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.” 

More from this author

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. 

Suggested reading

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.

With dark hair, a round face and a large nose, Louis Alphonse, 51, looks every bit the part of the roi. Clearly, blue blood doesn’t dilute. Louis Alphonse is directly descended from a long lineage of French monarchs that includes Saint Louis, Louis XIV and the hapless Louis XVI, guillotined during the French Revolution. As head of the House of Bourbon, he’s heir apparent to the throne. Were the hand of providence ever to crown him, he would be Louis XX.

But while Monseigneur may look the part, he doesn’t quite sound the part. Born in Spain — his second cousin is Felipe VI — Louis Alphonse speaks French with a thick Spanish accent. He often grimaces as he stumbles his way through declarations about the eternal virtues of royalty. Think Manuel in Fawlty Towers rather than Antonio Banderas in Zorro.

The crown isn’t Louis Alphonse’s sole preoccupation, either. Unlike his forebears, the man has to earn a living for his family. Every day, he grinds. A financier by training, Louis Alphonse worked for years for Banco Occidental de Descuento, a Venezuelan bank owned by his billionaire father-in-law, a self-proclaimed “socialist” said to have been tight with Hugo Chavez. Since 2019 he has also been honorary president of a foundation that promotes the memory of his great-grandfather on his mother’s side: General Franco, who he claims “created the Spanish middle class, built dams and roads [and] prevented the installation of communism”.

Yet, right now, Louis Alphonse’s heart aches for his ancestral homeland. With France mired in political chaos —  and polls ranking Emmanuel Macron as the most unpopular ever leader of the Fifth Republic — Louis Alphonse has pitched himself as a king-in-waiting. “I see France in a situation of total blockage and I am dismayed,” he told France’s most-watched news channel last October, adjusting his webcam with customary panache. His message: “If France asks it of me, I will be at her service.” But he won’t go further. Like a Hollywood star angling for an Oscar, he lets his supporters campaign on their own initiative.

***

Far from Paris, in the small village in Corrèze, central France, a man dreams of helping Louis de Bourbon claim what fate stole away. Damien Pennes, 39, is a shopkeeper who has always felt a deep attachment to the monarchy. More than a year ago, he founded the royalist political party Lys Royal de France. It currently has around 142 members, though it punches above its weight on social media. Its spokesperson, a young woman who posts as Madame de France, has racked up nearly 200,000 likes on TikTok. It has a celebrity supporter too: Yellow Vests icon Jacline Mouraud, the hypnotherapist and accordionist who helped spark the protests that rocked France in late 2018.

Lys Royal is only fielding three candidates in the municipal elections next month — but that’s just the start. “Our aim, without pretense, is to run in the presidential election,” Pennes tells me. Still, should Lys Royal by some freakish miracle win, Pennes has no intention of governing. He would “do away with Lys Royal de France — as with all the other parties — in favor of the return of the monarchy”. He continues: “We have nothing else to gain from this… we are just simple French people. There are no nobles here, no great fortunes. We are shopkeepers, employees, care workers.”

The musketeers of Lys Royal aren’t alone. Other small outfits also advocate for a restoration. The most infamous is Action Française, an Orleanist movement long associated with the prewar nationalist Charles Maurras. Orleanists believe Jean d’Orléans, the descendant of the last French King Louis Philippe I, should be king; Legitimists back Louis Alphonse; Bonapartists aren’t really a thing since Napoleon was a proud product of the Revolution. 

But while they are divided on who should rule France, the monarchists are broadly unified on the question of how they should rule France. Most of them loathe UK-style parliamentary monarchy. The ideal is a Catholic sovereign who actually rules, albeit with devolved powers at the local level. Above all, what they long for is a strong leader who can embody an ultraconservative idea of France. For Emile Chabal, a professor of contemporary history at the University of Edinburgh and the author of France, royalism may be “a negligible force in both French political and intellectual life,” but it is “one of the available far-Right ideological toolkits” in France today.

The monarchists share the same preoccupations as France’s far-right: the defense of national identity, opposition to high levels of immigration and hostility towards the European Union. Frexit is even on the agenda. Still, this doesn’t mean they support Marine Le Pen’s National Rally or Eric Zemmour’s Reconquête. Most abstain in national elections and reject the Left/Right divide, which they see as a dreadful by-product of the Revolution (which is, after all, where the very idea of a Left/Right divide comes from). Zemmour, who extols France’s Catholic heritage, is probably the most monarchy-coded French politician. In Chabal’s view, he combines a “reactionary, old-fashioned” program with “a celebration of a hierarchical vision of Frenchness”. But even that isn’t enough for royalists. Zemmour plays the Republican game — and that sin can’t be absolved.

This rejection of the very idea of French democracy means that royalists, perhaps inevitably, play a negligible part in actual French democracy. Still, they do know how to put on a good show. Every year, they commemorate the execution of Louis XVI on 21 January 1793 with a torchlight march across Paris organized by Souvenir de Louis XVI. This year, more than 700 people showed up. Their slogans: “À bas la République!” and “Vive le Roi!” 

And they also represent something far bigger than their small number. Some 17% of the French electorate support replacing the President with a King, according to a 2016 poll, and 39% say it would have positive consequences for national unity. Royalists are quick to cite these figures as vindication. The truth is that it’s more complicated. Most people aren’t familiar with royalist thought and probably picture a King as a French Charles III — rather than a divinely appointed ruler. 

But where French royalism is most relevant is in its opposition to liberal democracy. Across the West, we are witnessing a growing rejection of liberal principles, a backlash that has intellectual roots that go back to 1789. It draws on doctrines espoused by French royalists who abhorred the Revolution’s promise of democracy. In other words, the reactionary vibes of French royalism haunt our moment.   

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, thinkers like Joseph de Maistre and Louis de Bonald formulated a grand critique of the Revolution: la contre-révolution. To them, the new system was illegitimate. Sovereignty didn’t come from the people but from God. It was mediated on Earth by long-established institutions: the monarchy, the Church and the family. Worse, democracy was a dangerous illusion. Far from leading the masses to happiness, it ruined them by unleashing their basest impulses. Chaos inevitably followed. The only winners were the new ruling elites gaming the system.

The return of the King was the prerequisite for the return of the old divinely sanctioned order. Royalism, therefore, became the animating force of the contre-révolution. And it was a force to be reckoned with throughout most of the 19th century. There were three kings after Napoleon’s fall. Even at the outset of the Third Republic in the 1870s, a restoration seemed on the cards. “There was a real hope of restoration for monarchists,” the historian Baptiste Roger-Lacan tells me, “and this hope engendered a republican reaction”. 

Even after royalism lost majority support in the 1880s, it retained the power to disrupt. The monarchist group Action Française took off in the early 20th century at the time of the Dreyfus Affair. “By its ideological radicalism and its capacity to attract intellectuals it became an intellectual touchstone on the Right and the far-Right,” says Roger-Lacan. Its maître à penser, Charles Maurras, espoused a doctrine of “state-anti-semitism” believing French democracy had been captured by “internal enemies”: Protestants, Freemasons, foreigners and, of course, Jews. 

More from this author

Is Mélenchon betting on civil war?

By Theo Zenou

At its peak in the Twenties, Action Française counted 60,000 members and reached many more with its newspaper. Today, it claims to have 3,000 members (journalists say the number is far fewer). Among them is Robin Vaillant, 24, a brewer who lives in the North of France. He insists that antisemitism is no longer part of Action Française’s doctrine. In his view, it was never central to Maurras’s royalist project and can be “taken out” without undermining its coherence. Historians tend to disagree, seeing Maurras’s visions as inextricably linked with Vichy.

Still, its vision for France is reasonably clear: Action Française continues to support “a decentralized monarchy”. The King would hold “regalian powers”: justice; national security; defense and diplomacy; state finances. The French Parliament would be abolished, and local assemblies would spring up all over the realm. These assemblies would be elected to deal with everyday life. People would also join corporations — or guilds — to represent their interests. 

France would also no longer be secular. The King would be Catholic, and Catholicism would become the official religion — though other faith groups would still be allowed to practice. What about the will of the people? Royalists reject this too. There are issues, they argue, where vox populi should hold its tongue. “Can a French person give an opinion on nuclear energy when they aren’t informed, [or] on geopolitics, I don’t know, in sub-Saharan Africa?” asks Vaillant. “No, you need experts and the King sort of embodies that eminence with his ministers.”

People would only get involved where they know best. “People should give their opinion on questions where they are concretely knowledgeable: local and community life, the economy, the distribution of tax.”

The Legitimist vision of the restoration isn’t so different from this Orléanist version. It might differ on the details, but the basics are the same. “Action Francaise pinched all the good bits from the Legitimist doctrine,” says the good-humoured Loïc Baverel, head of the Cercle d’Action Légitimiste, who laments the fact that French monarchists spend more effort arguing among themselves than communicating with the public. “Our efforts of communications and interactions should be directed towards everyday French people,” he tells me, “not sniping at each other between telephone booths.”

Unlike in the UK, the King would not be a ceremonial figure in Baverel’s France. He would wield real power and head a royal council made up of a principal minister and specialized ministers. For royalists, liberal democracy has led to decline. It has unleashed progressive forces, eroded France’s Catholic identity and sold off its sovereignty to the EU and giant corporations. 

But the critique goes even deeper than that — it aims at the very idea of an elected government. Royalists believe that transferring power every few years to a new president — who comes with a new agenda and needs his party’s support to implement it — is reckless. It impedes strategic planning. Baverel’s initial attraction to royalism came from his frustration at “the inability of politicians to carry out long-term structural economic policies, which may require actions that are unpopular at first, because of electoral deadlines”.

So, the dreamed-of restoration would not just be a radical departure from what France is today. It would undo centuries of political development since the Enlightenment. It’s literally a reactionary project; its roots lie in the reaction to the French Revolution. Like de Maistre, today’s royalists defend a hierarchy they consider natural. In the imagined Kingdom of France, society would no longer be organized around the individual, but around traditional institutions and “organic” communities. The King would be the great arbiter. He would ensure, in Baverel’s words, “that society functions harmoniously and that justice is respected between the different intermediary or constituent bodies”.

But France is no longer where the reactionary party is at. These 21st century French counter-revolutionaries would surely have more success in another Republic born of revolution: the United States, where an unlikely band of monarchists are riding the coattails of President Trump, who has long fancied himself an American monarch. He has posted memes where he wears a crown with the tag “Long Live the King”. And he recently said that the only limit to his power is “his own morality”. Not even the Sun King himself, Louis XIV, would have dared utter something so brazen.

Under Donald I’s reign, a movement dubbed the Dark Enlightenment is emerging. Its leading figure, Curtis Yarvin, is a tech bro de Maistre. He has decried democracy as “weak” and wants the US to become a monarchy. But he envisions an even more powerful king than the French royalists: a CEO monarch who runs the realm like a Silicon Valley tycoon. Yarvin has reportedly influenced the White House and counts Vice President JD Vance as a reader. Elsewhere in the Magasphere, the far-Right streamer Nick Fuentes brags about being “a reactionary” and dreams of turning the US into a “Catholic monarchy”.

But while Yarvin and Fuentes borrow gleefully from the counter-Revolution, their visions of monarchy are ultimately dictatorial. They aren’t interested in theories of regalian powers and decentralization. Roger-Lacan points to “post-liberals” such as the Catholic political theorist Patrick J. Deenen and the Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule as closer in spirit to the French contre-révolutionnaires. “The American post-liberal movement really introduces in the US elements of counter-revolutionary doctrine that come from Europe,” he says. For him, post-liberals are “anti-moderns and anti-liberals who consider that liberal democracy is a catastrophe for humanity and that it was the last step of the separation, or the collapse, of Christian society.”

But the MAGA Right doesn’t just import reactionary ideas from the old continent. It is also obsessed with the aesthetics of traditional Christian Europe — cathedrals, medieval castles, Renaissance paintings — and fears this ancestral heritage is under threat. In its National Security Strategy, the Trump administration blames the European Union and migration for the “loss of national identities and self-confidence”. Europe itself risks “civilizational erasure”. At the Munich Security Conference, Secretary of State Marco Rubio hailed the “sacred inheritance” shared by Americans and Europeans. 

Ironically for European reactionaries, it’s the United States that is now boosting their message — and it’s a message that increasingly chimes with voters. In the UK, according to a 2025 Channel 4 poll, half of Gen Z believe the country “would be a better place if a strong leader was in charge who does not have to bother with parliament and elections”. In France, things aren’t much better. A recent survey found that 41% of the population would favor “a leader who governs without parliament and elections”.

Amid this profound crisis of liberal democracy, it’s clear that French royalists have a card to play. Will they succeed? They are tiny in number but determined. “I tell people who feel discouraged by the numbers… the one thing that’s certain is that if we do nothing, nothing will happen,” says Loïc Baverel. While the monarchists will play basically no role at all in next year’s presidential elections, that’s not to say the ghost of their King won’t hover over it. Macron himself once remarked: “There is in the democratic process an absence. In French politics, the absent one is the figure of the King, whom I fundamentally think the French people didn’t want to die.” As such, the French “have tried to reoccupy this emptiness, to put other figures there”.

Whoever comes out on top in 2027 will be the leader who manages — if only temporarily — to occupy this emptiness. Charles de Gaulle did so in 1958 at the outset of the Fifth Republic. Napoleon did so in 1804, when he crowned himself Emperor. He reportedly said: “I found the crown of France in the gutter.”  

One day, royalists hope, the crown will rest once again on the King’s head.

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.

More from this author

Andrew: the half-buffoon prince

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.

Suggested Reading

Can King Charles re-enchant Britain?

By Aris Roussinos

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.

As you may have guessed, Young is no doctor. But for 25 years, up until his most recent arrest in the summer of 2022, the retired pro-tennis player from Utah peddled his life-threatening cures to sick and desperate Americans. He is not alone. Far beyond the familiar landscape of yoga, chiropractics and aromatherapy lies a Wild West of supposed cure-alls, many of them driven by small-scale entrepreneurs who hope to parlay a unique product or brand into a sprawling business empire. Such characters have always floated around the margins of America’s healthcare scene, but right now, fringe practitioners are having a moment. The alternative-medicine lobby that backs them has never been more powerful.

The story of its rise to power begins in the mid-Nineties, around the same time that Young first started dabbling in alternative health: pairing tennis-related diet and exercise advice with a line of branded dietary supplements. The supplement industry was going through a sea change, thanks to the nascent alternative healthcare lobby, which scored a massive and improbable victory in the halls of Congress in 1994. The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act broadened the definition of a food supplement to include almost any vitamin, mineral, plant or hormone. It also, critically, shifted the burden of proof away from manufacturers to the federal Food and Drug Administration, which had to identify dangerous products on a case-by-case basis, a resource-intensive prospect that allows tens of thousands of quacks to sell shady products with relative impunity.

This lax regulatory environment made selling supplements far more profitable. Between 1994 and 2002, the US supplement industry mushroomed from $4 billion in annual sales to $18.7 billion, and the number of dietary supplements advertised grew too, from 4,000 to 29,000. Bolstered by the efforts of its Republican Senator, Orrin Hatch, the supplement industry was centred in Utah, which became a sort of Silicon Valley of suspect health claims.

Suggested reading

The real Covid conspiracy

By Ian Birrell

This was the ideal environment for Young, who rose to fame after publishing a bestselling book on the importance of an alkaline diet, The pH Miracle Diet, in 2000. The book was innocuous enough — it recommended exercise and a plant-heavy diet, and offered a blend of American can-doism and hucksterism that is tolerated, or even looked upon fondly, by the American public. This is where Young might have stayed, had his fantastical beliefs not led him down a much darker path.

The problem was that Young thought he had made a paradigm-shifting discovery: that germs were a myth, and that all diseases were caused by the body becoming overly acidic. When he began treating cancer patients at his upscale resort, a former grapefruit and avocado ranch in Valley Centre, he took his groundless theory even further. His de-acidifying treatments denied patients the chance to seek proper healthcare: Naima Houder-Mohammed, a 27-year-old captain in the British military with advanced breast cancer, drained her family’s finances to raise more than $77,000 (£62,700) to fund a visit to the Miracle Ranch.

Young might never have gone so far had the healthcare profession maintained its integrity. In the early days, there was a fairly clear division between people like Young and licensed medical doctors, a division that was enforced by state laws and various gatekeeper institutions — public health agencies, medical universities, and legacy media outlets, none of which would consider Young’s medical theory to be worthy of consideration.

But the alt-health lobby, swelling with profits and energy, began seeking ways to bypass these gatekeepers and make unfettered health claims directly to consumers. By 2005, supplement manufacturers were partnering with libertarian lobbyists to aggressively court small businesses in the alt-health community. Lobbyists held hundreds of Health Freedom Expos, where fringe practitioners gathered to hear them out. Their sales pitch focused on an appealing libertarian message: medical freedom. Instead of convincing the established gatekeepers of medical science that, say, herbs could treat cancer, practitioners should instead convince the public and their elected representatives that Americans had a fundamental right to buy the medicine of their choosing, whether it worked or not.

Suggested reading

How we appeased China's Zero-Covid regime

By N.S. Lyons

It was an ingenious strategy. By 2010, Americans were spending $34 billion out of pocket for alternative healthcare, and industry analysts estimate that spending increased by more than 50% between 2010 and 2020. An estimated 72 million American adults now use some form of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM).

The political makeup of CAM users shifted too. In 2003, it was extremely progressive Leftists who favoured alternative medicine, a hangover from America’s hippy movement. Twenty years on, it is mainly Conservatives, particularly when it comes to taking dietary supplements. A 2019 industry survey found that the American South has higher rates of supplement use than anywhere else in the country, while a 2008 survey found Republicans were twice as likely as Democrats to be heavy users of supplements.

How did a culture known for peace, love, happiness, marijuana and socialism transform into a hotbed of gun rights, anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and nationalism? The answer lies in the “medical freedom” movement, which very quickly found synergy with Republican politicians in the early 2010s, after 18 House Republicans, led by Georgia’s Tom Price, first floated the Medical Freedom Act. Not only were Republicans loathe to decry freedom in any form, but presidential candidates including Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee and Herman Cain also found that they could monetise their campaign email lists to sell quacky medical products to their supporters. At the same time, Right-wing media personalities including Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones and Ben Shapiro began promoting supplements and other alt-med products.

It wasn’t long before millions of conservative Americans found themselves bombarded with glowing sales pitches about herbal Viagra, brain-enhancing pills, pendants to ward off electromagnetic frequencies, and handheld lasers that could cure cancer. The pandemic only hastened this trend, as medical freedom lobbyists touted their miracle health cures and rail against mandatory mask-wearing and vaccines.

Suggested reading

Adderall is not an identity

By Oliver Bateman

Of course, not all alt-med users are poor Conservatives. The field tends to be associated with well-to-do urban women, who spend significant amounts of money on Gwyneth Paltrow-style toxic cleanses and reiki therapy. And it’s true that, among white women, the more money they make, the more likely they are to use mild alternative therapies (mostly mind-body medicine such as yoga) — but that’s alongside routine visits to their private doctors.

Instead, the real victims of the alt-med lobby are poor Americans who struggle to pay for proper healthcare, and who are far more likely to seek out alternative cures for serious diseases. A National Health Interview Survey found that having unmet needs in medical care or having delayed care due to cost were associated with a higher chance of CAM use.

And as long as America’s justice system remains ill-suited to combatting the problem of medical misinformation, that looks unlikely to change. Despite serving several months in jail in 2017 and being ordered by a judge to pay out $105 million in damages to a single patient in a civil lawsuit in 2018, Young has refused to give up his operation. In May 2022, he was hit with further criminal charges related to his treatment of a patient, including that he had committed “wilful cruelty” to an elderly woman suffering from liver and thyroid disease.

Suggested reading

The Ozempic class war has begun

By Oliver Bateman

It is unclear whether this will lead to a penalty that finally puts Young out of business — but, either way, the alt-health movement is unlikely to disappear soon. In the years since the pandemic motivated many Republicans to oppose Covid vaccines and mask mandates, Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis has brought other aspects of the medical freedom movement out of the libertarian fringe and into the conservative mainstream. He has emboldened Republican state lawmakers across the country to introduce hundreds of public health bills this year in the name of liberty: critically, they go beyond targeting Covid-specific mask and vaccine mandates by weakening evidence-based care.

Under the DeSantis agenda, Florida’s proposed medical freedom laws would give doctors and insurers the freedom to refuse treatment to vulnerable Americans and force doctors to inform patients of alternative Covid treatments, regardless of FDA approval. As other red states follow Florida’s lead, America’s alt-health lobby will continue to prey on the poorest in society. They have created a world we cannot escape: where Left is Right, medicine is poison, and the doctor’s white coat is a harbinger of death.

With The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Survival, DeSantis very clearly frames his prospective candidacy in light of our historical moment: he is the tribune of the red states and antidote to the ills of progressivism. He is keen to highlight his achievements as governor: resisting lockdowns, fighting wokeism in schools, and standing up to big corporations like Disney, one of the state’s major employers. His record won him a landslide re-election in November with 59% of the vote, flipping Miami-Dade (with its concentration of Latino voters) and Palm Beach counties from the Democrats. But will his success be enough to snatch the nomination from Trump and the presidency from Joe Biden?

Though the book is generous with praise for Donald Trump, the unstated premise of DeSantis’s run is that he can do what the former president once did but without the outsize flaws. If DeSantis truly wishes to displace Trump as the party’s leader, he must prove that he is a superior vessel for the populist impulses that now predominate in the GOP (“Trumpism without Trump”). The problem with the 45th president, as I have argued before, is that he was not able to follow through on the authentically populist and nationalist instincts that won him the White House in 2016. Under the influence of institutional Republicans, his administration largely stuck to the standard party line, or else failed to deliver in the few instances when the president’s advisers did try to break free of Reaganite dogmas. (In a strange twist, Trump disowned his administration’s most impressive executive achievement — the vaccine roll-out — in order to win culture war points.)

Trump also failed to grow his coalition by winning the support of moderates and independents, who are less likely to care about his partisan vendettas. Per Theodore White, a president with a sharper historical sense would have been more alert to the transformative potential of the present moment which, like the New Deal or the end of the Cold War, marks the epochal movement from one paradigm to another. Such a leader would also not have been so easy to derail or distract.

Suggested reading

How Miami turned red

By Alex Perez

So, does Ron DeSantis fit this bill? By all accounts, he is a far more cerebral politician than Trump ever was, and, being more conscious of the shifting ideological tides in the GOP, he is in theory less likely to be co-opted by the professional conservatives in Washington. DeSantis’s intellectual streak can be seen in his CV: he is an Ivy League graduate, had a stint as a history teacher, and authored a now forgotten 2011 book, Dreams From Our Founding Fathers: First Principles in the Age of Obama, in which he derived his vision of conservatism from the framers of the Constitution. DeSantis is able to engage with groups like the National Conservatism Conference (“NatCon”), a gathering of heterodox thinkers, in ways that more pedestrian elected officials can’t. Looking at his pronouncements in these intellectual settings can help piece together DeSantis’s own distinct “sense of history”.

In September, DeSantis gave the headline speech to the NatCon gathering on his home turf in Miami. He seemed aware of what made this era different from Reagan’s: “when Reagan came on the scene, for example, it was really big government that was to blame… You now have a woke mind virus that has infected all these other institutions.” DeSantis was saying what many populist Republicans have been thinking, which is that the private sector needs to be reined in just as much as the state — a sea change in conservative philosophy. And if “culture war is class warfare”, as J.D. Vance (another rising star of the Right) said, then one can expect cultural and economic grievances to be bundled together as the Right takes stands against firms like Disney, fighting against cultural wokeism while also fighting for the material interest of the working class.

But taking a closer look at DeSantis’ war on Disney shows that this is not actually how it works. DeSantis was ruthless in stripping the various privileges that the state had long granted to Disney in response to their opposition to Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill. As one impressed conservative columnist put it, here was clear evidence that the governor was ready “to take on Big Business on behalf of the little guy”, which was “Reagan-era Republican heresy”. However, conspicuously absent in DeSantis’s case against “The Happiest Place On Earth” is any mention of its exploitative working conditions or its refusal to pay decent wages to its workers. DeSantis appears to be indifferent to the properly economic dimensions of populism and is only concerned about calling out corporations in so far as a cultural dispute over wokeism is involved. Man cannot live on culture war alone, and it was left to Bernie Sanders to speak up about these bread-and-butter concerns. It doesn’t help DeSantis’s populist bona fides either that even after their feud, Disney lobbyists remained co-chairs for his inauguration.

More from this author

Nikki Haley's neocon pantomime

By Michael Cuenco

DeSantis is equally constrained in his conception of populism when it comes to immigration. The governor has been perfectly willing to make an “own the libs” show of bussing migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, but has been terribly reluctant to enact universal mandatory E-Verify in his state as a means of screening out undocumented migrant workers from the labour market. Why? Because it would be burdensome on business. After four years in power, it was only a few days ago (and now that he is about to run for president) that DeSantis came out in favour of universalising E-Verify — though this was also his promise when he ran for governor in 2018. But even if he succeeds in getting a law passed, much will depend on the sincerity and effectiveness of enforcement. As Bloomberg reported, “E-Verify Laws Across Southern Red States Are Barely Enforced… Even the most anti-immigration states don’t like cracking down on business.” It seems as if DeSantis (like Trump) wants to come across as an immigration hawk for culture-war purposes but without offending the business-donor class.

What about the anti-woke crusade in education? Surely, as DeSantis must be telling himself, the great mass of voters can get behind that. However, Florida’s war on woke schools is emblematic of what happens when the Right takes culture war as the be-all-and-end-all of politics. Yes, parents have no patience for woke excesses, but neither do they endorse the other extreme, which results in the same pathologies (book bans, political uniformity) but in a conservative direction. Republicans often interpret public opposition to wokeness as license to indulge in their own peculiar moral and cultural tastes, which can be no less alienating. Polling shows that banging on about Critical Race Theory has failed to resonate with all but a small slice of parents across the country. At the end of the day, most voters have little time for the ideological fixations that animate partisans of the Left and Right, and simply want an America that can deliver stability and opportunity for all.

Suggested reading

The coronation of Ron DeSantis

By Park MacDougald

In his 2011 book, DeSantis identified with the founders who supported proposals for a strong national government, or what would eventually become the Constitution. Chief among these were the authors of the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. DeSantis even declared that Hamilton was “one of the greatest American statesmen never to serve as president”. Opposing them were the Anti-Federalists, who argued against the idea of an American nation-state and wanted to retain a minimal confederation. These tendencies have remained in tension ever since. The Anti-Federalists tended to be reactive, defined more by what they were against. And despite his professed Hamiltonian affinities, DeSantis has governed more from this negative position, building his political brand in opposition to things, be it wokeism or “Fauci-ism”. (Re-litigating the pandemic in 2024, when most Americans wish to move on, is also not likely to be a vote-getter.) The GOP itself seems to be moving toward an open embrace of Anti-Federalism: witness Marjorie Taylor Greene’s “national divorce” idea.

However, what is needed now is a revival of the Federalist tradition, defined more by what government is for, and infused with a greater level of institutional creativity and ambition. To build a new post-Reaganite order, it is not enough to wage a culture war without also working to change the material and institutional frameworks that shape American life. Like the Federalists themselves, who renovated the republic and used the power of the federal state for economic modernisation, the next generation of statesmen must present a national vision that is more positive than oppositional. One wonders if Ron DeSantis has enough of a “sense of history” to do just that.

This week, Nikki Haley launched her own bid for historical sub-footnote status (she is polling around 3%) when she declared her intention to seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. The former South Carolina governor and ambassador to the United Nations is the first official challenger to her former boss Donald Trump. Commentators and bookmakers are largely agreed on her campaign’s (wholly non-existent) chances. The real challenge to the former president’s hold on the GOP will most likely come from Florida governor Ron DeSantis. But his appeal to the base is that he is a younger and more disciplined version of Trump, who can essentially continue what Trump started in 2016. With her appeals to the conservatism of the George W. Bush era, Haley can be expected to play the same role as Breckinridge: the swansong of a dying breed and the harbinger of her party’s irrevocable transformation. But even so, for the future of Republican politics and strategy, there is more to Haley’s bid than the sense of inevitable defeat that infuses it.

Clues about the true significance of the Haley campaign may first be found in retracing the relationship between the 45th president and his one-time ambassador. Nimrata Nikki Randhawa was born and grew up in Bamberg, South Carolina, the daughter of Sikh immigrants who came to the US by way of Canada from India. After graduating from Clemson University, she rose through the ranks in local politics and married national guardsman Michael Haley, converting to Christianity and later getting elected as a Republican to the state legislature in 2004. Haley became a national figure upon winning the governorship of South Carolina in 2010 as part of a Tea Party wave. Combining traditional conservative positions on taxes and social issues with an energetic populist style, Haley and the Tea Party represented a revival of GOP fortunes in the Obama years. She is also remembered for her call to take down the Confederate flag in 2015 after the Charleston massacre, and was touted as a serious presidential contender in 2016 though she opted to stay out of a crowded field.

Of course, that was the year both mainstream conservatism and liberalism were shattered by the insurgent force of Trumpian populism. Going well beyond the Tea Party, the real-estate mogul openly repudiated Bush-era conservative shibboleths, such as the Iraq War and free trade, while vociferously rejecting the establishment’s relatively moderate stances on immigration. As one of the party’s leading figures, Haley faced a choice between calling out Trump on principle or falling in line. Like many establishment conservatives at that juncture, she chose wisely: she did both.

At times, Haley appeared to criticise Trump, such as during her 2016 state of the union response when, in a veiled reference to her party’s frontrunner, she warned against the temptation “to follow the siren call of the angriest voices”. When her preferred candidate, Marco Rubio, was eliminated, she indicated she would vote for Trump but made clear that she was “not a fan”. In the end, Haley managed to say just enough to maintain her image as one of the respectable Republicans, but not nearly enough to anger or alienate the nominee. After Trump’s victory, Haley accepted the offer to serve as America’s envoy to the UN: it was an appointment that seemed to confirm the newfound unity between the president and the party establishment.

More from this author

Is George Santos a Machiavellian prince?

By Michael Cuenco

At the United Nations, Ambassador Haley brought this political balancing act onto the international stage, gaining a reputation as the “good cop” of the Trump administration. This often meant adopting a of tone of rhetorical moderation to counteract Trump’s less statesmanlike instincts, while still pledging fidelity to the president. Nonetheless, Haley’s positions seemed to illustrate the distance between Trump and Bush-era foreign policy. For instance, while Trump was in favour of forging closer ties to Putin’s Russia and, at least initially, questioned the viability of Nato, Haley made a point of reaffirming the Atlantic alliance throughout her ambassadorship and took stands against Moscow and other authoritarian regimes.

When Haley stepped down in 2018, Trump praised her and she returned the favour in her memoir, in which she lauded her former boss as a strong president who was “great to work with”. A breach in relations due to January 6, after which Haley denounced Trump, was soon repaired when Haley later went back to supporting him. In 2021, she made clear she would duly make way for the former president if he opted for another run . “I would not run if President Trump ran, and I would talk to him about it… That’s something that we’ll have a conversation about.”

Even now, however, with Haley reneging on her pledge, Trump doesn’t seem all that bothered, writing on Truth Social, “Nikki has to follow her heart, not her honor. She should definitely run!” Unlike with DeSantis, Trump appears to be content with going soft on Haley, despite many lines of attack being open to the former president, such as tarring her as a disloyal “Republican In Name Only”, which can be enough to excommunicate someone from the party. Instead, the task of attacking her has fallen to Tucker Carlson and Trump’s other backers, who have referred to her as the “Carly Fiorina of 2024”, his one female rival from 2016.

Suggested reading

Will a Trumpian party destroy the GOP?

By Oliver Bateman

The lack of any real antagonism between Haley and Trump has led some to suggest that the former’s campaign is just a prelude to a possible vice-presidential selection (though he would likely be better off picking someone ideologically closer to him to avoid a repeat of the awkward relationship with Mike Pence), or part of some divide-and-conquer strategy to diffuse opposition to Trump and weaken the chances of Ron DeSantis. In this case, Nikki Haley’s run is not as pointless as it seems. Whether she is fully conscious of it or not, her campaign could very well be a welcome exercise in “regulated opposition” within the Republican Party.

That still begs the question: why is there so little tension between the two divergent wings of the party represented by Trump and Haley? After all, to hear Haley speak is to be transported to the halcyon days of post-Cold War Republican orthodoxy, when global market capitalism (neoliberalism) and military interventionism (neoconservatism) were unquestionable. This is a world away from the “America First” nationalism of Trump and the newer crop of populists, with its echoes of prewar isolationism and protectionism. Yet the Republican Party seems to have room enough for both of these tendencies without any big protracted battles over policy.

And while there now appears to be a brewing war of words between Trump and the Right’s traditional powerbrokers (like the pro-business Club for Growth and Americans for Prosperity, who are threatening to withhold their support in favour of more orthodox candidates such as Haley), the understanding seems to be that this is a mere pantomime act. The parties will go through the motions of dissent and protest before inevitably rallying to Trump (as they had done after 2016). Indeed, the Club for Growth has already made it clear that they would support Trump in the general election if he became the nominee.

More from this author

Hunter Biden and the curse of the failson

By Michael Cuenco

The explanation for the lack of genuine ideological conflict is simple: surface-level squabbles belie a practical convergence on policy. As president, with the partial exception of tariffs, Trump readily outsourced his agenda to Washington insiders with either neoliberal or neoconservative inclinations like John Bolton, producing a record that is in many ways a continuation of the old regime, on everything from tax cuts to immigration to foreign entanglements. In return for acquiescence to party regulars on policy, Trump was given free rein to ratchet up the culture war and to rebrand the GOP into the MAGA party, while effectively retaining much of the four-decades-old conservative programme.

Unlike Henry Breckinridge, who really did disagree with FDR (and who bolted from the party), the contrast between the likes of Nikki Haley and Donald Trump is mostly one of posture and aesthetics. In distancing herself from the former president rhetorically while nonetheless working to ensure that national policy follows party orthodoxy, Haley embodies the non-dilemma of the Republican establishment. Their struggle is not in deciding between principle and power, but in preserving the appearance of principle while reaping the spoils of power.

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.

Suggested reading

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.

Suggested reading

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.

Suggested reading

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.

Suggested reading

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.

The death of the Queen might eventually invite more sceptical and wide-ranging reflection. Georges Clemenceau said of the French Revolution that it was a bloc — to be accepted or rejected as a whole; the same is true of the British royal family. Any individual monarch is the product of an institution that revolves around the hereditary principle. Real monarchists must ask themselves whether they believe in this system enough to accept all its potential consequences. Remember that if Prince Charles had broken his neck playing polo in 1976, we would now be awaiting the coronation of King Andrew.

Curiously, a “successful” monarch and, especially, a long reign weakens the monarchy as an institution. During such a reign, loyalty comes to focus on a person, rather than on the Crown as an institution. Note how frequently, in recent years, politicians have answered questions about their views on monarchy with some anodyne remark about their admiration for the Queen. The cult of an individual sovereign increasingly overshadows all other members of their family, including their eventual successor.

More from this author

The myth of Tory Birmingham

By Richard Vinen

That heir, waiting in the wings, will have accumulated a great deal of baggage by the time that they get to the throne — whether that baggage means actresses and obesity (as in the case of Edward VII) or an unsuccessful marriage and a history of publicly expressing political views (the case of Charles III). The problems of a long reign are exacerbated when the monarch is a woman. Partly because they were comparatively rare in British public life until recently, Queens lend themselves to mythologisation.

There are two striking and worrying precedents for what happens when a long-serving monarch dies. The first is Elizabeth I. Her death was followed by an unsuccessful king (James I), a catastrophic king (Charles I), civil war, regicide and, for a time, republic. The second is Victoria, whose death was also followed by a period of turbulence for the monarchy, culminating in the abdication crisis of 1936. I am not being entirely flippant when I say that the First World War was, in some ways, a civil war within Victoria’s own family — in which the English branch came off much better than the German or Russian ones.

Their long reigns served to occlude problems that then came back to haunt the next monarch. Elizabeth I — who refused to “open a window into men’s souls” — was careful to cultivate a useful ambiguity over religion. But that ambiguity was linked to her personal idiosyncrasies — her refusal to marry, for instance, avoided the question of whether she would take a Protestant or Catholic husband — so that it was hard for the monarchy to sustain after her death.

The ambiguity of Victoria’s reign was less deliberate. Her long period on the throne and, particularly, her partial withdrawal from public life after the death of her husband, helped to conceal the extent to which (much to Victoria’s own distaste) the monarchy had lost its political power during her reign. It was significant that politicians did not consider it necessary to call a general election when she died: they had done so as a matter of course after the previous monarch’s death. Still, the monarchs that came after her did not really reconcile themselves to the institution’s loss of political power until the accession of George VI in 1936.

The central ambiguity of Elizabeth II’s long reign revolves around Britain’s relations with the wider world. Before her accession, she pledged herself to serve “our imperial family”. But the empire went in the early years of her reign and was replaced by the Commonwealth — Enoch Powell, always attentive to the precise meaning of constitutional terms, believed that the most important speech he ever made concerned the addition of the letter “s” after “realm” in the Royal Titles Bill of 1952. Elizabeth’s death has now raised awkward questions, long suppressed, about what the Commonwealth itself means and, in particular, whether the British monarch will remain its head.

Suggested reading

The moment the monarchy nearly toppled

By Mary Harrington

In some ways, the personalisation of the monarchy is more marked now than it was in 1901 or 1603. This is partly because of other changes in the British state. It is often suggested that every aspect of the constitution hinges on the monarchy. But in some ways, the reverse is true: the institutions of the British can get along perfectly well without a monarch — as was shown during the interregnum of 1649-1660 — though the monarchy has, in the past, been sustained by its relations with an infrastructure of ancien regime institutions.

In 1953, I suspect the Queen herself would have said that being head of the Church of England was the most important of her duties. Now the idea of a state church seems peculiar — most vicars would give you a blank look if you point out that parliament has not sanctioned the prayer book used in most churches. As for the House of Lords, it is now, for the most part, an assembly of retired, middle-ranking politicians — not a single one of the six surviving former prime ministers has bothered to take a peerage. The institutions that have long propped up the monarchy are ailing.

She was also always held to be above politics and often presented as representing an integrity that elected politicians lack. Yet the briefest glance at the register of members’ interests or parliamentary expense claims reveals that MPs most interested in personal enrichment tend to be fervent admirers of the Queen — and keen collectors of honours. One might also point out that two of the most important figures at the court of King Boris (the cabinet secretary, Simon Case, and Lord Geidt, advisor on ministerial standards) had previously worked in the royal household.

Suggested reading

The taming of the republicans

By Alwyn Turner

For all the talk of the monarchy being “apolitical”, no serious observer doubts that the monarchy serves the interests of the Conservative Party — often, as when George V promoted “National Government” in 1931, serving those interests by going along with the Conservative claim that their own policies were “apolitical”. A group of MPs closely associated with Thatcherism, including Norman Tebbit and Nigel Lawson, wrote an interesting document in 1978. They were struck by the show of affection for the Queen during her Silver Jubilee; they recognised that it might reflect “a deep nostalgia, in part for what is thought of as a comfortable past”, suggesting that they needed to be careful with calls for radical change. All the same, they concluded that the spirit of the Jubilee would work to their advantage: “People will be more attracted by a promise … to restore some of the valued things they have lost than by promise of a vague, bright tomorrow.”

But Conservatives are not quite the royalists they sometimes make out. They are heirs to a political tradition that looks back to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 (when James II was abruptly ejected from the throne) and emphasises the pre-eminence of the parliament — especially the House of Commons. Churchill paid ostentatious deference to the young Queen Elizabeth and took the side of Edward VIII during the abdication crisis of 1936. All the same, Churchill was blunt to the latter: “When our kings are in conflict with our constitution, we change our kings.” He also, as First Lord of the Admiralty, once tried to name a ship HMS Oliver Cromwell.

Suggested reading

The mythic power of King Charles III

By Aris Roussinos

Conservatives found it easy to be loyal to Elizabeth II because her public statements — in favour of family, nation and the armed forces, and prone, in recent years, to evoke a certain memory of the Second World War — fitted with their own political vision. It will be interesting to see how they get on with a monarch who recently, albeit unintentionally, let it be known that he disapproves of their asylum policy and who has devoted much of his life to drawing attention to the dangers of climate change.

King Charles will, I suspect, not have an easy time. His reign will be relatively short and he will spend much of it in the shadow of his mother. The historian Peter Hennessy recently wrote that his generation (he is more or the less the same age as the King) found it hard to imagine any monarch other than Elizabeth II. Like many remarks that sound conservative, this is, when you think of it, profoundly subversive. Saying a monarch other than the present one if unthinkable is, in effect, saying that the continuation of monarchy is unthinkable.

And, while we are on the subject of unthinkable things, consider the dramatic constitutional rethinking likely to be brought about by, say, the break-up of the union, an attempt to re-enter the European Union, or the creation of a written constitution — all things desired by a significant minority of the population and all things that might raise questions about who should be head of state. For all the talk about centuries of continuity, I doubt if any realistic observer is sure the monarchy will survive for another 70 years. If it is to do so, it needs to get away from an emphasis on the supposed personal qualities of any individual King or Queen and rest once again on the abstract quality of the Crown. Perhaps one day historians will recognise that the most important constitutional commentator of the period was not Sir Simon Schama or Lord Hennessy but Johnny Rotten, who marked the Silver Jubilee of 1977 with the words: “She ain’t no human being.”

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”.

Suggested reading

The truth about Elizabeth's empire

By Remi Adekoya

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.

Suggested reading

The tragedy of Australian republicans

By Shahar Hameiri

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.

Suggested reading

The mythic power of King Charles III

By Aris Roussinos

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.

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.

Suggested reading

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.

More from this author

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.

For the first time in the history of Northern Ireland, a party representing republicans and nationalists has won the largest number of votes in a Province-wide election. This, in many ways, is a startling result. So too are the advances made by the Alliance Party, gaining from disillusionment within unionist ranks, as the larger parties buckled under the pressure of events. In particular, the poor performance of the DUP in the face of the challenges posed by Brexit negotiations has been damaging to its brand of hard-line unionism.

Northern Ireland was created in 1920, and its borders were confirmed in 1925. The inclusion of six counties within this newly formed jurisdiction was intended to ensure a comfortable unionist majority. A possible nine-county option, which was entertained at the time, would have given unionist voters a bare edge. On the other hand, a mere four counties, which was also considered, would have rendered the unionist homeland scarcely viable. As things came to stand in the six-county unit at the outbreak of the modern phase of the Troubles, the electorate was divided into a 60-40 split between unionist and nationalist voters.

From 1920 to the present day, a higher birth rate among nationalist voters along with a lower volume of emigration has meant that the disproportion between the two sides has been eroded. This election result is a vivid illustration of the implications. And the current trend is set to continue. In the last Northern Ireland census completed a decade ago, the Protestant population made up 48% of the voting public. Catholics, by comparison, stood at 45%. Historically, religion has been a predictor of party affiliation, with Protestants inclined to vote for unionist parties, while Catholics have tended to choose nationalist representation.

The issue, however, is not merely one of party strength. The parties in Northern Ireland are not just divided over policy matters. They are also split in their fundamental allegiances. Sinn Féin and its supporters are committed to joining the Republic, while the unionist parties are determined to maintain the status quo.

But the outcome will not be decided by elections. It will be determined by a referendum, with provision for such a plebiscite built into the legal architecture of the Good Friday Agreement. This states that a mere 51% percent of the population is entitled to determine sovereignty over the territory. Should a vote be triggered, the status of Northern Ireland could be legally redefined. The North could be brought under the jurisdiction of the South.

Suggested reading

Will Sinn Fein unite Ireland?

By Carlo Gebler

Since the last census in 2011, the gap between the rival electorates has continued to narrow. Experts predict that by 2030 there may be a majority of nationalist voters. In any case the direction of overall travel seems clear. It is true that there is no certainty about how a nationalist majority might vote. At present there seems little appetite for a border poll. Nonetheless, given the latest electoral result in Northern Ireland, it is clear that the situation is likely to evolve. We might therefore reasonably expect some degree of planning, or at least an informed debate among interested parties.

Before the election, Sinn Féin had been playing down the deeper significance of the impending shift for fear that expectations of fundamental change might reduce their appeal. This caution may soon recede. Just as the party has steadily increased its strength in the North, it has likewise gradually advanced its position in the South. It is currently more popular than any rival party and may before long be able to form a government.

Yet despite its popularity, Sinn Féin has failed to offer a positive vision of the future. Its main focus has long been on defeating its historic adversaries, which it has pursued with due application and ruthlessness. However, as a party of government it needs to develop a wider perspective, inclusive of its opponents as well as supporters. So far, it has offered nothing to the unionist population, still more or less half the inhabitants of the region. This is exactly what nationalists complained about when unionists ran the old Stormont regime.

There is certainly no inevitability about future outcomes. Nonetheless, as the decades pass, a united Ireland looks increasingly plausible. This should cause some serious rethinking on all sides. Instead, the actors are rather haplessly being carried along by events. John Finucane, Sinn Féin’s director of elections, recently declared that “only unity” could hope to unlock the potential of the island. This is a case of being blinded by heady optimism. Meanwhile, in the South, there is no agreement on the possible character of a new republic. Equally, there has been little examination of the likely costs.

Still more obvious problems are evident in the North. Among the DUP in particular, there is a refusal to confront reality. This obstinacy has its roots in unionist tradition stretching back to the years before partition. Historically, unionist allegiance has taken the form of dependence. Their representatives have looked to Britain to secure their position, usually with a mixture of anxiety and bluster. The reason for the anxiety is clear: dependence can only be happy if both sides share the same objective. Yet this has not been the case between Britain and Northern Ireland.

Suggested reading

Northern Ireland's dangerous future

By Jenny McCartney

The asymmetry is now more obvious than at any time in the Province’s history. Prior to the election, the DUP campaigned to scrap the Northern Ireland Protocol, which governs its economic relations with the European Union. Under its strictures, customs arrangements in the six-county area are distinct from those that operate in the rest of the United Kingdom.

Despite fierce opposition to these unwanted Brexit clauses, disaffected unionists have been unable to bring about change. In fact, as if to humiliate the largest unionist party, the day before the election Brandon Lewis, the Northern Ireland Secretary, made plain his government’s reluctance to suspend the Protocol. With a single utterance, a minister of the crown exposed the structural impotence of unionism.

There is a pathological dynamic in operation here. Unionism has banked upon unreciprocated loyalty. But the British establishment has no real commitment to maintaining the Union with Northern Ireland, a fact which undermines the bargaining power of unionism. At the same time, many unionists are blind to the looming crisis around them. Typically, this has encouraged empty swagger instead of dispassionate calculation. It is, then, strongly in unionists’ interest to change their strategy going forward. A start might be made by building new alliances in the North. The recent success of the Alliance Party in expanding its horizons could offer lessons to more hidebound unionist mentalities.

Further progress might be made by collaborating with the South. For instance, unionists could open discussions about the future of cross-border arrangements. In the process, they might canvass new opportunities for rapprochement. They could start by underlining the cost of reunification. The crucial point is that there are substantial pockets of opinion in the South that are determined to counteract the inexorable rise of Sinn Féin. Unionists are sure to find confederates among them. This kind of partnership is surely more promising for the unionist cause than the bitter mistrust that has characterised their dealings with British governments.