life from within his palace walls. This urge to call him weird as an insult, springs from the same source as the eye-rolling ironic epithet “normal country” levelled at Britain. Instead, it is a compliment. Britain is not a normal country, whatever that would be, and thank God.

From the beginning of recorded history, Britain has always been viewed as a place strange and apart from the rest of Europe and the world, an insular realm of eccentric people and half-understood customs. In the awkward adolescence of his reign, between the inheritance of his role and his donning of the crown, Charles has perhaps hidden his own essential weirdness, in an attempt to fit how he felt modern Britain wants him to be. It is only now, as he prepares to assume the role, that Charles has begun to let his weirdness show.

In its true meaning, wyrd is “fate”, the supernatural destiny imposed on all men, just as Charles’s destiny, long-delayed, has finally settled upon him. We must encourage, through Charles, the wyrd’s manifestations in public life.

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Consider Charles’s much-analysed choice of the Green Man as his symbol on the Coronation invitations. What does it tell us about our new king? What makes it so fascinating is not that it is a submerged pagan symbol buried beneath Christian decoration — a popular claim modern folklorists reject — but rather the very knowing ambiguity of the Green Man, a Christian symbol of rebirth that gains its power from the winked suggestion of older, deeper roots. It is a symbol so intentionally rich in opposing meanings, so downright weird, that no settled meaning can ever be found: it was created to be puzzled over, argued about, and in doing so to uncover hidden truths. It is time for the Green Man to run riot in SW1, for Charles to enrich British public life with his own fertile ambiguities.

How, for example, would our Green Man king bridge the gap between Palace Green’s eco-protesters, fearful of what they believe to be an apocalyptic near-future, and the opposing political tendency, fearful of what they believe to be a dawning age of eco-austerity? In an age where our dependence on Russian energy and neglect of nuclear power has driven ordinary families into financial difficulty, the argument that Britain’s antiquated housing stock requires better insulation has been widely adopted by urban yimby commentators, evidence of one path through a divided political sphere.

King Charles, tireless promoter of traditional craftsmanship, could make the still-little-known case to the public that it is precisely because Britain’s housing stock dates from before the 20th century, and was built with traditional breathable materials such as lime, that insulation with modern impermeable materials, as Insulate Britain promote, would worsen the problem. This simple truth, well-known to heritage professionals, has been entirely neglected. And who could have a better pulpit to make the case for a better way forward? For if Britain’s largely Victorian houses could be insulated using traditional materials by a scaled-up, newly-trained workforce of high-skilled, high-wage craftsmen, a major political and economic problem could be resolved according to the methods Charles has spent a lifetime promoting.

Similarly, the recent collapse of much of Britain’s intensive agriculture model has heightened the growing clash between those who believe it is the way to food security, and those who believe it is despoiling Britain’s fields, forests and waterways; nor does it keep the nation fed and healthy, nor our farmers in business. As a longstanding advocate for the small family farm, King Charles can bridge this gap: instead of lecturing the nation on how to do better, he could show how the best nature-friendly farming systems work by converting Buckingham Palace’s 40 acres of private gardens into a working small farm. Imagine a rural oasis of hay meadows and rippling fields of grain in the centre of the capital, a haven of wildlife watched over by our benign farmer king. Through taking action, the king can become a living bridge between the capital and the countryside, the old ways and the new.

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While ideas like these may seem trifling and eccentrically small-scale to both the eco-modernists, enraptured by grand geoengineering projects, and to large-scale rewilders alike, it is their pure simplicity that grants them power. While fate has planted him at the nation’s apex, the abiding characteristic of our new king is his genuine love and affection for the humble and vernacular, even if only expressed in an occasional holiday from the super-rich luxuries of his permanent existence. It is a rare head of state who mends hedges and sleeps in peasants’ cottages and monasteries for relaxation (even if his personal lodgings are more those of abbots’ quarters than monks’ cells); he can now share the same powers of regeneration these simple pleasures must bring to him with the nation as a whole.

It is only through converting the advocacy of the Prince of Wales into the necessary labour of showing and doing that our Green Man King can make himself and the monarchy a central, guiding presence in British public life. To heal the new divisions of the coming age, and make the coronation a genuine period of national rebirth, there are worse options than embracing the sheer Weirdness of Charles III.

Hadleigh Castle, one of the featured properties, was built in the 13th century but now lies in ruins on a hill above a section of the Thames meandering towards the North Sea. People like me who grew up in this densely populated, marsh-fringed stretch of Southend might know Hadleigh as a right-of-passage destination for teenage drinking, rather than for any association with Edward III. Sheltered from the wind in one of the towers, you could truly escape the streetlights, Neighbourhood Watch patrols and trendies spoiling for a ruck.

The surrounding constituency of Castle Point — named after the ruin and containing Hadleigh, Benfleet and Canvey — is, according to new polling by UnHerd, the most monarchist place in Britain: 67% think it’s “a good thing”. Neighbouring constituencies had similarly high results. Essex, it seems, more than any other county, belongs to the king.

Castle Point is an area closely linked with the Thatcherite stereotypes of Essex Man and Essex Girl. It is notable, too, for being at the top of two other charts that have come to define Britain: it had the third-highest Leave vote in 2016, and it has the highest percentage of property ownership in the UK, with 82% of its dwellings owner-occupied.

Monarchism and home ownership are intrinsically linked; there are, after all, few more voracious property owners than the Windsors. As Londoners leaked into Essex in the postwar years, if they didn’t move to the new towns of Basildon or Harlow, they swapped a life of anxiety under landlords for a dabble at sovereignty. Soon, the transfer of the working classes from east London’s slums to Essex’s new suburbs became a shiny symbol of home ownership, particularly after Thatcher’s Right To Buy scheme.

Yet property ownership in these parts was not triggered by Right To Buy, but by a boom in the sale of parcels of land on which migrating Londoners with not much money but plenty of resourcefulness built DIY homes. On to this patchwork of land, acquired wholesale by cunning developers, were built thousands of makeshift homes. It’s partly how my father’s family came to live in Essex, by building a bungalow in a woodland clearing in Thundersley, which is now part of Castle Point. The rectangular, pebble-dashed dwelling my Nan grew up in is long gone; the plot now houses a luxury detached property for the modern Essexperson on a street filled with SUVs parked on lit-up driveways. When I recently visited the area for my new book, I met a woman who lived in one of the surviving bungalows built by my great-grandfather. She was very keen to talk about the history of the people who built the original estate, but not in stories of kings and the queens. “I like real history,” she said.

Before the Coronation, 1953 was already a pivotal year for Essex: the Great Flood that swamped the lowlands up the east coast of Britain killed 120 in Essex, the majority in low-lying clusters of seaside bungalow communities in Jaywick and Canvey Island. The newly-widowed Queen Mother visited Benfleet near Canvey to meet evacuees, many of whom would never move back to their ruined homes. Her visit was reported in Hilda Grieve’s The Great Tide as a morale booster and source of salt-of-the-earth stories: “There was I in me nightie, up to me neck in water with the bloody cat in me arms. What was I to do? Chuck the bloody cat in the drink?’”

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The rescue effort relied on a flurry of Royal prefixes. Evacuees from suddenly sea-filled places such as Foulness Island were taken to the Royal Corinthian Yacht Club in Burnham; missing persons on Canvey Island were diligently recorded in the form of case cards by the South Benfleet branch of the Women’s Royal Voluntary Service. It was, as the social historian Ken Worpole observed, a purely practical upshot of a post-war society of “small platoons” and the omnipresence of the monarchy in a kingdom that had not fully realised its Empire was in terminal decline.

Yet Essex’s modern affiliation with the monarchy may still prove to have a limited shelf life. Many of the outbursts of fondness for the Queen after she died stemmed from the fractured connection between civic life and the monarchy, as if the decline of the country were somehow inexorably linked with the life and death of Elizabeth Windsor — whereas it perhaps has more to do with the policies of Right To Buy architect, Margaret Thatcher. As house prices outpace local wages, Essex property is less accessible to first-time buyers than ever, beckoning already wealthy Londoners to buy property in the county and chipping away at its reputation of offering upward mobility through homeownership.

John, a retired postman and sometime anarchist I met in a pub in Southminster on the Dengie Peninsula, talked fondly of receiving Royalty In Essex when he was a schoolboy in Walthamstow, which was still part of the county in the Fifties. John had voted for Brexit, but was not a card-carrying Conservative property-owner, much less a monarchist. He lived in a modest rental property in a side street away from the pub, trying to invent a new kind of software on a knackered PC that made spread betting more profitable for him (I don’t think it ever paid off). Back at his house, he pulled the slim book from a shelf, still in pristine condition, and talked at length about the hope and promise it had symbolised 70 years ago. When Britain’s tarnished king is crowned this year in a country that feels like it is bottoming out, Essex — and England — will not be able to say the same.

After years of drifting apart, the United Kingdom suddenly felt united again. It couldn’t last, of course, and it hasn’t: a new UnHerd Britain poll reveals that while 55% of UK citizens agree that it’s a good thing Britain has a monarchy, in Scotland only 45% do.

Yet while the results are unlikely to put a smile on King Charles’s face, they are not, in the end, all that surprising. If anything, they represent a reversion to historic norms, following the fever dream of grief that broke out upon the Queen’s death. Previous surveys on Scottish attitudes to the monarchy have also shown that the Royal Family is not especially popular: shortly before the Platinum Jubilee, for instance, a poll found that fewer than half of Scots supported keeping the monarchy, while the Royals were similarly unloved four years before that. On a visit home last summer, I found that while Tesco had decked out even the frozen meat aisle with “happy and glorious” banners to mark the Queen’s jubilee, it was a lot harder to find signs of celebration in Scottish shops and institutions. The management of the purportedly “Royal” Botanic Garden in Edinburgh had tucked their jubilee sign away in a corner, while at the celebratory garden party in my hometown of Dunfermline, there were no royal souvenirs, not even a mug — although there was a cut out of John Forbes, a long-dead local worthy who founded the city of Pittsburgh.

It may be tempting to connect increasingly negative attitudes to the monarchy with the rise of nationalist sentiment since devolution. Prominent cultural figures, such as the author Alasdair Gray and the SNP politician Margo MacDonald, espoused republicanism. Nicola Sturgeon’s anointed disciple, Humza Yousaf, has vowed not only to break up the UK using “any means necessary”, but also declared on Monday that within five years of independence, he’d expect Scotland to find a new head of state. But republicanism isn’t merely an SNP talking point; Scotland’s bad relationship with monarchy goes back a long way, at least as far back as the Reformation, nearly five centuries ago.

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The secrets of Scotland's ancient capital

By Daniel Kalder

Calvinism, the national philosophy that came to dominate afterwards, is an innately levelling creed, with its cheerful teaching that God has already decided who is saved and who is damned and there is nothing you can do about it. Post-Reformation, the inhabitants of Dunfermline managed to forget where they buried no fewer than seven Scottish kings, including one of the greats, Robert the Bruce, who was only rediscovered by accident in the 19th century. In Scotland, the monarch was not the head of the church; the ministers elected their own leader. John Knox, who spearheaded the Reformation, neither admired nor feared monarchs and reduced Mary Queen of Scots to tears in front of her own court. George Buchanan, the tutor of Mary’s son James, was the author of The Law of Government Among the Scots, wherein he wrote that “the people have the right to confer royal authority upon whomever they wish”, and that they were free to overthrow — and kill — tyrants. Buchanan freely admitted to having “whipped the king’s arse” when the heir to the throne annoyed him.

Chafing against the ideas that his Calvinist tutor had tried to impose upon him, James threw off any restraints on his power as soon as he could, describing monarchy as “the supremest thing on earth” after he became king of England as well as Scotland. His son Charles I attempted to rule in the same way, but when in 1637 he tried to bring the Scottish church to heel by forcing it to accept the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, the people did not meekly comply but rather rose up in anger, resulting in two wars of rebellion. Taking a leaf out of George Buchanan’s book, the Scots did not accept the King’s authority if it conflicted with the will of God (although they later agreed to fight for him when he agreed to support Presbyterianism).

But if the Scots were less than keen on monarchs, then the feeling seems to have been mutual. For a period of almost 200 years, following a brief appearance by Charles II in 1650, no king bothered to make the journey north of the border until George IV (described by Robert Burns as “a witless youth”) toured Scotland in 1822. This trip, in which the portly King appeared in a mini-kilt and pink tights, appears to have presaged a kind of thaw, and inadvertently laid the seeds of today’s heritage industry. Sir Walter Scott, at least, was very excited, and the pageant he organised cobbled together so many Scottish tropes that one resident of Edinburgh complained that he had “ridiculously made us appear to be a nation of Highlanders, and the bagpipe and the tartan are the order of the day”.

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However, it was with the ascension of George’s granddaughter, Victoria, to the throne that Scotland really seems to have become integrated into the cult of monarchy. Prince Albert purchased Balmoral for his Queen in 1852 while Glasgow, today the most anti-monarchical place in the UK, was referred to as the Second City of the Empire, a title its inhabitants welcomed with pride. Indeed, the whole city was transformed into a monument to Empress Victoria; a statue of the Queen riding a horse (the first equestrian statue of a woman in the UK) stands close to the City Chambers (which she opened in 1888) to this day. This is easy enough to understand: in those days, Britain was winning at geopolitics, and the Scots wanted to be part of the winners’ club. While nationalists today may sometimes complain that Scotland is England’s last colony, the truth is that the Scots were enthusiastic colonisers themselves, proudly extending and administering the power of the British Empress across the globe.

Yet within a few decades of Victoria’s death, that sense of shared triumphalism vanished. My grandmother grew up in Clydebank in the heyday of the radical Red Clydesiders and remembered red flags flying at rallies in the Twenties and Thirties, while my father recalls attending a birthday party in a “communist chapel” in the early Fifties. He also remembers people booing Churchill when he appeared in cinema newsreels, and yet despite this radicalism, he has no memory of anyone booing the Queen. Indifference rather than hostility was the rule; she seemed “remote”.

Similarly, by the time I was growing up in Fife in the Eighties and Nineties, it was a given that the Royal Family were ludicrously posh and rich and out of touch, but we also accepted that that was kind of the point. Prince Charles may have liked to stride around Lochnagar in a kilt and paint landscapes of the Scottish wilderness, but this did not endear him to the masses; indeed, all that stuff about talking to plants inspired mocking impersonations at my school, and beyond. The Scottish comedian Craig Ferguson took his exceptionally cruel portrayal to the US, where it became a regular feature on his late-night chat show.

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For all the talk of the Queen’s love of Scotland, which was emphasised after she died at Balmoral, it does seem that this profound emotional attachment was more than a wee bit correlated with that majestic estate. Although I do not doubt that the Queen was absolutely sincere when she spoke of her “deep and abiding affection for this wonderful country”, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to suggest that anybody who spends every summer in a castle surrounded by beautiful forests could reasonably be expected to love it. Indeed, I might never have emigrated to the US if Balmoral were my holiday home. By contrast, the Queen spent much less time at her official residence, the Palace of Holyrood House in Edinburgh.

Yet for all that, I do not recall meeting many vocal republicans until I went to university, and they were all English. The nationalists that I knew in the Nineties — and I knew somebody who ran (unsuccessfully) for the UK parliament — never talked about the Queen or her family. They weren’t fans, of course, but they didn’t care that they weren’t fans: the Royals were simply irrelevant. It is not until 2004 that the republican “Declaration of Calton Hill” — a spirited call for “an independent Scottish Republic built on the principles of liberty, equality, diversity and solidarity” — was issued, to coincide with the Queen’s visit to open the Scottish parliament. It attracted support from significant Scottish cultural figures such as Iain Banks, the poet Edwin Morgan, and Irvine Welsh. But it was organised by the Scottish Socialist Party, which currently has zero seats in the Scottish parliament. Ever since the days of Alex Salmond’s leadership, the official position of the SNP has been to retain the monarchy.

None of this is to say that I don’t think republicanism could become a serious force in Scottish politics. If Scotland were to become independent, then the lowest hanging fruit for nationalists to go after to maintain their sense of existential purpose would be the abolition of the monarchy, as Humza Yousaf’s sudden interest in republicanism makes clear. But until that day comes, the Royal Family simply will continue to be unpopular in Scotland, and poll after poll will reveal that they are unpopular, but it will not matter at all. Always “there” but never actually present, they will drift by on TV screens, occasionally turn up to open a building, and then go away again.

And Scottish apathy might, in the end, be for the better. Because although it is nice to think that we have an inherent aversion to authority, Scots were actually quite respectful towards Calvinist preachers for many centuries, and — as the willing submission to an extended lockdown revealed — the pursRed-lipped, finger-wagging, moralising style of leadership still has quite a constituency in the country. If not King Charles, then who? I’ll take my chances with the Royals, thank you.

It wasn’t the mercurial, ADHD-fuelled writing style, which somehow still manages to tease a bright narrative line out of the chaos. It wasn’t the harrowing details of the two years the author spent in the notorious Nineties CEDU boarding school system for troubled teens. It’s that the book is trend-buckingly unapologetic. There is no privilege-acknowledging. There is no self-flagellating liberal guilt. There is one trigger warning, but in context it functions more like a titillating anticipatory pause than a chance to avoid upsetting content. After all, what reader of Paris: The Memoir is going to set the book aside just when she’s getting to the juiciest part of her traumatic origin story?

It’s hard to overstate how unusual this is. It’s got to the point when writers insert privilege disclaimers reflexively, including in contexts where they don’t make sense and aren’t even necessarily true. (“My house burned down and somebody murdered my cat — but as a cis, straight, able-bodied white woman, I’ll never know what it means to really suffer.”) I understand why people do this, of course; if you don’t call out your own privilege, you run the risk of someone far more unhinged and vindictive doing it for you. I just didn’t realise how refreshing it would be for a writer to just… not.

In the few places in the book where the word does appear, it tends to have a very different meaning. In the CEDU facilities where Paris was confined for two years in her teens, it was a “privilege” to contact your family, to wear shoes, to sleep on a bed instead of a bare mattress in the hallway. Said privileges would be revoked for violations of the facility’s rules, which were both so numerous and so intentionally self-contradictory that it was impossible not to break them. In short, the abuse that occurred at these places, which multiple lawsuits have alleged functioned more like private prisons than schools, is nothing short of horrific — residents were forcibly medicated, ritualistically humiliated in group struggle sessions, beaten and sexually assaulted, stripped naked and left in solitary confinement for up to 20 hours at a time. And the teens destined for them were the last to know what was happening: standard intake protocol was for members of the CEDU security team to snatch them out of bed in the middle of the night.

Since 2020, when she first shared this story in the documentary This Is Paris, Hilton has been part of a survivors’ movement that calls for CEDU facilities to be shut down. The sections of her memoir detailing her treatment there read like equal parts exposé and survival thriller. But here, too, the book takes an unexpected turn. Paris Hilton isn’t sorry for her privilege, but she isn’t sorry for herself, either. In a world where so much cultural currency resides in narratives of victimisation and oppression, she chooses again to just… not.

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This is striking, juxtaposed with another recent memoir by a certain individual born into breathtaking wealth and status. Consider Paris’s tone when reflecting on how her time at Provo, Utah’s CEDU facility, left her not only traumatised, but completely lacking the education of a normal person her age:

This whole shit storm had stolen two years from me, and that’s like—what is that? Like 10 percent of my life at the time? No! More like 20 percent, isn’t it? Because, like, two years would be a fifth of your life if you’re twenty, and I was only eighteen, so—ugh. Forget it. I can’t do math. Math got robbed from me, along with geography, algebra, socialisation, healthy flirtation, how to conduct my body and value my soul.

Now compare it with Prince Harry, bewailing that he’d been cut off financially by his father at the tender age of 34:

Cutting me off therefore meant firing me, without redundancy pay, and casting me into the void after a lifetime of service. More, after a lifetime of rendering me otherwise unemployable. I felt fatted for the slaughter. Suckled like a veal calf.

Both passages embody a peculiar type of celebrity: fame was guaranteed long before they did anything attention-worthy in their own right. Both were notoriously troubled teens who responded to the pressures of a privileged upbringing by rebelling, often as publicly and messily as possible, secure in the knowledge that they were too well-protected to be left with nothing. Both, too, experienced genuine trauma in their lives, the pain of which no amount of money could soften.

And yet, if someone had said 10 years ago that only one of these people would ultimately build a multimillion-dollar brand on the foundation of his or her victimhood — and make a spectacle of renouncing his or her famous family while continuing to capitalise on it at every turn — who’d have guessed it would be the Prince?

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Perhaps we might disagree on who has the greater claim to family grievance: the motherless royal who chose to renounce his role in the family, and wound up renounced by them in return; or the heiress whose complicated relationship with the parents who sent her away doesn’t stop her from citing the family name among her list of assets. (It is worth noting here that Harry, though he has made headlines by acknowledging his white male privilege, always somehow seems to avoid mentioning the part where being born royal and astronomically wealthy was surely a greater advantage. He also has the word “PRINCE” emblazoned on its cover in an exceptionally large font.) But the difference is one of degree, not of kind.

The difference in their attitudes, meanwhile, is vast. After returning to her parents’ home from the lockdown facility, a 19-year-old Paris stays up at night, unable to sleep in the room from which she was abducted at the age of 16, listing “ways to make money and leverage the assets no one could take from me: my face, my name, my legs, modelling contacts, and experience on the runway — none of which would mean anything if I wasn’t willing to work hard”. Harry, a married father in his thirties, also stays up at night — raging at the injustice of having to navigate the adult world, for which he is woefully unprepared in a way that neither the press nor his family seem to appreciate. He laments having been cruelly robbed, by his royal upbringing, of formative experiences such as carrying cash, riding the subway, or (yes, really) receiving boxes from Amazon: “After decades of being rigorously and systematically infantilised, I was now abruptly abandoned, and mocked for being immature?”

The two approaches make for a study in what each author evidently perceives as his or her most winning public relations strategy. Harry’s brand is a sob story, wrapped in a privilege acknowledgment, stuffed into Oprah’s mailbox. He is undiscerning in the details he shares. Paris’s is a more carefully choreographed airing of dirty laundry, offering front-row seats for the press. Unlike Harry, Paris is under no illusions as to the symbiotic nature of the relationship between herself and the media. They exploit her, but she exploits them, too, often beating them at their own game. As harrowing as the boarding school stories are, the more radical — and revealing — part of this memoir is the frankness with which she describes a lifetime of living in front of the cameras, for better and for worse.

Her humanity, the real person behind the public figure, comes through in unexpected flashes, as when she describes putting her own body between a mini-dress-wearing Britney Spears and the hovering paparazzi as the pop star climbed into a car, shielding her in the vulnerable moment when a photographer might have captured an upskirt shot. But what also comes through is how savvy Hilton has always been about how much she controls the narrative when it comes to her family’s public face — how much she is its public face.

When her parents come to visit her at the Provo boarding school just a few weeks shy of her 18th birthday, she hisses a promise in her father’s ear: if he makes her stay at the facility until she’s reached legal adulthood, her first stop after they let her out will be the offices of the Wall Street Journal, where she’ll tell the press exactly what they’ve been doing to her — what her parents paid them to do. After years of refusing to believe their daughter when she said she was being abused at Provo, what does it say about the Hiltons that this was the one utterance they took seriously? (Paris was released shortly thereafter.) And what does it say about Paris that, despite her threat — and despite the obvious cachet of having been so sensationally mistreated — it took decades before she made this story public?

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I came of age at the same time as Paris Hilton — she is almost exactly one year older than me — and it’s tempting, having read this memoir, to indulge in a little self-flagellation of my own. I remember laughing along with everyone else when Sarah Silverman, at the 2007 MTV Movie Awards, joked with gleeful malice about Hilton’s upcoming stint in jail. I remember rolling my eyes at The Simple Life, the reality TV show that featured Paris and Nicole Richie struggling their way through menial, low-paying jobs as janitors, farmhands, camp counsellors. Of course, there was no way of knowing at the time how much of The Simple Life was pure performance (apart from the strip searches and struggle sessions, Provo’s preferred method of character-building was to make the residents haul rocks), or that Paris’s widely-mocked breakdown over being sentenced to jail stemmed from genuine PTSD. But the mix of sneering contempt and total incuriosity with which she was treated: that was a choice.

It seems incredible that the media hasn’t jumped at the chance to recontextualise what they did to Paris Hilton in the same way that they’ve done with Britney Spears — which is to say, to shamelessly march out all their most exploitative coverage for a documentary re-airing, under the nearly transparent pretence of repenting for their sins. And yet, the response to Paris’s latest offering has been, at best, only marginally less sneering than usual.

Maybe it’s because there never was a meltdown, or a breakdown, or a tearful sit down with Oprah that made Paris seem like a person it was possible to feel sorry for. Or maybe it’s just the same old cynicism: who is to say that this isn’t just another example of Hilton’s uncanny capacity for controlling the narrative, even as she appears to be making herself vulnerable? If a person is both incredibly calculating and also incredibly honest about it, does that make her more trustworthy, or less? When she forgives her parents for sending her away, is it because she really forgives them? Or has she simply concluded — as Prince Harry must have when he decided to christen his daughter a Princess — that her family is a greater asset to her than renouncing all its privileges could ever be?

So feudalism returns to save us from ourselves and, like feudalism, Nansledan has a wild charisma. There is a granite obelisk at the roundabout, by the kind of Art Deco building you might see on the finer parts of the North Circular. It is made of Bodmin granite, and it marks the King’s first visit to Nansledan in 2014. I spend three days here — I was trapped after one of Cornwall’s rare snow flurries — and I think I know a lot about the king from the village that walked out of his head. There is something sensitive and thwarted about him — his watercolours are idealistic, and fragile — and Nansledan mirrors this. There are bird nooks in the walls of cottages, a herd of cows browsing in a wildflower meadow, and solar panels on roofs designed to look like slate. The school looks like the Overlook Hotel in The Shining — it has stolen its roofline — but that is a rare mistake, and surely not his. Everyone remarks on his taste.

There is a master plan. It shows sector after sector rising over 25 years, courtesy of approved builders: Morrish Homes; Wainhomes; C G Fry and Son. Eventually it will have 4,000 homes, produce one job in Nansledan for every household, and will meet up with Newquay Orchard, another expression of the king’s preoccupations, across the valley. (A stone at the base of a tree in the orchard says, rather ruefully: “We are all growing.”) It has principles which summon a village of the past, but with pain scrubbed out. There is no typhoid or indentured servitude here, though people are appreciative of the king, and talk about him fondly: “You know he’s coming when people start sweeping things up, and finishing houses.” I pity the republicans here, who statistically must exist, but people will do a lot for good housing nowadays.

Everything is within walking distance to discourage cars. Small independent businesses are favoured, though a Little Waitrose made it into Queen Mother Square in Poundbury, possibly because it stocks Waitrose Duchy Organic. Apprenticeships of traditional crafts are promoted, as is renewable energy. Freeholders must sign a covenant agreeing to maintain their buildings according to duchy principles, and holiday lettings and the placing of whole buildings on Airbnb are banned. Of the housing, 30% is reserved for social housing, affordable housing, and shared ownership — a high proportion for Cornwall and for England — and it took a royal duchy to do it.

I have only lived in old houses and older towns, and nothing prepares me for the oddness of Nansledan. I’ve never seen a village like it: there are no road markings, no mature trees, no church, no pub and, for a village, very few people. Mothers with buggies flee past, out of the wind; young children scoot on pristine streets. There is a glut of parking, which is astonishing for Cornwall: Elysium.

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Art Deco is where the king’s clock stops. Otherwise, Nansledan winds its way from medieval through Queen Anne to neat Victorian cottages. They are painted in pastels, like that street in Notting Hill: pale pink, pale blue, pale green. Nansledan: meet Instagram. The impression is of a box of macaroons stranded on a hill, stamped with a crown: a Duchy Original village, and it is both addictive and curiously oppressive, due to the intensity of its vision. I have a fantasy that he lives here in an ice-blue Victorian pastiche cottage, sticking his nose out of his door, and sniffing his cherry trees. I think he should: it is his.

The house builders have their offices on the main road by the obelisk. Donna from Wainhomes takes me to the show home, a white oversized cottage on three storeys, with a cherry red front door. If the exterior aesthetic is disorientating, the interior is generic: it’s a show home clad in neutrals, well-designed and finely built. Perhaps it is a metaphor for monarchy itself: something ancient rebuilt with mod cons to stay pleasing, a common royal contortion in the shape of a house.

“It’s like a fishing village,” says Donna and it is, if you have never seen a fishing village. There are no fish, and no sea, and no Lidl, and no foodbank. Cornwall tends to divide itself into local and tourist aesthetic, and Nansledan has chosen the tourist aesthetic. This is not wrong — why should it be? — but it is new, and therefore odd.

In a parade of shops, I find life at the Methodist community space. I peer in, see two women and two dogs, and they wave me inside. I sense that Nansledan, which is isolated on its hill, is very like St Mary’s on the Isles of Scilly: in a few minutes everyone will know who I am, and why I am here. Clare Anderson is the Methodist minister in Newquay. She lives here because the Methodists were going to build a church at Nansledan, but costs spiralled, and they will build in Newquay instead: there will be no idealised church. She has lived here for four years.

“There’s a lovely sense of community apart from the keyboard warriors and the people who are a bit cliquey,” she says, when I ask what it is like living in a partially built ideal village. “Because the duchy has got a design code it’s almost a stick to beat people with.” No one will tell me explicitly about WhatsApp fights relating to hanging baskets — it’s too new and small a community to criticise the neighbours openly — but they don’t have to. I can sense them. They have sworn fealty to their village and its design code, and woe betide those who won’t conform.

“It’s a mixed environment,” Claire says, “but nonetheless it feels like a wealthy development and that brings its own prejudices and baggage. There are coffee shops where a cup of coffee is expensive. If you were living in affordable housing here it would be completely unobtainable.” She is a town councillor, and she knows the misery of the housing crisis — she says every local Facebook group is filled with pleas for housing as rentals are sold for Airbnbs. I ask her what Nansledan will achieve. “30% of these houses is just a drop in the ocean,” she says, looking about. “It’s not something Nansledan can solve.” At least, not alone, and so Nansledan functions partially as a rebuke, and partly as — and this is universal — something that others cannot have.

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I visit Newquay. There is nowhere to buy food in Nansledan when the cafes and the chocolate shop and the bakery close at dusk. Newquay is the same as most mid-sized Cornish towns, grand — the waves are vast, rolling in off the Atlantic — and rotting. It has none of the finesse of Nansledan, but it feels real nonetheless, and therefore comforting. I find a pasty in Warren’s, and the prototype for Nansledan: a small estate called Tregunnel Hill near the boating lake. Within Newquay, the duchy aesthetic feels less deranged than in Nansledan: that is, it looks like a piece of high Victorian Eastbourne, transplanted to Cornwall by people with time and leisure for good taste.

On the way back I stop in St Columb Minor, the closest village to Nansledan. Sometimes in winter Cornwall feels like a shoulder closed to the wind. A woman with a vast fur hood tells me she thought Nansledan was like Noddy’s Toytown when it emerged from the farmland. (There is a still a farmhouse. It is proudly unrenovated. It looks angry, for a house). She regards Nansledan in the same way that she might regard Asgard. “A hundred pounds for a cardigan,” she says, amazed, and says that Nansledan is not for her: too expensive. It is true that it is expensive for Newquay — an open-market three-bedroom house is £330,000 in Nansledan against £250,000 outside it — but as of last August 45% buyers of open-market homes were from Newquay, and 70% were from Cornwall. (This is down from 72% in May 2020.) There are a few second homeowners, but they keep their heads down, like women living among religious fundamentalists.

I visit the shops, which are offered at good rates to suitable businesses, which must go through a detailed application process. There are rules on signage colour, placing and font. Eventually there will be a vast marketplace but for now Nansledan sells pretty food and, above all, aesthetics, as if they sing to each other. There is a café called Shiva with an attached yoga studio, two homeware shops — one also sells clothes — a giftshop with a minimalist bucket and spade, two hairdressers and a boutique which I suspect is the source of the £100 cardigan slur. Nansledan is already a shopping destination. Local people come to the Ladyvale bakery to eat gluten-free cakes, admire the papery flowers on the ceiling and, above all, park their cars.

In Shiva I meet a young woman who used to lived here with her father over his blinds and awning shop: she has a baby, and she is as lovely as anything in Nansledan.  She has now bought a home here with her partner for 60% of market value under a section 106, which will remain affordable even if she sells it on: her previous home in Newquay has Airbnbs on both sides. “There were so many people who applied for our house,” she says. “They chose us!”  She adores Nansledan: “It’s like a movie set, it’s so perfect”. The Cornish relationship to affluence is complicated. It must be, in a relatively isolated and culturally feudal duchy with a thriving entrepreneur class on the one hand, and some of the poorest people — and housing — in western Europe on the other.

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But Nansledan admits no such tension openly: it is as smooth as icing sugar. This is the village of a perfectionist, who has lined up every Cornish element he can find. The street names are Cornish. The granite and slate are Cornish. The houses are Cornish-shaped; there is even a tiny replica of the ducal manor house at Restormel. The effect of all this Cornishness, of course, is to make Nansledan seem very un-Cornish. It is pastiche, and that is forgivable. If it isn’t Cornish, then neither is he, but he gifts his vision – his experience – of Cornwall to them, and they accept it happily.

I think the contradiction — the potential offence — of Nansledan is that something so fine has emerged from a feudal remnant and is likely to be fetishized for it; perhaps we will want more of it, since government and council cannot provide. It offends our far newer belief in democracy, which has not provided the housing people need: on the contrary, children are dying in mouldy homes due to the greed of landlords enabled by our insane planning laws. It takes a man who can afford not to be greedy, to show us the error of greed in house building, and I can’t think of anything more depressing, or more English.

Nansledan is not just an aesthetic marvel I am confused by, because it meddles with time and space. Above all, it is a failure of government, and so we look backwards for a solution, and establish an idealised village in less than a decade. I can laugh at the fishing village without fish or fishermen and the Waitrose magazine aesthetic fallen on the streets like snow, but the truth is I don’t have a friend in Cornwall who wouldn’t want an affordable home in Nansledan, and that is both cheering and pitiable.

When it comes to their media image, things could be worse for the House of Windsor. Last week, the fifth Netflix season of The Crown began after an overture of outrage deploring the drama’s distortion or fabrication of various episodes in royal history during the Nineties. While former premiers (John Major and Tony Blair) rail against the “malicious nonsense” and “complete rubbish” in the scripts, few champions of the “Firm” have paused to reflect that, even now, the royals enjoy a smoother ride than many of their ancestors.

James Gillray’s 1791 print “Hopes of the Party Prior to July 14”, described above, added one more acid drop to the flood of satirical engravings that lampooned the Hanoverian monarchy — along with other pillars of the ruling class — between 1780 and 1820. In this “golden age of caricature”, with Gillray, George Cruikshank and Thomas Rowlandson as its lords of misrule, palace misconduct and political intrigue unleashed a level of obscene ridicule that makes the snide smears of The Crown’s lead writer Peter Morgan feel like the softest of touches.

Yet a glib contrast between Georgian ferocity and 21st-century gentility will only take us so far. The stance of the shape-shifting Gillray, in particular, is famously hard to pin down. Tim Clayton’s definitive new study of the artist, James Gillray: a Revolution in Satire, notes that his “ambiguous, enigmatic” pen means that “it is rare in mature Gillray for either side to be entirely right or wrong”. Is “Hopes of the Party” an awful warning against the sanguinary horrors of French Revolutionary radicalism (Gillray engraved it two years after the Bastille fell, but before the guillotining of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette)? Or could it be interpreted as a parody of reactionary scare-mongering, a jibe at whipped-up alarms about the rotund Whig leader Charles James Fox — who features as George’s III’s executioner, while his gaunt Tory foe William Pitt dangles from that rope — and his reformist comrades? Proper satire slices both ways: different strokes for different folks.

Yes, Gillray and his colleagues could be brutal. In “A Voluptuary under the Horrors of Digestion”, the bloated, gluttonous Prince of Wales recovers from his vices with an overflowing chamber-pot and bottles of pox-pills behind him. Chamber pots, in fact, became something of a running gag with Gillray. In “Lubber’s Hole — Or — the Crack’d Jordan” (“jordan” was slang for a chamber-pot), the future William IV, then Duke of Clarence, dives through a suggestive gash into a giant receptacle that represents his long-term mistress, the actress Dorothea Jordan. Even when he opted for an epic style, Gillray might be gross. In “Sin, Death and the Devil”, which alludes in his richly inter-textual way to Milton’s Paradise Lost, the wrinkled-breasted, Gorgon-haired Queen Charlotte intercedes in a fight between the naked Pitt and Thurlow (a rival minister), with her hand clasped over Pitt’s genitals. Although that particular scene did apparently give offence to King and Queen, the rudeness — and crudeness — of the “Prince of Caricatura” and his epoch can never be mapped neatly onto anti-Hanoverian attitudes.

Indeed, Gillray’s portrayals of George III and his consort as cheese-paring peasant bumpkins — as in “Frying Sprats, Toasting Muffins” — edged into outright affection. Gillray’s heyday coincided not with a fall but a rise in the royal household’s popularity after the débâcle of the American Revolution. When the widely-welcomed revolt against elite injustices in France turned regicidal and expansionist after 1792, the cross-Channel threat rallied sceptics to the House of Hanover. In “Anti-Saccharrites”, the frugal King is urging sugar-less tea on his daughters not simply to cut costs but as a blow against the West Indian slave trade. What “a Noble Example of Oeconomy”! And in Gillray’s master-stroke of loyalist toilet humour, “The French Invasion — Or — John Bull Bombarding the Bum-boats”, sturdy patriotism and poo gags reach a joint apotheosis. George III has morphed into the map of Britain itself (although he still wears a dunce’s cap in the shape of Northumberland) as he craps majestically — from somewhere around Lyme Regis — all over the hapless French fleet. As Tim Clayton puts it: “The daubs of the caricaturist produced no contempt for ‘Farmer George and his wife.’”

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By Tessa Dunlop

Never mistake vulgarity for venom. Partisans both of the Windsors and the digital dukes of Netflix (a new elite if ever there was one) should reflect that mere rudeness about royals, however scurrilous or scatological, might not weaken monarchy itself. Critique, mockery and caricature — dim, cheapskate kings, randy, farting princes, blowsy mistresses and all — could leave the institution intact if the idea behind it remained robust. The flawed royal person (in Gillray’s time, that meant above all George Augustus Frederick, Prince of Wales, then Prince Regent and, at long last, George IV) might guzzle, booze, schmooze, fornicate and plunder at will. But if the core faith in monarchy held, an artist’s vitriol-tipped burin would not in itself corrode the crown.

For much of the audience could still separate frail individual from sacred office. The medieval doctrine of the king’s two bodies — one fallible and mortal, the other an impersonal “body politic” — just about survived in many minds. In his terrific book on London in the great age of satire, City of Laughter, Vic Gatrell argues that star caricaturists “didn’t aim to influence the common people, still less to subvert the monarchical principle”. Besides, mockery usually shadows flattery. Dr Johnson dreaded the time when his name would cease to provoke “calumny or ridicule… for then I would be neglected and forgotten”.

Once the firm hold of an ideal starts to slip, however, and the public no longer accepts a necessary gap between person and principle, then even mild and oblique sniping, Netflix-style, may take a toll. In a disenchanted time, private life and public role have to align. Of course, the player in the royal show who best grasped — and acted on — that insight was the late Elizabeth II. Whereas the politician who has most shamelessly tried to revive in his favour an ancient distinction between the errant human being and the august office-holder who “got all the big calls right” was none other than Boris Johnson. Now there’s a target for some Gillray Redux.

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Annie Ernaux: queen of the suburbs

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Gillray, Cruikshank and co. assaulted the royal family but not the royal function. In the age of Tom Paine, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, real revolutionaries certainly did the latter. The circles of the graphic satirists seldom overlapped with theirs, although in the 1810s the Cruikshank brothers would forge stronger radical links. However, even the implacable George Cruikshank fell prudently silent on royal matters after a paltry-sounding royal bribe in 1820.

In 1797, Gillray himself had taken a £200 pension from the Tories while remaining a “deniable” loose cannon. For many years he lived and worked in St James’s Street, in the belly of the Establishment beast. He would have spotted his victims en route to club, town-house or palace. Some called in to buy the sort of prints that depicted them as grotesque bags of piss, pus and wind. Fox himself — the engraver’s beloved bugbear over many years — dropped by to purchase a portrayal of himself as a swarthy, sinister Jacobin insurrectionist (“A Meeting of Unfortunate Citoyens”). He left Hannah Humphrey (Gillray’s landlady, publisher and chaste life-partner) with a cheery “Good morning to you”. The Prince of Wales himself made sure that lackeys came in to buy successive caricatures of his flabby royal personage. There were many of those. Between 1803 and 1810, the Prince’s establishment at Carlton House spent £57 (a lot) on Gillray prints of their master as a preposterous balloon of lust and greed. Sometimes, he just wanted them taken off the market. But vanity loves even a distorting mirror.

You might say that the surface cruelty of Gillray’s time masked an underlying kindness, or at least solidarity. The royal satirists wanted to rock the boat but not to sink the ship. Whereas The Crown lavishes an unctuous, pseudo-respectful concern on its characters (Morgan has called the series a “love-letter” to the late Queen) while not caring too much if it does its bit to send the yacht of monarchy beneath the waves. You may think that a desirable outcome. If so, then the comic hyperbole of Gillray and Cruikshank would offer a more honest mode for hostile royal soap-opera than Netflix’s gear-crashing blend of fancily-written tittle-tattle with boring slabs of po-faced court reportage for “balance”.

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Kingsley Amis vs God

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At the high noon of caricature, ribaldry and reverence could rub along together. Meanwhile, Napoleon’s slide from liberator to despot (brilliantly chronicled by Gillray himself) handily blocked the path in many British minds that might have led from burlesque to the barricades. In any case, chortles tend to limit theoretical critique. As Clayton says of prints such as Gillray’s “Presentation of the Mahometan Credentials”, with the Turkish ambassador pointing a long phallic scroll at the royal couple as Pitt the pet monkey cowers at their feet, “they induce laughter, not hatred”. Even (especially?) at their rudest, Georgian and Regency graphic satires have a strong flavour of Carry on up the Throne-room.

Their artists’ slaps and digs bruised Hanoverian flesh but broke no vital bones. Once the tide turned in the direction of reform and respectability in the 1820s and 1830s, memories of the debauched Prince Regent and his idle clan did nothing to stop the emergence of Victoria and Albert as discreet, bourgeois monarchs for an increasingly discreet, bourgeois nation. Today, in contrast, the simpering faux compassion of The Crown has neither the candour of a principled aversion to royalty nor the coherence of a principled defence. Gillray and the satire squad’s tough love did not kill the monarchy; arguably, they made it stronger. In contrast, the unaccountable plutocracy at Netflix want to stifle it in a long, slow, sickly kiss of death.

In episode two, Jonathan Pryce’s Philip tells his (much) younger blonde friend Penny: “The one thing human beings do the minute they make a commitment to a life together” is “grow in separate directions”. His imagined advice to the vulnerable Diana (preparing to detonate her Andrew Morton “bomb”) is even more incriminating: “Be creative… you can do whatever you want, you can make whatever arrangements you need to find your own happiness”, as long as “you remain loyal to your husband and loyal to this family in public”. But the show doesn’t dare go further.

Likewise Philip’s marriage to Elizabeth has always been a tough subject for biographers. There is no hard evidence that Philip was unfaithful, and while Her Majesty was still alive the issue was all the more sensitive. This may explain the strange detour in Gyles Brandreth’s otherwise excellent biography Philip, the Final Portrait. Promising an interrogation of the Duke’s reputation as a womaniser, Brandreth seeks to establish what Freud would have made of Philip’s female-heavy early childhood. (He was a longed-for son arriving late into a family of four girls.)

Brandreth explores the hypothetical possibility of Philip having “penis awe”, perhaps even “phallic swagger” — both conditions which apparently stem from disproportionate female attention and devotion when young. He tells us what we already know: that Philip liked the company of young attractive women, but his discussion with a Freudian psychologist is inconclusive. Apparently, men with “phallic swagger” aren’t always serial adulterers.

Had Brandreth really wanted to land a psychobabble blow, he would have looked into the male role models in Philip’s life. There was his father’s failed marriage and glamorous lady friends in the Riviera, his uncle Lord Mountbatten’s notoriously “open” marriage, not to mention his Greek uncle Big George and Marie Bonaparte’s “unconventional” relationship. Monogamy did not have much currency in the Duke’s wider family.

In many respects Elizabeth and Philip’s marriage was in keeping with the pair’s pedigree, upbringing and exceptional status. What went on behind closed doors in their marriage is a moot point and one which has disproportionately focused on the importance of monogamy at the expense of arguably greater goals — an enduring marriage and stable family monarchy.

Aristocrats have long played by different rules, and in the first half of the 20th century, when marriages were often undertaken for practical and dynastic reasons, an exclusive physical relationship was rarely a prerequisite for a lasting union. Between the wars, commentators promoted the idea of emotional and spatial independence in marriage. In 1935 co-founder of the National Marriage Guidance Council, Edward Griffith, recommended “the independence of each must be guaranteed”. Others were more explicit: “A woman may love her husband with all her heart, but even love needs an occasional rest.” And those women, invariably without an income of their own, had to shut up and put up.

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Can the nation survive Elizabeth?

By Paul Kingsnorth

But times were changing fast. Service girls, having enjoyed rare freedom outside the domestic arena during the war, bought into new idealised notions of a companionate marriage. These modern unions were based on affection, friendship, and sexual gratification; it was anticipated that a spouse would meet all of their partner’s emotional and physical needs. Or as a panellist on the 1954 Royal Commission of Marriage and Divorce put it: “We are coming to expect more and more of our marriages.” It was these expectations that meant “marriages today are at risk to a greater extent than formerly”.

Take 99-year-old Daphne Attridge for instance. As a young woman, she served in the female army (ATS) during the war and keenly followed Philip and Elizabeth’s love story. Like many, she got engaged during the conflict (and promptly unengaged). Until she found her perfect man, she pinned her romantic hopes vicariously on the royal couple’s relationship. “We wanted to know they were in love. That mattered to us.”

This post-war companionate model of marriage has endured, but marriages in general have not necessarily. As the Commission predicted, higher expectations led to greater disappointment and a rapidly rising divorce rate. Despite the best efforts of both church and state, marital breakdown quickly became a hallmark of modern living, with Elizabeth and Philip’s union an almighty exception. But then, they were playing by different rules, weren’t they?

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How the Queen weakened monarchy

By Richard Vinen

There is no doubting the late Queen’s devotion to her husband; she was sticking press cuttings about sailor Philip’s wartime adventures into her scrapbook aged 14. As for the nomadic Prince, steadfast Elizabeth was a game-changer. However, their union lent heavily on more independent models of marriage in vogue in the early 20th century: Elizabeth did not hang out with Philip’s “funny friends” who entertained him in Soho supper clubs, at Cowdray Park playing polo, and on (and off) the River Solent. She avoided Cowes Week “like the plague”, pursued separate equine hobbies, had agency and income that vastly outstripped her husband’s and slept in her own bedroom. (According to the author and campaigner Marie Stopes, interwar champion of Married Love, the latter was a sensible move. Apparently separate bedrooms prevent “everyday association” which “tends to reduce the keen pleasure each takes in the other”.)

By all accounts, even Charles was irked by his father’s latter-day friendship with Penny; perhaps he was also miffed that there had been a spread featuring 13 women in Tatler, entitled “The Duke of Edinburgh’s Fan Club”. And yet somehow, in both cases, Philip got away with his reputation enhanced: a raffish old man at worst. Who could resist the outspoken Duke in his dotage, stumbling around Sandringham, riding carriages with his sometime blonde companion and driving when dangerously old? Like his father, Charles had also inherited Mountbatten as a pre-marriage mentor, but with very different results. Times had irrevocably changed. The posh propensity to turn a blind eye no longer washed in a society where divorce was prevalent, and modern celebrity promised riches outside the royal club.

Elizabeth and Philip’s union was forged in a different age, when commitment to monarchy and marriage trumped everything else. Ultimately their 73-year union not only stood the test of time, it was a great success, and one which the couple were justifiably proud of. The Queen, never an open book, divulged her tips for a successful marriage in 1972 — the year of the couple’s Silver Wedding anniversary — explaining that a Christian marriage should be “tolerant and understanding”. Fifty years later, the Duke confirmed the Queen had “tolerance in abundance”.

Exactly what that says about the dynamics within our late monarch’s marriage is open to interpretation, as the Duke no doubt intended. After all, Elizabeth and Philip came from an old-fashioned school of thought — it was important to be seen, but, where possible, royalty should not let in too much “daylight upon the magic”. As Walter Bagehot explained, “its mystery is its life”.

First, an appropriate Spring date for his early coronation has been announced. And then, on Wednesday, he perhaps deliberately broadcast to the world his irritation and dismay at Truss: “Back again? Dear, oh dear. Anyway…” This incident has already exploded any notion that Charles as King will be completely apolitical. But a more political monarchy should be welcomed, both in principle and also on account of the immediate and complex danger in which our realm now stands.

In the face of this peril, King and Prime Minister represent two completely opposite possible future responses: one concerned with restoring a more natural, rooted, cooperative order under the authority of a mystical deity; the other determined to install a yet more nakedly liberal and secular regime in which order is to be distilled out of the uprooted strivings of human individuals who seek only their own further advantage.

Thanks to both new global circumstances and to Truss’s overkill, we can no longer be so sure of the inevitable triumph of the second, more obviously modern perspective as we once might have been. We can now recall that the Queen’s funeral was the sudden and gently confident rising to the surface of an older and deeper reality. What drew people to this event was a phenomenon of incarnation, in an ultimately Christian sense, which nonetheless resonated for people of many different faiths and none at all. The Queen, in her increasingly frail body, had been the ultimate locus of power and authority. She stood for the notion that legitimate power, in contrast to the Trusketeer vision, is, indeed, inherently symbolic as well as personal, because it derives from above and from our answerability to the eternally and objective Good, True and Beautiful, not from a balancing of brutally material forces.

England was once devoted to the notion of the “king’s two bodies” — the idea that when the mortal body of a monarch dies, her immortal body of authority survives. (Charles became king not through a ceremony, but at the very instant of his mother’s passing away.) This idea was ultimately inseparable from a theological one: the doctrine that Christ was, in a still more radical sense, at once both human and divine.

Yet in the case of kingship, this never meant that the monarch was a pagan semi-deity. Rather, kingship is anointed: the king is only king under God, and bound to the divinely-given law of the land and to the people who themselves belong to God. The scriptures recognise both the dangers of monarchic tyranny and the likelihood, in a republic, of aristocratic corruption. It is for this reason that they advocate what is in effect a mode of constitutional monarchy.

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It's the Queen or tyranny

By Mary Harrington

We speak of ourselves too often as a mere “democracy”, as if we believe in the dominance of the sheerly aggregated will of the British people. But in reality, we live in a representative democracy, under the ultimate sway of the Crown. Political representatives are in effect a kind of “aristocracy”, since they at once guide, influence and interpret the will of the people.

It can seem as if the way forward should be further to liberalise and democratise that mixture. But do we wish to unleash the isolated wills of narcissistic individuals — or their aggregated compound, often in populist reaction against the former? In reality, a less hollow, more participatory and continuous democracy can only prevail if we cultivate a more honourable and rooted leadership at every level, rather than a self-seeking oligarchy that seeks to manipulate and control the populace as though it were a machine.

Monarchy might stand at the apex of this better “aristocracy”. Its leadership is inherited, tying it to tradition, to land, to the interpersonal and to patronage. It is naturally linked to the rural soil, to the encouraging of creative labour, and to life, as instanced by the causes that Charles III supported when he was a prince.

However, mixed government supposes a perennial sense (well known to Charles as a reader of René Guenon) that human beings tend either to be thinkers, doers or sustainers — therefore to fall into contemplative, political-military or economic social roles. A monarch is naturally drawn towards the top-down integration of these three elements, just as he tends to see the need to link the executive, judicial and democratic powers within the political sphere.

Therefore, the monarch not only enables but also counterbalances the aristocrats. His power resists their latent republican desires for purely oligarchic rule; indeed, it often depends upon a “Caesarian” appeal, over their heads, to the people, as we see in Shakespeare’s tragedy, Julius Caesar. The monarch can act as a counterweight to the over-confidence of the supposedly wise, whose wisdom has degenerated into mere expertise. A king is properly concerned with the inculcation of genuine wisdom and often this resonates much more with the common-sense and folk traditions of the people than the bourgeois theorising of the semi-educated.

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Only a monarch can control the elites

By Curtis Yarvin

For this reason, there is nothing inappropriate about King Charles’s specific interest in a better pedagogy. Ultimately, a non-liberal politics exists to inculcate virtue in its citizens. Charles has often promoted exactly that, through his various trusts and projects. But at the same time, he has also attended to the popular voice with respect to architecture, family, community, land, craft and local economy. Experts have tended to deride this work, ignoring the fact that monarchy can help to render democracy more substantive, as opposed to allowing it to become increasingly hollowed-out by attention to only formal procedures.

Everything here is paradoxical: if more power is to spring from below, it needs a space shaped, crafted and protected from above. Only a king may possess a destiny sufficiently at one with his people to be relatively immune to selfish distractions and partisan influences.

That is why monarchy is never apolitical or merely “dignified” and ceremonial — but is, rather, political in a sense higher than is usually observed in our agonistic politics. Deeper than our arguments lies always our consensus, without which the arguments could not be peaceably conducted. Kings and Queens can legitimately attend to the shaping and promotion of this consensus, even though it will never, of course, be without some contestation.

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The mythic power of King Charles III

By Aris Roussinos

Charles as Prince was right to focus on matters of land, life, labour and education. He was right also to focus on trying to include the socially marginalised. All this is about the pursuit of the common good, and should not be controversial, or thought of as “meddling”. A Trusketeer politics that ignores the common good is not a politics at all, but an anti-politics. It is a monarch’s higher priorities that may serve to preserve the Union of four distinct peoples and a shared feeling of “Britishness”, despite an increase in federalised self-government.

We need to understand that our institutions are all in disarray because we do not understand the real principles of mixed constitution which they embody, nor their ultimate links to sacral monarchy. For it is impossible to pursue a shared Good, Truth and Beauty if one has no conviction that these things are eternally real — and can, to a degree, be rendered truly incarnate and instantiated as “harmony” here below. Congregations in churches and Hindu temples may be inspired by the priestly promise of the celestial, but the people in the queue were even more inspired by the notion that heaven might be brought down to Earth — and the hope that, one day, the Earth itself would be restored, when only “God”, or the Truth itself, is finally our ruler.

Monarchy is subordinate to a spiritual priesthood — to us, the established church, which now guards the orb and sceptre until coronation day — and yet looks carnally beyond it, to a greater integration of soul with body and of understanding with pleasure. This is why everyone was so awed and yet excited by the funeral.

But how can we renew our constitution today? Monarchy should be a key part of that renewal: it has an especially strong role to play now that elected leaders are so distrusted. Without a monarchic tempering, populism may well deliver ever-further extremism, and liberalism may deliver ever-further intolerance of those who uphold objective norms. Our hope must lie in Charles exercising the higher and more fundamental politics proper to a king.

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A very British Hajj

By Will Lloyd

He could make more of his views public, where crucial aspects of our civic life are under threat. He could reduce his household, but increase his assembly of advisers and their interactions with the Civil Service. He could meet more regularly and not just ceremonially with members of his Privy Council. He could increase his influence with the House of Lords. He could consider the exercise of the royal veto in relation to matters that obviously violate the verdict of the ages or fundamental human liberties. In the future, the Crown might also move to prevent gross violations of our constitution, such as Blair’s removal of the House of Lords’s role as our highest court, or Johnson’s prorogation of Parliament.

Above all, Charles could expand the role of Royal commissions, colleges and trusts. On the model of the National Trust, he could establish organisations operating under royal charter concerned with ecology, land use, water, energy resources, housing, education and so forth. They would both produce strong ideas and put them into practice, on land that the organisations themselves owned.

None of these measures would damage representative democracy, because elected assemblies would still generally have the last word. But by increasing and encouraging honourable virtue and wisdom — drawing at once on ancient traditions and popular instinct — Charles’s reign could truly enable more popular involvement in social and economic processes.

God is said in the New Testament to have “emptied himself” by becoming a man on Earth. Instinctively, the people of this country recently responded to the self-emptying character of royal power. They saw that the monarch is us — her body our body, her death our death — and yet, miraculously, she is not dead, not even in her fragile earthly body, which is re-embodied in Charles. They saw that real power is obedience to the Good and service to the people. They saw that they can only be people themselves if they pursue these kingly virtues and become a “royal priesthood”. It is this vision that we must now seek to realise if we are to save ourselves as a polity.

Last Thursday evening we were camped on the shores of a lough, cooking our day’s catch on a grill as the sun set. Remote though we were, there was still — unfortunately — a phone signal, so my wife was able to bring us the unwelcome news from the outside world.

“Did you hear that the Queen died?” she said.

I hadn’t heard. I had been living in a different world for a while, but now the bigger, bleaker one had broken back in. I was surprised at the sense of loss that swept over me. You have to be British to understand this — and British at this moment in time especially. For my entire lifetime, and almost all of the lifetime of my parents, “the Queen” was just there. She was on the stamps and the coins and the telly every Christmas. Technically, she owned the whole country and had the power to dismiss governments and sack prime ministers, but we all knew she would never use them. Even republicans admitted a sneaking admiration for her sense of duty and work rate. At least somebody in the country, ran the subtext, still knew what duty actually meant.

The Queen lasted: nothing else did. Come up with whatever diagnoses you please, blame who you like, but you can’t deny Britain’s downward trajectory over her reign: steep, dizzying, painful. Only the Queen stood still, or seemed to, and as she did so she represented something much older than any of the rules we live by. A monarch has sat on the throne of England for 1,500 years. The meaning of this is mostly inaccessible to our argumentative modern minds.

Now we have a new monarch, we British, and sitting by that Irish lake last week I felt both sad and, suddenly, homesick. I felt that I wanted to be back in my country to share what was happening with my people. All the ceremony that is unfolding around me as I write, leading us smoothly and impressively towards the funeral and the coronation that will inevitably follow, embodies at once both the determination of the British state to maintain itself and the strange, proud, bloody-minded anachronism of the whole business.

How much longer can it last? The republicans and the rationalists have mostly been keeping their heads down this week, as the tide of media-fanned national sentiment roars over them. But those who want to “modernise” the country still further will be back soon enough. A monarchy is, after all, an offence against modernity. It is a hang-up from an earlier, more organic age, which at its worst is a trapdoor to a particular type of tyranny (our new king’s ancestral namesake ended up with his head in a basket on this charge), but at its best is a bulwark against another: the money-power of digital modernity. A monarchy is irrational, uncommercial and inexplicably mystical. It embodies tradition passed down through time. As such, it is deeply “unrepresentative” according to the current, constipated definition of that word, and yet it manages somehow to represent the country better than any elected politician, celebrity, pundit or philosopher ever could.

For all these reasons, a monarchy in the Machine age will always be in the crosshairs. What, after all, is the point of a monarch in the modern world? There is really only one: to represent a country and its history; to be a living embodiment of the spirit of a people. As such, the throne represents to its critics more than some putative offence against “democracy”: it stands for something whose very existence is increasingly contentious in its meaning, form and direction: the nation itself.

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By Aris Roussinos

I recently wrote about the home, and its degradation by the culture of the Machine. We are all being levered out of the domestic sphere and sold instead a pseudo-egalitarian fulfilment “in the workplace”, at capitalism’s behest, upending our family lives and diminishing our self-sufficiency. I suggested that the home can be a place of independence and of resistance to this process — for a real home is an economy, a dwelling, and a web of mutual care. For this reason, the home, and the family which inhabits it, must be broken if the Machine is to triumph.

If this is true at the domestic level, it can be true at the national level too. A nation is, at least in theory, a home on a grander scale: a home for a people. “Nation” is one of those over-capacious words which, if not used carefully, can mean almost anything and almost nothing. A term which can be applied both to an Amazon tribe and the United States of America has to be handled carefully. The connecting tissue, though, is that a nation is a group of people with a shared sense of self, forged through time. Quite how that “people” is constituted or defined is as varied as the nation itself, which may be of the tribal, ethnic, civic or imperial variety. But a nation remains a signifier of group belonging, something which seems to have defined humans, for better or for worse, since humans have been around.

Like a monarchy, then, a nation can be hard to define, or perhaps even to justify, at least on reason’s terms, and yet it offers the human psyche something that it seems to need. It should be obvious enough at this point what our Machine anti-culture has to say about this kind of thing. It has to say: no. At its best, a nation is both a home for a people and a repository of history. At its very best, it may also be built around some spiritual or cultural story that transcends Machine values, and its laws or structures may offer its people something other than participation in the metastasising consumer globoculture. Even if our nation does not, in fact, offer us any of this, it is clear that growing numbers of people would like it to. This explains the rift between “nationalism” and “globalism”, which defines much of our current moment.

That rift is in many ways a pushback against the anti-national sentiment that has been evident amongst Western cultural elites for decades. Throughout my lifetime, a relentless deconstruction of the legitimacy of nationhood has been a constant background thrum, rising in recent years to a devouring roar. The right to national self-determination is a founding principle of international law, and yet speaking up in favour of it today is enough in some circles today to see you accused of blood and soil nativism. As for defending actual links between people and place across time: don’t even think about it, unless you fancy being labelled a white supremacist.

To understand the reason for this attitude, we need to understand that Europe has not yet recovered from the trauma of the Second World War. If the Great War laid bare the failures of the old order, then World War II, for Europeans of a certain generation, delegitimised not simply a ruling class and its worldview, but the very existence of nation-states. European nations had been battling each other for centuries, but fascism, and especially National Socialism, revealed new depths to which a country might sink in pursuit of greatness or purity. Theodor Adorno famously claimed that it was “barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz”. For many Europeans, surveying the ruins of a continent demolished by fascism and then carved up by communism, it must have seemed equally barbaric to continue believing in nations.

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Who can rule Britain now?

By Mary Harrington

It was in the bloody aftermath of this carnage that today’s dominant vision of a post-national world took root. The European Union, seeded in the Fifties, is rooted in this vision of national sovereignty “pooled” (read: abolished) for the greater good. The UN, the Bretton Woods settlement, and the entire structure of “global governance” constructed, under American direction, after 1945: all of it stems from this new post-war consciousness, which had no time for the jingle of spurs and the rattling of sabres. Instead, we were offered a new vision, of a borderless world of technocratic co-operation and peace.

Unfortunately, it turned out that a borderless, utopian world with no national boundaries and no national sovereignty also just happened to suit the interests of transnational capital and its enablers. It wasn’t long before universalist utopianism morphed into commercial globalism. Suddenly, “no borders” seemed less of a promise than a threat. Suddenly, those utopian elites chattering about the need to demolish the “social construct” of the nation sounded more like they were defending their own class interests than ushering us all towards broad sunlit uplands.

Years ago, when I was writing Real England, I had a strange sort of vision as I sat in a roadside cafe drinking a mug of tea. I looked out of the window, across the A-road, and saw the physical manifestation of the world this vision had built. I looked over at a couple of huge white boxes squatting on the landscape — delivery hubs, I think, for some supermarket. I saw them connected by the asphalt roads and the electric wires strung out by pylons, and by the invisible digital currents in the air. All of it was rectangular, straight-edged, dedicated to efficiency and the piling-up of riches. We were all products of this layout, I saw. It hadn’t come from here, of course. It hadn’t come from anywhere. Nothing like that even mattered anymore.

Since then, I have thought of this thing as the Grid. The Grid is a physical manifestation of the values of the Machine on the landscape itself. It is, I think, replacing the nation, just as it is replacing culture and antiquated notions of “tradition” and the like. The Grid does not care about tradition. It does not care about anything. It demeans both time and space, and its language is geometry and profit.

It goes without saying that the Grid is also global. Like electricity or the internet, it knows no borders, and neither do its children. It manifests as an identikit globoculture of sameness, a pipeline of product and corporate-progressive verbiage, and its proponents talk relentlessly about “diversity” because the Grid produces the precise opposite. We all know the bland, correct, corporate Gridspeak we must use to get by in this new country: it is what facilitates Progress, by which we mean uniformity disguised as difference.

In the world of the Grid, a nation becomes little more than a postcode or a glorified airport lounge. Its population is from everywhere and anywhere, its people consume global corporate culture rather than drawing their own from place and history, and its ruling class would always rather be somewhere else.

When I first noticed it back in the early 2000s, the Grid seemed unassailable; the End of History in physical form. Today though, like the End of History, it appears to be mired in the escalating mess of the present. In Europe, the nation is increasingly resurgent, and not just amongst monarchists. The unpopular attempt to replace older nations with newly engineered “multicultures”, combined with unprecedented rates of inward migration has, predictably, led to a political backlash, and a resurgence of nationalism. It is unlikely to retreat any time soon, and much of it might not be pretty either.

It would be easy enough to portray the current war over nationhood, as many do, as some David-vs-Goliath struggle between plucky little nations and dastardly globalists intent on their demise. To me, it looks more like a situation in which nobody is clear quite what they want or how to get it. Proponents of corporate globalism want a borderless, frictionless world that offers minimal “barriers to trade” and movement. Nationalists want prosperous nations without the cheap immigration that fuels prosperity. Liberals want multiculturalism and social cohesion, despite the persistent evidence that one undermines the other. The Left wants a world without borders that somehow also contains welfare states, and the Right wants to defend the traditional ethnic makeup of nations without acknowledging that ethnicity is increasingly meaningless in a globalised world.

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The taming of the republicans

By Alwyn Turner

This last point seems to me important. When the phone in your pocket allows you to make more friends in other countries than you can at school, when the whole world is converging on the same digitally-enabled globoculture, when you can log on to Instagram in Austria or Australia and order from Amazon in the Amazon, what does your “nationality”, let alone your “ethnicity”, even mean? Travelling around Europe this summer, seeing this reality in several different countries, I couldn’t help thinking that Machine modernity is, in some ways, an emerging ethnicity in its own right: a global cultural identity that, for many people, seems to be replacing any older, national or regional cultural markers.

It is in this context that so many people see the nation-state as a potential bulwark against unaccountable technocratic globalism. But it is also a reality that the nation-state is what has driven that globalism forward. While some nations are ancient things, nation-states in their modern form are mostly not: their rise coincides with the rise of modernity, and today they rarely represent the actual nations they purport to speak for. Too often, today’s nation-states are a toxic imitation of real nations. They are nodes in the Grid — economic units posing as cultural ones. They pledge themselves to their “people” and then get on with the job of following the dictates handed down by the EU, the WEF, Silicon Valley, the FTSE-100 or the White House, whether “the people” like it or not.

To many, nationalism seems like a reasonable response to this, and I think it can be, under some circumstances. But there are also good reasons to be nervous about what it can do to the human mind. Humans remain human, and it is easy enough for national feeling to shade into xenophobic triumphalism. Personally, I’ve long found myself in the uncomfortable position of valuing nations but mostly being repelled by nationalism.

I’m not sure what to do about this. It seems to me that if you hold your country lightly, it will nourish you, even complete you. Attach yourself to it needily or defensively or angrily, though, and it will make mincemeat of you just as surely as if you had marched off into the trenches singing the national anthem, only to come face to face with the machine gun nests.

What would the ideal nation look like, and could it act as a collective bulwark against the Machine rather than a driver of it? In the Dao De Jing, over 2,000 years ago, we find a beautiful vision: anarchic, localised, rooted, unobtrusive, soaked in actual, human meaning. It is also — and this is the key — very small. If it has ever actually existed, though, we are certainly a long way from living it now. Western “nations” today are vast, centralised, technocratic entities governed by oligarchies on behalf of big business. In this context, if we are going to talk about nations at all, and certainly if we are going to defend them, the only question that seems worth asking is: what are they for?

René Guénon, with whom our new king is familiar, wrote nearly a century ago in The Crisis of the Modern World that a nation without a spiritual purpose would inevitably be replaced in time by another which had one. Nationalism, he believed, was beside the point if the nation in question was nothing but a human collective in search of glory, or built around nostalgia. Either the West would rediscover the spiritual roots it had abandoned in pursuit of Machine values, or “Western civilisation will have to disappear completely”. As for those who shout about “defending the West”: they should remember that “it is the West that is threatening to submerge and drag down the whole of mankind in the whirlpool of its own confused activity”.

Nearly a century later, we subjects of the digital Grid can understand, perhaps, that Guénon was pointing at us. But it could be that as the global anti-culture trembles and begins to dissolve, our nations may emerge, caterpillar-like, in some new shape. As Guénon also wrote, “the passage from one cycle to another can take place only in darkness”. Perhaps the dissolution of the modern nation state into smaller, more anarchic, less centralised units is both inevitable and welcome. Perhaps then new nations will form, around a spiritual core and a love of their place, which will give to their people the kind of meaning which the nation-states of the Machine era have so successfully imitated while at the same time destroying. Perhaps we will live in real nations again. Perhaps we will build them.

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Whatever happens, I suspect we will always need countries. We want to know where our ancestors came from, and where they are buried; we want to find the place that incubated our stories and our characters. Without a homeland we are always partial people; and when our homelands are taken away from us, or we are forced to leave them, the sense of loss can span generations. How many Americans call themselves “Irish” even when they’ve never visited the country? How many Europeans of Asian heritage are still unsure quite where home is? How many Brexit voters felt their country was changing in ways they didn’t understand and couldn’t control? Why are people furiously battling in the ongoing culture wars about the meaning of history and who gets to write it? For now, we are living through the high age of cosmopolis, and the Grid is its image laid out across the hills and the fields, like the Roman roads before it.

But change is coming. As it does, we might heed the words of the French philosopher Frédéric Bastiat who, writing before Guénon, offered his own warning about the consequences of facing in the wrong direction for so long:

“When misguided public opinion honours what is despicable and despises what is honourable, punishes virtue and rewards vice, encourages what is harmful and discourages what is useful, applauds falsehood and smothers truth under indifference or insult, a nation turns its back on progress and can be restored only by the terrible lessons of catastrophe.”

Or, if we prefer, we can take our guidance from Leonard Cohen, a more contemporary prophet — guidance which, I think, comes complete with the only hope worth having:

“I’ve seen the nations rise and fall,
I’ve heard their stories, heard them all,
But love’s the only engine of survival.”

***

While most of us have spent the week praising the life and legacy of Queen Elizabeth II, she has been denounced by those who claim to speak on behalf of truth and justice. She wasn’t a benign monarch, these people say. She sponsored a system of racist division, and any black or brown person who mourns her death is a stooge of Empire and white supremacy. A House Negro. Self-hating. A coon.

It is indisputable that the British Empire committed many atrocities, and many of its advocates were motivated by racism. But the idea that Queen Elizabeth II’s international legacy can be reduced to colonial oppression and violence is a perverse distortion of history. When many West Indians moved to Britain in the Fifties and Sixties, their claim to a British identity and equal status with native white Britons was on the basis of being subjects of the Crown. Should they have rejected this? Is any black or brown person who accepts a knighthood a traitor to his race? Are all those nations where they are now flying flags at half-mast — from India to Nigeria to Jamaica to Ghana to Trinidad and many, many more — governed by self-hating coons? Every single one of them? Were all the postcolonial leaders who either decided to stay in the Commonwealth or join it motivated by profound self-loathing? This is not just an offensive argument: it’s patently absurd.

Rather than being a symbol of white supremacy, Queen Elizabeth II devoted much of her reign to fostering amicable relations with those countries which used to be a part of the British Empire. In April 1947, Princess Elizabeth spent the afternoon of her 21st birthday recording a filmed message to “all the peoples of the British Commonwealth Empire, wherever they live, whatever race they come from, and whatever language they speak”. Elizabeth calmly outlined her dedication to the colonies and countries that linked through Britain like a daisy-chain across the world: “I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and to the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.” It was a promise she would keep.

By the time of her coronation, in June 1953, the Commonwealth, which had emerged after decolonisation, only had eight countries. They wanted to rule themselves, but they didn’t want to completely sever their relationship with Britain. It would be tempting to describe the Commonwealth as Anglophone, a continuation of the countries Britain conquered and subjugated, and imposed their language and customs upon: the pink splash across old maps of the world. But this is a simplistic way of looking at this mosaic of nations.

The picture is a complex one. Canada is a majority English-speaking and minority French-speaking country; Cameroon is a majority French-speaking country and minority English-speaking country, colonised by the Germans before it was handed over to France. Both Canada and Cameroon are part of the Commonwealth. The official language of Mozambique is Portuguese — and when it joined the Commonwealth, in 1995, it became the first country to do so that was never a part of the British Empire. Togo and Gabon, two former French colonies, have joined the Commonwealth this year. They are the 55th and 56th members. It is a club that people want to join, not a union imposed by force.

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If it’s not language, then what unites these nations? To a great extent, it was that quietly-spoken young woman, who, five years after giving that speech on her 21st birthday, became the Queen of Britain, and assumed the ceremonial position of managing the loss of an Empire. She didn’t bestride these newly independent countries like an aggrieved dictator. Nor was she a passive caretaker. She listened, and learned, and exercised her inquisitive mind. She was devoted to internationalism, and many nations warmed to those qualities. Elizabeth was the greatest diplomat of the 20th century.

Her diplomatic qualities were crucial in 1961. By that time, the Commonwealth had grown from eight to 12 members. That year, she would have to visit one small but profoundly consequential country in west Africa, and make sure it didn’t leave the club.

Ghana was the first black African country to gain independence, and it soon became the first African country to join the Commonwealth. The president was a charismatic firebrand called Kwame Nkrumah. He spent the Thirties studying sociology and economics in Pennsylvania, and selling fish on the streets of New York. After he moved to England, in 1945, he was often in Camden cafés chatting amiably with communists and anti-imperialists. When Nkrumah moved back to the Gold Coast, as Ghana was then known, and threatened the status quo by launching a mass strike, the governor-general Sir Charles Arden-Clarke described him as a “thoroughgoing communist”.

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1961 was the white heat of the Cold War: five years after the crushing of the Hungarian uprising, and the year the Berlin Wall went up. Africa was decolonising, and many of these new nations were being courted by the Soviet Union. The Queen was scheduled to arrive in Ghana on 9 November 1961. The month before, Nkrumah had visited Moscow. Closer to Ghana, five days before her visit, a bomb exploded in the capital city of Accra which damaged a statue of Nkrumah.

The Queen was undaunted, telling Prime Minister Harold MacMillan: “I am not a film star. I am the head of the Commonwealth — and I am paid to face any risks that may be involved. Nor do I say this lightly. Do not forget that I have three children”.

The trip was a peach. She landed first in Accra and met several government ministers and dignitaries. These diplomatic endeavours were followed up by meetings with the chiefs and kings of Ghana. According to Nkrumah’s personal photographer, the Queen was genuinely interested in the people she met, asking incisive questions, for instance, about the cultural significance of native dress.

She was introduced to High Life music — a fusion of the native Akan musical rhythms and Jazz — and danced with Nkrumah. The revolutionary pan-Africanist leader, the chum of Nikita Khrushchev and Mao Zedong, danced happily with the Queen of Britain; the Commonwealth was a model of tolerance. (This, at a time when any black man who stared at a white woman for too long could be lynched in the United States.)

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Ghana never left the Commonwealth. And by the Seventies, with revolutionary fervour ramping up across the developing world, the club had more than doubled its membership to nearly 30 nations.

If the legend of Elizabeth as the silent, passive doll Queen were true, the Commonwealth never would have worked. Her public inscrutability belied a deeply engaged person. Eugenia Charles, the Prime Minister of Dominica, and the so-called Iron Lady of the Caribbean in the Eighties, said of the Queen that, “it’s obvious that she’s not just talking pieties. She’s interested, definitely interested, in what is happening in each of those countries”.

The Queen of the Commonwealth was not the mute Queen of postage stamps. She was articulate, she argued, she cajoled. The former Prime Minister of Fiji, Kamisese Mara, put it like this: “If you don’t know what you’re talking about she’ll soon let you know that you’re not quite fully versed in what you’re talking about because she’s so knowledgeable.”

Shridath Ramphal, the former Commonwealth Secretary-General, knew this Queen, a version largely hidden from the rest of us: “Every prime minister, every president, and I’ve been up against some pretty radical ones, militant ones, ones that you might think probably don’t care too much for this all monarchical thing.” Even they, according to Ramphal, placed maximum importance “on those 15-20 minutes when they can sit down with the Queen and talk about their countries, their problems, because she knows them very well”.

Her ability to approach internecine conflict with wisdom and knowledge was never on greater display than in her attitude to the nation where she was staying on her 21st birthday: South Africa. A year after that speech, South Africa started introducing a series of laws that prohibited marriage between people of different races; forced people of certain races to live in certain areas; and reinforced and expanded all pre-existing discriminatory practices in the country. These laws institutionalised the inferior status of black people. The word Apartheid entered the lexicon.

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In 1961, South Africa withdrew from the Commonwealth. The Afrikaner government saw the Queen as a symbol of British imperialism, and they wanted to be free to pursue their racist policies without hindrance. In 1986, Commonwealth leaders all decided, with the consent of the Queen, to impose economic sanctions on South Africa. The Queen later developed a strong relationship with Nelson Mandela. He called her Elizabeth, and she called him Nelson. He was the only non-royal to call her by her first name. In 1994, four years after Mandela was released from prison, and in the year of its first ever democratic and multiracial election, South Africa rejoined the Commonwealth.

The Queen’s decades of service within the Commonwealth display a more nuanced picture of the relationship between the British empire and the postcolonial world. This is a story that is about more than conflict. To have the Commonwealth — that legacy of the Empire — embraced by leaders who also embraced Frantz Fanon and Karl Marx illustrates the complexities of the post-colonial relationship to Britain. These leaders detested white supremacy and brutal economic exploitation. But they also loved the Queen. Through the dignity of her character, she transcended hateful divisions.

Many of these post-colonial leaders, like Nkrumah, later degenerated into corrupt and authoritarian despots. Others, like Mandela, are universally acclaimed. But for most of them the Queen was a genuinely popular figure. A source of unity rather than oppression. An embodiment of the greatest virtues in a divided world: curiosity, compassion, grace and knowledge.

King Charles may not possess exactly the same qualities as his mother, but he is the custodian of a magnificent legacy. Despite the fact Barbados removed the Queen as its head of state last year, it is still a part of the Commonwealth. And I predict many more countries will want to join. And despite the bitterness of parochial diaspora activists, we have this to console ourselves with: our head of state, for 70 years, was a unifying figurehead across the world.

There is one Commonwealth realm, however, where republicanism is anathema — at least among the establishment. Canada’s dominant political culture descends in large part from loyalist exiles who fled the American Revolution in the late 18th century, and so it is no surprise to see their contemporary heirs, the present political establishment, expressing support for the monarchy. (It is a different story for the general population who usually lie somewhere between lukewarm and “unaffected”.)

This runs contrary to the widespread image of Canada’s elites as post-modern cosmopolitans who despise their own history and traditions. But the recent outpouring of personal homages paired with pro-monarchy sentiment led by the likes of Liberal prime minister Justin Trudeau and his cabinet, former Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney, and the editorial board at the national newspaper of record, is indicative of where the Canadian ruling class stands.

Unlike in other parts of the Commonwealth (and discounting the special case of Québécois separatism), there has never been a properly pan-Canadian republican movement of any significance, much less a prime minister who avowed republicanism (the closest was a high-ranking cabinet minister in the 2000s, but his was an isolated case). More than a convenient way to distinguish Canadians from Americans, the monarchy has become an unlikely object of affection for those who govern Canada.

Trudeau himself is, of course, a hereditary monarch who would have never risen to the top were it not for his surname. In fact, Trudeau first met the Queen as a child in 1977 when his father was prime minister. Their personal history became the subject of a humorous exchange in 2015, when the Queen remarked: “Thank you, Mr. Prime Minister … for making me feel so old.”

Historically, the Trudeau Liberals have often been regarded as either indifferent or outright hostile to Canada’s imperial heritage. It was this party, after all, that retired the Union Jack and Red Ensign in favour of the Maple Leaf Flag in 1965, while one of the most iconic images of Trudeau Sr. is of him doing a pirouette behind the Queen, noted as a gesture of irreverence. More recently, a Liberal government dropped the adjective “Royal” in the name of Canada’s navy and air force, only for it to be restored by the succeeding Conservative government.

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Yet such stylistic changes belie the fidelity maintained by Canada’s liberal establishment towards the Crown. Trudeau Sr. and the Queen, by all accounts, actually had a warm and fruitful relationship, which is exhibited in two more iconic photos: one in which the prime minister is peeking under the monarch’s umbrella, and another featuring the two presiding over the “patriation” of the constitution, in which Canada severed the last colonial links with London and became a fully sovereign state. For the final act in this constitutional saga, in 1982, the Queen came to Ottawa to personally grant royal assent to what had been the elder Trudeau’s life’s work: the pillars of today’s progressive Canada — the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, official bilingualism, multiculturalism — were codified.

Against charges that Pierre Trudeau discarded the history and values of the Old Canada, the Queen’s presence at this pivotal moment in the country’s evolution highlights not the disjuncture but rather the continuity between the Old Canada and the New. For the nation-building project begun in 1867 with declarations of fealty to Queen Victoria reached its maturation under the gaze of her great-great-granddaughter. The motto of the province of Ontario is thus an apt descriptor for Canada as a whole, no less under its current liberal and multicultural Trudeauvian regime: Ut Incepit Fidelis Sic Permanet. (“Loyal she began, so she remains.”)

So perhaps it is understandable that Canada is not as eager as its Commonwealth cousins to leave the royal embrace. When a newly-elected Justin Trudeau was asked by the BBC if he was sympathetic to republicanism, he replied: “We’re perfectly happy with our Queen of Canada.” No doubt he will be just as happy with the new King of Canada. As Jacobin correctly pointed out in its denunciation of this modern-day liberal monarchism inherited from the nation’s counterrevolutionary forebears: “Canada’s elites and its governing class admire the royals and evidently want their legacies to endure … [they] see in the monarchy a reliable ‘last resort’ to maintain ‘stability’ and prevent potential major upsets resulting from popular will.”

What is notable these days is not so much how Canada’s centre-left elites have lent their support to monarchy, but how the Right-wing opposition to those elites has increasingly drifted into anti-monarchist territory, almost seeming to converge at times with voices on the Left. The opposition Conservative Party is officially devoted to the monarchy; indeed, the mood at the election of their new leader last Saturday, the pro-trucker populist Pierre Poilievre, was subdued in the wake of the Queen’s death. Poilievre opened his speech with a tribute to the late sovereign and expressed allegiance to her successor with the words “God Save the King”. However, the highly online Right-wing base that bolstered Poilievre has begun to see things differently.

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Scrolling through the Twitter replies to coverage of the King’s first speech by the conservative site True North Centre reveals how its Right-wing audiences view the new monarch: “An irresponsible globalist”; “Please don’t put his face on our money”; “All hail King Klaus”. As these responses suggest, Charles III’s record of speaking up on climate issues or taking the stage with Klaus Schwab at the World Economic Forum has not endeared him to the Freedom Convoy.

It is also notable that one of the most active media supporters of the convoy had previously come out in support of abolishing the monarchy in the conservative National Post, while revolutionary republican imagery of the 1776 variety was a very prominent feature in those demonstrations. Aside from the Stars and Stripes and the Gadsden flag, the truckers and their sympathisers waved the Patriote flag of the 1837 Lower Canada rebellion against the Crown, and the Eureka flag beloved of Australian republicans (and lately used by anti-lockdown protesters in that country).

Meanwhile, across Canada’s Western provinces, particularly in oil-rich Alberta, a new kind of separatism has reared its head in response to the perceived abuses of the same Central Canadian liberal elites. The intellectual currents fuelling this movement have long-harboured the fantasy of seceding from “the bureaucratic despotism of Ottawa” and carving out a libertarian republic in the prairies. Even with the potential elevation of a premier running on a platform of de facto secessionism, this is admittedly a distant possibility but one that nonetheless highlights the synergy between Right-wing populism and the republican ideal.

As the Trudeaus and the Carneys can attest, the monarchy has stood as a symbol of order, stability and continuity in Canada, as it has in Britain and throughout the Commonwealth. But it remains to be seen if this ancient inheritance can continue to resist the hyper-politicisation of institutions that has become so ubiquitous in this era of culture war and populist ferment.

John Osborne, the world’s principal Angry Young Man, was incensed by that sort of talk. There was a “trough of Queen worship”, he raged, “the National Swill”. And he described monarchy as “the gold filling in a mouthful of decay”. His attack was only to be expected, of course — there’s no point in having Angry Young Men unless they’re working themselves up about something or other.

But other isolated voices of dissent were beginning to be heard, and some were harder to ignore since they came from within what had recently been dubbed “the Establishment”. There was, for example, Woodrow Wyatt, then a Labour MP though later a disciple of Margaret Thatcher. “Mooning about the Royal Family is one of the main contributory factors to Britain’s plight,” he complained in 1956. “It saps our dynamism. It makes us dwell on the past.”

Or there was John Grigg, who could hardly have been more Establishment: Eton, Grenadier Guards, Oxford, Tory parliamentary candidate, latterly the 2nd Baron Altrincham. So when he said rude things about the Queen in his 1957 article “The Monarchy Today” — published in the magazine he edited, the National and English Review — it proved especially controversial.

He was no republican, Altrincham insisted, he was merely seeking to reinvigorate the monarchy, which was too remote, surrounded “almost without exception by people of the ‘tweedy’ sort”. But at the centre of his criticism was the Queen herself. Five years into her reign and she really needed to buck her ideas up. Her public persona was that of “a priggish schoolgirl, captain of the hockey team, a prefect, and a recent candidate for Confirmation”, while her “style of speaking is frankly a pain in the neck”. What was to become of her “when she has lost the bloom of youth”?

The article didn’t win him many new friends. It was roundly condemned by pretty much everyone, from the Archbishop of Canterbury (who hadn’t read it), down to the leader of the Conservative group on Altrincham Council in Cheshire, who wanted to distance the town from the man who bore its name. Nor did the abuse stop there. “Altrincham, if we ever see you in the street, we’ll do you in,” said one of the many letters he received. “You go too flamin’ far when you criticise our Queen.” It was signed: “Eight (loyal to the Queen) Teddy Boys”.

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Nothing came of that threat but he was thumped in the face by the Deputy Chairman of the League of Empire Loyalists (a far-Right group that went on to co-found the National Front). The assailant was 64-years-old and didn’t pack much of a punch, so he got off with just a one-pound fine, together with the sympathy of the magistrate: “96% of the population were disgusted and offended by what was written”.

A couple of months later, journalist Malcolm Muggeridge — still then in his incarnation as iconoclast — joined in with his own article, “Does England Really Need a Queen?”, written for the Saturday Evening Post. His analysis was hardly startling. “The British monarchy does fulfil a purpose,” he wrote. “It provides a symbolic head of state transcending the politicians who go in and out of office.” But as he made his way to his somewhat obvious conclusion, he dropped in some wonderfully scandalous titbits of upper-class gossip. “It is duchesses, not shop assistants, who find the Queen dowdy, frumpish and banal,” he revealed. The whole thing had become “a kind of Royal soap opera”.

Like Altrincham, Muggeridge found himself under severe and sustained criticism. Angered by the distorted, misquoted accounts of his article, he consulted a lawyer on whether he could sue for libel, but was told that, while there undoubtedly was a case, “in view of the circumstances, and the particular matter at issue, I could not count upon a jury or a judge taking an unprejudiced view”.

What these early critics demonstrated was that in a world of sycophancy, there was a good deal of media mileage to be made from thumbing one’s nose at the royals. Played right, there was a career in this.

The man for the job was Willie Hamilton. He was a Labour MP from 1950 to 1987, yet the only national coverage he ever received was in his role as an outspoken republican, “the Hammer of the Windsors” as the press liked to call him. He complained about the cost of the monarchy, describing the royal family as “scroungers”, but there was a deeper complaint that sometimes surfaced: the Queen represented a class that had “deeply hurt the class to which I belong and which I represent in our sovereign Parliament”. For years he was Fleet Street’s go-to guy for a bit of outrage on a royal news story; a happy event such as a wedding wasn’t complete without Hamilton carping about the cost. His autobiography was titled Memoirs of an Anti-Royalist, because this had become his identity; effectively he’d been subsumed into that great royal soap opera, the pub cynic who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing.

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Others were drawn in as well. Come the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977, John Grigg, the former Lord Altrincham (he’d renounced his title in the interim), returned to the storyline. This time he praised “her exceptionally steady character” — which was pretty much what he’d condemned her for back in the Fifties. “She looks a Queen,” he now wrote. “She behaves decently because she is decent.”

The Silver Jubilee also saw the soap opera acquire an alternative theme-song: “God Save the Queen” (1977), the second single by punk band the Sex Pistols, sneering about a “fascist regime” and how the Queen (who “ain’t no human being”) “made you a moron”.

It was incendiary stuff, and would have been so at any time, let alone when the Jubilee was reaffirming the nation’s love of monarchy and providing a desperately needed moment of unity in the midst of strife. The promotional artwork, picturing the Queen with a safety-pin through her lip, added visual injury to aural assault. The record was banned by radio and television; it was deplored by MPs; leading retailers declined to stock it, and pub chains refused to have it on their jukeboxes. Meanwhile members of the group were assaulted on the streets by the contemporary equivalents of the “Eight (loyal to the Queen) Teddy Boys”. But the single still shifted 200,000 copies in Jubilee Week alone.

Punk now being associated with anti-monarchy sentiment, others followed, from the underachieving — the Exile’s “Jubilee 77” and the Drones’ “Corgi Crap” (both 1977) — to the over-ambitious: Derek Jarman’s movie Jubilee (1978). But it was the Sex Pistols who became so closely associated with the moment that they got dragged into the soap, not as regular characters, but always there or thereabouts at special times. When the Queen celebrated her Golden Jubilee in 2002, it was marked by a band reunion, accompanied by yet another greatest hits compilation (inevitably titled Jubilee), and a re-release of the offending single, now seemingly part of the ceremonial trappings.

The single was back 10 years later for the Diamond Jubilee, with excited talk of it getting to #1 in Jubilee Week. (It didn’t.) This time, singer John Lydon disowned the whole thing: “I wish for no part in the circus that is being built up around it.” The band also declined an invitation to appear the opening ceremony of the London Olympics that year, though a snippet of “God Save the Queen” was included. It didn’t upstage the Queen’s double-act with James Bond, though.

As the Sex Pistols’ rebellion faded into the warm haze of nostalgia, the problem for others was that there was nowhere much further to go, short of summoning up the spirits of Oliver Cromwell, Madame Guillotine and Yakov Yurovsky. And there was no call for that.

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In any case, republicanism had rather lost its forbidden allure. This was apparent even before the martyrdom of Diana in 1997. Five years earlier, Alastair Campbell, then the political editor of the Daily Mirror, denounced the royal family as “the apex of a class system that exposes John Major’s ‘classless society’ for the slogan that it is,” and called for Betty Boothroyd, the Speaker of the House of Commons, to be elevated to the monarchy: “Queen Betty has a rather truer ring than Queen Diana.”

The same year, Sue Townsend’s novel The Queen and I was premised on the election of a republican government, leading the royal family to be rehoused on a rundown council estate. The Queen and Princess Anne are sufficiently practical to adapt to their changed circumstances; Prince Philip not so much. Less seriously, there were books such as Stephen Haseler’s The End of the House of Windsor and A.N. Wilson’s The Fall of the House of Windsor (both 1993).

And then in 1994, the Independent on Sunday became the first mainstream paper to declare itself in favour of the abolition of the monarchy. We needed an elected president, the paper declared, and it asked its readers who that should be. Again, Betty Boothroyd won support, coming in second, ahead of Jarvis Cocker, the singer with Pulp, but behind the people’s choice, Tony Benn. (The highest ranked royal was Princess Anne in eighth place, just behind Richard Branson.)

In such a climate, it was hard to make a mark, though many continued to try. In his first book, God Save the Queen? (2002), Johann Hari, then writing for the New Statesman condemned the Queen’s “cruel neglect of her children”, and said the abolition of the monarchy was necessary “for the mental health of those involved”. The book helped launch Hari on a career that saw him win the Orwell Prize for political journalism (even if that was subsequently withdrawn), but it was incapable of generating the same notoriety as Lord Altrincham or the Sex Pistols had managed.

And maybe it was all grist to the mill. The monarchy has survived the centuries by adapting to new social demands. Its function, as Malcolm Muggeridge pointed out, was as “a useful unifying element in a society full of actual and potential discord”. And if society wanted a pantomime villain or two to express republican views, then that requirement could also be accommodated. “God save history,” sang Johnny Rotten. “God save your mad parade.” And then he too took his place on the periphery of that mad parade, forever associated with the institution he so disparaged. In his respectful tweet to mark the passing of Elizabeth, he included the picture of her that had been used to promote “God Save the Queen”. This time, there was no safety-pin.

There was something different about Elizabeth II. Millions treated her with a hint of the divine right of kings, a woman who lived above interviews, who loomed over her own society mysteriously, with more in common with Franz Josef or the Romanovs than her own son.

This is the end of that story. The remaining royals of Europe are anachronisms, whether they are beloved or not; whether they are effective at their constitutional roles or not. This is the end of something which began on Christmas Day in 508, with the baptism of Clovis, which was the true start of sacral European Kingship. The story of a once Germanic warrior aristocracy that conquered and ruled Europe for over a thousand years, after the barbarian invasions that finished off the Roman Empire. Their demise from Paris to St Petersburg — as a sociology, as a political faith, as a simple fact — has been the story of modernity.

This end was first noted by the Bavarian nobleman Count Albrecht von Monteglas in 1917, when he decried that the house of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, with a thousand-year history, changed its name to the pedestrian Windsor “for a mere war,” the true age of European monarchy was over. The democratic age had arrived. That great flattening force seen so clearly by de Tocqueville in America, had come home to the old world meaning — not even a Hapsburg, let alone a Hohenzollern, even a Windsor — would serve without the implicit consent of the governed.

Queen Elizabeth’s death marks the latest step away from divinely ordained monarchy, towards something else. No longer sacred, the European monarch would rather be a pilot, or a country gentleman interested in urban planning. Another step along the path we have travelled since the laying of hands on His Majesty to cure disease was suspended after Queen Anne. It is no longer possible to suspend disbelief. The magic — or rather the mindset — was gone. There have been tears for the Queen this week, but can we imagine the same for Prince William decades from now? Looking at him, I can’t shake the feeling that he is just a West Londoner. Not a unicorn on his crest.

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The Russia we have lost

By Ben Judah

You don’t need tabulating political scientists to understand the British and their Queen. You need European psychoanalysts: Freud, Jung, Fromm. You need to understand the subliminal, the subconscious and the immense recesses of antiquity that haunt our psyches. It is here where monarchy draws its power. From the moment it was announced to her in Kenya, through her coronation as Queen of countries including Pakistan, Sri Lanka and South Africa, across a lifetime of the last post being sounded, over the by then mostly African Empire, that still existed when her reign began — she never stopped pretending. And for her, we never stopped pretending, either.

We pretended with her and for her — that the Commonwealth was real, that there was love and affection for her, or for us, in countries we’d conquered and lost, that we were still a great power. And if not an empire, then she ruled its heir. That her first minister was the equal of the men she received in what even the Kennedys realised was not splendour, but more a dowdy country hotel called Buckingham Palace. It could be beautiful, it could be felt, all this, but it wasn’t real. We all know a first principle of psychology is not to fantasise, but to accept who you really are.

As she aged, shrinking into her clothes, it became clear there wasn’t enough there, behind the insignia of government, to hold us up in the world.  The factories, the mines, the shipyards, the discoveries that powered the rule of Queen Victoria — we simply no longer had enough of them. The carpet has long been threadbare. The draught could now be felt in the house. This funeral is the last great pretence. The last funeral for a British world power. The world’s leaders will never gather like this in Westminster Abbey again. The crowds will not flock to London, let alone Edinburgh, like this again.

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The truth about Elizabeth's empire

By Remi Adekoya

This is third stanza of Rudyard Kipling’s Recessional. His great poem warning, amid the jingoism of Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, that this empire too would go the way of Nineveh and Tyre. This is the moment — “that all our pomp of yesterday” — is buried with that tiny body. The trumpets and the ensigns remain, but as folklore, and hardly as anything more.

If Kipling were alive today, he might walk the Royal Mile, in Edinburgh, and see tourists, not mourners. He would stop outside Buckingham Palace and note the mawkishness of the Paddington Bears; the flowers wilting in their cellophane. None of this has the Christian certainty of Elizabeth’s Coronation, it has all the hallmarks the post-Anglican way we mourn now. How we festoon grief with lilies, postcards and teddies.

He wouldn’t be able to write — “God of our fathers, known of old, Lord of our far flung battle line” — even as a lament, or a prayer. The gap between his world, Churchill’s world, the Queen’s world, and our own is more than a matter of years. The threads that bound Church, Crown and Country into “Onwards Christian Soldiers” are gone. That was a Christian empire. There is only spectacle left.

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Who can rule Britain now?

By Mary Harrington

Elizabeth II was believable: because she believed. The last European monarch to believe her role was a divine calling. Today the old religion is not felt, even by the King, so uncomfortable — a scholar of Islam, a guest at al-Hazar, a patron of Jewish charities — at being Defender of the Faith. Charles could only bring himself to say, in his first address to the nation, that his faith was “rooted in the Church of England,” like he had long outgrown it. 

The King is not a stupid man. “Big Ears” of the tabloid press has spent his life knowing there is nothing sacred about him. That nobody reveres him. Every charity, every interview, has been proving Count Albrecht von Monteglas’s point. This is not what he called “the true Royal tradition” but an institution that knows it must constantly fight to keep its popularity afloat in the polls. A permanent referendum. Charles III could never rule like a true Hanoverian: his appetites or insanities, easily justified to the public as simply the divine order.

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The mythic power of King Charles III

By Aris Roussinos

The earliest known direct male ancestor of King Charles is Theodoric I of Wettin, a Germanic warlord, at the edge of the dark ages. His family tree includes Charlemagne, crowned Emperor in Rome. It includes Hugh Capet, who turned his dynasty from the Duke of the Franks, into the Kings of France. And, of course, Henry VIII, Charles I and Charles II. All the way through this story his ancestors have tried to weld what was sacred at the time to their crown.

Only with such a long view does it become obvious what Charles has spent a lifetime doing. By trying to be the King of, every craft, every field, every hedgerow — the voice of the planet — he is trying to channel that one thing we still all still treasure. Our ailing world. It is actually a question about us: whether he succeeds in making us believe. But whatever we come to feel for him or respect him — it will not be the hymn book reverence Kipling would recognise.

This is partly why, just a few months ago, the ARM issued a celebratory statement titled “Australians reject King Charles”. According to the ABC survey the ARM was referring to, 53% of Australians did not want Charles to become king, while only 35% were in support. Today, then, despite the fact that the government’s flags are flying at half-mast and Parliament has been suspended for two weeks, the republican cause in Australia seems in strong shape. Indeed, the newly elected Labor Party government is the first to appoint a Minister for the Republic, Matt Thistlethwaite, whose job is to prepare the grounds for a future referendum on Australia becoming a republic.

Such a vote will be necessary, as any change to Australia’s system of government requires a constitutional amendment, which can only be done via referendum. Yet the government is currently preoccupied with its proposed referendum on enshrining an indigenous voice to parliament. Senior ministers have therefore suggested that the republic referendum would likely have to wait until the government’s second term, which will be in 2025 if the ALP is re-elected.

Despite this delay, republicanism is clearly back on the political agenda and is enjoying substantial support at the highest echelons of government. An unpopular King now sits on the throne in Britain. What could possibly go wrong?

While the circumstances are certainly propitious, if the ARM believes that a favourable result would simply fall in its lap, they could end up bitterly disappointed. Let’s not forget: we have been here before. In the Nineties, when Australia was gearing up for its first referendum on the republic, a majority of Australians supported the change. Successive polls showed the margin in favour of a republic was roughly two-to-one. Yet in the 1999 referendum, the republican cause lost by 45% to 55%.

Of course, the circumstances today are not entirely similar. Whereas the current Labor government and its leader, Anthony Albanese, is in favour of a republic, John Howard, who was Prime Minister at the time, was a staunch monarchist who put forward an unpopular model, in which the Head of State would be elected by parliament, not by voters. Malcolm Turnbull, a future Liberal prime minister, who was leader of the “yes” vote, later told Howard that he had broken “the nation’s heart” by manipulating the referendum to get the result he wanted. This was largely true, though the republican defeat was also enabled by a split within the movement over the preferred model for electing an Australian Head of State.

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America can't understand monarchy

By Andrew Sullivan

Still, the Nineties would turn out to be the highest point of support for the republic. Recent polling has shown that more Australians do not support a republic than those who do. At 34%, support for the republican cause is at its lowest ebb since 1979. Perhaps surprisingly, only 26% of voters aged 18-24 said they would support a republic, the lowest of any age group. A large share, over a quarter of all respondents, said they were uncertain how they would vote. If many of those decided to vote “yes” the republic vote could still win, but they would need to be won over to the cause. The biggest challenge facing the ARM, then, appears to be a debilitating one: public apathy. The republic just does not seem to excite Australians anymore.

This in itself is surprising, given the way the monarchy and its unelected representative in Australia, the Governor-General, have significantly intervened in Australian politics. Only this year, newly released documents showed how Governor-General John Kerr corresponded with the Queen’s Secretary throughout the dismissal of the ALP Whitlam government in 1975. The letters revealed how Kerr railed against the Whitlam government, attacking its policy decisions, and even asked whether the monarchy would consider using its powers to dissolve it. And more recently, it was uncovered that Australia’s current Governor-General, David Hurley, secretly swore in former prime minister Scott Morrison to several ministerial roles during the pandemic. These appointments, which could have had a monumental impact on government operations, were not recorded anywhere on Hurley’s publicly available schedule, again raising questions about the powers vested in the Governor-General’s office.

And yet so many Australians, including younger citizens, just don’t seem to care about introducing a republic. In part, this reflects the ARM’s firmly middle-class characteristics. The Movement was established by prominent journalists, academics, lawyers, corporate figures, and some politicians in 1991. The same professions dominate today. Although these individuals undoubtedly bring a wealth of relevant expertise and knowledge, one negative consequence is the ARM’s heavy emphasis on the symbolism of becoming a republic and on designing the perfect selection process for an Australian Head of State, while paying relatively little attention to articulating precisely how a republic would benefit ordinary Australians.

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Australian Labor's hollow victory

By Shahar Hameiri

This is the most important issue because the fate of the republic will not be decided in meeting rooms. For the constitutional amendment to take place, Australians need to vote “yes” in a referendum. And symbolism and identity, seen as self-evidently important to the ARM, don’t appear to be vote-winners. Absent a stronger positive case, many Australians might just vote to keep what they know.

To make matters worse for the ARM, the debate for a republic is now happening in a context of serious decline in Australians’ trust in their public institutions and democracy. A spike in trust in democracy during the early stages of the pandemic swiftly fizzled out, and was followed by the second biggest recorded decline in 2022. This explains Queen Elizabeth’s remarkable and enduring popularity. Many viewed the Queen as dutiful and publicly minded, a source of continuity and stability in contrast to their feckless politicians and globally oriented elites. Irrespective of King Charles’s personal standing with Australians, their declining faith in democracy makes this a difficult moment in which to argue for the inherent benefit of elected office.

Queen Elizabeth’s death should therefore be a moment of collective reflection and debate for Australia. The end of her 70-year reign represents a major fork in the road — a time to assess where we came from and, perhaps more importantly, where we would like to go. Tragically, there seems to be little appetite for this: republicans seem to expect the transition to happen almost by itself, while monarchists are also counting on inertia to keep things as they are.

Neither side seems capable of, or interested in, mounting a compelling, positive case for their cause. And given the void left by the Queen’s passing, the monarchists’ job appears to be the easier one.

At those points in my life where someone close to me has died, the hours and days afterward felt heightened, timeless and liminal: as though the world has grown thin, and unimaginable truths or possibilities might hover just out of sight. When that mood governs your every waking moment, and that of others too, going about the ordinary business of living feels absurd.

Why would I go to Tesco and buy butter, when death walks abroad? Why would I hang the washing out, when someone who mattered so much is gone? And she did matter that much. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth’s death is a shattering event, infinitely beyond those who knew her as mother, grandmother, great-grandmother or friend.

In her single person, and in her dedication to a selfless life of public service, our late Queen embodied continuity across nearly a century of seismic change. She sailed serenely through the dismantling of the British Empire, accepting without demur its transmutation to a “Commonwealth” and her role as figurehead of that entity.

In this way, more than any other single individual, she both guided and personified Britain’s transition from the most sprawling empire in history to… whatever it is we are now. In her calm and stalwart presence, Great Britain managed to act as though nothing had really changed, or if it had it was all for the best.  We could ignore the fading carpets, and the Russian oligarchs buying up grand country estates. We could ignore the ugly buildings where beautiful ones used to stand. We could ignore our apparent inability to build new infrastructure, or to agree over whether or how to defend our borders, or what our history means.

With our Queen still soldiering on, at some level it all felt like the same big story, and we could argue in relative emotional safety about what the next century of “Modern Britain” might be. A great global soft power? A hub of financial corruption? A geopolitical has-been juggling the demands of European and American empires? A great nation dormant and ready to rise again? However you answer that question, we could put off coming to any firm conclusion, as long as she was there to hold it all together.

Now she’s gone. And once the interval of grief passes and the world stops feeling thin, we’ll all still be here. Life will have to go on. And that means we can’t put off answering the questions that have been lurking below the surface on which our Queen sailed so serenely. What happens next? Who will lead us? And, more importantly, how?

No doubt alongside the inevitable ghouls loudly rejoicing for the hate-clicks, we’ll hear renewed calls from the ever-present (and, to date, mercifully unpopular) republicans, to dispense with the monarchy in favour of something more “democratic”. This is an irony given that the very presence of a constitutional monarch has served, for some 334 years, as our guarantor of democracy: the autocratic grit in the democratic oyster. That, at least, is what I wrote after seeing the quiet dignity with which the Queen sat alone at her husband’s funeral, carefully following pandemic-era rules on social distancing.

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Britain should decolonize the Commonwealth

By Will Lloyd

It was Victoria and Albert who first embraced monarchy as a form of moral leadership, pioneering the sober stoicism we’ve come to associate with our Queen. But it has been Elizabeth who most fully embraced that duty, and led by example – as at Prince Philip’s funeral. In her reign, this symbolic monarchy has taken on ever more intense meaning: for if Victoria still wielded a measure of direct power, as Empress of an immense territory, so the Queen’s moral leadership seemed to become more important, and weighty, as that territory evaporated.

The result has, for those who still treasure that grain of autocratic sand in the English democratic oyster, a sense that it really isn’t just about her office, as Queen, but also about her. Can anyone else fill those shoes, and represent the Crown in Parliament now she’s gone? Even staunch anti-monarchists of my acquaintance are talking of the gap she leaves behind. There’s no one left now to connect us, as a nation, to the age when we still seemed able to get things done.

But we should perhaps worry less about the Crown in Parliament, than Parliament itself. For if our Queen served selflessly for more than 70 years as guarantor of this form of democracy, today that settlement feels threadbare too. The stories pile up: notoriously, for example, as our Queen sat alone in her pew, mourning Prince Philip, we now know No 10 staffers were throwing parties. A relatively minor blip in our ever more dyspeptic news cycles, but it dealt another blow to our collective faith, such as it was, in the fitness of our elected leaders — a failure that stood out with especial clarity when contrasted with our Queen’s calm stoicism and commitment to duty.

But the stories are everywhere. It’s not just that news items relish in painting our ruling class as  venal, mendacious, incompetent, ignorant, nepotistic, or just hopelessly detached from everyday life in the country. Faith in our democratic institutions has been waning for some time. Voter cynicism is not new. But scepticism toward the democratic process is getting worse. Our loss of faith in the very form of our government is chipping away at trust in the electoral process, and this is happening across the political spectrum.

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It's the Queen or tyranny

By Mary Harrington

A growing proportion of politics seems to happen somewhere other than in the democratic process; the youth are growing more authoritarian; I worry that for profound structural reasons, we’re no longer forming the kind of citizens for whom that type of government was self-evidently the best. And as that becomes clearer, it’s my suspicion that so, too, will it become clearer that inasmuch as we still live in a democracy at all, it’s no longer one that functions in anything like the fashion first made possible by the events of 1688. And that we can’t go back.

We’re staring now into an incalculably vast void, left behind by the longest-serving monarch in our history. She dedicated her life to serving as the anchor for a liberal democracy. I don’t think I’m alone in feeling that more is passing with her death than an unimpeachable life spent in public service. She held in place an entire order. She stood throughout a convulsive century, as our shield against far greater and darker convulsions. And with the passing of our last anchor to a bygone Britain, her successor will need to find his own way to help the current one flourish.

What kind of leadership will her son be called upon to provide? There will be those who would see that role diminished further, or eliminated altogether. This is a mistake. For if I’m right, we are effectively already under unaccountable technocratic rule. And this is here to stay: the modern world is so complex that we’re likely stuck with at least some technocrats.

And if this is true, the critical factor isn’t electoral politics but the moral fibre, public ethic and aesthetic outlook of whoever is set over all. If we must have unaccountable rule, it should be by someone with as few vested interests as our late Queen, as great a concern for honour, order, beauty, and the natural world, and as deep a respect for leaving things as they are unless there’s a compelling reason for change.

And on that front, I’ll take the man who built Poundbury, over either a faceless swarm of bureaucrats or indeed the woman who can look around three decades of smoking post-Thatcherite rubble and still insist the answer to everything is simply “freedom, low taxes and personal responsibility”.

Let there be no effort to weaken the monarchy still further, by re-running the Glorious Revolution. Far better to do the decent thing and reverse it. God Save the King.

So it seems especially impertinent — hence especially appropriate — for an American to criticise your monarchy. Especially an American monarchist like me. I am not even a costume monarchist — I am not in it for the castles, weddings, and funny hats. I actually think of monarchy as a legitimate form of government. And by monarchy I mean actual monarchy: absolute monarchy.

There are only three forms of government: monarchy (rule of one), oligarchy (rule of few), and democracy (rule of many). Monarchy is good because it is better than oligarchy. Democracy is neither good nor bad — it is just impossible. With today’s voters, at least. It is not just that voters are not wise enough to control the government. It’s worse: the voters are not powerful enough to control the government. They — or at least the politicians they elect — have not had significant power for decades.

Monarchy is both the most common form of public-sector governance in history, and the universal form of private-sector governance (all corporations have CEOs). Any private-sector firm could operate as a republic or other oligarchical form. None do. There are no senates, assemblies or supreme courts in the private sector — let alone anything like the administrative state. Monarchy —ideally accountable monarchy, with a board of directors or some other safety mechanism — just works better.

So either the whole public sector today is mad, or the rest of human history was mad, and so is the entire private sector. As an American monarchist, I choose the former. But in Britain, how should you feel about it? You already have a monarchy. Not monarchy as a form of government — but as a theatre of government. It’s a sort of official soap opera, one that has been on-air a long time — about 300 years, by some counts.

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The Royal Family always wins

By Will Lloyd

As even its defenders would surely admit, the British monarchy is not a functional organ of governance. It is a living monument of history. The German for “monument” is evocative — Denkmal, meaning “an occasion to think”. To ask questions, perhaps. Simple questions. Dangerous questions.

Yet in this year of Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee, few Englishmen will stop to ask the simplest, most dangerous form of question that history can ask: to ask the past for a judgment of the present. One insanely dangerous way for you to ask is: what would Elizabeth I think of Elizabeth II?

Leopold von Ranke, not a Nazi Panzer commander but actually the inventor of modern history, wrote: “Every age stands equal before God.” Ranke’s law does not deny any era the right to judge any other. But it must allow itself to be judged in return.

At the birth of Elizabeth I, England was a minor power. At the death of Elizabeth II, the UK will be a minor power. In between, Britons ruled the world for a century and a half. In Elizabeth I’s time, England was a rising power. In Elizabeth II’s time, England is a fading power.

How would Elizabeth Tudor feel about all this? Petrified? Blimpish? If she had to characterise Elizabeth Windsor’s perspective of monarchy and government, what adjectives would she use? The term roi fainéant (a do-nothing monarch) is a millennium older than the Tudors — invented for the hopeless Merovingians.

How would the Tudors not find the comparison of the Windsors to the Merovingians obvious? Especially when they heard that the Windsors, unlike the Merovingians in France in the 5th century, had reigned over a palpable national decline? At least the Merovingians had the good grace to give way to the frankly much more badass Carolingians. The Windsors have given way not even to Parliament, but to a bunch of bureaucrats; to a gang of foundations, quangos, media conglomerates and university administrators. At least the early Merovingians won and held their crowns by the sword. Perhaps: once a costume dynasty, always a costume dynasty.

It is easy for Elizabeth II to judge Elizabeth I. For example, diversity and inclusion are among Elizabeth Windsor’s core principles whereas Elizabeth Tudor was a racist. But we need not accept Elizabeth I’s prehistoric racial theories to find her political insights relevant. The past, without being perfect, can usefully criticise the present.

It was Bagehot, the 19th-century theorist of the English Constitution, who best described the difference between Elizabeth I and II. Bagehot divided sovereigns into the effective (actually in control of the state) and the dignified (a crowned Kardashian, a long-haired Merovingian man-doll). A more modern version of these labels might be operating and ceremonial. Elizabeth I was the operating Elizabeth. Elizabeth II is the ceremonial Elizabeth. A costume Queen.

It is true that the binary is not absolute. In Bagehot’s day, Parliament was effective and Victoria was ceremonial. But Victoria certainly mattered much more than Elizabeth II, if much less than Elizabeth I. In our day we might say that both Parliament and Queen are dignified —the operating power lies in Whitehall (if it is in England at all).

Moreover, a really critical Tudor historian might question whether the decline of working absolutism in the English monarchy did not precede Elizabeth II. The Stuarts, alien in nation and suspect in religion, were never secure on the throne. James I ranted about divine right and absolute power, because he knew he doesn’t have it. Charles I seriously tried to be a limited monarch — resulting in the judicial murder of Strafford; Charles II was restored only as a limited monarch; don’t even start me on the “Glorious Revolution”. But surely Elizabeth I was peak England?

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Britain should decolonize the Commonwealth

By Helen Thompson

But was Elizabethan England really Elizabeth’s? To what extent was this woman actually the CEO of the government? Was she in charge — or was it “Leicester’s Commonwealth”? Was it really the Cecils who invented the Deep State? And Walsingham the intelligence community?

We do get a sense of the increasing importance of an early “deep state” as the Tudor dynasty boots up. Henry VIII was a kingly king, but his attention did seem to wander, and his policies did often seem driven by his advisers. I know of no indication that his father, Henry VII, meant anything but business — as anyone would expect of a chad rebel who seized the throne on horseback with his sword. For there were true kings on Earth in those days. But let us treat the Tudors as a homogeneous monolith and history as binary. Tudors both reign and rule; Windsors only reign, but do not rule. (Cromwell, also a monarch, ruled, but did not reign.)

One way to identify a ceremonial or dignified institution is to detect a situation in which a seeming organ of power is vestigial. An organ or organisation in a larger regime is vestigial if the regime could continue operating as usual without it. When Elizabeth I kicked it, that was the end of Elizabethan England. What followed was still very cool, but it was not Elizabethan England.

An objective political change can change the lives of everyone in the country — think of everyone who used to be an East German — and always somehow disrupts or replaces the governing elite. If Elizabeth II passes away tomorrow, the trash in London will still be picked up. If the monarchy did not exist, Whitehall would function as usual. If Parliament, the Cabinet, and the voters did not exist, Whitehall would function as usual.

What this “Elizabeth test” teaches us is that it is obvious to even the dogs in the street that democracy has gone the way of monarchy, becoming ceremonial or dignified. The 20th-century removal of politics and politicians, and hence voters and elections, from actual authority over the government, was the century’s great changing of the guard.

The Trump administration did not disrupt the elite. Disruption can be measured by number of jobs destroyed. How many elite jobs did Trump destroy? He annoyed and energised the elite. He was the best thing that ever happened to the New York Times. Thousands of public-spirited Ivy graduates must owe Trump their jobs to this day.

Brexit did not disrupt the elite. If anything, Brexit gave power back to some purely British institution — such as Whitehall (for Yanks, the British deep state). But Whitehall would much rather implement directives from Brussels — freeing the native mandarins from responsibility, the bane of all bureaucrats. The only possible recipients of power in Brexit did not even want it. The voters? They voted for Brexit, accepted a few weird bureaucratic complications, and went back to their fish and chips.

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By Park MacDougald

As Bagehot explains, putting a fake power in front of the real power has tremendous benefits. It is even better to have two layers of fake — both monarchy and democracy. This double panel acts as a perfect bullet-absorber for the civil-service oligarchy, which, though young, was already building its strength in Bagehot’s time.

The working Queen, Elizabeth I, must feel that her fancy-dress successor was in some way tricked out of her rightful power. Elizabeth I will judge Elizabeth II for investing in this trick — rather than exposing it, rising up and restoring the monarchy. For the people, too, were tricked — out of their right to a real monarch.

How did monarchies even become ceremonial? Usually not in one step. Rather, their first step was to become constitutional. It turns out that as soon as a monarchy loses any power, it very soon loses all power — and often its head as well.

Ultimately, the purpose of a ceremonial monarchy is to prevent the existence of a functional monarchy. Where a puppet reigns, no one else can reign; so no one reigns at all. So a murky, distributed oligarchy can rule — unchallenged by the clear, clean sunlight of irresistible central power.

The Whig oligarchs of the early 18th century installed the Hanoverians, a dynasty with no inherent support base in England, in place of the dangerous Stuarts. Any Stuart revolt — and there were two — would have to go through the Hanoverians first. But it is a long time since the early 18th century.

We can look at the UK today and ask: what would Elizabeth Tudor do? When we imagine Elizabeth Tudor waking up in the rejuvenated body of Elizabeth Windsor, it makes little difference that their actual roles in government have changed. Nothing at all has changed about the English constitution. The Queen reserves all her royal prerogative.

It is customary for the British monarch to use prerogative power only under her ministers’ advice — except in an emergency. While monarchy is nothing without a deep respect for custom, unfortunately it is an emergency. And has been, Elizabeth Tudor will tell you, for at least the last half-century.

The new old Elizabeth declares martial law and puts the police under her direct orders. She never considers the possibility that she has anything less than absolute power. Bobbies everywhere are shutting down the oligarchy — padlocking the buildings, imaging the servers, freezing the accounts. All state, media, quango and university employees are retired. Even primary schools are closed for the reset. Only essential productive workers still work — for now, everyone else can chill, and still get paid. As we learned under Covid, the paycheck is the essence of the bullshit job.

Of course, this day is only the start of the renewal of Britain. “The revolution was first in the mind of the king.” The truth about the revolution is that, in nations with a surviving monarchy — even a purely ceremonial monarchy, like Britain’s today — the revolution remains in the mind of the monarch.

A modern monarch who chose to be not a costume-king in the school of the Windsors, but at the very least a Patriot King in the school of Bolingbroke, would not have to work hard at all to regain monarchical control of the state. At least, regaining full control is much easier than regaining a tiny bit of control.

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Britain should decolonize the Commonwealth

By Dominic Sandbrook

The essence of the modern coup d’etat is the use of popular enthusiasm to gain stable, unified, direct control over the security forces. Everything about this transition must feel completely natural, inevitable and irreversible — in retrospect. This is exactly how it could feel — it won’t, of course — when Charles III finally takes the throne.

All agencies other than the army and police can be retired. This cannot be done with the security forces. No one wants anarchy in the UK. But also, no one actually needs the Ministry of Defence — what is it defending? Just bring everyone home already. At least temporarily.

Under direct royal command, military and police leadership must undergo a rapid purge and reshuffle. Staff who can show their (prior) commitment to the new regime are rapidly advanced; those known to be sympathetic to the old are sidelined. It may not be fair. What is? What ever was?

And power is a shark. It has to keep moving. Power for power’s sake is a dead fish. What does Charles III want to make of his Britain? What does he have the power to change? After executing this manoeuvre — anything. The Patriot King is the nation’s gardener; his goal is to make its lovely human flora burgeon and blossom. Obviously, his first job is building a new government — but the problem goes far beyond this. He has to build a new society and a new economy. Everything is a ruin.

If there is any set of people who need to be challenged the most, it is the highest elites. An aspect of the Elizabethan court which is almost impossible to explain to the modern world is that it is the centre of excellence in everything. In the early Elizabethan era at least, the best plays and poems in England were by courtiers. In the modern era, a royal court in the Elizabethan style would be surrounded by the country’s best scientists, filmmakers, mountain climbers. Not only would royal sponsorship select and fund the best people; it would even lead them stylistically. The style of the king would become the fashion of the country.

As opposed to — where does style come from, nowadays? Centres of excellence are hidden to those not in the know; they are widely spread across fields; sometimes they are taken over by bad people, and become centres of badness. But elites benefit from concentration; concentrating the elite of an elite around one centre is the way to create the most awesome elite. Such is the job of a royal court.

Of course, it all depends on the right king. In the history of kings, which is most of human history, there are awesome kings and not-so-awesome kings. But if we accept Elizabeth II’s responsibility for the condition of England, and try to hypothesise Elizabeth I’s reaction to that same condition, “not so awesome” doesn’t cover it. Imagine her inspecting some of what you chaps call “council housing”.

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Yet as an American I must face the fact that London is the last city outside America which still has the right to call itself the capital of the world. “Though much is taken, much abides.” It will probably keep falling. It could rise again.

A proud, renewed and independent royal Britain, a based Britain, could easily create elite institutions and cohorts that challenged and surpassed the aging titans of the American world. Because of London’s legacy of world domination, anti-American nationalists everywhere would naturally become Anglophiles.

And even we Americans could easily throw off the vast carcass of our 20th-century regime by appealing to a higher power to restore order — were there any such power. One day we may elect a President with a mandate to peacefully cede sovereignty to our rightful king, Charles III.

The King is right there, on the inauguration podium. The President hands him the Bible and the nuclear football. He takes command and the President calls an Uber. From the river, a deep roar — a corps of Royal Marines, on enormous transatlantic Hovercraft, is cruising in formation up the Potomac…

He was right — or seemed to be. Only a few weeks earlier, the same paper had reported “panic at the palace over the lack of street parties”. The official Golden Jubilee website, exulted the Guardian, “bears a forlorn look. So far it lists a golden jubilee snooker and pool tournament in Plymouth, the planting of an oak in the village of Oxhill, Warwickshire, the planting of a jubilee garden at Cranmore infants’ school in Shirley, Birmingham, the placing of small fountains all over London — and precious little else.”

And then — what a comeback! When the Queen’s Jubilee weekend finally rolled around, it turned out that the Royal Family was only too fashionable after all. Two million people applied for tickets for the classical Prom at the Palace. A further million people packed into the Mall to see the handsomely coiffured Brian May kick off the Party at the Palace, while another 200 million watched on television. And although the Sex Pistols re-released “God Save the Queen” for the occasion, their hearts weren’t really in it. As a youngster, admitted the erstwhile Johnny Rotten, he had taken exception to the Queen’s “Mother Superior” tone. But “they’ve mellowed that out. Charles is a really good-natured bloke who talks to plants. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

There have been eight jubilees since the first, held for George III in October 1809, and the story has always been the same. For months everybody predicts a humiliating fiasco. Nobody cares, and nobody bothers to organise anything. Then at the last minute, to the horror of university lecturers and Twitterstorians across the land, millions of strange people come crawling out from beneath their rocks, waving their Union Jacks and openly daring to feel good about their country. This, of course, is how Nazi Germany started.

Like all great British institutions, the first Jubilee was basically an exercise in sticking it to the French. The Napoleonic Wars were in full swing, the British campaign in Flanders had become badly bogged down and Wellington was slogging his way across Spain in the Peninsular War. So the country needed cheering up, and the beginning of George III’s 50th year on the throne provided the perfect opportunity.

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Although there was virtually no central organisation, most towns were happy to plan their own celebrations, with local landowners footing the bill. There were ox-roasts and fetes, feasts and fireworks. People staged sword-fights and fired muskets, while the elderly king went to a service of thanksgiving. And there were special pardons for debtors, deserters and prisoners of war — though not, of course, if they were French.

For poor George himself the Jubilee was something of a last hurrah, since a year later he succumbed to madness. He spent the rest of his days endlessly weeping and tying and untying handkerchiefs, which is how most Guardian columnists are planning to spend the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee next week. But the success of the event set a precedent, and in 1887 Lord Salisbury — not exactly an obvious party-going Prime Minister, but appearances can be deceptive — decided that Victoria should have a Golden Jubilee too.

At first the monarch was less than keen, fearing (ironically) that people would think a national celebration rather too Napoleonic. But Salisbury prevailed, and the result was a huge success, with vast crowds lining the streets of London to cheer Victoria on her way to Westminster Abbey.

There was, however, a remarkable twist. To mark the occasion, Salisbury decided to organise a false-flag terrorist plot, his agents encouraging a group of Irish-American Fenians to cross the Atlantic with some dynamite, purportedly to blow up both the Queen and Salisbury himself. Obviously the PM never intended the bomb to go off: the plan was to roll up the Fenian network in Britain and discredit sympathetic Irish nationalist MPs. Even so, the head of the Metropolitan Police’s “secret department” advised his own children not to attend the Jubilee service, just in case. Has Boris Johnson planned something similar this year? Given his organisational skills, let’s hope not.

All this was merely a curtain-raiser for the Woodstock of royal blowouts, the very acme of patriotic knees-ups, the Diamond Jubilee of June 1897. Not for nothing does this provide the centrepiece of Jan Morris’s great book on the apogee of imperialism, Pax Britannica, since it was explicitly conceived by the Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, as a “Festival of the British Empire”.

There were Jubilee events in every corner of the earth, from Ireland and India to Singapore and the Seychelles. And the London parade was the most spectacular the capital had ever seen. In Morris’s words: “There were Hussars from Canada and Carabiniers from Natal, camel troops from Bikaner and Dyak head-hunters from North Borneo… There were Malays, and Sinhalese, and Hausas from the Niger and the Gold Coast, Jamaicans in white gaiters and ornately embroidered jackets, British Guiana police in caps like French gendarmes, Cypriot Zaptiehs whose fezzes struck so jarring a chord that some of the crowd hissed them, supposing them to be Turks, and a jangling squadron of Indian lancers led by a British officer in a white spiked helmet.”

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Not surprisingly, Fleet Street’s finest were in a state of patriotic ecstasy. It was “a pageant which for splendour of appearance and especially for splendour of suggestion has never been paralleled in the history of the world”, reported Her Majesty’s Daily Mail, with “every man such a splendid specimen and testimony to the GREATNESS OF THE BRITISH RACE that there was not an Imperialist in the crowd who did not from the sight of them gain a new view of the glory of the British Empire”.

And equally unsurprisingly, do-gooding citizens of the world hated it. “Imperialism in the air,” Beatrice Webb lamented in her diary, shuddering at the sight of “all classes drunk with sightseeing and hysterical loyalty”.

Even over this greatest of all Jubilees, though, there was a shadow. Britain might have been Top Nation, but foreign rivals — the United States, Germany, even Russia — were catching up fast. When Joseph Chamberlain organised an imperial conference a few days after the jamboree, the other colonial delegates rejected his suggestion that they should form a permanent imperial federation, with a special council to coordinate their policies. And when Rudyard Kipling was invited to publish a Jubilee poem in The Times, the result — “Recessional” — read more as a prediction of imperial decline than a celebration of imperial glory:

Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget — lest we forget!

Kipling was right, of course. By the time of the next royal binge — George V’s Silver Jubilee of May 1935 — the tone was very different. Royal houses had crumbled all over Europe, Communism and Fascism were in their pomp and Britain was only just emerging from the Depression. The previous autumn, the Nazis had held their most spectacular Nuremberg rally yet, filmed by Leni Riefenstahl for Triumph of the Will. But George’s Jubilee could hardly have been more modest. There was plenty of bunting, of course, and there were thousands of street parties. But the imperial fervour was much reduced, and nothing better summed up the mood than the advent of the ancestor of coronation chicken — a concoction called Jubilee chicken, made with mayonnaise and curry powder.

It was a Pooterish dish for a Pooterish king, an unassuming, unexciting man who had never knowingly said an interesting or clever thing in his life. The Germans had their Führer, the Russians had their General Secretary, and we had our King-Emperor, who liked stamp collecting and had very strong views about where you should crease your trousers. Quite rightly, though, people admired him for it. “I’d no idea they felt like that about me,’ said George, after crowds cheered him in the East End. “I’m beginning to think they must really like me for myself.”

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If 1897 was the peak, the nadir was probably the Silver Jubilee of 1977. Most ordinary people actually had a tremendous time; and with record sales of Jubilee-themed jewellery, t-shirts, beer mugs, jeans, even egg timers, thermometers and ashtrays, Britain’s tat merchants were in dreamland. Even so, the fact that it rained for most of the day rather summed the whole thing up. Inflation was rampant, Jim Callaghan’s government had just cadged a record bailout from the International Monetary Fund, and the newspapers were generally full of doom and gloom. “The popular imagination can no longer feed on the glories and wonders of empire,” lamented The Times. “Nor, it has to be admitted, does the Britain of 1977, relieved of almost all its imperial baggage, present the sort of spectacle to light in the mind the bonfires of national rejoicing.”

Musically, the lowlight wasn’t the Pistols’ punk anthem, but the truly terrible “unofficial” Jubilee single by the former Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band member Neil Innes (sample lyrics: “Sailing in the yacht Britannia / Nowhere in the world would ban ya’ / Or your Royal Family”.) And while Kipling’s “Recessional” had at least been printable, Philip Larkin’s Jubilee poem, which he showed only to a few friends, is unlikely to feature on too many university reading lists today:

After Healey’s trading figures
After Wilson’s squalid crew
And the rising tide of niggers
What a treat to look at you!

By these standards, the Jubilees of 2002 and 2012 were positively joyous. And no doubt next week’s party will be fun, too. My 10-year-old son reports that his schoolmates are all very excited about it. Each class is going to dress up as a different Commonwealth country, and his own class has chosen Mozambique. As long as they don’t get Justin Trudeau to provide their costumes and make-up, what could possibly go wrong?

But what if, like Beatrice Webb and similarly miserable drips throughout history, you can’t stand the monarchy and aren’t looking forward to the Jubilee? Well, I have a consolation for you. Even if, God forbid, Prince Charles succeeded tomorrow, it’s statistically very unlikely that he’ll be around for a Silver Jubilee of his own. Even William, who is now almost 40, will probably do very well to mark his 25th year on the throne.

So this may very well be the last Jubilee most of us will ever see. Unless, of course… we change the rules and have them every four years, like World Cups. It would drive the Guardian mad, of course. Let’s do it.