Though not much is known about the second Lady Fiennes other than that she is a horse trainer, it sounds as if she rivals Prince Harry in the paranoia department. She is said to be convinced that King Charles hates her husband, despite his being an enthusiastic patron of Fiennes’s projects for years. She is also alleged to have told friends that Queen Camilla arranged for helicopters to fly over the couple’s property in order to annoy them. Her estranged son is now crowdfunding for a legal review of Fiennes’ situation, and other loved ones are expressing grave concern.

With the rise of dementia and the social care crisis so much in the news, it’s easy to see why this story has hit a nerve, though more difficult to decide whether it is a tragedy or a comedy. At the heart of the tale, there’s a titanic Lear-like figure, as well as a supposed Lady Macbeth. There are several identity changes, and not just for Fiennes. At least one intrepid family member smuggled herself into his residence under an assumed name, and a famous thespian relative also secretly visited (the one who starred in the film Shakespeare in Love, in fact). Fellow national treasures Joanna Lumley and Monty Don are said to be up in arms. A heartwarming screenplay is writing itself, to culminate in a thrilling care home breakout orchestrated by Bear Grylls.

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But despite the certainty with which some are viewing the situation, alternative interpretations are available. The police say there has been no illegality in Millington-Cotes’ actions, and the Office for the Public Guardian has repeatedly refused to intervene. Her husband has given her lasting power of attorney, a common enough practice in later life, and it may well be that she is sincerely acting in the perception of his best interests. Indeed, she may even be following his instructions. At one point, Fiennes apparently told a safeguarding team he did not wish to see friends or relatives. Having been so obsessed with physical accomplishment in youth and middle age, it doesn’t seem impossible he might want to spend his last years hidden from view.

Fiennes was 61 when he married Millington-Cotes, and already slowing down a bit. By then he had given up on polar exploration and was confining himself to smaller projects — like climbing Everest, and tackling the North face of the Eiger from scratch. But his real passion was always for conquering frozen wastes larger than Europe. His autobiography, published in 2007, should be required reading for anyone who thinks they probably shouldn’t go to the gym today because they have a small twinge in their knee. Gangrene, blindness, kidney stones, and crotch rot are just some of the delights Fiennes stoically endured, during months of shouldering heavy sledges across treacherous ice floes.

At one point, he writes of removing his own frostbitten fingers with a fretsaw, turning each finger “around several times to cut it from different sides, like sawing a log”. Later in the book, he declares that “a life without the prospect of any physical challenge would be no life at all”. Here it is clear that he would not include laboriously tying one’s shoelaces, or climbing the stairs out of breath.

For those who knew the earlier version of him, so magnificently self-propelling and imperious, the notion of his confinement now must appear obscene. In a quest to indict Millington-Cotes, one outraged friend has seen fit to circulate footage of Fiennes shuffling slowly along with a wheeled walking aid; as cruel an action as anything his wife is said to have done to the man. The accompanying voice in the video is seemingly hers, and sounds unnervingly brisk and infantilizing; but still no more so than the voices of thousands of other carers across the country, addressing once vital adults as if they were naughty children. The whole situation is sad and unnecessary and perhaps even actively unpleasant, but none of this means it is public business.

At the heart of the furor is a confusing tendency to think of Fiennes as sempiternally granite-like and exceptionally vulnerable, both at the same time. Indeed it is fascinating to see how quickly the idea that he may have been heavily influenced by his wife in various matters — once again, a common enough occurrence in marriages, for better or worse — has translated into an image of him being heinously coerced. Charles Moore now even wonders whether the explorer’s surprising conversion in 2016 to supporting a ban on fox-hunting was a “ventriloquised” sham, controlled by his wife behind the scenes. Mere mortals are henpecked by their spouses, and nobody raises an eyebrow; but it is apparently easier to think that Fiennes has been deprived of free will completely than to think he might have been swayed by his wife.

In truth, no outsider can really tell what is going on, either in Fiennes’ marriage or in his mind now. If real evidence of abuse does arrive, that will be a different matter; but as yet, no compelling arguments for more state involvement have been aired. It is not even clear whether Fiennes has been judged to have lost mental capacity; and even if so, it is not obvious his friends would do a better job than his wife in making decisions for him. The Mental Capacity Act code of practice stresses that information about a person’s “past and present wishes and feelings” should be central to an assessment of best interests; and we still don’t know whether he ultimately wanted to be left alone or not. Many of those objecting to his current position say he did not, and would not; but equally, he might have confided different feelings to his wife. People can be complex like that.

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And we shouldn’t forget that, in Fiennes’ professional life, he spent years being radically alone. Arguably, no man has ever been more alone, unless you count Captain Scott dying in his tent. During particularly trying moments, Fiennes wrote that he would imagine his loved ones “right behind me, helping to suppress the ever-lurking urge to put a stop to the pain and the cold by giving up”. It seemed to work. For all we know, that is what he is imagining now. Perhaps he doesn’t think he needs the real people there too. Maybe — as with some of his expeditions —more companions would only mean more arguments about navigation.

Yet another reason for the fascination with Fiennes’ case may be selfish: most of us fear getting old and dependent, having to relinquish agency and let others take control. The prospect of loneliness is also frightening, knowing that many familiar faces are likely to disappear. In every British town or city, right now, there are elderly people sequestered away, feeling miserable and forgotten, and charities trying to reach them, in dire need of volunteers. There’s something strange about ignoring this fact, while fretting excessively about the unusually dramatic situation of a much more glamorous man — and especially when, for all we know, he might just be walking back out onto the ice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

Back then, after all, the United Kingdom was a fairly prosperous, settled nation, and would soon be on the winning side of the Cold War. As for Nigeria? A dictatorship with some crude oil. Now, of course, everything has changed. As Elizabeth’s son welcomes Bola Tinubu today, it’s Nigeria, not Britain, that holds the best cards. Indeed the UK’s long-term prospects feel rather uncertain — precisely why courting Nigeria, and countries like it, is so important to its future.

For much of the post-Cold War period, Britain and its Western allies could sort the world into two broad zones: stable and unstable. In the stable countries, money was safe, governments were predictable and the future discernible enough for long-term bets. In the unstable places, governance was erratic, investment risky, and violence never far off. This mental mapping had real consequences, shaping where capital, attention and diplomatic respect all flowed.

Nigeria long sat on the wrong side of that divide. With Marxist-Leninism just about still a going concern, the anti-communist Babangida was an important friend to have, likely explaining the 1989 state visit. At the same time, though, Nigeria’s economy was taken far less seriously. Through the Eighties and Nineties, after all, the country lurched through coups, aborted transitions and IMF austerity schemes, while its politicians acquired a reputation for predation and volatility. As late as 2016, David Cameron was filmed describing Nigeria as a “fantastically corrupt” country.

Over recent years, of course, our neat ideas of stability and corruption have started to collapse. A major war has raged on European soil for four years now, with the Baltics and Poland fearing for their very sovereignty. The Gulf, long an oasis of affluent calm, suddenly looks much less secure. America, hitherto the chief guarantor of Western stability, is now a country whose Capitol can be stormed by an angry mob, and whose president can levy tariffs or launch foreign adventures overnight. As for Britain, one-in-three Britons now believe civil war could occur here in the next decade.

This does not mean that Britain or America are “just like” Nigeria. But it does mean that disorder, or at least the serious prospect of it, is no longer something that simply happens over there. That in turn changes the relative position of countries like Nigeria. Their problems hardly vanish, but they no longer look like uniquely disqualifying flaws in an otherwise ordered world. Now, Britain’s Business and Trade Secretary Peter Kyle says that “the UK and Nigeria share a belief in the power of enterprise, innovation and education” — with a new strategic partnership between the two countries promising a flourishing of finance and fintech jobs.

To be clear, Nigeria still remains a difficult, exasperating country, whose promise has long been squandered by its own elites. Tinubu himself is hardly the personification of clean government, with allegations of corruption trailing him throughout his career. In this, Nigeria’s president shares much with the country’s broad political class. For instance, a court in London is currently hearing bribery charges against Diezani Alison-Madueke, Nigeria’s former petroleum minister, who supposedly spent £2 million at Harrods gotten from industry figures keen on government contracts.

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Meanwhile, though wealthier now than they were in 1989, most Nigerians remain poor, even as the state struggles to deal with a plethora of jihadist terrorists and criminal gangs. Kidnapping for ransom is so rife that it’s become a multimillion dollar industry of its own. The country’s size and natural resources have often made outsiders assume its eventual success is somehow inevitable. It never was — and isn’t now.

Yet it’s also true that Tinubu’s government, in power since 2023, has done something previous Nigerian administrations long avoided: embarking on reforms that acknowledged the country’s economic model was bust. Oil rents, import dependence, the sheer hustle of its citizens — none of these make an advanced economy. The broad direction of Tinubu’s changes, including lifting fuel subsidies and generally liberalizing the economy, have won praise from the IMF and World Bank. This matters not because their approval is all that matters, but because many Nigerians agree that the old system was unsustainable. The year before they were removed, the fuel subsidies consumed a quarter of Nigeria’s budget.

What many Nigerians rightly complain about is the brutal way in which Tinubu’s reforms were implemented. For instance, the sudden removal of fuel subsidies has drastically raised costs, with some basic staples now costing two or three times what they used to. That’s a big deal in a country where poor households spend up to 70% of their income on food. In other words, then, measures that look rational on an IMF spreadsheet can feel like punishment to regular citizens, especially if they’re already distrustful of their rulers. With 8-in-10 Nigerians expressing little to no trust in Tinubu’s government, he certainly has his work cut out for him.

Yet if Tinubu’s reforms succeed, Nigeria’s strategic position offers reasons to cheer. Aside from the country’s transition to democracy, the country’s GDP has also jumped eightfold since 1989, while its population has tripled to around 230 million, roughly 60% of whom are under 25. This makes Nigeria one of the youngest nations in the world, in sharp contrast to the aging societies of Britain and the wider West. That youthfulness offers both opportunities and risks in a land where some estimates put youth unemployment at around 50%. Fail to create enough jobs and the government is in trouble.

Nonetheless, Nigeria’s youthfulness remains a strategic fact. And besides, it has other strengths Britain can only dream of. Alongside the crude oil reserves it’s long been famous for — especially helpful given events in the Middle East — Nigeria also enjoys significant deposits of lithium, beryllium, zinc and other metals critical to technology supply chains. Britain needs access to critical minerals to power its renewable, high-tech and defense industries, even as it actively seeks to “full-proof” its supply chain over the years ahead.

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Britain has more basic reasons to cultivate economic ties with Africa’s most populous nation too. Since 2008, its GDP per capita growth has fallen to a sluggish 0.46% per year, hardly enough to cover the galloping rise in living costs. The country’s long-run economic story is hardly cheering either. In that context, a fast-growing market of over 200 million people looks less like a realpolitik ally — and more like an opportunity. Britain and Nigeria already do about £8 billion of trade a year, and British ministers have spent the last two years pushing new agreements in legal services, finance, education and energy. And why not? This is precisely the kind of fast-growing, English-speaking market Britain cannot afford to dismiss.

The feeling is mutual. For decades, and despite being such a vast oil producer, Nigeria imported much of the refined petroleum it consumed: its own state-run refineries barely functioned. Now, though, Aliko Dangote, Nigeria and Africa’s richest man, has built one of the world’s largest oil refineries in Lagos, spearheading investments in steel as part of a broader industrialization push. These are the most serious recent attempts to drag Nigeria up the value chain, and Britain can prod things along with targeted investment.

All the while, Nigerian immigration to the UK, reckoned to be around 300,000 over the last five years, means that the country’s cultural influence has blossomed too. Afrobeats stars now fill arenas and top music charts the world over, while the Nigerian diaspora is helping shape British society from KSI to Bukayo Saka — to Kemi Badenoch.

Altogether, then, it’s clear that Britain needs meaningful relationships in the rising global south, relationships based on more than postcolonial guilt, paternalism or nostalgia. In our increasingly dangerous geopolitical age, friendship is not ornamental. Rather, it shapes supply chains, diplomatic leverage and investment decisions. Britain can no longer simply announce its importance everywhere. It has to work out where history, language, and diaspora networks give it a real foothold, then build out from there.

Nigeria is one of those places. And while some on the fringes of British politics — both the radical Right and Left — are uncomfortable with that fact, Nigerians themselves seem far more relaxed. As a 2020 Ipsos survey of young Nigerians found, Britain’s people, government and institutions are the most trusted among foreign nations. Tinubu’s office has described Nigeria and Britain as sharing a “special bond”, while many wealthy Nigerians send their children to British universities, maintain homes here, and consider London a serious place to do business. Nigerians who live or spend most of their time in Nigeria itself have little time for the performative anti-colonial waxing some British-Nigerians indulge in here.

That, in turn, should prompt a change in British sensibility. A mature relationship with Nigeria cannot be conducted as though London still dispenses order while Nigeria merely receives it. The old imperial habit — part condescension, part nostalgia — is now not only unattractive but also impractical. If Nigerians are prepared to engage Britain as an equal, Britain will have to learn to reciprocate.

Whitehall is already learning these lessons in its dealings with countries like India, where capital, demography and strategic leverage increasingly matter more than inherited assumptions of rank. That is likely to become one of the century’s governing patterns: former imperial subjects, or once dismissed peripheries, gaining influence as Western states lose their monopoly on confidence. The sensible response is neither sentimentality nor resentment, but realism.

The United States has had an ambivalent relationship with the British monarchy, then, for as long as the United States has existed. But while this relationship is certainly “special” in the ironic sense, that revolutionary legacy of republican hostility often seems tempered with something warmer. If anything, the hostility more frequently seems to flow the other way. The British institutional reaction to Edward VII’s relationship with American divorcée Wallis Simpson was scorn at a perceived social inferior and gold-digger. In America, though, the response was curiosity at the American woman who had captured the heart of a king. More recently, at least to begin with, something of the same mood surrounded the marriage of Prince Harry and the American actress Meghan Markle. 

The current President of the United States, too, is known to be a fan of the British monarchy: he paid a warm tribute to the late Queen Elizabeth II on her death in 2022. So today, as Donald Trump begins his first state visit since his Presidential inauguration in January, everyone around Keir Starmer is hoping that a dose of royal pomp and ceremony will pour balm on a “special relationship” that has, latterly, looked more than a little threadbare. 

Will it work? The day and a half Trump will spend in the UK is programmed like the most high-end imaginable private tour of Museum Britain, that curated subset of the British Isles popular with tourists eager to see the “typical England” of their imagination (and of the oeuvre of Richard Curtis). Should official Britain succeed in containing Trump in this museum zone, suitably diverted with guards of honor, a Red Arrow fly-by, historic carriages, lavish banquets, and a visit to Windsor, plus the undivided attention of the Royal Family, the cumulative effect will no doubt be enjoyable for Trump, if also hermetically insulated from the Britain the rest of us live in.

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Meanwhile, it speaks volumes about the restive mood of Britain as an un-curated whole that there will be no public procession; in fact, no public-facing element at all. This is reportedly because of security fears, in the face of far-Left agitation. But what if it’s also to minimize the risk of Trump seeing those parts (or denizens) of the country that aren’t part of the Museum Britain picture, and forming too accurate an impression of how the rest of us live? Worse still, what if it afforded us too accurate an assessment of our own leadership? If officials want to spare Trump the sight of (for example) Birmingham’s cat-sized rats, or indeed our thriving national business in supplying free seaside accommodation for undocumented workers, it may also be too awkward to display in public our poorly, footling constitutional King, beside the brash, bouffant, and genuinely ascendant Trump. 

This is, after all, a man who, despite being formally a president, has far closer to monarchic powers than any current British leader, either crowned or elected — and who, besides, leads the West’s foremost superpower. What if Britons looked at Trump side-by-side with King Charles, and drew the wrong conclusion about which of the two was more kingly?

I’m being a little facetious here, but not entirely. Charles’ mother, Elizabeth II, reigned during a post-war political consensus that viewed nation-states as on their way to obsolescence, and the future a bright one of internationalism. Her reign was one of dignified stoicism in the face of relentless diminishment to a cryptic cipher: the sole speck of absolutist grit in the liberal-democratic oyster. Concurrent with her death, though, that future has vanished. History is back with a vengeance, as are strongman leaders. 

And as the United States continues its tumultuous slide toward fully post-liberal governance, a corresponding aesthetic shift is afoot — of which, like it or not, Trump is a leading edge. The incumbent ruling class doesn’t like it: from the FT’s performative shuddering at Trump’s “turning the White House into Mar-A-Lagoland”, to the New York Times’ prim distaste at the way his gilded décor evokes “the crudeness of the times”, everyone who did well in the spreadsheet-brained Clinton/Obama salad days of management consultants and financialization thinks he’s ghastly. But outside Bluesky and the rarefied world of wealthy progressives, it seems, the world likes ghastly. 

And no wonder. History is well and truly back: the world is no longer borderless, or, conversely, is more borderless than electorates would like. War is back on the menu, even in Europe. The same America that dismantled the British Empire in the name of national self-determination is murmuring about colonizing overseas territories. But nor is this the old industrial age of standing armies and tanks and planes; today, it’s data cables, terrorism, liminal warfare, bot farms and drones. Biotech is proliferating: Silicon Valley mavericks are gene-editing their babies. The vibe shift is here; it’s weird, and loud, and more than a little sci-fi. 

Against this, it’s the dressed-down technocrats of the Obama era that feel obsolete, along with their sans-serif fonts and “discreet luxe”. And this plus the obvious popularity of Trump with at least a large subset of his own electorate all points to a possibility that no one but America’s progressive “No Kings” protesters (and perhaps Curtis Yarvin) wants to consider: that if any Western state today can be said to have as its leader something approximating a Royal Brute, it’s America. 

Emanations from the vicinity of the Palace suggest that His Majesty King Charles is, like his great-great-great-grandmother Victoria, not amused. Back in July, a nameless “friend of the monarch” told (of all outlets) the Daily Beast that Charles is worried Trump will use his upcoming visit to embarrass British officials on the topic of immigration into Europe. Trump has, after all, already called the inflow of migrants from Africa and Asia “a horrible invasion that is killing Europe”, a remark that the King’s unnamed friend says “appalled” Charles, after a “lifetime promoting tolerance and compassion”. 

It is of course impossible to know whether or not this nameless source spoke to the press with the King’s support or not. There have been other such suggestions of dislike, which indicate this may really reflect Charles’ views. If it does, he would only be echoing every other upper-class idealist of the boomer generation who took John Lennon’s Imagine as prophecy, and really believed that history had ended and that tolerance and compassion could now bloom forever. Even so, this naïve partiality shows Charles in an unfavorable light compared to his mother, who both had her own views on politics and nonetheless remained perfectly reserved through a lifetime of duty as Britain’s figurehead. 

Arguably, though, it shows him in a still more unfavorable light compared to Trump himself. For however ghastly Obama liberals (and perhaps also Charles III) think Trump is, the Donald’s breezy insistence on saying whatever the hell he likes is far more kingly than any amount of passive-aggressive whispering to the press via underlings, no matter how you gussy that up as royal stoicism.

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To be fair to Charles, he is in a difficult position. He presides over a skint and increasingly fractured post-imperial rump Britain. His own royal legacy is bound up with a Commonwealth whose membership includes many countries that obviously, actively view Great Britain as at best a mark to shake down for “reparations” or remittances, if not an active enemy. At the same time, support for the constitutional monarchy of which he is a head persists mainly among small-c conservative Middle Englanders for whom, in the age of mass migration, Charles’ avowed internationalism and extension of “imagined community” to the Commonwealth feels at best misguided if not, according to some more febrile social media posters, actively treacherous.

Amid all these tensions, perhaps Charles feels he has no choice but to communicate his views obliquely, in hints and whispers. But the unfavorable comparison between Charles III and Donald Trump is not just about confidence. It’s also about power, and the freedom to aestheticize power: a willingness to “just do things”, as the kids say, and to be a bit extra as you do it. The ancients framed this as a virtue, “magnificence”, meaning to spend in accordance with your rank, especially on goods of wider civic value, such as ornate architecture.

It would be a stretch to call (for example) Trump’s remodeling of the White House Rose Garden as an exclusive private members’ club “magnificent” in this sense; the logic is too commercial. But when Henry VIII demolished a thousand years of monastic history, he did so to realize their value, to fund his wars and lavish spending. Today, the bloom of gold across every White House surface speaks to a similar sensibility: one ruthlessly focused on realizing assets and then exerting power through displays of wealth and, where necessary, the recently re-titled Department of War. If Britain were ruled today by a Henry VIII rather than a Charles III, would a man known in the sixteenth century for his quick temper, unpredictability, vast appetite and, of course, numerous wives be more like our current monarch, or more like Trump? I think we all know the answer.

Many American republicans, of both the small- and large-R variety, are proud of their national origin story, in which a war of independence was fought to escape the yoke of “the Royal Brute of Great Britain”. But in a twist of fate, 250 years on they appear to have gained a magnificence-loving leader of their own, one whose mercurial, Henrician forcefulness so completely eclipses the impotent, passive-aggressive titular monarch of now much-less-great Britain, let alone its insipid, technocrat PM, as to make the old country look weirdly leaderless.

But perhaps the more accurate assessment is that Britain is not leaderless at all. Rather, we are de facto ruled as a province from imperial Washington, by something far closer to the old-fashioned kind of king. And from this perspective, the dissident agitating for independence isn’t some American Thomas Paine. Rather, it is King Charles, impotently signalling via nameless aides his resentment at the subordination of his kingdom to the Royal Brute of Greater Britain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The woman thrashing me pauses to throw a ladleful of eucalyptus-infused water onto a sauna stove. There is a hiss, and steam clouds the room. “Beware the puddles, for they are fiery intra-planetary cauldrons, used by the Sussex dragons to travel to Australia,” chants the English siren. Outside, a hip Canadian woman chops wood to sensuous French-Malian rock-kora fusion playing from a portable speaker. Others are busy at work, sweeping and carefully preparing the enchanted sauna ceremony.

My birch-twig attacker is Jamie, the ethereal saunameister of this spa-start-up-cum-pagan-temple. In a previous life, Jamie was a MacBook-using, flat white-sipping hipster photographer from east London, growing slowly disillusioned with the pressure and precarity of the city’s gentrification. Then, one day, while hungover at a music festival, she stumbled upon a sauna. “I came out of the sauna into nature and plunged into a cold lake and was reborn,” she says.

Months later, Jamie left London, moved to Sussex and set up her first sauna venture. After just five years, she’s flourishing: “I’ve created a really beautiful life for myself. I live on the beach, I work in a forest, I run my own business. I’m doing work that feels purposeful and impactful.”

In this, Jamie’s rebirth is far from unique. Quite the opposite: she is part of a vanguard rejecting the refined hedonism of the globalised Brooklyn-Shoreditch urban creative class. Suffocated by the downward mobility induced by our neo-feudal economy and its spiritually malnourished consensus, Jamie is part of an emergent socio-economic class — the Bohemian Peasantry, or Bopeas for short.

The Bopeas are a new paradigm in culture and consumption. They are the descendants of other post-war consumer groups: the Hippies, the Yuppies, and the Bobos of Soho House. However, unlike their predecessors, who grew from the boom of generational upward mobility and urbanisation in the 80 years after the Second World War, the Bopeas are responding to something else: a crisis of what Peter Turchin calls “elite overproduction” — and a diminishing need for everyone to be an urban creative.

For the past year, I have been investigating and decoding the experience of the downward mobility of the elite-aspirant creative class across the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, and China. As part of a collective of social scientists, I have been exploring optimistic alternative responses to widespread disenchantment. Contrary to the depressing “opting-out” tales of global NEETs, hikikomori and the Great Resignation, I studied people and communities finding new ways to live a fulfilling life within society.

Like the rest of their generation, the Bopeas were bred to chase a particular vision of the good life, but they now know they cannot replicate their parent’s lifestyles — waiting until their deaths to inherit. Thomas Piketty calls this the return to the “inheritance society” that has been the norm for most of history. Steve Bannon puts it more bluntly: they are “nothing but 19th-century Russian serfs. They’re better fed; they’re better clothed; they’re in better shape; they have more information than anybody in the world at any point in time, but they don’t own anything.”

Yet rather than succumbing to the doom and gloom or burning themselves out by hustling, Bopeas are developing new ways to build a life. They cultivate meaning and status in ways that expand the ideals of success beyond conventional material accumulation and instantly decaying “cool”. Moreover, while this modern serfdom may not be able to accrue capital, Bopeas are spoiled for choice in a consumer universe built by brands. They can’t buy houses in the city, but they do have disposable income and a clear idea of “how to spend it”.

But what are Bopeas? The Bopeas are diverse in demographics and geography, but united by a shared mindset. Like the creative class that now dominate our culture, they draw inspiration from the bohemian ethos of artistry, non-conformity and self-expression. At the same time, however, they are wary of the narcissistic excesses of bohemianism, and enjoy a neo-medieval peasant worldview rooted in community values, rituals and natural rhythms.

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The Bopeas don’t wear a uniform. There is no universal white sneaker choice and craft-beer calling card. Instead, it’s all about the niche, the hyper-local and the mythic. While they might be wearing an expensive French worker’s jacket bought from a nose-to-tail restaurant, they are more easily spotted by their deeds and search for harmony. Unlike their success-obsessed Yuppie and Bobo ancestors, Bopeas want to flourish holistically. They want to feel deeply in tune with their bodies and the world. They are the wild swimmers,  the sauna obsessives, and the knitting, foraging and fermenting revivalists. They’re the ones rewilding our forests and guts. They are already shaping elite culture — they’re the reason the Financial Times wants you to buy £1,225 Givenchy cargo gardening trousers.

In essence, Bopeas opt for enchantment over refinement. In an algorithmic meat market of homogenous aesthetics and lifestyles, Bopeas differentiate themselves through their intentional cultivation of harmony. While Bopeaism incarnates in individuals — Paul Kingsnorth is perhaps the Bopea made flesh — it is also an aspirational mindset. During the Covid lockdowns, for instance, many of us transfigured into sourdough Bopeas.

The Bopeas I studied are essentially united by a desire to nurture genuine connection and finding meaning in life. They care about wider societal issues such as climate change and inequality, but they are rarely overtly political. Instead, they are driven by a small-scale politics of harmony channelling their values into making a positive, sustainable impact in their immediate world through their work, social and family lives. They don’t care for empty virtue-signalling.

Bopeas want to immerse themselves in nature and quirky culture. All of them are tired of trends, off-the-shelf lifestyles, and endless inane scrolling and swiping that leaves them feeling hollow. Instead, they seek wisdom that provides lasting guidance to shape life, even if it comes from ancient practices and traditions — or even (gasp) institutional religion. There is no central inspiration hub for Bopeas. They curate their own constellation of ideas and wisdom from a dynamic fusion of writers, podcasters and micro-influencers who align with their particular Bopea passions.

Most importantly, Bopeas don’t want to do it alone. Frustrated by the loneliness of modern branded “community”, Bopeas seek the comfort of tight-knit fellowships pursuing shared projects and a soulful life comforted by real community obligation and nature. In many ways, then, the Bopeas are a kind of post-internet Arts and Crafts movement. And yet, the dark satanic mills they rebuff are not the soulless Victorian workhouses, but the design agencies and tech start-ups that inhabit the WeWorks that have colonised the very same factories. Indeed, if the Victorian backlash was ideologically led by John Ruskin and manifested by William Morris, then their Bopea spiritual successors are King Charles III and Taylor Swift.

Like Ruskin, Charles III serves as the Apex Bopea philosopher king. With his tireless environmentalism, Perennialist theology, and mystic outlook, Charles has set the agenda for a bohemian neo-medieval revolution that places harmony and ancient wisdom at the centre. As Aris Roussinos writes, as “a Christian mystic, a layer of hedgerows and protector of the soil, there is a mythic quality of identification between our King and his land which we have not experienced for some time”.

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Meanwhile, like Morris, Taylor Swift has served as an avatar of the King’s Bopea ideology. In the midst of the lockdowns, Swift used her albums Folklore and Evermore to position herself as the ultimate Bopea vessel. With her knitted cardigans, enchanted forests and magic, Swift catapulted the niche Pinterest-TikTok cottagecore aesthetic community to a global platform. By celebrating the wonders of a simple, traditional lifestyle surrounded by a bucolic paradise and manual crafts, she made the enchanted Bopea worldview sexy.

Elsewhere, Bopeaism continues to be evangelised to the masses through notable Bopea Elders. Jeremy Clarkson’s Clarkson’s Farm is now the most-viewed original series on Amazon Prime in the UK. Nick Cave has transitioned from post-punk enfant terrible to earnest coronation-attending Christian. Tilda Swinton set up a tiny Steiner school in rural Scotland where phones are banned and children must learn to care for bees. Even Carrie Johnson, with her strawberry picking and knitted blankets, has become the nation’s Bopea tradwife. These are clear signals of a subtle re-enchantment of the world — a paradoxically countercultural conservatism.

Beyond the global stage, the internet is awash with Bopea missionaries. One does not have to search too far before getting lost in the world of doomstrolling, Irish water worshipers, entrepreneurs restoring small holdings, fungi activism, and Gladstone’s foraging and wild-swimming chef many-great-granddaughter. Bopeaism is simultaneously everywhere and totally invisible to those that are not looking. Some go full Bopea and are living off the grid. Others are more likely to gentrify semi-urban spaces like Hastings or Polperro — or perhaps Bruton if there’s family money. Financially, most Bopeas often maintain more conventional urban creative industry jobs — in marketing, design or tech — but work remotely from their more affordable homes. However, the most committed enter the Bopea culture production industries, selling Bopea artefacts and services to wealthier Bopea aspirants — like Jamie and her sauna business.

What next? Will Bopeas go the same way as the hippies? Bopeaism certainly seems more robust than its ancestors. It is, after all, more than just a set of aesthetics and practices that you can trade in and out of, but rather a mindset inspired by a hunger for timelessness. It serves as the North Star of a more harmonious post-internet worldview that rises above the digitally mediated pleasure that David Courtright terms “limbic capitalism”. But if it is to survive, it must be nurtured carefully and protected from the trend-market feedback loop, lest it be bled dry and discarded.

When Richard Florida published the The Rise of the Creative Class in 2002 and anointed the Yuppie-slaying “No Collar” hipsters and Bobos, policymakers and corporate brands descended like vampires. Within two decades, the creative class has been drained of all vitality. Investment bankers now wear white sneakers. Wetherspoons sells smashed avocado muffins. Everywhere looks like an Airbnb. In such a world, Bopeaism is surely something that must be nourished and sustained — not for a generation, but for eternity.

Hesitantly at first, then loudly, the crowd sang God Save The King, clapping and waving their own flags. “We’re part of the Loyalist Shankill Road, you’ll not get a place anywhere that’s more loyal to the crown,” Janet McGregor, a middle-aged woman wearing a slightly unsettling King Charles mask and coronation robes told me. “We had to fight hard to stay part of being Britain, so we did, whereas those over there now [in Britain], they don’t seem to care. Look at Scotland, trying to get away. Until the death, isn’t that right? You’ll have to kill us first.”

But the passionate attachment of working-class Loyalist communities to the United Kingdom and the monarchy, so exotically performative to mainland eyes, is not reciprocated by Westminster. The Conservative party relied on the support of the DUP, the province’s largest Unionist party, to push Brexit through, but Brexit has had the unintended consequence, for many Unionists who supported it, of bringing down their own devolved government and further isolating Northern Ireland. On the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, a poll revealed that 62% of Unionists oppose the return of devolved government until Johnson’s Northern Ireland Protocol is completely scrapped.

But London wants to move on, and is increasingly impatient with the DUP’s refusal to return to Stormont, warning that abstention from power sharing is “the biggest single threat to the union”. In an effort to restore the relationship between Westminster and Brussels, the Sunak government recently deployed the new king’s regal stardust to obtain the Windsor agreement, a ploy condemned by the DUP’s Nigel Dodds as politicising the monarchy, and resented by local Loyalist activists.

“The Windsor agreement is the Belfast agreement [Good Friday Agreement] renamed, it’s the same,” Julie Davidson of the ACT NGO, created to integrate former UVF paramilitaries into civilian life, told me, “and that was a blindside to put that Windsor in there. People in the community feel exactly the same as me, it’s a failed agreement. I voted for the Good Friday Agreement 25 years ago, but would I do it over again? No. Bring the whole lot down.”

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If power sharing resumed in Stormont, Sinn Fein would lead Northern Ireland’s government as the country’s largest party, as King Charles himself affably noted to Sinn Fein’s Vice President and Northern Ireland leader, Michelle O’Neill. The oddly warm relationship between the King and the republican leader is remarkable, not least because his own beloved uncle was assassinated by the IRA. Yet Charles has worked hard to advance normalisation between Britain and Ireland — his 1995 visit to the Republic was the first official visit by a royal since the country’s independence, laying the groundwork for the Queen’s historic 2011 visit — and it may already be paying dividends.

“I’m very proud the way he’s met with Republicans,” Janet’s friend Jacqueline told me beneath the mural, “I’m proud that he done that. It showed them’uns [Nationalists], I’d love them’uns to take their seats in the House of Commons, if they’re genuine about trying to move on, that’s something that would have to be asked.” Yet Charles’s outreach to a Nationalist community which rejects his role has already met with new reciprocation from Sinn Fein, eager to position itself as the natural party of government for all of Northern Ireland. Michelle O’Neill’s surprise announcement that she would attend the coronation — as a mark of respect for Northern Ireland’s Unionists — was well received by some Loyalists gathered under the mural. “I feel sorry about the hunger strikers’ families to be honest with you,” says Jacqueline. “Them people died for their cause and the next minute she goes away to London and wants publicity for votes.”

Indeed, it’s perhaps O’Neill’s own Nationalist powerbase that looks most sceptically at her attendance of the coronation. On nearby Northumberland Street, the Peace Gates — the optimistically-named metal barriers built to keep the two communities apart — divide the Protestant Shankill from the Catholic Falls Road. Murals to dead UVF volunteers and the fallen of the First World War Ulster Division suddenly give way to memorials to dead republican militants and lurid expressions of support for various Third World liberation movements. At the An Chultúrlann centre, an Irish-language cultural hub, Gerry Carroll of the Republican socialist People Before Profit party told me that O’Neill’s attendance was a misstep. “Somebody who classes themselves as a democrat should not be endorsing and entertaining the most reactionary elements in British politics,” he told me, “so I think it’s a real shame that Michelle O’Neill and others have endorsed that rotten institution. As soon as they offered that, it wasn’t enough for the DUP, they were clamouring for Union Jacks on every public building, so Sinn Fein are conceding ground to the DUP and others’ narrative.”

On West Belfast’s Catholic Divis Street, two PSNI officers sat bored in their parked patrol car watching an anti-coronation protest stretched out along the road. Pádraic MacCoitir, former Republican prisoner and organiser for the far-Left nationalist Lasair Dhearg faction, was giving a speech railing against the “imperialist rule” of a “parasite” king, but reserved his greatest ire for Sinn Fein. “Twenty-five years after the Good Friday Agreement, we find ourselves faced with the spectacle of two former Republicans standing in front of a king, acting as Viceroys of Empire,” he told the 50 or so demonstrators, waving red flags and placards saying “Not Our King” in Irish and English as beeping cars rushed past. “Their presence is an endorsement of the very forces that oppressed and terrorised our people for centuries, this is a betrayal of everything that we have fought for.” But asked whether his anger was shared in the wider community, MacCoitir was more equivocal. “Well obviously Sinn Fein, politically — you can see all the posters about — they’re very strong,” he told me. “It’s wrong what they’re doing, it’s completely and utterly wrong. But will it affect them in the forthcoming council elections? I don’t know. I really don’t care to be honest, but it could. Who knows?”

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But it’s unlikely that Sinn Fein, now the largest party on both sides of the Irish border, will be electorally troubled by O’Neill’s gesture: if anything, it marks a growing confidence that history is on their side. Back on the Shankill Road, there’s a weary sense that Northern Ireland’s Nationalists are now on top, have better PR and London’s ear. The sight of Sinn Fein’s leadership seated so prominently at the ceremony highlights that the party has now become, in its own way, part of a Westminster establishment whose authority it doesn’t formally recognise. “The Republican movement seem to have better spokespeople and people [in Westminster] are more sympathetic towards them,” Matt, a drinker in the Shankill’s Rex Bar, bedecked with Union Jacks and portraits of the king, told me. “I don’t think it matters if it’s a Conservative government or a Labour government, if it suited them, they’d do away with the six counties and be happy with a united Ireland, they see it as a burden. It’s like an unrequited love, it doesn’t matter what we do, we’re taken for granted and ignored.”

This sense of disaffection will only grow as Northern Ireland braces for savage cuts in Government services to fill an £800m budget black hole. Already the poorest part of the United Kingdom, with the country’s worst transport infrastructure and longest NHS waiting lists, now the province’s Department for Infrastructure is warning it will be forced to limit road maintenance and turn off street lights to save money. The greatest perceived trump card for the Union, Northern Ireland’s superior public services to the Republic, are now threatened by the looming budget cuts, the effects of which will further entrench political divisions within Unionism over power sharing. With the DUP blocking Stormont, and the Unionist vote divided over the way forward, even on the Shankill there’s a grudging respect for Sinn Fein as efficient political operators.

“The streets here is alive with rats, them politicians knock on your door for votes and then you’ll never see them,” Steven, a young local, told me as he puffed on a cigarette outside the Shankill’s Royal Bar. “I’ve seen people in Shankhill Road going to Sinn Fein for housing problems, because at least they’re working, and they seem to resolve the problems. I’ve known many Protestant people go down to Catholic councillors to resolve their problems, it’s shameful to be doing it but it’s the only way.” Steven’s friend Nicola, an NHS worker, agreed. “There’s no government here,” she told me, “I’ve never seen Belfast so run down. Why are we paying for them to sit at home? We’re all working and they’re getting paid for nothing, and now they’re going to turn off our street lights.”

Divided between those who want Stormont restored and those who want it abolished entirely, working-class Unionists in Belfast are on the back foot, and increasingly disillusioned with Northern Ireland’s dysfunctional political system. For all that the coronation provided an opportunity for the community to coalesce and demonstrate their passionate attachment to the Union and the monarchy, their fractured politics leave them voiceless in Westminster, and an irritation to a British Government whose reciprocal loyalty seems ever more uncertain. O’Neill’s presence at the crowning of the man she hopes will be Northern Ireland’s last king was also a coronation of her own, establishing Sinn Fein as the province’s next party of government, and reframing Loyalist attachment to the monarchy as a harmless cultural quirk of a people she is destined to lead rather than a meaningful political identity. In Northern Ireland, so misleadingly similar to mainland Britain and yet so utterly different, the glittering spectacle of the Coronation took place in a Westminster that looks to be moving ever further away.

That astonishing moment stood, and still stands, as a governing metaphor for the age that followed: one which seemed to be all about breaking down walls, and opening everything up. Think of all the nice liberals celebrating “open” societies and tutting at “closed” ones; NGOs such as Open Democracy and Open Society; the respectively positive and negative connotations of “inclusion”, and “exclusion”. Opening, expanding, breaking down borders and boundaries is always better than the inverse. Isn’t it?

I wonder if the first British monarch to be crowned in more than seven decades will register on a similar level for my daughter. We’ll view it on a screen, captured by cameras, in full glare of public and mediated view. It’s a form of scrutiny that has been at the heart of disagreements within and about the Royals since Diana’s notorious interview with Martin Bashir: how open should this institution be? Should everything be on display?

At one pole, we find Diana’s younger son hard at work today, continuing her faith in the beneficial power of openness, with a memoir that includes (among other revelations) a startlingly open description of his frostbitten penis. But if Harry’s life to date has comprised a love/hate relationship with cameras and screens, Charles’ coronation today will centre on another, older form of screen: one whose role is not to reveal, but to conceal.

The most mysterious and sacred centre of Charles’ coronation is the Anointing. In this ceremony, which dates back to the Old Testament, Charles will remove his robes of state. Dressed in a simple white shirt, he will be anointed by the Archbishop of Canterbury with oil of chrism, made on Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives and blessed in a special ceremony by the Patriarch of Jerusalem.

The millions watching the Coronation won’t see any of this. Our screens will see only the anointing screen: an elaborate tapestry embroidered by the Royal School of Needlework, depicting every nation in the Commonwealth as leaves on a tree. Behind this, the Archbishop will pour the oil into an ornate silver-gilt spoon, the only surviving relic of the pre-Civil War coronation regalia, and anoint Charles on the hands, chest and head: a moment traditionally seen as between the sovereign and God, and thus closed to public view.

And in screening this moment from the view of public and cameras alike, Charles makes ceremonial acknowledgement of a truth with both personal and political significance, and profound countercultural power: that some things are not, and never will be, open to all.

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Why doesn't King Charles like me?

By Terry Eagleton

In an age when the online competition for attention incentivises the disclosure of intimacies of every kind, from intense emotion to sexual transport and frostbitten genitalia, it’s easy to see how some might suggest Charles lean all the way into disclosure. But those most at ease in our digital-first culture already understand intuitively the two-sided nature of screens — and, in the age of large language models, the vital role played by the obscure, the gatekept, the subtextual and esoteric.

Perhaps in response to those who sympathise more with the Harry/Diana relationship to screens, Camilla, the Queen Consort, will be the first Royal ever anointed in view of the cameras. But despite brief speculation that Charles might do the same, he will have his moment with God on-screen, but screened. And in thus resisting the siren song of openness, Charles reveals himself not as a reactionary holdout, but strikingly in tune with the times.

For the Carolean age is already one of screens that conceal, as well as of screens that reveal. Our official culture still pays lip service to openness, whether of borders, gender categories, flows of capital, the political process, or whatever. But the contemporary macro- and micro-trend is not toward but away from openness. This has been especially marked since 2016, the year our Moral Betters became uncomfortably aware that getting everyone online meant getting everyone online – including people whose opinions they didn’t like. And this in turn raised questions about how ineluctable the march of democratic progress could be made to appear, when that march seemed to be at odds with electoral will.

It has tacitly always been the case that just because something is a majority view doesn’t mean it gets enacted. Capital punishment, for example, has been suspended in Britain since 1965, despite the fact that polls repeatedly show a majority of Britons would support execution for the worst crimes. But in 2016, the tension between progressives’ erstwhile faith that “digital democracy” would inevitably drive further openness and progress collided with the reality that most people, given an open opportunity to voice their opinions, don’t express the desire to live in a world of maximum openness after all. Quite the contrary: Brexit and the Orange Man revealed to our appalled Moral Betters that there is no axiomatic relationship whatsoever, between internet-enabled discursive openness and the overall progressive project.

Since that moment, the consensus has begun to shift. Before the fall of Die Mauer, tech optimists were already declaring that “Information wants to be free”. Today, though, promoters of the “open society” are more likely to tell you that what wants to be free — and must at all costs be contained — is misinformation. Accordingly, supporting “openness” now means censorship, and (notably since Covid) an increasingly muscular politics of attention, that seeks to manage what is more or less noticeable. With this, too, comes an increasingly (sorry) open acknowledgement that “democracy” in the age of mass digital communications doesn’t mean anything even remotely majoritarian, or even very strongly connected to what electorates say they want.

But along with this public turn toward a new regime of (at best) heavily qualified political openness has come a more private turn, away from the screen that reveals towards the one that conceals. Understandably so: Harry’s woes ought to make it clear to all of us that radical openness takes us nowhere very good or enriching. The perverse incentive toward ever-greater online self-disclosure, for example, whether by princes or regular celebrities, turns the world of letters into a pornography of the self. And this is in turn degrading what’s left of our cultural landscape into a parade of grotesques to be endlessly recycled by pattern-recognising machines.

Very little can be gleaned from this age of human centipede culture that feels nourishing, inspiring or truthful. And in response, new allusive and esoteric aesthetics are emerging from the bottom up. For it’s not just that, as Carl Schmitt once said, “the machine has no tradition”. The machine — the pattern-recognising one — also has no subtext. An AI has no interiority. With such a machine, there is only the screen that reveals.

Seeking, perhaps, to bring us up to this standard of radical transparency, the mercurial stuff of interiority itself is increasingly a matter for compulsory disclosure. In some circles, should I feel ambivalent about the social norms associated with my sex, I’m no longer allowed to keep this to myself (any more than I may conceal my deepest erotic fantasies) but must instead choose a set of pronouns that others will use to address or refer to me, that “aligns” these personal reflections with the way I appear in others’ speech.

Against this tyrannical and increasingly bot-generated anti-culture, those voices most able to distinguish themselves as human — and thus to survive as voices — will be those most skilled in working creatively with what’s not said. But this doesn’t just go for artists of allusions meme and Straussian esoterica. Looking around at those least deranged by the glare of total transparency, it’s clear that those best-placed to survive the digital revolution with a measure of sanity are those most deliberate about keeping themselves partly or wholly hidden from the networked eye of Sauron.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the online litany of inducements to “bare everything” (especially if you’re young, hot and female) has been paralleled by an offline proliferation of long-sleeved dresses, of a cut that a religious conservative might have worn 100 years ago without blushing. In an age of pervasive pornification and compulsory regime-endorsed taboo-smashing, sexual reticence – even repression – feels not just like the last hiding-place of eros but an act of political resistance. On the male side, we see a similar via negativa resistance to the economy of sexposure in the NoFap movement, in which (almost always) men support one another to beat porn addiction.

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Britain needs King Charles the Weird

By Aris Roussinos

Hidden-ness also, often, has a more straightforwardly political purpose. For as the public regime of theoretical openness plus intensifying censorship has grown more palpable, so too nonstandard opinions have withdrawn from the once-mainstream presumption that all conversations can and should be conducted in the open. Real-world consequences for having the wrong opinion grow more palpable every year. Faced with this re-convergence of piety and power, frank and open discourse has retreated into a vast, hidden substrate of carefully gatekept group chats, convened on assorted encrypted messaging platforms. The embroidered screens are up; no one speaks frankly in public any more.

And even on the technological front, recognition is growing (at least among elites) that there can and should be limits to our openness. Many in Silicon Valley now screen their kids’ access to screens – a trend that’s prompted a new wave of ‘dumb phones’ with all the modern looks but no social media functionality, such as New Zealand’s BoringPhone or America’s Gabb.

Those who remain devoted to radical revelation may see this emerging 21st-century politics and aesthetics of hidden-ness as an unqualified disaster. I’m ambivalent about its manifestation at scale, within our ever more frankly post-democratic political process. I also find troubling the fact that this occlusion of power in practice operates in tandem with an official embrace of ever-more-oppressive technologies of total transparency, such as vaccine passports and the facial recognition technology being used to scan crowds tomorrow. But the re-emergence of regimes of the hidden also affords, perhaps, a possibility for cultural renewal, in the terrain (still mostly hidden, save to initiates) on the other side of total exposure.

So when King Charles III is anointed, on-screen yet behind a screen, we should rejoice in being excluded from that sacred moment, and in the defence Charles has offered on all our behalves of that which cannot be mediated. In holding out against total transparency Charles has taken up, for the 21st century, a role as profoundly important as that occupied by constitutional monarchs since the Glorious Revolution. For throughout modernity our kings and queens served as the kernel of authoritarianism that sustained democracy. And now, for post-modernity, Charles III stands for and sanctifies an irreplaceable, un-digitisable kernel of IRL that the virtual world can never represent or mediate, let alone replace.

We should follow his wise example. You may or may not like the exoteric Carolean aesthetic, with its vaguely garden-centre-meets-William-Morris vibe. But we should all embrace the esoteric one: Charles’ understated celebration of hidden-ness, today more than ever a vital precondition for cultural, artistic, creative and philosophical flourishing, under the tyranny of total digital disclosure.

All hail, then, to our new King, and to the Neo-Carolean aesthetic of occlusion. I will be celebrating IRL. Don’t expect me to post about it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Ireland is a Freudian dream

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

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

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

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Harry and Meghan's Montecito prison

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After two world wars, an aversion to military conflict has long hampered Berlin’s ability to act decisively and shoulder its fair share of responsibility as part of the Western alliance. In the past decade, Germany’s defence budget barely made it across the 1% mark of GDP, never mind the 2% required by Nato. When Russia’s invasion of Ukraine exposed the fallacies of Germany’s unconditional pacifism, it plunged Berlin into an identity crisis. A national rethink was in order and Chancellor Olaf Scholz dramatically declared in February 2022 that a Zeitenwende, a watershed moment, was underway: “the world afterwards will no longer be the same as the world before.” While German aid to Ukraine was initially sluggish and always badly communicated, it is now among its biggest financial and military supporters. Only yesterday, 18 German Leopard 2s arrived in Ukraine.

There are many Germans who can’t and won’t kiss old certainties goodbye. But the two world wars at the root of modern German angst were all-encompassing catastrophes that plunged the entire country into a moral abyss. This trauma is a national one and, since Russia’s invasion, has triggered a lively public debate, leading to a degree of change. Alongside a vastly increased military budget for the German army, Berlin has also just announced that it wants to raise military aid for Ukraine from currently €3 billion to more than €15 billion in the next few years — a clear sign that it is beginning to come around to the idea of contributing to European security on a much greater scale despite its historical inhibitions.

The same cannot be said about another legacy of Germany’s tumultuous 20th century: the fact that it spent much of the latter half as two separate countries. Between 1949 and 1990 two Germanies existed: the Federal Republic in the West and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the East. Each found very different ways to move on from the horrors of war and genocide. And unification in 1990 was not enough to foster agreement on Germany’s response to armed conflict, particularly not one that involves Russia.

When East Germany vanished overnight, 16 million people who had been born there became citizens of a country that was in many ways alien to them. Their fellow Germans on the other side of the Berlin Wall may have shared their language and cultural roots, but they had an entirely different understanding of modern Germany’s place in the world.

From West Germany’s very foundation in 1949, its first chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s transatlantic outlook and focus on reconciliation with France laid the groundwork for a thoroughly Western political identity. His American partners supported this process, seeing in West Germany the easternmost outpost of the democratic world, one they wanted to fortify against Soviet influence. As a result of its ringside seat on the fault lines of the Cold War, West Germany became a fully fledged member of Nato in 1955, a mere decade after the end of the most devastating war the world had ever seen. Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower declared in 1951 that he did “not believe that the German soldier as such has lost his honour” in the Second World War. Adenauer was trusted to rebuild a German army, the Bundeswehr, in the early Fifties.

Adenauer saw no conflict in the fact that he was binding German soldiers to their former Western enemies. He declared in 1955 that Nato’s objectives were “in full harmony with the natural interest of the German nation”. While many Germans, particularly his opponents on the Left, disagreed with him, he pressed ahead, spending over 4% of GDP on defence in almost every year of his tenure, from 1949 to 1963. Bundeswehr pilots learned how to drop American nuclear bombs which were stationed on their soil alongside American nuclear-capable missiles. With male conscription reintroduced in 1956, West German men learnt to fight for and with Nato. Even as defence spending was gradually reduced and a powerful peace movement evolved in West Germany with anti-American strains, the bulk of society remained firmly Western in outlook. Nato was a partner, not the enemy.

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It was this outlook that East Germans were expected to share when they joined the Federal Republic in 1990. After all, they had gleefully watched Western television in secret and obsessed over branded American jeans. They had eventually joined mass demonstrations to bring down their socialist system and then voted for parties that had advocated a swift and one-sided unification process. It seemed reasonable to assume that they had shared the pro-Western outlook of their counterparts on the other side of the Iron Curtain all along.

Yet East Germans were not asked to return to something they were once part of, but to blend into a state that had evolved without them. They had served in the National People’s Army, formed in 1956, and were integrated into the Warsaw Pact. Unlike the trust Adenauer had enjoyed from his American Allies, the East German leadership had a rather different relationship with Moscow. During the Prague Spring in 1968, when the Soviets suppressed political reform in Czechoslovakia, East German troops only formed supply lines and were kept directly under Soviet command. It was a decision made in Moscow, not in Berlin, that they weren’t deployed in open combat. The East German authorities didn’t even know how many Soviet troops were stationed on their own soil (still around 350,000 in the Eighties). They relied on guesswork based on water use in Soviet military installations to gain a vague picture. This peculiar mixture of being tied to Moscow without enjoying its confidence defined the East German experience for 41 years.

Military affiliation is just one facet of the worlds that collided in 1990. East Germans had learned Russian at school, they read Russian literature, watched Russian films, and had Russian partner schools and organisations. Meanwhile, West Germans learnt English and watched Hollywood movies.

Unsurprisingly, these differences still echo today. According to one survey carried out last month, only a quarter of Germans living in the former East think of the US as a “reliable ally”, as opposed to the majority of West Germans. Fewer easterners also deem Russia a threat to peace, (though the figure is still high at 73%). Meanwhile, East German politicians such as Michael Kretschmer, the Minister President of Saxony, or Sahra Wagenknecht, a vocal member of the far-Left party Die Linke, have been among the most ardent supporters of a swift peace in Ukraine — even if this means severe concessions towards the Russian aggressor.

On Russia and Ukraine, many Germans in the eastern states keenly feel the economic legacy of division. It is here that oil and gas connections, such as Druzhba, one of the world’s longest oil pipelines, once delivered Russian energy. Many German locals were involved in its construction in the Sixties. Today, however, sanctions and escalating tensions have seen the pipes dry up, leaving entire regions uncertain about their economic future.

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Yet all these ongoing rifts have largely been ignored. East Germans are a minority: there are more than five times as many West Germans. In terms of actual representation, the picture is even more slanted. In his new book, Dirk Oschmann, an academic who was born in the GDR, points out that only 1.7% of the senior positions in media, research, the justice system and the civil service are currently occupied by East Germans. It has been a bestseller for weeks in Germany, obviously voicing concerns that many feel have been ignored for too long.

Will King Charles, caught up in the circus of his first foreign trip as monarch, also ignore them? It seems unlikely, given his special affinity with Germany. He has visited the country more than 40 times since his first trip at the age of 13, and has dazzled audiences with speeches delivered in fluent German. He will also make a point of visiting places in the former East, such as the rural village of Brodowin, 50 miles north-east of Berlin. The respect he will show small East German businesses — such as by visiting an Ökodorf, an eco-farm, where he will make his own cheese — makes the important point that a state visit to Germany should include its eastern regions. At a time when almost 60% of East Germans say they feel second-class citizens in their own country, Berlin’s political class would do well to take note.

For while Germany rethinks its position in the world and in Europe following Ukraine, it needs to rethink its society too. When the East German state disappeared in 1990, the life experiences of its former citizens did not. To airbrush 41 years of political, social and economic history out of the national story as a failed experiment, an anomaly or the side show to the continuity narrative is as ahistorical as it is unhelpful. Reunification was a step towards bringing the nation back together, not the happy ending of that path. A Zeitenwende in German foreign policy might be underway, but a domestic watershed is needed too.

In both cases, the principal focus of the anger was President Emmanuel Macron, accused of being arrogant, monarchical, aloof, cruel, sinister, brutal and unjust. Between the two revolts, Macron became the first French president to be re-elected for two decades.

The two rebellions inevitably tell us something about the young French head of state. To preside over one revolt may be regarded as a misfortune; to provoke two in the space of six years looks like carelessness. And yet the present crisis in France is not just Macron’s crisis. It is the culmination of a failure of French governance over four decades. It exposes the child-like refusal of the majority of French people, and most political parties, to confront simple demographic and economic truths.

The postponement of the state visit of  King Charles III, which was supposed to start last night, is not just a humiliation for the President. It is a serious blow to France toute courte. One of the world’s largest and richest countries could not guarantee a safe visit by the head of state of its neighbour and ally because of an incendiary row over a modest reform.

The twin rebellions of the Macron era — the Gilets Jaunes revolt of 2018-9, and the pension reform revolt of 2023 — have different origins but the same underlying causes. The Left-Right pattern of French politics has broken down and debate has been hystericised. The country has a political system and culture which at once demands, and detests, a supreme leader.

The protests in both cases have been piggy-backed by a tiny, violent minority of the priggish ultra-Left which seeks to overturn the state by injuring “flics” (cops) and smashing bus-shelters. The violence on Thursday night — 903 acts of arson in Paris, 441 police injured nationwide, 1,500 young, black-clad rioters — was significant. But not motivated by the prospect of working two years longer in the 2060s for a state pension.

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The pension revolt is more conventional in its origins and its protagonists than the Gilets Jaunes rebellion as well as being more threatening and more dangerous — and not just for Macron. The Gilets Jaunes protests began as a violent awakening of a peripheral, rural and outer-suburban, France which demanded “change” because it felt ignored and despised. They detested all politicians and political parties and all trades unions. The tone was Poujadiste or populist Right-wing — anti-elite, anti-government, anti-state, anti-parliamentarian, anti-tax.

The pensions revolt is a more typical, latter-day French revolution: a conservative Left-wing rebellion against change by people who constantly demand Reform with a capital R but resist all reforms. It has been led by all eight trades unions federations and by the political parties of the Left. Marine Le Pen’s Far Right opposes the reform but remains cynically silent, hoping eventually to benefit from the chaos.

The one thing that does unite the rebellions is an exaggerated contempt for Emmanuel Macron. His predecessors — Messieurs De Gaulle, Giscard, Mitterrand, Chirac, Sarkozy and Hollande — were detested in their day. There is, however, something about Macron which provokes a deep and unreasoning hatred among many French people.

He is accused of being both an elitist and an upstart; a president for “the rich”; an autocrat; someone who despises ordinary people and has no understanding of their lives and how to speak to them. But every French president for half a century has failed. Macron has failed less than most of the others. He has reduced unemployment from 9% to 7%. He has started, tentatively, the re-industrialisation of France after two decades of rapid decline. The French economy recovered from the Covid pandemic more rapidly than almost all other rich nations.

The President’s insistence on pension reform, at a time of war in Europe, soaring inflation and Post-Covid exhaustion, was ill-advised. His decision to override a normal parliamentary vote to impose the reform (though perfectly constitutional) was courageous — but, in the circumstances, foolish. His reform, though, is neither. It is modest and sensible.

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By Tom McTague

France’s life expectancy is among the highest in Europe. It works less – in terms of average hours worked by all adults – than other large industrial nations. The country has not balanced its state budget for half a century. Its accumulated public deficit of 113% of GDP is well above the eurozone average at a time when interest payments are surging.

The state pension system — actually 42 different regimes — is supposedly funded by the monthly payments of workers and employers. Its permanent deficit in the state sector is disguised by a 30bn euros a year “bung” from general taxation. And it is unjust. Generous early retirement schemes for rail, Metro and other state workers are co-funded by taxes paid by private sector workers who retire later on poorer pensions.

Macron argues that pension reform is the “mother of all reforms” — a first step towards increasing France’s capacity to generate wealth and to fund its generous welfare state without permanent, swelling deficits and debt. But the Unions and Left-wing parties and Marine Le Pen’s Far Right – and an opportunist section of the supposedly fiscally responsible centre-right – describe it as “brutal”.

Brutal? If the reform goes ahead (as it may) the official French retirement age will rise from 62 to 64 by 2030 — it will still be lower in seven years’ time than it is in most European countries now.

Unfortunately for Macron, democratic politics is not about being the cleverest boy in the class. You must not only have the right answer but also convince a majority of people that the answer is right. Macron and his prime minister, Elisabeth Borne, have failed to sell their reform. They have alternated between saying that the changes are “just and fair”, and saying it’s a painful necessity to prevent the state pension system from collapse. Only recently has Macron confronted the French with the most urgent reason for reform: the need to give France’s international creditors proof that deficits and debt are under control.

The UK Right will hate the comparison, but there is much of the Margaret Thatcher about Emmanuel Macron. He has set out to reform the country for its own good and against its will. Thatcher, admittedly, had much of the media and the House of Commons on her side; Macron, however, attempted to impose pension reform without a parliamentary majority and with little support in the French media. (The centre-Right Le Figaro is an exception.)

It is doubtful whether Thatcher — or Abraham Lincoln or Cicero or John the Baptist — could have convinced the French public that it needs to work longer to preserve its social model and its way of life. But Macron’s failure is striking all the same. In January, 66% of the public opposed retiring at 64; according to recent polls, the figure is now 73%.

That is Macron’s failure but it’s not just Macron’s fault.

There is a systematic refusal by a large part of the French public to accept that the country is living beyond its means. Macron reinforced their illusions by spending “all that it takes” to sustain businesses and individuals through the Covid pandemic. He spent another 100bn euros on softening the impact of energy inflation last year

The French economist, Philippe Crevel, says: “The French seem convinced that public expenditure has no limit. If Macron can spend 100bn euros on defence, why can’t he spend the same on pensions?”

This irresponsibility has been reinforced by the break-down of the old Left-Right framework of French politics. There is now an unstable, three-way division between a reformist centre, a populist-nationalist Right and a radical, anti-capitalist Left (incorporating the Greens). The parliamentary elections last June split almost precisely along these lines, giving Macron the biggest bloc of seats but no overall majority.

Both the radical Left and Le Pen’s far Right have incoherent economic programmes. Both campaigned last year for the official pension age to be reduced to 60. The Left believes all can be solved by “taxing the rich” and “taxing business” in one of the most taxed countries in Europe. Le Pen wants simultaneously to spend big, to reduce taxes and to cut deficits. All will be made possible she says, by spending less on migrants.

Macron and Borne had planned to push through their pension reform with the help of the rump of the centre-right Gaullist party (Les Républicains or LR). They might have succeeded. They constantly altered their reform to suit centre-Right demands. The party leadership promised its support. But in the end, almost half the 61 LR deputies refused to go along, motivated by opportunism or fear of their constituents.

Macron had to then use his constitutional power to impose the legislation without a “normal” vote. This special power under Article 49.3 of the Fifth Republic constitution has been used 100 times since 1958 by governments of all persuasions. So why the outrage and outbreak of violence?

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Partly because imposing the vote fits the “autocratic Macron” narrative. Partly because leaders of the radical Left have been encouraging — and then partially disowning — violence for weeks. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the biggest Left-wing party, La France Insoumise, spoke of defeating the pension law by “force”. Another radical Left leader compared Macron to the Emperor Caligula (whose interest in Roman state pension systems has yet to be confirmed).

The worst street violence in France comes from the shadowy “black blocs” of the ultra-Left but its dynamics are curious. Mélenchon and other leaders on the Left vaguely condemn it, but delight in the sense of national crisis that it creates; governments condemn it, while hoping that it will scare the peaceful majority and reduce turn-out at demonstrations.

Violence — from the black blocs, from a radical wing of the Gilets Jaunes and from the police —  eventually ruined the Gilets Jaunes movement. It may also deflate the pension protests but defeating them will be much harder.

Macron could see off the Gilets Jaunes because they had no leaders and no clear demands. The anti-pension reform movement, by contrast, is well-organised and has a single clear objective: to kill the reform. In the past couple of days, moderate unions have offered Macron a route of honourable retreat. If he “pauses” the reform for six months, they will enter negotiations on wider reforms, including pensions.

Macron is unlikely to back down. If he did, the remaining four years of his mandate would probably be (international diplomacy apart) a wasteland. If he persists, it may also be a wasteland but at least he will have achieved his pension reform.

But, truce or no truce, the real French crisis will not be over. The underlying causes of Marcon’s twin rebellions will remain. The French political system is distrusted; there is no majority in the country for any clear course of action; the people are unwilling to be accept even a modest degree of pain or sacrifice to confront reality.

That is not just Macron’s failure. It is France’s failure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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By Daniel Kalder

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A “lolcow”, for those who don’t know, is a derogatory, very online term for someone who gains notoriety via attention-seeking behaviour, combined with imperviousness to criticism and lack of self-awareness. And 28 years ago, in 1995, in an emerging world of 24-hour news cycles and ever-hungrier tabloids, Harry’s mother became the first true lolcow. She also set the bar for media oversharing, in the notorious Martin Bashir interview that tipped her from remote, paparazzi-hounded royal to press-courting celebrity megastar. Here, Diana coyly dropped bombshell after bombshell of juicy gossip for the media, interspersed with soft-voiced woe about how awful it was that the media wanted to know everything about her.

In Spare, Harry has followed decisively in her footsteps, producing more than 400 pages of such painfully needy oversharing that every page of airport-novel prose cries out for a hug. And it does so while conveying a queasy sense of squinting through the curtains at some sordid domestic scene. Reading it left me bemused at how the people around this clearly unhappy man could have encouraged him – or at least not stopped him – over-sharing to quite such a degree.

But why do it? Why subject yourself to the hostility and humiliation that anyone could predict would follow these revelations? To a significant extent, the opportunity to lolcow himself in this way is not of Harry’s choosing. Rather, the larger context is the fact that this outdoorsy, obviously basically well-meaning-but-emotionally-mixed-up midwit was not born a prince in (as a wag observed on Twitter) an age where he could perish heroically in some ill-advised charge against Prussian cavalry. Rather, he had a prominent role thrust upon him, unasked, from birth, in an age that has made commodifying ourselves a centrepiece of culture and commerce alike.

I expected to feel exasperation and perhaps distaste reading what has by now been exhaustively trailed in every newspaper as a bombshell tell-all memoir of the notoriously private Royal Family. But I was surprised to find myself feeling deeply sorry for the Duke of Sussex. And if Spare has this unexpected effect, it’s less because it reveals him – as he presents himself – to be the innocent victim of persecutory tabloids and conniving courtiers. Rather, it’s in demonstrating just how ill-equipped he is, by temperament, to navigate the impossible choices with which fate has afflicted him.

In the decades since Diana’s death, ever greater swathes of the human soul have been redirected from human relationships to commercial exploitation. Celebrity culture is perhaps the most well-established and pervasive of such dynamics. It commodifies two other core features of our emotional landscapes, redirecting them from intimacy to profit: the social roles of gossip, and of self-disclosure. As our daily lives grow ever more atomised, we depend more and more on synthetic gossip about celebrities we don’t really know to fill the gaps in our personal “village” and provide fodder for its water-cooler conversations.

If gossip helps to oil the wheels of conversation, so too does self-disclosure. When we share something personal in a conversation, it invites an answering disclosure from the other. Over time, such disclosures create trust and intimacy. And the power of modern celebrity status comes from just such self-disclosures, but delivered asymmetrically: instead of forming part of an interpersonal exchange, the “celebrity” feeds gobbets of gossip to the publicity machine, in exchange for validation, money, or other opportunities.

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Even within my modest platform, I’m conscious of this dynamic. Nothing elicits positive feedback in a column like a juicy personal anecdote. And there is always the temptation to go ever further, spilling more and more of yourself out for consumption by strangers until the result — in some quarters — becomes a kind of pornography of the self.

I can only guess at what relentless press scrutiny — which Harry calls the “fishbowl” — would feel like for someone accustomed to it at such immense scale, since childhood. Or, indeed, how such an individual might feel about the fact that its hunger was partly responsible for his own mother’s death. But if Spare depicts being endlessly “papped” as a living nightmare, it’s also in the nature of Faustian bargains, as Darran Anderson noted yesterday, to offer power as well as a horrible price. It is, after all, a function of Harry’s public profile that anyone cares about his childhood or inner life at all. And if Harry laments the way media scrutiny ruins relationship after relationship for him, he doesn’t seem able to imagine simply opting out altogether. It’s not beyond the wit of man to imagine disappearing altogether; wildly famous celebrities sometimes succeed in doing so. Instead, though, Spare recounts him rejecting an offered position as Governor-General of Bermuda, which he interprets as a plot by Camilla to get him out of the way. Well, yes, but doesn’t he want to be out of the way?

But it really doesn’t seem to just be Harry who wants to be both private, and yet also public. As Spare convincingly (if perhaps unintentionally) reveals, the entire Crown is in hock to the same bargain. At one point Harry recounts being berated by his father for taking legal action against the press, because (as Harry reports a courtier putting it) “one has to have a relationship with the press”. If Spare is to be believed, Charles tells him repeatedly just to ignore the tabloids — while playing the press like a fiddle, sometimes at the expense of his own sons, via carefully-managed leaks.

Harry’s explanation of his father’s behaviour in turn sheds light on his own tragic path to lolcow-dom. After a youth “deprived of love”, Harry speculates, Charles is “dangerously, compulsively drawn” to the “elixir” offered by the media. If Spare is at all accurate, this could apply just as well to Harry. But perhaps what damns Harry, unlike his father, to a tragic fate as lolcow is simply that he’s not very good at managing the balance between disclosure and self-protection, probably because he’s simply not cold-blooded enough. A lolcow is, in essence, someone who isn’t very good at playing the game of calculated self-disclosure; that’s Harry, to a T.

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He clearly understands how avid the machine is for anything relatable. In one genuinely poignant passage, he recounts reaching for his father’s hand at the Balmoral gates, after Diana’s death, and how that gesture set off a barrage of clicking cameras: the media machine capturing an intimate moment, so it could be sold to the public. “I’d given them exactly what they wanted,” he says. “Emotion. Drama. Pain.”

But giving the public its fix of emotion, drama and pain shades over into lolcow behaviour at the point where sharing becomes a toxic cycle. In Harry’s description, at the gates of Balmoral, the cameras were weapons: “They fired and fired and fired.” And yet some go back for more nonetheless. For intimate self-disclosure to strangers rarely produces just empathy. While you may get a measure of this (and Harry has plenty of supporters) you’ll also get objectification, mockery, and further demands for personal details. Then, still needy, and still craving love and validation, those with lolcow tendencies will respond by further disclosure, thus provoking ever more objectification and so on.

My sense of the Duke of Sussex is that, unlike more cold-blooded and self-disciplined operators, he has spent his life since that moment in Balmoral reaching out again and again for a metaphorical hand-hold, only to receive in return another barrage of photography. So he’s given in, and attempted what he calls “honesty” — which is to say, flinging every personal detail into the maw of the machine at once, presumably in the hope that this will finally make the great mass of strangers like him.

Without ever leaving the same studiedly bland, tabloid-register prose, the book lurches between accounts of travel and action, grotesquely over-personal revelations, including about family members who doubtless never consented to be thus exposed, and strangely platitudinous passages of introspection. The cumulative impression is of someone who put his own personality into storage, and bought a replacement one in IKEA.

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What beggars belief is the sheer level of neediness implied by such a wince-inducing level of self-exposure. But it’s hardly difficult to grasp why he should be so needy: his mother’s death haunts almost every page of Spare. He describes Diana as “light”, and reminisces about “Her devastating smile, her vulnerable eyes, her childlike love of movies and music and clothes and sweets – and us. Oh, how she loved us.”

But one twist in this heartbreak is never acknowledged. For if Harry describes the boys at his prep school as “abandoned children”, and we may infer that he considers himself abandoned, by her death, he doesn’t acknowledge that — regardless of how much she loved him — in truth his mother abandoned him before she died. “My mother legendarily said there were three people in her marriage,” he writes. “But her maths was off. She left Willy and me out of the equation.” And indeed she did, divorcing Charles and leaving her two sons behind with him, while she jetted off to beach resorts.

Unable to tip his mother off her pedestal, though, Harry recounts a youth spent seeking maternal warmth wherever it might be scrounged. Spare is full of what a therapist later tells him are “surrogate mums”: school matrons, Tiggy Legge-Bourke, and Teej, an older friend. Meanwhile the sainted Diana can do no wrong.

Perhaps, then, we shouldn’t berate him for vulnerabilities and cognitive dissonances he has, to such a great extent, inherited from her. For Spare also reveals just how far Harry is his mother’s son. He has inherited her fear of the dark, he says, “along with her nose, her blue eyes, her love of people, her hatred of smugness and fakery and all things posh”. But he seems to have followed her footsteps in more ambivalent ways, too. Spare is already as much of a voyeuristic sensation as she was. And it’s not much of a stretch to imagine Diana rationalising her own prioritisation of personal feeling over tradition and obligation much as Harry does, as part of “living in truth”.

Harry talks about fearing “a repeat of history, another untimely death like the one that had rocked this family to its core 23 years earlier”. The clear implication is that he is afraid Meghan might die in a car crash just like his mother. But my sense is that if anyone is in danger, it is Harry. For if he has inherited Diana’s nose, we may infer from Spare that he has also inherited her cocktail of vulnerability, emotional reasoning, and (shall we say) below-average analytic capacity that, combined with unasked-for levels of public scrutiny, has sealed his fate as Prince Lolcow.

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Spare left me feeling genuine compassion for Harry, mingled with a queasy sense of shame for this tawdry era. Another time and culture might have afforded a man such as he an honourable life of leadership, even heroism. Instead, the 21st century has turned him into a broken reciter of Hallmark-tier therapy platitudes, hell-bent on strip-mining what’s left of public affection for him in fruitless pursuit of the empathy he clearly craves.

Arise, then, Prince Lolcow. For your own sake, please buy a few thousand acres somewhere remote, and devote yourself to something healthy and practical such as cattle farming. If you don’t, the media machine whose empathy you so self-destructively crave will continue farming you. And eventually it will grow tired of you, and torture you to death.

After a week of controversial and, at times, cringeworthy leaks from his book, Spare, Prince Harry’s interview with ITV came as an anti-climax. His host, Tom Bradby, gamely tried to stir up trouble while seeming to step back from it, suggesting to the Prince, about his relationship with the Royal Family, “you haven’t so much burnt your bridges as taken a flame thrower to them”. Harry’s response was arguably the closest he came in the interview to the disarming candour of his book, claiming “They’ve shown absolutely no willingness to reconcile. And I’m not sure how honesty is burning bridges. You know, silence only allows the abuser to abuse.” Yet throughout the interview, there is a sense of damage limitation, if not outright back-pedalling, that chimes with the generally scathing response his book has received critically.

As confessionals go, it’s a particularly evasive one. In contrast to the salacious, or salaciously reported, leaks from his book, of frostbitten appendages and so forth, there are few revelations here. There are references to leaked conversations with Camilla, troubling and melancholic remembrances of his mother’s death and the aftermath, acknowledgements that the Cambridges and Sussexes never entirely got on from the beginning, his entirely brotherly relationship with his brother, and so on. Little is surprising and there is much that is conciliatory. In the interview, he concedes “there are two sides to every story” and gives a mature and tender assessment of how difficult Princess Diana’s death must have been for Prince Charles, reflecting as a father himself, “Only now… did I really think about how many hours he’d been awake. And the compassion that I have for him as a parent, having to sit with that for many, many hours, ringing up friends of his, trying to work out, ‘How the hell do I break this to my two sons?’”

Throughout there is the suggestion of vertigo in speaking publicly about the issues compared with how emboldened print can make one feel; his book, by contrast, does not lack boldness and feels, occasionally like it could have been ghostwritten by a republican. Many autobiographical writers are plagued with a feeling they have betrayed and even sabotaged relationships with loved ones, simply by writing about them — “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished” Czeslaw Milosz has been quoted as saying —and there’s a sense with Prince Harry of at least wanting to heal the divisions, while, tragically, perhaps deepening them.

The most telling line, which reaches towards the heart of the matter, comes back to the Faustian nature of fame and particularly the media’s gaze and how that can distort, “After many, many years of lies being told about me and my family, there comes a point where, going back to the relationship between, certain members of the family and the tabloid press, those certain members have decided to get in the bed with the devil.” This reiterated the accusation Harry made against Camilla in his 60 Minutes interview with Anderson Cooper, where he claimed, she was “dangerous because of the connections that she was forging within the British press. And there was open willingness on both sides to trade of information. And with a family built on hierarchy, and with her on the way to being queen consort, there was going to be people or bodies left in the street because of that.” Again and again, in his recollections in interviews and writing, Prince Harry comes back to the media as a baleful destructive force in his life.

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It is evident that, seeking sanctuary from these pressures, Harry often found cold detachment or rejection from his family. There has been much made of Meghan Markle’s apparent reluctance to play the game expected of a royal, but the reticence has been there in her husband for much longer.

What is particularly illustrative and sympathetic about Prince Harry’s relationship with fame is that it was not chosen. In the traditional Faustian transaction, the would-be genius or celebrity sells their soul, knowing that the cost is damnation and believing that the gains will be worth it. With the royals, fame is hereditary, which is as much of a curse as a blessing. The transaction is one-sided. No deal is made and yet the individual assumes precisely the same debt. In a world, even a country, where children are born into horrendous poverty and deprivation, it’s difficult to have sympathy for someone born into immense privilege. Yet it is warranted, given that child we watched walking along forlorn at his mother’s funeral did not choose any of this.

The problem is that Prince Harry is now a man and no longer a lost boy. Though he has chosen an arguably noble route of walking away from an environment that had shunned him, and he has the right to speak his mind and tell his own story, he has not walked away from fame. Sympathy, like any resource, is finite. It is entirely reasonable to wish to escape the stilted environment expected of the royals, the stiff upper lipped omerta that hides a multitude of pain and sins, the expectations to be a well-turned-out blind eye-turning mannequin (some years ago, I found myself in the unlikely company of a drunken lord who informed me that the royals were pitied by the rest of the aristocracy).

It is even more understandable to wish to escape the glare of the lens that played a part in the death of a beloved parent. Having chosen Meghan and America, Prince Harry had the chance to transcend fame and to effectively defeat the presence that has seemingly haunted his life. He could go semi-privately into any number of ventures. Harry was not, after all, a signatory to the Faustian pact. One of the most tragic aspects to what has been unfolding is not just the painful reality of a family schism, but rather that at the brink of escape, Harry decided to return to the table to sign the contract.

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Idleness is the tool of the devil

By Darran Anderson

A cursory scan over Twitter will show that there are those who dislike the Sussexes for petty vindictive reasons, casually firing around racist and sexist tropes in the process. Yet there are far more who have sympathy and are interested because it is a human story that resonates, especially those who have been through grief, familial rifts, childhood rejection and so on. The royals are just like us, it suggests. Who knew? The point where sympathy dissipates is with this issue of fame, the courting of it rather than the walking away. This is where the public’s role in the Faustian bargain comes in. This is what differentiates celebrities from the rest of us, the point of departure, and the judgement can and may well be merciless. By aiming for the echo chamber of the terminally online and the patronage of the American establishment, the wider sympathy is lost. It is especially frustrating as the prince had a chance to get out.

Harry’s case is not helped by a mixed tone of grievance and sanctimony. One moment, he is referring to the killing of Afghan militants as a game of chess, the next he is engaging in flagellation about his previous lack of social consciousness. At its worst, it seems distasteful and condescending, the opposite of a spiritual confessional. It undoes the undoubtedly brave work of speaking about trauma, autonomy, or even his right to speak. As George Orwell put it, “Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful”, but here even the disgrace feels performative. It feels grubby and out of touch, both too intimate and too remote. It feels, in other words, like fame.

Here lies the deeper issue. Whatever you think of Harry and Meghan or the Royal Family, you are expected to think something — whether acolyte or tormentor. The public are the essential piece of the Faustian contract, as much as the media. We are its creditors. When it is signed, what might begin as human sympathy becomes a detached form of judgement. The figures we gaze at become dehumanised, either as saints or demons. The weight of having to play these roles or simply being perceived as such is no small thing, though we can always say they are well renumerated for their troubles. It is worth considering what the gaze of the media does to such figures, and Prince Harry’s life is an ongoing example, but it is also worth considering what it is doing to those of us who watch.

Since his ascension, King Charles and his model community have become an unlikely source of inspiration for those jaded by modern politics. A honeymoon of praise has flourished around the King’s idiosyncratic, anti-modernist philosophy concerning life, work and nature. All of this has largely focused on his experimental community on the outskirts of Dorchester. And this buzz has even worked its way to the lips of Michael Gove, the minister responsible for revolutionising Britain’s housing stock, who this week rhapsodised about Poundbury’s beauty and vision.

Poundbury was conceived in the late Eighties when a section of the Duchy of Cornwall estate was confronted by Dorset County Council with new house-building targets for lower-income families. Today, it has a community of 4,600 people, up to half of whom find employment in the town, living in new-build properties so eye-pleasing they couldn’t possibly have been built this century.

“People often come here sceptical and end up changing their minds,” says Blake Holt of the resident’s association, which, unlike most such groups, is more accustomed to promoting the town’s ethos than solving neighbourly disputes. Blake talks me through the sustainability, social integration, and “harmony” between man and his environment that Charles and his architect Leon Krier have built into every shop front, front door, flowerbed and fountain. With empty words like sustainability too often thrown at us, it’s intriguing to actually see them in action. Blake talks of the local factory, the anaerobic digester plant that covers most of the town’s energy needs, and the Duchy’s commitment to having 35% of housing as “affordable”. He speaks of the many who have come here, from ministers to amateur mystics, in search of some sort of alternative to the reality of living in England in the 21st century.

Not all are convinced. The New Yorker’s profile of the town from September got tied up in a Truman Show analogy after it questioned what “the best of the United Kingdom’s past” could really “tell us about its future”. “Architectural visionary, or regressive Nimby?” asked The Times in a recent reappraisal of the King’s take on architecture that saw the town described as a “nostalgic vision”. This was how Poundbury was widely interpreted after Charles’s ascension: a sad, backward refusal that fails to reckon with Britain’s present, let alone its future.

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Walking through town, you can see this is all wrong. We walk past a carpet shop housed inside a building that looks like a Roman Temple, then a fountain that wouldn’t look out of place in Moorish Spain. It would be a mistake to confuse Charles’s cultural and aesthetic cherry-picking with a bygone age, let alone the values he has actively tried to install into the town. It doesn’t take long to realise that nothing like Poundbury has ever really existed in England’s past. This radical blend of conservatism, localism, environmentalism and aesthetic appreciation is more idealistic than nostalgic, more pioneering than retrograde.

We arrive at the edge of town, the clear boundary between Poundbury and Dorchester. You look back at the forgotten England, the one you normally see from a high speed train window. The disused water tower, the matchbox council housing. You start to wonder if — or even when — Poundbury could start to exist there too.

The world out there is in crisis — and not just Dorchester. Far from a beacon of innovation, Britain is fast becoming renowned as a lesson in economic stagnation and failure. Throw in the death of the Queen, a flurry of Prime Ministers and a Budget that crashed the economy, and you have a very English apocalypse. Both in the sense of such grim incompetence you can only laugh, but also in the old religious sense of the word: in the divine revelation of a truth. Surely we can’t go on like this. Something in Britain must change.

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Charles, or his cheerleaders, could well argue that what he was trying to implement on the edge of Dorchester was at least an attempt to grapple with this. Poundbury isn’t about the past, it’s about a different, more cautious understanding of what is likely to be a poorer, uncertain future. Critics of Charles may sneer at his alternative to the globalised modernity he sees at the root of our problems: the idiosyncratic mix of mysticism, localism and environmentalism he laid out in his 2010 book Harmony. But as acute observers of the King’s philosophy have observed, his desire to find harmony between man and his environment is not just a sounding board for nice ideas about fewer cars, sustainable farming and pretty houses. Charles, and by extension his planning committees, is trying to grapple with a more existential question that now dominates our country’s future. When the tide of globalisation turns and the age of abundance ends, what do we really have left?

In Poundbury, there is an answer of sorts woven into the architecture and community. It’s not hard to see why so many make the pilgrimage. The King is asking questions about living, purpose and our future, and has found feasible answers compatible with a wider cross-section of British society. Meaning in community, localism and environment. Security in energy, employment and home. A culture, aesthetic and way of life in complete contrast to the globalised modernity that has dominated the country for so long. This is a language few of our politicians talk, let alone understand. Could what has worked so well for Poundbury, be scaled into the ethos of our nation? Could it tame the forces of our present and future apocalypse?

Of course, this version of our future is not without its sacrifices, something Poundbury itself has struggled with. On the other side of town, one that looks away from Dorchester and out to the rolling fields of Dorset, there is a more desired but increasingly exclusive version of modern Britain. Here, in the final stages of the town’s development, a trio of property companies are set to take advantage of the 29% premium new arrivals are willing to pay to become residents. In the Queen Mother Square, in the middle of the town, I can see a busy Waitrose, and just next to that a luxury spa. Poundbury’s vision has become a victim of its own success. Now without its founding Prince to shepherd its ethos, it’s easy to see its rising house prices take the reins. Instead of being a viable alternative for a different kind of Britain in the 21st century, much of Poundbury is fast becoming a luxury refuge for those lucky enough to afford where to see out the storm.

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Here the pilgrimage must come to an end. Regardless of whether or not Poundbury will stay true to the King’s philosophy, the reality is that increasingly we will have to take seriously the vision of the future it was built to anticipate. A less gentrified form of Poundbury may provide us with an ideal of what might work in a poorer country as the tide of globalisation turns. For a country long weaned on the opposite, the path to optimal decline may well be a tough sell. It will require us and our politicians to confront a set of questions we may soon have no choice but to answer.

Can we continue to bury a forgotten England from a high-speed train window in poorly-built, isolated communities? Or can we rediscover a common purpose and identity that will allow us to forego the cultural and economic individualism of high modernity many of us may no longer be able to afford? Until we face up to these questions, we will keep returning to Poundbury.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

For a millennium there were Royal Sieges, Royal Weddings, and Royal Jubilees at Windsor. But nothing, in living memory, like this Royal Funeral; the Queen — a most revered and respected and beloved Queen — was to be buried within the King George VI memorial chapel. A million-strong crowd was expected. An invading wave of grief vaster than any the authorities had planned for, and more than Windsor could really take. A unique British Hajj.

It was standard for locals to see the Queen in Windsor. This is a Royal borough — the Firm owns 4,500 acres —  and the family took its name from the town. In return, the town received the Real Presence of Her Majesty, riding in horses in the park, or wheeling over asphalt in a Land Rover to her chapel. Windsor was charged with glamour by association.

After Elizabeth died, the town whirled into action: the paranoid iron railings, camera cranes and subcontracted stewards, whose hasty assembly marks every major public spectacle in the Kingdom, appeared. This was the heartland of the grieving process.

When the Queen was crowned, in 1953, a third of her subjects believed she was placed on the throne by God. There was no foreign travel, no wine, no Lady Chatterley’s Lover. No real teeth in the mouths of half the adult population. Stalin ruled Russia and virtually the whole of Africa belonged to Europe. The British had just informed the UN that they did not see how it was possible to abolish flogging in their mandated territories, thank you very much.

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How Camilla became Queen

By Will Lloyd

Yesterday, there were thousands of people everywhere. Then thousands more. Walking from Slough and Staines through the misty morning, along closed roads, past tent cities set up for stewards in the greens around the town. More streamed in for the funeral.

The crowds are candidly patriotic. Monarchy is something they feel in their bodies. It is a powerful internal force, not a theory, not an idea. It’s an obvious decision: take the pram, and the dogs, to Windsor. They say the Queen was theirs. They say the same things, over and over: we expected her to go on forever; we knew her all our lives; we wanted to pay our respects. Trails of flowers are left, under trees, under the hard glare of the castle walls.

I’m reminded of Walter Bagehot, Monarchy’s most supercilious theorist. For the Kingdom, he said, the monarch was simply “a visible symbol of unity to those so imperfectly educated as to need a symbol”. The portraits of Queen Elizabeth, hung in every shop window across the town — including the Thai Massage parlour — are pure symbolism. She looks as exact and fictitious as the lines on a map. People are not always sure what to do when a symbol dies. I’m told they almost ran out of champagne in The Ivy Windsor on September 8. Hallowed British etiquette: if in doubt, drink.

Otherwise, a child walks up to one Elizabeth in an estate agent’s window, stops, pulls a handful of conkers from her pocket, and lays them there in a small line below the image. An offering. Walking around Windsor, Bagehot would have thought himself vindicated.

Yet he was too cynical. Being a fantasy does not make this unreal.When you speak to enough mourners, you realise Elizabeth was more than symbol. She was not abstract to Lee, a huge bull-thick slab of a man who is in charge of the catering in the Great Park. He cooked for the Queen twice when he was a chef in the Army. “She sat in the mess with 400 blokes, like anybody would.” The recollection cuts him somehow. “She remembered my name, three years after the first time we met.”

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Or David, a garrulous ex-guardsman, who is on his third wreath-laying trip to Windsor this week. Tourists are making him pose outside the castle gates with a corgi. He served in the household division. The Queen was as regular as post in his life for 18 months. What was she like? The memory enters his face and complicates his bonhomie. “She was… strict.” He always feared she would have him locked in a cell if he slouched on the parade ground.

Elizabeth was the people’s to make of her what they will. I begin to lose count of the number of mourners who compare her with their mothers, or grandmothers. “It’s like losing her all over again”, says one woman.

The mourning is not exclusively for the Queen then. It’s for them, and their families. They relate the Queen’s pain to their own; somehow this is the same pain their grandmothers felt. They saw them ground down by life and imagine that was the Queen’s fate too. All these grandmothers, never-ending in our heads, amen.

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A thick human hedgerow grows in two parallel lines up and down the Long Walk. We watch the funeral on jumbo screens. The silence here can straighten shoulders. When we sing God Save the King, the words feel curious in our mouths. Someone stumbles off to cry behind a portaloo.

Grace tugs the edge of her Union Jack shawl. She came to Britain from Ghana in 1985. “I am the Commonwealth”, she says. A producer from ITV keeps calling her, begging her to come to London to be interviewed. But Grace wants to be in Windsor. She turns her phone off.

“We have a saying in my country: when the frog dies you will know the length of the frog.” I ask her what sort of frog Elizabeth was. “A very good frog”, says Grace. “The best frog.”

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She tells me to wait under a tree, and returns with a cardboard cut-out, clearly well-used, of the Queen. “The moon and the stars will follow her,” Grace intones, posing for photos with machine-gun-bearing police officers.

After midday, we stand at the top of the Long Walk, waiting for the procession. There is static in the air. People say things out of nowhere. “Arlo, please stop, or I shall strap you in the pram.” Somebody says she will freeze her Bramley apples. “Once she’s in there, that’s it, it’s over — it’s over there, you can see the chapel.” Another, thinking ahead, wonders how long it will take to get back to Paddington.

A row of notables, in a dream of hierarchy, stands on the opposite side of the walk. They are wearing furs, white gloves, and spotless ruffs. On our side, there are no pearls, only Sandra handing rice crackers to perfect strangers. The first thing she did when the Queen died was post a poem on Facebook. They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old… “Me and Paul watched it all on the telly, everything”, she says. “There was so much we never knew.” She talks about the Queen like a song she can’t remember the words to. The telly told her to come to Windsor, so now she is forcing a rice cracker into my hands.

All of us shaped by television and language and the jokes we share, have never had so much in common: we are waiting on this smooth baize runway, in the sun, to watch her go home. And we are sharing the same frustrations in this crowd, which is ten heads deep. The same elbows in our faces, the same children crying and rustling; the irritations and bathos and peevishness, all the subterranean currents that flow beneath the splendour. Time feels like it’s buffering. Sandra sighs. There will be no more rice cakes.

It begins with a soldierly bellow. Then, hush. Then the squashed pom-pom thud of cannon half a mile away. They scatter rooks from the elm-trees, who corkscrew overhead. People tell each other to look.

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Look: the procession glints in the far distance. It moves into clarity. Cavalry in outline, a haze of red wool, eerie piping. Everybody is filming the slow, square marchers. Everybody wraps chains around these minutes, to keep them alive, to keep her with them.

They are filming the old style, the British high idiom, bury the Queen. Pageantry separate in kind and scale to any they have seen before, or will ever see again. A precious echo of the country this used to be. All this power kept in reserve for today. There are flashing swords, gorgeous armour, and blazing uniforms, but gentleness is the overwhelming impression. Militarism to send off a Grandmother, not to project power. Grief, not anger. We are its witnesses.

When the crown is level with my face there is so much brass in the air you can taste the metal. People close their eyes to stretch the crowded seconds out. The music rings flawlessly in a dozen directions. Skin and bone absorb the moment. A key is turned. History has been released from reality.

The car wheezes forward for the last time, followed by four billion eyes, through the gates of Windsor Castle. The Queen is swept along and swept up into the cheerful English heaven she believed in. She takes her final seat in the stands, with Charles I and George III, Henry VIII and Victoria, and all the others, even poor King John.

As dusk fell, we sloped back down the Long Walk, and the thumping drums faded away. Screens showed the Queen alive, accepting some carnations from school children. Elizabeth had no grand idea. No message of hope and change. No calls to arms. Her life was blockaded by duty. She seemed to ask nothing of us but to do ours too.

Back in 1994, Charles suggested that when king, he might become Defender of Faith, instead of Defender of The Faith, the title given to him as the Supreme Governor of the Church of England. There was a storm of criticism, and some years after, he clarified what he meant: he would keep the royal title while also protecting other faiths. His openness to those faiths — especially Islam — did lead many to question his commitment to the Church. On the surface, at least, he seems to veer towards syncretism or even a covert form of secularism; an appeal to a multicultural Britain no longer willing to assert Christianity as the one true faith.

But the story is more complex. Charles — who might just be Britain’s modern-day philosopher king — has long been affiliated with Perennialism, a school of thought which holds that there is one universal truth which is present, to varying degrees, within all traditional religions. As the patron of the Temenos Academy, an educational charity dedicated to the study of Perennialism, Charles has done more to cultivate this philosophy than any other modern thinker. Unconventional as that philosophy might sound, it is one fit for a hereditary monarch: its purpose being not to subvert tradition, but to revive it.

Charles has expressed particular sympathy with the Traditionalist School, a branch of Perennialism. Led by the French philosopher René Guénon, the Swiss metaphysician Frithjof Schuon, and the Ceylonese philosopher Ananda Coomaraswamy, the Traditionalists emerged in the 19th century in reaction to the materialist ideologies of the Enlightenment. Its proponents believed that modernity had left humanity bereft of its spiritual dimension, and thought that this could be remedied by the metaphysical teachings contained within traditional religions.

For Guénon, pre-modern civilisations had oriented themselves “vertically” towards transcendence, with every aspect of life, from politics to art, corresponding to the order of the cosmos and the nature of God. But with the proliferation of “profane philosophy”, the dimensions of existence had become purely horizontal, extending only to things of this world. The result is what he famously called “The Reign of Quantity”, in which all human activity is rationalistic and utilitarian, focused on material progress rather than man’s ascension toward the divine.

Charles, who has himself invoked the concept of The Reign of Quantity, also seems to lament a world which no longer reaches for God. He has devoted himself not only to the reconsecration of nature, as is evident in his environmentalism, but also the reconsecration of art. In promoting the mastery of traditional crafts through the Prince’s Foundation School of Traditional Arts, he echoes Guénon’s view that creativity should not be a mode of mere self-expression, but a vessel of transcendence. The students at his school “can experience the beauty of the order of nature — a spiritual, sacred beauty, connecting the whole of creation”.

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Protecting hedgerows, trees and ancient crafts is all very well. Where Charles’s philosophy becomes controversial is in the fact that he, like Guénon, is willing to draw inspiration from the religions of both East and West. His suggestion that Islam “can teach us today a way of understanding and living in the world which Christianity itself is the poorer for having lost”, for instance, appears to reflect the Perennialist position that it is possible to illuminate one’s own tradition with the light of others, for nestled within all of them is the same universal truth.

Does this suggest that Perennialism, if allowed to flourish, would one day lead to the merging of all the world’s belief systems into one? Those sceptical of Charles’s openness towards other faiths fear precisely that: a “one world religion”. In our postmodern age, it is not hard to envision a world which has dissolved all particularities to make way for an ideological monoculture.

One hundred years ago, G. K. Chesterton imagined what the beginnings of such a world might look like. His novel The Flying Inn is set in a future England where the elites, romantically inclined towards the idea of a universal religion and politically motivated to unite East and West, embrace a strange, progressive form of Islam which they see to be less superstitious than Christianity. The end result is something that resembles neither traditional Islam nor Christianity, but a ghastly syncretism which destroys the country’s identity (and its pubs).

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But Chesterton’s dystopian England is not what the Perennialists had in mind. In fact, they were more critical than anyone of syncretism — with Guénon writing sharp polemics against New Age spirituality and its subversion of tradition — and would certainly have feared the coming of a “one world religion”. They emphasised the need to be firmly rooted in one faith in order to attain spiritual insight, and were highly critical of the homogenisation of cultures promoted by a globalising, secularising world. This, Guénon believed, caused the “flattening” of knowledge and ultimately sealed off higher truths.

We can rest assured that Charles has no intention of subverting Christianity. But he does believe, in the spirit of Perennialism, that glimmers of its light can be discerned elsewhere — perhaps in places less dimmed by modernity. That’s why he may draw inspiration from Islamic or Dharmic thought, and yet still remain the steadfast defender of the Christian faith.

Admittedly, Charles’s attitude to defending that faith is somewhat unorthodox. But in the 21st century, where there is no choice but to accept religious pluralism, it might be the only way to go about it. Perennialism has the virtue of being able to welcome multiple faiths, while also maintaining a conception of absolute truth. Whereas other leaders might surrender their truth in the name of inclusivity — instead allowing each religious group to have its “own truth” in true postmodern fashion — Charles’s philosophy allows for religious difference without slipping into relativism and the eventual abandonment of the sacred.

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The path from pluralism to relativism is all too easily taken. When Nietzsche remarked that “there are various eyes… and as a result there are various truths, and as a result there is no truth”, he foreshadowed the postmodern response to pluralism that ends in the denial of objectivity. Today, this takes the form of states privatising religion and reducing it to an aspect of cultural diversity rather than a source of insight that could benefit us all. Likewise, when identity politics calls to “represent” religion, it too often reduces it to a point of intersectionality on par with race and class rather than something which points to a shared eternal truth.

But Charles, our philosopher king, is a firm believer in eternal truth. He is able to respond to pluralism in such a way that results in neither syncretism nor secularism. Instead, his philosophy allows religious difference to go beyond the secular paradigm of inclusion and reintroduce a much-needed spiritual dimension to public life — for everyone.

He is, of course, in the best position to do so. The symbolic function of monarchy is to point to something higher; to be the “vertical” axis which reaches for transcendence above “horizontal” reality with all its diversity and conflict. Perhaps his reign might strive to overcome The Reign of Quantity in this way, made all the more possible by the fact that his kingship allows him to respond to modernity from a station that is not political, but spiritual.

While some seek to tear the modern world down in a way that is distinctly post-modern, Charles — in returning to the primordial foundations of existence — represents something pre-modern. Far from betraying tradition, King Charles III might just save it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

However, since Liz Truss became Prime Minister, all this intergovernmental wrangling has ground to a halt. The death of Queen Elizabeth II, and the ensuing period of mourning, was always going to disrupt government communications. But what does that mean for Truss’s new administration?

There is, of course, an argument that this is a bonus for Truss. One of the immediate challenges for any incoming Prime Minister is to stamp themselves on the public imagination as being “prime ministerial”. What better way to do that than appear with the new monarch, King Charles III, as he travels around the United Kingdom? If you can’t generate attention, you can at least gain some authority.

Yet sometimes, making the best of a bad situation isn’t enough. And Truss’s real problem is that you only get one chance to make a first impression. We know that Team Truss had a “First 100 Days” plan, which they wanted to follow with 12 months of delivery in 2023, and then finally pivot into the election year of 2024. The public would quickly get to know their new Prime Minister by her actions. As Truss reiterated throughout her leadership campaign, she gets things done.

Her recent energy price cap announcement was not a stand-alone event — it was the start of a concerted programme of reform. The intention was to follow up with necessary legislation, information for households, and details for businesses and public services. And then to move rapidly to a “fiscal event” — a “mini-Budget” in old money — where promised tax cuts could be delivered without the threat of any doom-mongering from the Office of Budget Responsibility. This concerted activity and the generous giveaways would provide a powerful sense of momentum. The Leader of the Opposition, Keir Starmer, would be left carping from the side lines about a package of help three-to-four times larger than the one he had proposed last month.

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How Labour can beat Truss

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But instead of hitting the ground running, Prime Minister Truss has hit the ground mourning. In the background there has been discussion of government policy, but it has mainly consisted of questions and criticisms around details of the energy price cap. The problem is that her full policy requires legislation, which can only be passed and debated in parliament, when it returns to full sitting in mid-October. If a week is a long time in politics, the five weeks until the House sits again is an eternity.

Now, there is some press briefing going on. The abandonment of the sugar tax, and possibly the entire government anti-obesity strategy has been floated. As has ending the cap on bonuses in the City. These give the flavour of what the 100 Days Plan must have looked like. Sir Lynton Crosby famously talks of “getting rid of the barnacles”: that before a government can campaign effectively, it needs to rid itself of unnecessary distractions. These could be unpopular policies, ungrasped nettles, or unresolved disputes, but the Queen’s death has prevented this, disrupting the Government’s momentum.

Team Truss were clearly planning for a bolder strategy — what you might call the Joe Strummer approach: Cut The Crap. The Prime Minister wants to govern as she campaigned for the leadership. Directly, clearly and simply. She has said she wants a smaller state, and Labour have taken the bait. Without waiting to see any government policy, some Labour frontbenchers have immediately attacked Truss as a Thatcherite intent on cutting public spending. That’s hard to argue in the face of the energy price cap — one of the biggest unfunded public spending commitments ever made by a UK government.

Worse, it showed that some in Labour haven’t been listening to Truss, or taking her seriously. There’s more than one way to shrink the state — and getting out of people’s lives is an effective and popular one. One of the greatest weaknesses of progressive politics is the belief that what the country is crying out for is “more government”. A large part of the fuel that drives the campaign against political correctness is the sense that government is over-reaching, interfering in bits of life where it has no place. Liz Truss wants to tap into that. She instinctively knows that most people want to look after themselves, their families and their communities without government interference.

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By Thomas Fazi

The other headline announcement — uncapping City bonuses — has trapped Labour too. Missing the wood for the trees, opposition frontbenchers have spluttered in outrage at policies that would benefit fat-cat bankers rather than the general public. The point, of course, is what David Cameron’s team used to call the politics of “aroma”. It is not the specific policy detail that matters; it is the sense of the overall direction. “Hugging a husky” showed a greener, more compassionate, modern Conservative party. Uncapping City bonuses shows a government committed to Go For Growth — no old-fashioned prejudices or well-meaning sacred cows will be allowed to stand in the way. The point is to grow the pie, not, as Labour want, to talk about tax and redistribution of the proceeds of growth.

Is this a risky approach? Yes. Is it a clear one? Absolutely. The trap for Labour is that they adopt the Sunak Strategy. Liz Truss’s ideas are simplified not simplistic; and as Rishi Sunak’s defeat showed, treating the new PM as a simpleton won’t win votes. Truss may not have the right answers, but she has asked the right question. Growth is the only game in town. If Truss manages to keep it on The Grid when parliament returns next month, her lost 100 days might not be fatal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.