It was her fate to preside over perhaps the fastest and most dramatic decline of any nation’s wealth and power in recorded history, a bitter function she fulfilled with compassion, quiet dignity, and a sincere Christian devotion to her duty. She oversaw the creation of 21^st-century Britain, and if she felt the same ambivalence over the results that we all do, she kept it to herself. Through it all, she kept a fractious nation united in turbulent times, the one calm and steady certainty we have all known through lives of constant, and unsettling change.

Listening to the BBC radio news reporting her last great task of state, the appointment at Balmoral of Liz Truss as Prime Minister, I noticed that our state broadcaster made a point of explicitly recording that the nation had undergone yet one more smooth transition of power. Not every nation is blessed with such orderly transitions: no wonder the reaction from quarters of less happy realms, where such peaceful continuity can only be dreamed of, has at times been as bitter and jealous as we have seen. A nation is a family writ large. As Orwell wrote, Britain is “a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks.” And as at any time of loss and change, it is in moments like this we are shown who mourns with us, and who does not, who our family and friends are, and who they are not.

For these are solemn mysteries, not readily understood by other tribes. Anyone who meets a member of the Royal Family remembers the occasion for the rest of their lives. The encounter is shared, brought out in conversation over decades. And in the same way, anyone who has lost a parent will feel a part of themselves sharing this moment of our King’s loss: witnessing the Royal Family’s grief we remember our own loss, an entire nation joined in a collective act of remembrance and contemplation. For as the Austrian political theorist Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn wrote: “a monarchy involves all the troubles, problems and joys of family life, on a large and public scale.”

My mother was born in London, two years into our late Queen’s reign, to a family of strong Irish republican sympathies with little love for the Royal Family. Yet even so, the collective rituals of our state, embodied in the Royal Family, would come to envelop her, as she lived and died under one Queen’s long reign. Just as we all remember that strange, disordered time, I remember, as a callow and cynical teenager, my late mother respectfully attending the crowds that watched Diana’s cortege pass down the M1 motorway through Hertfordshire towards London and her funeral. The collective act of sympathy and commemoration that reinforces the nation as a unit had brought her too, with no inherited links of blood or sentiment, within the British family fold.

And in the same way, this liminal moment of transition from one way of life to another will live on in my own family story, just as it will in yours or in any other British family’s. On Thursday evening, I went to pick up my eldest son from Scouts just after the news broke; we strolled along the harbourside to get fish and chips from a chippy where the radio played national anthem and we heard the Prime Minister paying her respects. At six years old, he will remember this moment for the rest of his life: what he was doing, what we said, what we ate together sitting, as we never do, in front of the television, watching the state broadcaster like every other British household. In such a way are nations strengthened and maintained as a collective body by the family unit around whom our state’s rituals revolve.

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But all things must change, and the nation our new King has inherited is not a happy one. There is much for him to do to keep our collective family together, and we must hope that he will play a more active role in governance than his mother felt her due. Our constitution grants our monarch greater political power than the Queen chose to exercise, and we are fortunate that our new King possesses a willingness to intercede in public life that has at times tested the patience of Prime Ministers. He must be encouraged to continue: whatever his personal foibles, his instincts are good and just, and his decades-long critiques of globalisation, of our despoliation of our natural and built environments and our pell-mell rush towards the mythical horizon of progress have been tragically borne out by events.

What do we know of how our new King intends to rule? He is, after all, a man, like the nation he now rules, of strange and esoteric depths, both progressive and conservative in ways our party system does not adequately reflect. In his little-discussed 2010 book, Harmony, Charles remarks in a “call for revolution” that “it is very strange that we carry on behaving as we do. If we were on a walk in a forest and found ourselves on the wrong path, then the last thing we would do is carry on walking in the wrong direction. We would instead retrace our steps, go back to where we took the wrong turn, and follow the right path.” For, as he writes: “I cannot stress the point enough: we are travelling along a very wrong road.”

A follower of the Perennialist philosophy of René Guénon, and an admirer of the great American writer and farmer Wendell Berry, King Charles III has observed that: “Just as natural species, once lost, cannot be re-created in test tubes, so traditional, so-called ‘perennial’ wisdom, once lost, cannot be reinvented. This is the real damage being done by our disconnection, which is fast becoming all but complete in the modern world, all the while proving that the great experiment to stand apart from the rest of creation has failed.” 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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For Charles III, inspired by the Orthodox Christianity of his fathers, believes sincerely that “we need to escape the straitjacket of the Modernist world view” and has for decades shared his “concern from the very start… that Western culture was accelerating away from values and a perspective that had, up until then, been embedded in its traditional roots.” As he writes: “What I could see then was that without those traditional ‘anchors’ our civilisation would find itself in an increasingly difficult and exposed position. And, regrettably, that is what has happened. This is why, ever since those disturbing days, I have expended vast amounts of energy to help save what remains of those traditional approaches. I knew they would be needed for a ‘rainy day’ which I fear is now close by.”

What is our King’s vision of a just and rightly-ordered realm? As he writes, “in the 21st century we desperately need an alternative vision… a future where food production and its distribution will have to all happen more locally to each other and be less dependent, certainly, on aircraft; where the car will become much more subordinated to the needs of the pedestrian; where our economy will have to operate on a far less generous supply of raw materials and natural resources.” It is of a land “where the character of our built environments once more reflects the harmonious, universal principles of which we are an integral part”. A King moved to write a book in which he condemns the poisoning of our seas and rivers will have much to advise a Tory government that has overseen our disastrous, squalid water system: our one-time anti-monarchist leader Liz Truss will be fortunate in such an example of what true British Conservatism, of every field and hedgerow, actually means.

In practice, King Charles has done more than anyone living in this country to promote humane and people-centred farming and architecture, and to preserve as a living tradition the historic arts and handicrafts of not just our own culture but of man’s patrimony as a whole. And as King, there is more that he can do, and must be encouraged to do. It is right and just that both the Communication Workers Union and the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers have called off their planned strikes for next week in honour of our late Queen, but the bonds of respect that bind state and sovereign, ruler and ruled must go both ways. It is, for example, beneath the dignity of our state that the Royal Mail, founded by Henry VIII in 1516, be parcelled off and sold to foreign investors at the behest of EU directives, a course of action that 96% of CWU members opposed. A state must guard and protect its assets and its workers just as it does its great rituals and ceremonies: the Royal Mail is no less a part of our history than Windsor Castle and the Palace, and the accession of Charles III must bring into being the revival of the British state, or else the British state, our shared home, will be lost entirely.

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For there is still much for us all to win, just as there is still much for us to lose if we continue further down our wrong path. Consider the one last great infrastructure project of our late Queen’s reign, the Elizabeth Line, and imagine what we would gain from a revival of the British state’s power and glory under her son and successor. Imagine His Majesty’s Railways, linking the beautiful and humanely-planned new towns our King could oversee on the Crown Estate, just as he has expressed his own philosophy in warm brick and stone in Poundbury and Nansledan on his Duchy of Cornwall lands. A benign and thoughtful King can do much to guide an inexperienced Prime Minister at a time of crisis. As he wrote: “I wonder if we might see wisdom in the Chinese word for ‘crisis’, which also means ‘opportunity’? It is almost a knee-jerk reaction to try to put things back as they were when we hit such a crisis, but we could be more positive and forward-looking and consider another approach that could create something different — a framework that is more sustainable; an approach to economics that is more proportionate, balanced and connected; an economics that recognises the need for harmony.”

Queen Elizabeth was fated to reign over a British state in sharp and calamitous decline, and it may yet be our new King’s unhappy fate to preside over the dissolution of our United Kingdom. But we must be thankful that our King understands there are great opportunities to be found and utilised in our current time of crisis. An unpopular Prime Minister taking office at such a dangerous and turbulent period will be naturally inclined to lean on the continuity and legitimacy only our monarchy affords, and a King equally inclined towards politics and a guiding role in our nation’s development must surely make use of the rare destiny he has been granted, for which he has prepared for his entire life. There is time still to save our struggling family unit, and rebuild our shared home towards the humane vision both our King’s faith and instinct guide him — a great Carolean restoration that will mark his place in our national history.

In its defence, the magazine could point to a multitude of other media outlets that had similarly been caught out by the sudden death of the Princess of Wales on 31 August 1997. And, more than the event itself, caught out by the public response.

Because the week that followed — between the fatal car crash in the early hours of a Sunday morning and the funeral the following Saturday, 25 years today — was an extraordinary moment, a week of all-consuming grief or hysteria (depending on taste), when nothing else seemed to happen, and nothing else mattered. There was only one subject of conversation, certainly in the media: radio phone-in shows experienced record numbers of calls, newspaper sales soared, and rolling news really came into its own.

There were two poles of attraction that week; two households, both alike in dignity. There was Kensington Palace, where Diana had lived. It became the centre of the people’s mourning: flowers costing an estimated £50 million were laid at the gates in a rising (and rotting) tide of tribute. And then there was Balmoral, where the Royal Family, including Prince Charles and his young sons, was on its annual visit. No visible expression of grief was forthcoming from that quarter, and even if that was understandable — after all, two children had just lost their mother and might wish for some privacy — the public was not in an understanding mood.

As the shock of the news began to recede in those days, the sorrow turned to anger, directed at the perceived failure of the royals to lead the national bereavement. “It is as if no one in the Royal Family has a soul,” raged The Sun, anxious to direct attention away from the paparazzi from whom Diana had been fleeing, and on whom the tabloids relied so heavily.

And since this was a time when flags were important to us, the anger focused on a third site: Buckingham Palace, where there was no flag flying at half-mast. The reasoning for this was protocol: only the Royal Standard flew over royal palaces, and then only when the monarch was in residence, and never, ever at half-mast. But that was precisely the sort of inflexible convention that Diana, the rebel daughter of an 8th Earl, had stood against. “I do things differently, because I don’t go by a rule book,” she’d said in her 1995 Panorama interview, “because I lead from the heart not the head.”

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That was the division that Diana Week exposed: head vs heart, duty vs feeling, the stiff upper lip vs the trembling pout. The Royal Family, wrote Daily Mirror columnist Tony Parsons, were stuck in the past, “undemonstrative, buttoned up, reluctant to show their emotions in public”, while the multitudes outside Kensington Palace were “very much a part of new Britain – emotional, passionate, willing to show their feelings. Just like Diana herself”. And if the nation was divided, the battle of the flag seemed to show who had the upper hand: on the Thursday, a Union Jack was duly hoisted to half-mast over Buckingham Palace.

There was much speculation that week about the end of the monarchy. Indeed, even before Diana’s death, republicanism had been on the rise. The year had started with an ITV show, Monarchy: The Nation Decides, filmed before a 3,000-strong audience at the NEC in Birmingham (more familiar to viewers as the arena for Gladiators). Less a debate than a forerunner of reality TV, it broke the record for Britain’s biggest ever phone-vote: 2.6 million calls were taken, with a third supporting the abolition of the monarchy.

A more orthodox poll by ICM in mid-August produced the same result: 30% said Britain would be better off without royalty, up from 13% a decade earlier. The upheavals of Diana Week seemed to have accelerated that trend.

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What halted the forward march of republicanism was the deployment of Princes William (aged 15) and Harry (12). They were carefully shielded from the media for the first days, but the pressure grew too great. On the Thursday, they appeared before cameras at Balmoral; on Friday they looked at the flowers and tributes outside Buckingham Palace; and on Saturday they walked behind their mother’s coffin in a funeral procession, the broadcast of which attracted a near-record of 32.1 million viewers — just shy of the 1966 World Cup Final. And the country felt better for having wept over the poor motherless mites. A poll by MORI immediately after the funeral showed just 18% in support of Britain becoming a republic.

It was, though few were prepared to say so, a bit ugly. A large part of Diana’s appeal had been her identification with the vulnerable. “I understand people’s suffering, people’s pain,” she’d said, in a leaked phone conversation. “It’s not only AIDS; it’s anyone who suffers. I can smell them a mile away.” Now, in her name — and in the interests of showing that we were a kinder, gentler nation — we demanded that her children parade their suffering on our behalf.

Then came the comedown. On Sunday there was nothing to do or to see, but still three million people found their way to the royal parks in London, seemingly reluctant to let go of the sense of a shared experience. And on Monday there began the process of forgetting just how bizarre that week had been, the sheer enormity of the public display of emotion, the “Latin American peasant hagiolatry”, as Boris Johnson called it.

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“We live in an age where feminism is a fact,” concluded Johnson, “where giving vent to emotion in public wins votes.” And that seemed to be the lesson. Tony Blair, who’d been elected just four months earlier, was the big winner of the week. He was convinced that his mantra of “New Labour New Britain” was in tune with the country that Diana symbolised. “In temperament and time, in the mood she engendered and which we represented, there was a perfect fit,” he wrote in his memoirs. And he might have been right; in the aftermath of her death, the opinion polls showed him with an approval rating of 93%, the highest ever recorded for a prime minister.

The Conservatives, on the other hand, were nowhere. Already reeling from their worst election defeat since 1906, they simply couldn’t fathom the mass mourning at all. “I walked through the crowds,” reflected one Tory ex-cabinet minister, “and realised this was no longer a country I truly understand.” In due course, the party decided to put that right with the election as leader of David Cameron, a man who, as a 14-year-old, had camped out on the Mall to witness the wedding procession of Charles and Diana. The assumption was that Diana had won. We’d finally shed the Victorian values championed by Margaret Thatcher. We were all emotionally literate now.

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Except that it doesn’t really feel like it. The clash of values that made such an impact in 1997 hasn’t been resolved one way or the other. It’s become more intense, more bitter, so that we now talk of a culture war, a conflict in which the two sides are pretty much the same as they were then. It’s still about heart and head, the subjective vs the pragmatic. The injunction to “be kind” still comes with an element of emotional bullying, and those who dissent are still, as John Redwood wrote of Diana Week, “well advised to keep their thoughts to themselves given the surge of public sentiment”.

And since this is Britain, the Royal Family is expected to play its part. So Harry is the champion of the Kensington Palace tendency, albeit transplanted to California. He’s prepared to tell anyone who’ll listen about his “genetic pain and suffering” and about his wife’s “lived experience”, in terms more Spencer than Windsor. (“I’ve never discussed private matters and I don’t think the Queen has either,” snapped Prince Philip, back when Diana was still alive.) Harry is not reluctant to share his truths. But every time he does so, he comes under increasingly heavy fire, and sheds more support. A YouGov poll in May this year showed just 32% seeing him in a positive light; even among those aged 18 to 24 — supposedly his constituency — this only rose to 42%.

William, on the other hand, is the heir to Balmoral, though with better PR advisors. There’s no radical departure from tradition here, just a steady adaptation. And the result is that he’s polling second only to the Queen as the most popular royal, with his wife in third place. The month after the funeral, the Queen mused: “I sometimes sense that the world is changing almost too fast for its inhabitants, at least for us older ones.” But she’s still with us, still quietly adapting.

Over the last 25 years, the noise from those rolling news channels, amplified by social media, has given the impression that society is in a state of frenzied change. Technology may be, but human beings are not. There is a generational evolution, as there always is, but what appeared to be a major step-change in 1997 was deceptive. Diana Week turned out to be an exception, not the making of a new rule. “Papa doesn’t embarrass me,” William was quoted as saying in 1995. “Mama does.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charles’s guest of honour, on her birthday, was his long-suffering mistress. She was then the crossroads where all national snobberies meet: a tabloid had recently printed a picture of her next to a horse, then asked: “Which one would you rather go to bed with?” The party was widely interpreted as an insult, but it was more of an apology to Camilla Parker Bowles. No other Royal attended.

A quarter of a century on and Camilla’s 75th birthday presents are the guest editorship of Country Life magazine, and a television special on ITV. The documentary reveals that she has shared a fag with Jeremy Clarkson, and her approach to life is to “just get on with it”. Through the cameras, and on the pages, she appears unaffected. Is this Camilla an actual person? Or a spit-and-polish construct designed behind-the-scenes to fill a vacancy when the Queen dies? 

Suspicions about her have lasted. Only 13% of the public believe that Camilla should be Queen. (It will happen, regardless.) In the run up to her birthday next week, newspapers wonder how Camilla has “won everyone round”, but she remains, in tabloidese, a “controversial figure”. The public are persistent Diana partisans. They do not get on with it. Like some of our politicians, for them it is eternally 1997, and Diana’s car will always be heading towards a smash. Against this sentimental legend, Camilla has nothing to offer but her Jack Russell terriers, being “nice” to photographers, and that time she laughed at some Inuit throat singers. She becomes a mirror of her mother-in-law — a quiet enigma.

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Still, the essentials are not at all mysterious. War hero father becomes a wine merchant, and a mildly amusing writer. Mother: knitting, wealthy, and deb of the year 1939. School friends remember Camilla’s ability to stand in the cold for longer than normal. (This will prove useful later in her life.) There is nothing to suggest the formation of an unusual character.

She passes fewer O-levels than Jeremy Corbyn. (Similarly, Diana Spencer’s most notable academic achievement is to win a school prize for best-tended guinea pig.) She likes hunting, and blowing cones of smoke between tokes of her Marlboros. Camilla Shand is of her class but slightly before her times. She is tomboyish and funny, consequently perfect for the men in the Polo scene, with their frighteningly monosexual educations.

Camilla was brought up to be a rose-pruning, novel-reading, fox-hunting county lady. Today Camilla, if the pages of Country Life are anything to go by, is a rose-pruning, novel-reading, fox-hunting county lady. What Virginia Woolf called “tweed-wearing, sterling dull… with grim good sense”. Dog hairs deeply woven into clothes, the first G&T a little early; silly nicknames and beef on Sundays. Solid lives that have scarcely changed since the days of Pitt the Younger. In Country Life and Camilla’s vanishing England, it’s possible — even encouraged — to forget the passage of entire centuries.

The first marriage is described as a “major social event” by all the future biographies — because Princess Anne is there. Camilla Shand becomes a Parker Bowles. Her fast London days slow to a manor in Wiltshire, where she gardens and hunts. Her husband, known as Andrew “Poker Bowles”, is one of those libertine Catholics. He behaves badly, confesses, then throws his chips on the table again. He is prouder to be the inspiration for a character in a Jilly Cooper novel than of his marriage.

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This might have gone on until the grave. Camilla might have planted peonies in her garden for decades, might never have had to give up her pack a day, might have read the Sunday Telegraph next to Andrew at breakfast last weekend. But for Charles.

When they first met, he was not exactly Bond. In front of a white pavilion, amid billowing elms, across from a vividly green grass pitch. It was a civilised, convivial, and slightly alarming scene — polo at Smith’s Lawn. Camilla in 1972 was at the height of her sensuousness. Young Charles was the most magnificent job-seeker in a land filling up with them. He slept with his teddy bear. He believed the way to a woman’s heart was to play practical jokes on them — his favoured aphrodisiacs were exploding envelopes packed with rubber bands. Suavity was distant.

The relationship began. From the start, disdain wrapped itself around Camilla like a bag over a head. The Queen praised her for her lack of guile and ambition, without realising she was praising Camilla for what she most admired about herself. The sinister Lord Mountbatten (Charles’ male mentors are always sinister) called her a “good learning experience”. At this height, in this society, people and ponies are easily confused. Senior figures in Charles’s life believed, archaically, that she was not “pure” enough for him. He did nothing to challenge them.

Though he knew as early as 1972 that he loved Camilla, Charles married Diana. A binary emerged; one day the country would be invited to take sides. Where Camilla was unoriginal and unimaginative, Diana was theatrical and neurotic. Camilla was stage scenery, Diana was Othello. Camilla didn’t feel things; Diana would weep at the sight of a bracelet. Charles literally had one job: marry well. He blew it. “Is it possible to love two women at the same time,” he asked, the night before his blockbuster marriage. The answer, unhappily enough, will forever be: yes and no. By the late Eighties, pictures of the prince show smoke signals wafting from his eyes. His hours of happiness seemed burned through.

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Raised by a coterie of what Prince Philip delicately called “nannies, nurses, and poofs”, the Prince of Wales was not prepared for a constitutional position that demanded epic stoicism. He was dimly aware of this mismatch between role and temperament. Battered by alternating gusts of public hatred and public reverence, he forgot himself. Once asked by a boy in Malaysia, “Who are you?” He replied: “I wish I knew”.

His solution was Camilla. When the public discovered this, and his first marriage ended, Charles’s mistress became as fascinating to the world as a goat with four heads. Typically, the world then asked the wrong questions about the relationship. Philip had told Diana that he could not imagine anyone in “their right mind” leaving her for Camilla.

The Duke’s words echoed throughout the Nineties, and they still echo today. Camilla was called an old boiler and a trout, fat and gaunt, a witch and a vampire. Mohammed Al-Fayed nastily said she looked “like something from a Dracula film”. Against this, the press compared Diana’s generational beauty. Camilla became the most hated woman in England. Like Anne Boleyn, she was considered a schemer, an opportunist, and a sexual predator. If there were still chopping blocks, Camilla would have graced them as Boleyn did. Instead she faced the stocks. In an eccentric (and rather late) attempt to regulate the nation’s extinct moral verities, women pelted her with rolls in a supermarket car park. Camilla went into hiding and did what Elizabeth II would have done. She said nothing. Charles’s approval rating was lower than Prince Andrew’s is today.

The supposed mystery of Charles and Camilla invited speculation. What exactly did Charles see in her, demanded the British public. A backwards question. The better one was: what did Camilla see in Charles? He might have been heir to the throne, but the throne wasn’t what it had been a century before. That is the real enigma. The answer is the one word the British flee from fastest. Love.

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Admittedly, it was not the most straightforward kind. Camilla’s love for him has been compared to a mother’s — a love smothered by fear. Nicky Haslam told the New Yorker: “It’s like a rope attached to her. There’s something very, very strong from her to him — almost umbilical.” When Diana left Highgrove, Charles purged his estate of all traces of his wife. Gone were the pink sofas and soft toys in favour of red curtains and tapestry covers. The interior designer Dudley Poplak saw the new rooms, and said Charles was withdrawing into the womb. He was going back to Camilla.

​​Charles is technically related to a divinity. He is said to be descended, via Alfred the Great, from the Saxon god Woden. But being Prince of Wales invites stasis, and semi-permanent adolescence. The woman he ended up with was always going to be a mother, not a whirlwind. This is what the public has never understood, and why they are wrong about Camilla becoming Queen consort. The closest replacement available for Elizabeth II — sane, steady, consistent — is Camilla. It might be a bit unconventional on Charles’ part. But it is good for the country.

Contemplate a day in her life. Hours of public ceremonial. A voice in your ear telling you who you are meeting and what to say. Half a dozen fixed smiles in every freshly painted room. Speeches and remarks heavily rehearsed. You can’t even smoke anymore. Next Tuesday you will open a new hospital ward in Northampton. Prince Harry calls your husband a “tit” in a podcast interview. This trends on Twitter. He is suing another newspaper. It rains.

But like her mother-in-law she goes on. Old structures are resilient. It is hard to conceive that anyone as publicly wounded as Camilla could also retain a sense of humour. Even in the artificial world of guest editorships and documentaries, though, you can see it. She is the only Royal who doesn’t seem fantastically annoyed by The Crown — she’s had so much worse.

Wrapped in royal tinsel, Camilla might be the last hard kernel of an Englishwoman left. History would have made most people in her position a fool, or sent them mad. Instead it has given her a gift, albeit a rather tainted one: being our Queen. It’s the least she deserves.

“We’re worried about you,” said Amis. “I’m worried about me,” responded Rushdie. Sitting in the pew behind was Paul Theroux. “I suppose we’ll be here for you next week, Salman,” he chuckled.

Rushdie remembered the moment, funny in the queasy-hysterical way narrowly not being hit by a car is funny, in his 2012 memoir Joseph Anton. After Friday’s attack on the author, which may cost him an eye and possibly more, the book is charged with new meaning.

Paparazzi and journalists began to follow Rushdie into the church. Hours before, Ayatollah Khomeini had issued his fatwa: “I inform all zealous Muslims of the world that the author of the book entitled The Satanic Verses… and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its content are sentenced to death. I call on all zealous Muslims to execute them quickly.” Fleeing the press, Rushdie was spirited away by Alan Yentob in a BBC car.

Aged 40, Rushdie’s life was split into an unwanted second act. “How easy it was to erase a man’s past and to construct a new version of him,” he recalled, “an overwhelming version, against which it was impossible to fight.” Several builders collaborated to construct the new Rushdie. There was the Ayatollah, a man who had used children as mine-sweepers in the Iran-Iraq war, and who marked the tenth anniversary of the Iranian Revolution with his fatwa. There were the Muslims who rallied and rioted against Rushdie in France, America, Norway, Bangladesh, Thailand, Sweden, Pakistan, Australia, Turkey, and the Netherlands. And there were the governments who banned The Satanic Verses in two dozen countries. As he watched all this in hiding, the author “imagined the Great Pyramid of Giza turned upside down with the apex resting on his neck”.

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The British builders were generally more subtle, though no less insidious. One of the very first calls Rushdie received after the fatwa was from Keith Vaz, the MP for Leicester East. Vaz described what was happening as “appalling, absolutely appalling”. He promised to support Rushdie. A few weeks later, Vaz was one of the main speakers at a demonstration against The Satanic Verses, describing the event as “one of the great days in the history of Islam and Great Britain”.

But MPs need votes more than they need writers to have artistic freedom. Joseph Anton is full of moments when they let Rushdie down. Max Madden, the Labour MP for Bradford West — Bradford, the city where copies of The Satanic Verses were crucified and set alight — suggested that Rushdie add an insert into his book allowing Muslims to explain why they found it offensive.

Offensive. That was the main charge against Rushdie in Britain. The five years it took to make a novel sing could be reduced to one slander. On the political Right, Rushdie had already caused offence. In the Eighties he had denounced “the Augean filth of imperialism” and described the British police as representatives of “the colonising army”. And, yes, Rushdie had praised the Iranian revolution: “We may not approve of Khomeini’s Iran. But the revolution there was a genuine mass movement.”

Writers at the Telegraph and Spectator, as well as members of Margaret Thatcher’s government, were patriotically scandalised that a foreign power could order the death of a British citizen and try to get his book banned. Not in this blessed plot; not in our England, mate. But it was still a cause for tickily spite that Rushdie, as Charles Moore would later reflect, “used to attacking whitey with impunity” was “suddenly seeking whitey’s help”.

There was dark, malicious glee. Auberon Waugh wondered “just how much we should exert ourselves, as deeply stained white imperialists, to protect him from his own people”. Sir Hugh Trevor-Roper said he wouldn’t be bothered if British Muslims decided to “waylay” Rushdie in an alleyway and “improve” his manners. Sir Stephen Spender, whose youthful communism was a distant memory, wrote in the Spectator of Rushdie: “It is mass immigration that has got him into the trouble in which he now finds himself…” Wasn’t it ironic that an immigrant like Rushdie, born in the twilight of the Raj before coming to England for boarding school, had become the hate figure of immigrants himself? “The liberals made their multicultural bed,” crowed Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, editor of the Sunday Telegraph. “Now they must lie on it, along with the rest of us.” Norman Tebbit spoke for them all when he described the novelist as an “outstanding villain”.

In Joseph Anton, Rushdie recounts this without much bitterness. Being cast as the “uppity foreigner” was something he expected. Neither is he particularly saddened to find successive Archbishops of Canterbury, and Prince Charles, respond tepidly to the fatwa. The Prince of Wales reportedly said he would not support a writer who had insulted the “deepest convictions” of Muslims. He was the defender of more than one faith now.

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More surprising, though, was the reaction on the Left. It was one thing for the Daily Mail to label Rushdie as “unattractive, small-minded, arrogant, and egocentric”. But what did it mean for George Steiner, the great Cambridge polymath, no roast beef of old England merchant, to launch sustained, remorseless attacks on The Satanic Verses, while suggesting that Rushdie was “looking for trouble”? Who could explain John Berger denouncing Rushdie in the Guardian? Or Germaine Greer describing him as a “megalomaniac”? Or for Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in the Independent, seeking the fatwa’s positives for Britain’s Muslim community on its fifth birthday and claiming: “Had it not been for that fateful 14 February 1989, the world would be hurrying, unchallenged, towards the inalienable right to wear blue jeans and eat McDonald’s hamburgers.” Or the postcolonial theorist Paul Gilroy accusing him of “misjudging the people”? These were supposed to be his people.

Then there was John le Carré. The great author could hardly bring himself to condemn the USSR, but he was happy to give countless drubbings to Rushdie — by this point lying low in the Welsh Marches somewhere, under constant threat of death, as his publishers filled their offices with sniffer dogs and bomb-detection machinery. “Again and again, it has been within his power to save the faces of his publishers,” wrote le Carré, “and with dignity, withdraw his book until a calmer time has come. It seems to me he has nothing to prove but his own insensitivity.” Rushdie, he thought, was “impertinent” to believe that those who wrote literature had special claims to free speech.

Unlike the Right, which preferred to giggle in the darkness, le Carré had located the actual terrain where the battle over The Satanic Verses was being contested. This was about writerly freedoms. To tell stories. Nothing was padlocked. Any material could be nicked; to be mocked, worshipped, shredded, then picked up again, whenever you wanted to. The writer had the special privilege, those on Rushdie’s side argued, to be a dogmatician or a doubter. The point was that nobody told them which one to be. “Man was a storytelling animal,” Rushdie writes in Joseph Anton. “The story was his birthright, and nobody could take it away.”

Well, actually they could. Before Friday, the fires around Rushdie appeared subdued. The year was 2022. He believed he was safe. His prophecies about the decline of free speech were indulged but ignored. He had become a designer handbag novelist, whose fiction critics could safely attack again. He was in the uneasy position of being an anti-fundamentalist who said there were fundamental intellectual values to uphold.

Once he was stabbed 15 times, a season of fine words began. There was Yasmin Alibhai-Brown on Twitter, hoping to see Rushdie pull through. There was Iranian Press Television’s own Jeremy Corbyn, offering solidarity. A contest was held: who would be the last politician to wish Rushdie well? (It was nearly Keir Starmer.) Fearing his death, and perhaps fearing that anyone with an internet connection could look up their behaviour during the initial rages of the fatwa, the Anglosphere jangled with weighty tributes to Rushdie.

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But the finest words of all, demonstrating how morbid it all was, came from a man dead for 10 years. In the first rounds of the fatwa, Christopher Hitchens had tirelessly stumped for Rushdie. Now, in this latest, unexpected round, Hitchens was summoned from his grave. All weekend, videos of him defending Rushdie were shared, videos where Hitchens spoke with an unimaginable frankness, videos where he spoke with more force, more intelligence, and more authority than anybody alive today.

In Joseph Anton, Rushdie writes that even his own defences of free speech had started to sound “stale in his own ears”. Something curdled in the 2010s. While he has escaped with his life long enough to become truly, especially bored of the fatwa, he begins to realise that the cause he is fighting for, the principle he embodies, is in decay. “Something new was happening here: the growth of a new intolerance. It was spreading across the surface of the earth, but nobody wanted to know.” What was happening? A simple, popular idea: if the collective felt upset, it had the right to silence the individual. This is what countless controversies, from Charlie Hebdo to The Lady of Heaven, scratching away in the background, proved. Authors like Peter Carey, who defended Rushdie in the Nineties, would not defend Charlie Hebdo in 2015, not weeks after the cartoonists had been slaughtered in their offices.

The world had turned. The idea had been internalised. It had spread far and wide, beyond religion, beyond anything Khomeini could have imagined, freakishly stretching and reaching into every cultural nook. The principle had a language: “It isn’t worth the fuss; it’s not a good look; it won’t play well.” Easier to say, as the Associate Editor of the Independent did a few years ago, that Rushdie’s “silly, childish” book “should be banned under today’s anti-hate legislation”. Who wants a brick through the window, a death threat, a calumny, all that damage to your reputation? Write out of turn and you get what you deserve. People felt this was justice, not cowardice. This is what Gilroy, le Carré, and Berger were getting at. They realised first that poets were not “the unacknowledged legislators of the world”. Poets were fair game, like everyone else. They realised, in fact, that most people do not like freedom of speech very much. Most people — and that includes most writers — will not risk being banished to Siberia.

“Good men would give in to fear and call it respect,” Rushdie predicted in Joseph Anton. “Good men would commit intellectual suicide and call it peace.” He was right. Martin Amis had worried about Salman Rushdie. What wasn’t so clear that morning in 1989 was how much further than Rushdie the culture of his fatwa would extend.

***

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And that’s why people worry about Prince Charles. Our future king threatens to be a politically active monarch. “I simply can’t see what I see and do nothing about it. I could not live with myself,” he told his biographer, Jonathan Dimbleby. The Black Spider Memos were the most worrying of his interventions to date; they revealed him successfully pestering ministers for changes in policy and spending. It is impossible to imagine the Queen sending 27 notes to ministers in just over a year asking for, among other things, specific items of defence expenditure. Perhaps Dimbleby is right to say, “a quiet constitutional revolution is afoot.”

And maybe that’s no bad thing. The last monarch to have a major influence over modern politics staged a few vital interventions. As Jane Ridley, author of a new biography of George V, told me: “George’s role was not to change things politically, but to react to events and crises, which he did with aplomb. He enabled the appointment of prime ministers at times when, through war or through political realignment, the party system was not functioning to produce agreed candidates.”

The political system has matured and stabilised since then. But it’s certainly showing its age now. It’s not unreasonable to imagine that, in the coming years, it will become so dysfunctional that a monarch must stick his nose in. And if he is obliged to be a more political monarch than his mother — long may she live — Charles ought to read Ridley’s account of his great-grandfather’s life, which provides a blueprint for how a monarch might effectively and acceptably involve himself in politics.

But it could also help Charles learn from his great-grandfather’s mistakes. For one thing, he needs to keep his voice down. George was notorious for blurting out his country-squire opinions. (“Of course you said it, George,” his wife, Queen Mary, admonishes him at one point, “we all heard you.”) Neutrality did not come naturally. He was so obviously a Tory. Just after he became king, when the Liberal Party was in power, he told the Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, “I don’t know how you can go on serving that damned fellow Lloyd George.” These ministers weren’t exactly thrilled to be working with a rude, reactionary king who they thought was “a dunderhead”. Especially because the nation was in the middle of a constitutional crisis.

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The House of Lords had voted down a budget for the first time in centuries, and the Liberal government was threatening to neuter their lordships with the Parliament Bill, which would abolish the Lords’ veto of legislation. The Liberals prevailed — by manipulating the naïve new king. The PM, Asquith, bounced George V into a promise to create hundreds of new peers to vote through the Parliament Bill, if it didn’t get through the first time, by threatening a “King and Peers vs The People election”. George’s private secretary, Knollys, advised the king to make the promise — having not told him that if the Liberals resigned, the Tories would take over, avoiding the threatened election. (Knollys was rightly sacked for this low-grade duplicity.)

When the bill went to the Lords, it looked like Tory peers would defeat it. George couldn’t let that happen. If the Tory peers voted the Bill down, he would have to make good on his promise. And a supposedly neutral constitutional monarch would be in terrible trouble if he created hundreds of peers to favour one party over another. Talk about interfering.

His other private secretary, Lord Stamfordham, sprang to action. Ridley has been much praised for rescuing George from his reputation as a dullard. She ought to be celebrated, too, as a political historian: she has discovered that Stamfordham asked the Archbishop of Canterbury to get the bishops in the Lords to vote for the bill. A former Viceroy of India was summoned from Scotland to do the same. Lord St Aldwyn was “encouraged” to vote the right way, while Lord Rosebery was outright asked to do so. He did — and took 20 others into the lobby with him. The bill passed by 17 votes. There we have it: the palace’s interventions were decisive in a parliamentary vote.

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This is, supposedly, unthinkable. So strict is the non-interference principle, the monarch isn’t even allowed to go into the House of Commons, let alone have their flunkies tip the balance in a legislative vote. Imagine the uproar if it was revealed that Charles had persuaded enough of his aristocratic friends to squeeze a bill through Parliament. But George was dragged into politics by Asquith, and if the palace hadn’t interfered in the vote, he’d have ended up doing something even worse: making a load of new lords. Charles’s second lesson, then, is to keep out of things unless strictly necessary.

This was sharp work, especially from Stamfordham, one of the many supporting characters expertly handled by Ridley, who makes the page fizz, bristle, and shuffle with figures like the fantastically waspish Lady Geraldine Somerset, the heart-breaking Prince John, and the blinking but quietly effective Royal Librarian, Owen Morshead (you can practically hear him cough politely). Stamfordham is the best of them though: the king’s loyal retainer, darting around London, corralling politicians and producing clear, effective memos that kept the king better informed than his ministers. Like Jeeves, he always appears at the right moment with a solution to George’s woes.

Stamfordham’s advice kept George on the right side of the constitution. During the Irish Home Rule crisis, George drafted a crude letter threatening to veto a bill unless it was put to the electorate — something no monarch has done since 1708. The accepted wisdom is that the royal veto no longer exists. But Vernon Bogdanor, the constitutional expert, has said that the use of the veto in similar situations remains an open question. Imagine Parliament sent Charles III a bill to abolish civil liberties. We might well prefer him to copy his great-grandfather’s threatened intervention than his mother’s scrupulous impartiality.

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It was the very real threat of civil war in Ireland — a threat the complacent Asquith met with endless rounds of champagne and bridge — that drove George to meddle. Sounding a lot like Charles in conversation with Dimbleby, he wrote to Asquith in 1914, “I cannot help feeling that the government is drifting and taking me with it.” And without George, Ulster might have been bloodier: he organised a non-partisan conference, for instance, and told Bonar Law, the Tory leader, to restrain his practically seditious rhetoric — which is more than we expect of the Queen, but less than we might get from Charles.

Although he liked to flex his fading prerogative — like when he outrageously tried to refuse Lloyd George an election in 1918 — George turned his role into an enabling one. When he was asked to open the new Parliament in Belfast, he insisted on giving a speech in favour of peace. The speech opened the way for talks, proposed by that quiet hero Lord Stamfordham, leading to the Anglo-Irish treaty. The palace were arbitrators, not partisans.

It took the same role when Bonar Law resigned as prime minister in 1923, he was too ill to nominate a successor. Commotion ensued. The choice was between the unknown Stanley Baldwin and the experienced Lord Curzon. Curzon was the obvious choice to almost everyone, especially himself. But he was a peer. And it was increasingly obvious that having a lord for PM was unacceptable in the new age of democracy. The Conservative party chairman was inundated with letters for Baldwin, but it took a royal intervention to sort out the kerfuffle. George, in consultation with the party’s biggest actors — including Balfour and Salisbury — picked Stanley.

Nowadays, the Queen waits for the party to appoint a leader, taking a purely ceremonial role (imagine if she’d weighed in on the choice between Boris and Hunt). But the systems we use for selecting leaders will be challenged on day. Charles might have to do what George did and make a neutral intervention to keep the system running. We might be grateful.

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But Charles will have to learn to moderate himself. Ridley’s portrait is a of a deeply Tory, reactionary man, who learned from experience to rise above politics and intervene without prejudice. The same king who bellowed at a footman who dropped a tray, “That’s right, break up the bloody palace!”, sharply admonished a coal rich aristocrat who was bad mouthing the unions to “try living on their wages before judging the strikes.” When the government wanted to stop banks paying Russian money to unions during the General Strike, George intervened, furious at this attempt to “touch the pockets” of strikers. He had come a long way since the 1911 railway strike, when he wrote to Asquith proposing legislation to stop strikes spreading. At that point, he and Mary were worried about “encouraging socialism… and pandering to the Labour party”. Like our Queen, he moved with the times.

Unlike previous biographers, Ridley takes no superior pleasure in painting George as a philistine. She combines a historian’s rigour with even-handed admiration for George’s gruff and prickly character. He wasn’t cultured or metropolitan, but he well understood the way the country was changing and how politics needed to follow, despite the fact that he didn’t appreciate Cezanne.

It’s not uncommon for people to mock Charles, either. He’s no philistine, but he is a crank. There may be more acceptance of his views, but like George he seems to belong to another world. While the Queen is timeless, Charles is old-fashioned. Where she is restrained, he is amateurishly enthusiastic, passionately gathering causes. He isn’t known for his temper (George was almost constantly in a foul mood), but he has the air of being high maintenance. Let’s hope he finds himself a courtier as good Lord Stamfordham.

What might be more important, though, is Camilla. George’s Queen, the redoubtable Mary, has, until now, been undervalued as an effective consort; but Ridley shows her at George’s side, an essential part of the process. “George always used to tell me everything first”, Mary said as a dowager. If Charles has to be a politically active monarch, his success may well rely on his famously enduring bond with Camilla.

Back then Diana — always channeling the popular mood — called him “the boy wonder”, “killer Wales”, and “the great white hope”. She laughed at his medals; she said he’d never succeed his mother. When he tried to pray before bedtime, she’d hit him on the head, and shriek. This was the man’s wife. Imagine what Kelvin Mackenzie’s Sun was saying about him.

Not just the Sun in the Eighties. In more recent times, Charles has been described as a prat, a terrible prat, a dangerous prat, ill-advised, idiotic, the “puppet of sinister gurus”, dismal, a “sower of division and contention”, and “way too grand” — and that’s one article in the Spectator.

Foreigners found this legal national blood sport irresistible too. They joined the hunt. Charles, chuckled a New York Times editorial in 1994, existed for the world’s “amusement”. Perhaps the blackest day for him that year was when the Italian press reduced all those titles to… “Il Tampaccino”. Being embarrassed for the primitivity of your sexploits by a nation that invented a sophisticated cinematic genre called ‘commedia sexy all’italiana’ would have pushed lesser Royalty over the edge. Not the heir apparent. Nor England. Letting the world ridicule our Prince was the one post-war export drive that actually seemed to work.

Other Royal Charlies had it better, didn’t they? A swift release from his troubles on the scaffold. A convenient hiding place in an oak tree. Ours has endured life as a dangling, slow-twirling, impossible to miss piñata. It would be human to feel sorry for him, if he didn’t feel so sorry for himself.

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Even his mother baited him. “Charles is hopeless” was her crushing verdict. “Not all the water in the rough rude sea can wash the balm from an anointed king,” Shakespeare makes Richard II claim. Well, with Charles, the rough sea tried. And tried.

Now that sea is washing out at long last. Finally, Charles is respected, admired, and — most shockingly of all — listened to. His balm is pristine again. It’s not the crown he possesses. Rather it’s an apparently merited authority, derived less from his birthright than from the time-weathered correctness of his views on composting.

This week, whether addressing the G20 in Rome, or handshaking dignitaries at COP26, the Prince has been accorded the kind of fulsome respect that he lavishes on the plants at Highgrove. A sedulous, loving attention. Why?

Since 1970 the Prince has issued warnings about climate change. Unlike his jet-age father, he had no faith in a technological future. He rhapsodised about bees and gazed into hedges. He wanted to protect the elephants and conserve the Botswana Bushmen, seeing them in approximately the same way. He experimented with vegetarian diets when the only other person in beef-dripping England to do so was Morrissey. “At the beginning everyone thought he was crackers… They wrote him off completely,” his biographer Penny Junor told the Washington Post. “He’s been saying these things for 50 years, but the world has caught up to Charles hasn’t it? He’s certainly not a crank.” Even Donald Trump admitted a few years ago that he “totally listened” to Prince Charles’s eco-views.

While he waited for his mother to abdicate, Charles yearned to do the right thing. He did this through thoughts, not actions. Winston Churchill told the Queen in a letter that Charles, at the age of two, was “young to think so much”. At a luncheon, Edwina Mountbatten told the eight-year-old Charles that he shouldn’t pluck the stalks out of strawberries. He should hoist the fruit up by the stems and roll them in sugar. Moments later his cousin Pamela Hicks observed that “the poor child was trying to put all the stems back on. That was so sad.” Charles’s entire outlook can be reduced to this desire to put stalks back on strawberries. “All I want to do,” he once dolefully told Jonathan Dimbleby, “is to help other people.”

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He believed this desire to save and serve was sharpened on the grindstone of reality, rather than the unintended consequence of an artificial upbringing. “I have come to realise,” he wrote in 2002, “that my entire life has been so far motivated by a desire to heal — to heal the dismembered landscape and the poisoned soul; the cruelly shattered townscape, where harmony has been replaced by cacophony; to heal the divisions between intuitive and rational thought, between mind and body, and soul, so that the temple of our humanity can once again be lit by a sacred flame.” Modernity could be escaped and replaced with… him, in a temple, lighting a flame. More alluring, I suppose, than cutting the ribbon on yet another community centre.

On and on he went like this for decades. The self-image was radical: Red Shelley in an Anderson & Sheppard blazer. He referred to himself, his ex-private secretary Mark Bolland said, “as a ‘dissident’ working against the prevailing political consensus”. All that dissent was collected inside a two-volume, 1,012-page treasury of speeches and remarks, retailing for over £320, illustrated with his own watercolours, and bound in stiff bottle green buckram, published in 2015. These heavy volumes appear designed to trouble the shelves of libraries, not their readers. What they reveal, once multiple introductions, glosses, prefaces, preludials, throat-clearings, and fanfares have been macheted through, is a vehement man hostile to the world as it is.

Charles never changes. But the world always does. When he was born in 1948, wars and revolutions had levelled everything. There was a ‘Great Compression’; inequality was suppressed, by accident, bloodletting, and design. For 30 years there were high taxes, good novels, middle-class successes, and an operational meritocracy.

By the Nineties, Tory politicians in Britain could dream of a “classless” society. Charles was most-lambasted in this midlife period, not merely because of the “War of the Waleses”, but because this socially democratic mood made the monarchy itself look ridiculous. “Who knows what fate will produce?” Diana said, ominously, at the time.

Fate dispatched her, then produced a vastly more unequal world. Meritocracy calcified into an aristocracy. It treats national and international institutions as outdoor relief for its favoured families. After Iraq, the financial crisis, and 2016, this elite, viewed from below, began to look like an Ancien Régime. With their fabulous wealth, estates, yachts, villas, servants, and elaborate sex lives, this class resembles the Windsors, just with stronger chins.

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Charles looks at ease with them all. Being admired by Jeff Bezos; being hailed by the Prime Minister as a “prophet without honour”. Hanging out with Leonardo DiCaprio. Drinking with Bill Gates, whose ratio of wealth to the average US citizen is roughly the same as the richest Roman aristocrats to the plebs in 400 AD. How right it looked. Those who have taken the glitziest prizes from industrial civilisation now, like Charles, believe it is sick.

So the dissident Prince is accepted at last. A fairytale to replace the old one, about the Princess dying in a tunnel. He believed he had waged a guerrilla war against scientific expertise all his life. Now it agrees with him about hedges and bees, so he gives it his blessing. Typically, his victory is Pyrrhic. All it has taken for Charles to be vindicated is the prospect of the near-term extinction of the human race.

In the Metamorphoses, the greatest anthology of classical myth ever written, the Roman poet told of Actaeon, a hunter who inadvertently stumbled upon Diana as she was bathing. The goddess, outraged that a mortal had seen her naked, turned the intruder into a stag. His own hounds then pursued him, dragged him down, and tore him to pieces. “Only once the life had left his mangled flesh, so it is said, was the rage of the goddess finally slaked.”

Today Princess Diana would have turned 60. What life she might have gone on to live had she not died trying to escape the photographers who, like a pack of hounds, pursued her into the Pont de l’Alma tunnel that fateful night in Paris 24 years ago? It is impossible to know, of course. One thing, however, is clear. The car crash that killed Diana at the age of 36 brought her immortality. It transmuted her once and for all into legend. Just as the break-up of the Beatles in 1970 set the seal on their status as the ultimate icons of the 60s, so did Diana’s untimely death ensure that she would ever afterwards be remembered as the archetype of a beautiful princess.

The parabola of a story, if it is to rank as great, requires a perfect ending. The ending of Diana’s story — so surprising, so unsurprising — seemed scripted to such a flawless degree that it has generated an entire multitude of conspiracy theories. Yet the attempt to blame “dark forces” for the car crash, to pin the blame on MI6, or Prince Charles, or Prince Philip, is really only a displacement strategy. We all of us knew in our hearts, when the news came through from Paris, who the guilty people were. We — the global public, hungry for every last sensational story, every last prurient snap — were the ones who had driven her to her death. Actaeon had never intended to intrude on Diana’s privacy. We, by contrast, had no such excuse.

“And it seems to me you lived your life like a candle in the wind.” It was a measure of Diana’s star quality that she could be compared at her funeral to more than one kind of goddess. Elton John, whose musical tribute to her directly preceded the Earl Spencer’s eulogy, sang lines that originally had been written to commemorate Marilyn Monroe. Everyone who listened to him perform at the funeral in Westminster Abbey knew this. Palimpsest-like, the two versions of the song co-existed. The ghost of one set of lyrics haunted the other. “Even when you died,” Elton had originally sung, “Oh the press still hounded you.”

As a superstar himself, he felt a natural sympathy for a woman plagued and tormented by journalists. Even so – unlike Diana, whom he had known well – Marilyn had been a stranger to him. He was just a kid, after all, when her candle burned out. He sang about her, not as a friend, but as a worshipper at the shrine of her celebrity, one of the numberless multitudes of her fans, a young man in the 22nd row. In 1973, when the song was recorded, Marilyn had been dead for over a decade.

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She had come, in that time, to serve as the paradigm of a peculiarly modern form of immortality: the celebrity cut off in her prime. Bernie Taupin, Elton John’s long-term collaborator, had been inspired to write “Candle in the Wind” after hearing the phrase applied to Janis Joplin. Aligned at her funeral with the gods of ancient Greece, Diana was aligned as well with more recent deities: James Dean, Montgomery Clift, Jim Morrison. In death, she had come to possess many different shades of immortality.

Yet if it was, in a Christian place of worship, startling, perhaps, to be informed that Diana’s name had appeared in the heavens, and that her footsteps, like some guardian spirit of the landscape, would always fall along England’s greenest hills, that did not render Elton’s song inappropriate to its location. Diana, unlike Marilyn, had married into the world’s most celebrated royal family. The tombs of her in-laws stood everywhere in Westminster Abbey. Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen, had been married to England. Diana had been the country’s rose. Here, then, was yet a further burnishing of her myth. The Princess of Wales was hedged about by a mystique that did not derive solely from fairy stories.

A thousand years and more before her birth, a sister of England’s first king, Athelstan, had travelled to Germany, there to marry Otto, the heir to the Saxon throne. Eadgyth, according to one admiring witness, was a woman “of pure noble countenance, graceful character and truly royal appearance.” She provided, at the court of her hairy and martial husband, a touch of feminine glamour. Famously beautiful, she was renowned as well for her compassion and her concern for the wretched. When she died, at the tender age of 36, she was mourned across the whole of Germany, and commemorated as the people’s princess.

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Few today, of course, remember Eadgyth. No one watched her wedding on television; no one splashed her photo on the cover of a magazine. Yet the potency of Diana’s fame was precisely that it had a venerable as well as a contemporary cast, and was no less rooted in the traditions of Christian monarchy than it was in the fashions of pop culture. Eadgyth stood at the head of a long line of queens and princesses in medieval Europe who served their people as counterweights to the ideals of masculine royalty: as paradigms of mercy, compassion, care.

Eadgyth was not alone in being hailed by her subjects as a saint. Holiest of all royal women, perhaps, was Elizabeth, a descendant of Hungary’s first Christian king who, in 1221, married the ruler of Thuringia. She tended to the sick; treated their wounds; mopped up the mucus and saliva from their faces. When she died at the age of 24, no one doubted that she belonged to heaven. Proof of this was manifest in the numerous miracles reported from her tomb. A woman who had stuck a pea in her ear when she was a young girl regained her hearing; numerous hunchbacks were healed. To this day, Elizabeth of Hungary is revered by Catholics as a model of charity and compassion. Unlike Eadgyth, she continues to be commemorated as a saint.

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Diana, of course, was no saint. Her own brother, in his funeral address, acknowledged as much. She died, after all, in the back of a car alongside her lover. Yet her affairs, her fallibilities, her vulnerabilities only led to her being the more loved. This would not have been the case had she been merely a fashion icon. Medieval hagiographers had been deeply moved by the spectacle of royal women such as Elizabeth of Hungary tending to the sores of lepers in their expensive jewellery and finest robes. Diana’s admirers, when they saw her shaking hands with AIDS sufferers, were touched and inspired in a similar way. Dread of what tabloids called the “gay plague” ran deep in the Eighties. The role played by Diana in combatting the taboos surrounding it had required courage as well as compassion. When Elton, performing his threnody in Westminster Abbey, sang of how she had “whispered to those in pain,” he did so from the heart.

In the Middle Ages, the Matter of Britain was the story of King Arthur and the Round Table. Today, thanks to the inherent drama of the narrative, amplified and repackaged as it has been by The Crown, it is the story of Princess Diana. That there were many who found her shallow and manipulative, and who regret the loss of nation self-control that her death seemed to prompt, makes no difference to the potency of her renown. Myths are not bound by the rules that trammel mere mortals. Diana’s candle burned out long before her legend will.

This is supposedly to do with the country’s history of serfdom, collective ownership and general misery and oppression. Even before Communism, life in rural Russia was very communal, and late tsarist attempts to introduce private ownership into the Russian village failed miserably. This, combined with the country’s hugely stratified social hierarchy, meant that most Russians had little chance of making it rich. When they did, their neighbours resented it and assumed that they must have done something nefarious and unmerited. Why should Ivan win a million when I’m stuck here?

In America, by contrast, audiences whoop and cheer when Hank or Chuck gets the question right because, even if they’re poor, they think that anyone can make it and maybe they will too. Historically, it’s not untrue.

The Russian view of other people’s financial happiness has its equivalent in the West today with other people’s romantic and sexual happiness. It’s a phenomenon I call “toxic validation”, because the more people make the wrong decisions in their life, the more the audience cheers.

It’s a very modern phenomenon because it’s only recently that we have seen the development of a sort of ambiguous class between celebrities and “civilians”; influencers with a medium-sized social media following who build a relationship with their audience so intimate that they one day might even control aspects of their lives.

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But even people who are not influencers still routinely go online for life advice, and the life advice they receive is invariably terrible. The most popular responses will always be the worst, but more toxic still is the way that people receive validation through social media engagement.

Here, the most popular lifestyle declarations, in terms of retweets and likes, are almost always the most disastrous. They’re the ones where people tweet about breaking off workable romantic relationships over quite minor problems; ending a relationship with a family member over politics; pursuing a conflict with employers that don’t need to be pursued; even self-mutilation — all while being encouraged, praised and applauded by thousands of people.

In many cases, the validation has a political aspect, in particular with regard to sex-positivity: such as when an exploitative narcissist uses ideology to undermine his girlfriend’s natural reluctance, and she tweets “Now he’s introduced me into a polyamorous relationship and although I felt uncomfortable at first I’m doing the right thing and am so happy!” Right?

The correct answer – the American audience answer – is “WRONG! Ditch him!” The social media applauders tell people quite the opposite:  obviously not what you’d advise a loved one.

But while ideology plays some part in this bad advice, the main problem is that these sites give people an audience, and audiences rarely have our best interests at heart; sometimes they are swayed by fashion and sometimes they are just bored and want drama.

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And this danger of toxic validation also applies to genuine, high level celebrities, too, especially if political fashion is involved. Just weeks after his Oprah interview, in which he basically denounced his family as racist, Prince Harry was at it again, talking about his upbringing: “I don’t think we should be pointing the finger or blaming anybody… but certainly when it comes to parenting, if I’ve experienced some form of pain or suffering because of the pain or suffering that perhaps my father or my parents had suffered, I’m going to make sure I break that cycle so that I don’t pass it on, basically.”

Prince Harry was obviously referencing the fate of his mother, but her relationship with the media was far more like that of predator and prey, although also symbiotic; the son, instead, receives toxic validation from sections of the commentariat for opening up, for tackling important mental health issues, for being modern.

“You know what, that happened to me, I’m going to make sure that doesn’t happen to you,” he said of his own troubled relationship with his parents. And he’s of course right, I’m sure. It wasn’t a hugely loving environment, but then the royal family isn’t exactly famous for the whole lovey-dovey thing.

Charles’s own parents went off on a royal tour of North America when he was three and upon their return at Euston a camera caught the young Queen speaking to various family members before briefly patting her son on the head as an afterthought. There is no question that a lack of parental affection continues to hurt right into adulthood, but is Harry benefiting from the validation he gets here? The wisest advice anyone could give him would be to avoid the media as much as possible, never say anything about his relationship with his family, not mention political subjects and instead concentrate on uncontroversial good causes. Every time he does any of those things, he gets validation and becomes slightly worse off; more unpopular, more divisive, less likely to rebuild happy relationships, more likely to feel guilt and self-disgust later in life.

And yet he’s cheered on by an audience that dislikes the royal family, that dislikes the sort of people who are anti-Meghan and who believe public displays of inner turmoil are in society’s best interests. I doubt they are, but they certainly aren’t in Prince Harry’s interests — this is a Russian audience voting, not an American one.

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So why do people validate other’s destructive lifestyles? One reason might be a need for chaos, but another is probably the need to rationalise their own life decisions. This is why, I suspect, so much bad advice is given out by journalists and social commentators — articulate, intelligent people who are often very bad at making life choices, and have been since the days of Rousseau and Paine.

Rousseau wrote a sort-of lifestyle guide to raising children while sending his own poor children to certain death in an orphanage; Paine wrote two of the most influential tracts on human affairs while pissing away his own life on drink. Journalists tend to have chaotic personal lives filled with debt, disastrous relationships and a desperate need for popularity, which is why you should never let them near the levers of power.

And people living distinctive lifestyles feel the instinctive urge to evangelise for that lifestyle, to gather cultural support around it, to encourage others to do the same. No one ever says: “I’ve decided I’m now X or doing Y or living with Z but I don’t particularly want to talk about it and don’t expect anyone else to go along with it.”

In the marketplace of cultural ideas everyone is selling, creating a competition in which values are inevitably changing rapidly. When social norms are ambiguous and up for grabs toxic validation can only flourish, because in the game of life no one is entirely sure what the right answer is to anything. Every question is worth £32,000 and the audience doesn’t necessarily want you to win.

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To return to Russia’s cheery history, after the revolution broke out, the Bolsheviks enacted the first great sexual revolution of the 20^th century. Determined to break the bonds of family, Russia’s rulers encouraged young Communists to publicly denounce family members for opposing the regime, to the approval of their peers and society’s new elites. This same thing happened in Mao’s China, where they were lauded with approval for their fervour in this time of revolutionary moral uncertainty.

Later, when it all sank in, the same people were overcome with guilt, shame and horror at what they had done. They had made a terrible choice. But then people, especially the young, seek validation from the most influential and powerful in society, not from the wisest, or those with their best interests at heart.

The Bolsheviks wanted children to turn against their family members because they saw the family as a rival to state power, but the family was also the source of common sense and folklore, the cumulative wisdom of the ages. It is a rival source of affection, and a genuine one, as Christopher Lasch called it, “a haven in a heartless world”. And it really can be a heartless world — which makes it all the sadder that the toxic validators cheer when a young man denounces his own.

Most of us undertake thorough and detailed research when buying, say, an electric toothbrush. But when it comes to our next head of state, we don’t need to ask any questions because we already know the answer: it’s him with the ears. Dust off the crown and fetch Welby.

Sheer randomness of personnel is what makes monarchy so great. You can end up with a thug, a mystic, a gambler or, as we will eventually, a bloke who genuinely believes he can talk to plants. Greatness can be dunked into the cesspit at any moment. Royalty endures in Britain, not merely because of the pageantry, or the beauty, or its great ennobling truth, but because of its brutal, hilarious irrationality.

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Republicans make the mistake of thinking the monarch rules over her subjects, when in fact she is a form of entertainment put on for her subjects, like those hardworking bears that ride motorcycles at the Moscow State Circus.

Our Royals almost understand this. “I’m not very good at being a performing monkey,” Prince Charles sadly admitted to Jonathan Dimbleby in 1994, unaware that his utter discomfort is precisely what makes him such a consistent amusement.

The monarch, her family, their flunkies, valets, chauffeurs, gardeners, manicurists, toadies, lovers, bodyguards, back-up toadies and piss-pot holders — they’re our subjects. They are more or less down on their knees at this point, existing for the increase, encouragement and maintenance of scandal, gossip and jokes. (Yes: they do fine things for charity, too.) Today’s Cromwells are usually American, and like all Republicans they fail to grasp a simple truth about the monarchy: why overthrow it when it bloodlessly overthrows itself every 25 years or so? The House of Windsor was built on a cliff edge — which is exactly where we want it.

This latest Windsorian plunge off the precipice is presented, depending on the sympathies of the storyteller, as either yet another family’s failure to assimilate an outsider, or a case of an outsider undermining that family’s domestic bliss. She stole our prince! Meghan in this version is a truculent and unsparing monster, rather than a garden-variety social climber, who, Godzilla-like, trashes our Royal city.

It is a flattering tale, in which neither the public’s gluttonous appetite for drama, Harry, nor our Crown Prince shoulders much of the blame for what’s happened. I’m not convinced that Meghan — who appears to be thoroughly consumed by a years-old argument about dresses with the Duchess of Cambridge — is really in the driving seat here. Instead, it is surely Harry in the lead; it was only when he appeared that Monday’s interview became interesting. Meghan was his convenient excuse, his getaway car, his ejector pod — in the same way that a nebulous accusation of racism is Meghan’s way of explaining why the Windsors disliked her. Both of them wanted to go. But why?

Well, it seems clear to me that Prince Harry hates his father very deeply. Watch again that moment when he says Charles stopped taking his calls. Harry’s eyes are so narrow they could be covered with a single penny. If this were the 14^th century, he would be in France right now, plotting his revenge, doggedly raising an army, ready to sail back to England to seize the throne, violently torture Piers Morgan, and place the entire editorial staff of the Daily Mail in a gibbet. Alas, the 14^th century is over, so Harry’s revenge is an over-bathroomed mansion in Beverly Hills and a maximum-damage television spectacular.

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Surely it is oedipal fury that made Harry do this, rather than the press or racism, as he claims. How else are we to explain their move to America, where there is no racism whatsoever, and to Hollywood in particular, where, as far as I can gather, no journalists or photographers have ever been seen?

Not that much will change for them. Harry will still smile when he doesn’t feel like smiling. He will still have to mouth phrases he doesn’t understand at interminable functions. The lost Prince will continue to press through crowds of frozen faces in dire rooms, still less free to bitch and scold than the poorest Laotian peanut farmer. In short, he will have escaped into another effigy of himself. The only thing that must make it worthwhile is the knowledge that he has humiliated his father, the man who forced him to walk behind his mother’s coffin.

The roots of Harry’s rage are, however, far less important than the inevitability of such bitter feuding among our Royals. It has all happened before, and will happen again; this pair of keys comes with the property. The Oedipal skirmishing of the Hanoverians, for instance, lasted for more than a century. George I hated his eldest son, the future George II, who hated him right back. George II hated his eldest son Frederick, whose hatred for his father was only interrupted by a fatal cricket accident (well, perhaps). George III’s eldest despised his father so greatly that… you can see the picture here. The inhuman requirements of monarchical life — Virginia Woolf once compared being a royal to living like a single ant “struggling with a pebble” — make bitter squabbling unavoidable.

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Even so, the griefs and frustrations and embarrassments of Charles do seem like they will stand out in the annals. Even the rare notes of sympathy he receives — such as this Washington Post column by Ben Judah — are fairly worthless. Charles, Judah writes, is not a villain. The Prince has been right about many great issues of the day. He thought the Iraq War was a bad idea. He was a green before it was trendy. Plus, Charles is broad-minded — he gives diplomatic speeches to worthy Europeans every now and then. (Judah forgets one of Charles’s key strengths: he looks authentically comfortable holding a pint of beer — once the kind of trait that swung general elections, before we discovered the joy of calling our political enemies racist.)

The problem with all this is that it does not matter if Charles is “right” about organic farming or interfaith dialogue or anything else. Nobody cares what Charles thinks — he was born to be a symbol, not a newspaper columnist.

As a father and a husband (the first time around), it is fair to say that Charles failed. Standing behind the curtains of history for decades, with all his charitable toiling undone by the simple phrase “God forbid, a Tampax”, has not left us with a dynamic, prudent Crown Prince who is capable of holding his family together. “Nobody knows,” he once moaned, “what utter hell it is to be the Prince of Wales.”

But being put through utter hell is exactly what the public wants from him, and all the rest of them, as this week has shown. Monarchy does not survive on laws and abstractions. The unfair truth is that as long as the Windsors dish up an unpleasant family disaster every generation or so, they will endure. The Firm will keep winning, even when it’s losing. That’s why Charles, when he at last dusts off the crown, will be thinking not the resentments of his son, or the cruel attentions of his subjects, but of his face on the coins.

Rabbi Sacks’s cancer overtook him quickly. It was only a few weeks ago that his office announced he was unwell. And many even in the Jewish community were unaware quite how poorly he was. In many ways, Jonathan Sacks was an intensely shy and private man. A scholar, a man of faith, a family man, with great personal warmth, a twinkle in his eye, and a very gentle yet penetrating sense of humour — but you probably wouldn’t call him emotionally demonstrative.

For a public figure, there was a deep reserve about him, which makes it all the more remarkable that he was able to communicate as directly and passionately as he did. His lush, resonant baritone voice made him a natural broadcaster, but it was his ideas and his way with words that enabled him to talk so directly into many people’s lives, touching things that made a difference to them whether Jewish or not. He was a serious person in the very best sense of that word. He took his responsibilities seriously: “To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God” as the prophet Micah put it. He will be remembered as one of the greatest Chief Rabbis this country has ever known.

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The last time I saw him was at Shabbat dinner in Golders Green, just before the first lockdown began. We drank whisky, we chatted about theology, we sang loudly, thumping the table with delight. He was, of course, typically urbane and erudite. But he also danced about and played with my young boys crawling under the table, who are themselves Jews but with a Christian father. Taking the funeral in a chilly north London cemetery yesterday afternoon, Rabbi Harvey Belovski, the senior Rabbi at the Golders Green synagogue (where Rabbi Sacks had made his spiritual home for the last seven years) made reference to that evening, which he had hosted. It was, Rabbi Belovski suggested in his eulogy, evidence of Rabbi Sacks’s remarkable ability to reach out to those on the edge of Jewish life, indeed even to those beyond it, not only to make them feel personally valued but also to make them feel included in the great enterprise of connecting to the divine.

This inclusiveness did not always win him friends within the more conservative parts of the Jewish community. “Chief Rabbi to the gentiles” was how some unkindly put it. Indeed, he went to a Church of England school and he didn’t come from a long line of distinguished Rabbis like many of his predecessors. He was an East End boy and the first in his family to go to university.

Throughout his tenure as Chief Rabbi, he had the unenviable task of providing a point of focus for a very divergent family of communities, some deeply conservative, some liberal. The fact that he didn’t please all of the people all of the time was more an indication of the diverse nature of Anglo-Jewry than of his own failings. He didn’t attend the popular Reform Rabbi Hugo Gryn’s funeral, for which he was attacked. He did attend his memorial service, for which he was also attacked. He couldn’t win.

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To many of us outside the Jewish community, he was the familiar voice on Thought for the Day who could read out the telephone directory and make it sound profound. His voice was calming, steady, resonant with purpose. And what he said was so full of hope. We need a new social settlement, he argued in his last book. One based on the priority of the “we” over the “I”. In Jewish theological terms, what we need is a covenantal relationship with each other, not just a legal contract based on our contractual obligations. And he was excoriating towards the anti-Semitism, the oldest hatred, that had been allowed to develop in the Labour Party. He also believed that Christian-Jewish relations in Britain are the best in the world.

But despite his willingness to speak into contemporary concerns, all of what he said was grounded in a very intense personal relationship with God. It ran through him like the words in a stick of Blackpool rock. And here, I think, we get to the most remarkable thing about Rabbi Sacks as a religious leader: he was not a man who threw around cheap certainty. He did theology without any of the sort of intellectual defensiveness that lesser religious leaders can sometimes adopt. His wasn’t a brittle faith of dogmatic assertion, it was something that grew out of decades of daily interrogation of the infinite.

In his eulogy, Rabbi Belovski made reference to the troubling story in the Book of Genesis, the Aqedah, in which God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son. Those who ponder its dark mystery find no easy answers. Indeed, as many of the great rabbis of the past have argued, it is a text that won’t allow a simple resolution. Theology often feels contradictory, at odds with itself. But for men like Jonathan Sacks, this became a source of strength not of weakness; an invitation to “antifragility” — an idea that he was much taken with. Living the contradictions meant refusing cheap understanding, and so became an invitation to a more capacious appreciation of the world in all its profound and disturbing complexity.

From this intellectual base, all his book and sermons, lectures and broadcasts flowed. Rabbi Sacks became a powerful emissary for orthodox Judaism throughout our national life — and internationally too. And no Jewish thinker could avoid being in mental conversation with his ideas. “All modern Jews are students of Rabbi Sacks, whether they know it or not, whether they acknowledge it or not, or whether they like it or not,” as Rabbi Belovski claimed yesterday.

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The ceremony itself was modest, given lockdown — bleak even. The current Chief Rabbi was unable to attend, having received a message to confine himself to home from a test and trace app message received on Friday. In normal times, thousands would have been there. But in the end, it was fittingly simple, with family and senior Rabbis standing in a flat and exposed landscape, saying farewell to the man who had done so much to inspire the Jewish community over the last half a century. Dayan Ivan Binstock, senior Rabbi of the St John’s Wood Synagogue, read out a message from the Prince of Wales. The tone was perfect.

“It was with the most profound personal sorrow that I heard of the death of Rabbi Lord Sacks. With his passing, the Jewish community, our nation, and the entire world have lost a leader whose wisdom, scholarship and humanity were without equal. His immense learning spanned the sacred and the secular, and his prophetic voice spoke to our greatest challenges with unfailing insight and boundless compassion. His wise counsel was sought and appreciated by those of all faiths and none, and he will be missed more than words can say.”

The programme, part of Sue MacGregor’s Reunion series, brought home how much like a wedding the whole thing was. The Coronation ring, placed on the fourth finger of her right hand, is also known as “The wedding ring of England”. It is a union of sorts, being struck between the Queen and her subjects. And back in 1952, both sides enthusiastically consented. The Pathé newsreel of the time spoke of “The happy heartbeat of the cockney crowd. London is royal and gay.”

It’s not just our language that has radically changed since then. The aristocracy is no longer treated with deference, the Church of England has been substantially abandoned, Coronation is a street in Manchester, and Coronation Chicken has becomer retro at best, and an embarrassing empire hangover at worst. Which raises the question: are the British people ready to get married again, and to get married like this?

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How the Queen brings us hope

By Helen Thompson

This is not an academic question. The Queen was 94 this week. And the presence of Covid-19 within the palace walls was a reminder of her mortality. The Queen retains the love and admiration of her people — but what on earth would 21st-century Britain make of the Coronation service itself. It’s a ceremony that exposes in liturgical form the nature of the British state, and, in particular, its intimate relationship to God?

At the beginning of the service, the archbishop asks the people present of they are “willing” to “do homage and service”? As Archbishop Charles Le Grice preached in 1821 on the day of George VI’s coronation:

“The solemn ceremony of this day is not the pageant of a Monarch receiving the homage of his vassals; it is not the triumph of despotic power …. The poorest subject is a party to the covenant which the King now makes.”

In other words, consent is vital to the delicate constitution balance as played out in the coronation. Indeed, it is even there in the National Anthem itself: “May she defend our laws, and ever give us cause, to sing with heart and voice, God save the Queen.” (Not that everybody knows that verse.) But here we sing of the hope that the monarch will always give us a good reason to defend her; subtly suggesting, of course, that if she doesn’t, we won’t.

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By Giles Fraser

How will the congregation react to the next coronation? Not so much the hand-picked thousands in Westminster Abbey, but the wider congregation at home. I doubt they will dress up in their Sunday best, as they did last time, and hang on every detail of a three-hour church service. But will they even understand what is going on? Will the deliberately Christian nature of the service be alienating in a post-religious and multi-cultural society? Will the plummy accents of the lords and ladies in waiting feel like the sound of another age, as if we are being secretly governed by some occupying power?

Understanding the symbolism of the service itself — the emphasis on anointing, for instance, and its origins in the Hebrew scriptures — requires a level of theological literacy that has been largely lost. Will the puzzled onlookers be like awkward guests at a wedding who feel uncomfortable in church, itchy in their hired suits, who don’t know the hymns, stumble over the words, and who snigger during the prayers?

That sort of thing might not matter so much at the wedding of someone else. But at the coronation, “the People” themselves have to say “I do”. And it’s been so long since the last coronation, I wonder if we will understand that we too have a part to play in the ceremony.

I ask these questions nervously. The coronation may only be an ‘ornamental’ aspect of our constitution. But I do worry that any interference in the complex dynamic of informed consent that the monarch and the people are believed to express to each other through the coronation could have unknown consequences for our historic constitutional arrangements. Brexit challenged us with a number of constitutional questions that we were not expecting. Helen Thompson, Professor of politics at Cambridge, thinks that the death of the Queen could well do the same. It could precipitate a constitutional crisis for which we are ill prepared.

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Meghan and Harry are playing a dangerous game

By Douglas Murray

Republicanism is not especially strong on these islands — but when the leader of a major political party (Nicola Sturgeon) reacts to the Prince Andrew/Jeffrey Epstein scandal with the comment “I think there is a debate to be had about the longer term future of the monarch”, you just know that the death of the Queen is going to be a moment of opportunity for those who want radically to reshape our constitution. Especially with brand Archwell — more Beckingham than Buckingham — continuing to chip away at the mystique that royalty requires to successfully operate.

Part of the problem in answering the Republican challenge is that it’s not straightforward to say what the monarchy achieves for the British constitution. Even the Queen herself has described it as “a puzzle” and “always will be”. There were times, before dreary things like evidence based policy, when you could have got away with this sort of answer. To this extent, royalty and divinity do have something important common: they don’t readily give up their advantages to empirical scrutiny.

Perhaps I am fussing unnecessarily. Patriotism in these islands is on the up, and affection for the Queen herself, and indeed for the Prince of Wales, is probably as high as ever. Her Majesty has had an especially good Covid crisis — her broadcast on Palm Sunday was well received a home and across the globe. At a time of crisis like this, where death has come amongst us so visibly, our connection as a nation to our past, our continuity over time and symbolic links to each other, feels especially important.

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By Ed West

In this midst of this, William and Kate are quietly getting on with the business of working out how to preserve the best of the Queen’s legacy. Even the relationship of England with Scotland — currently the weakest link in our constitutional settlement — hasn’t seen anything like the stresses and strains that other political unions, the European Union and the United States, have experienced in response to this virus.

But nonetheless, as we approach the end of the Queen’s reign, a moment of nervousness is not inappropriate — us getting ever closer to a moment where one wrong move could give us “President Blair” or some other similar indignity.

Over in the United States, they now have an elected official who behaves like the worst sort of dominating monarch. “When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total”, Trump recently boasted. By contrast, here in the United Kingdom we have a monarchy that, for those who can see past the pomp and the diamonds, goes in for quiet dignity and servant leadership. And long may that continue.

Happy St George’s day. And Vivat Regina.

Elizabeth II, who grumpily planted a tree this week, insisting she could still wield a spade, is the reluctant link to this imperial past. She makes us, unconsciously and inaccurately, feel safe in what is soon to be Boris’s Brexit Blunderland. What we must horribly call her brand is Duty: how can we not feel safe, when she is dedicated to us? But nothing lasts forever. She is 93.

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By Tanya Gold

Fear prevents us thinking about what will happen when she dies; better to live in a dream in which jam, and perhaps butter, will maintain us as the fifth largest economy on earth. We were fine in the world wars, an imbecile told the BBC recently in a vox pop, forgetting that we lost close to 1.5 million souls and took $3 billion from America after 1945.

Meanwhile, we have self-indulgent political chaos and, for distraction, gossip without end. The Duchess of Sussex goes to Wimbledon in jeans. She and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, who apparently likes gardening, are portrayed as avarice and benevolence. Meghan asks not to be photographed in a place that contains multiple television cameras. She spends blah pounds on a kitchen in Berkshire. She will not release the names of her son Archie Harrison’s godparents – is one of them a Teletubbie, or George Clooney?

Amid this babble, what we are not gossiping about is Charles III, probably because we have known him longer and he is not as photogenic as his sons’ wives. Even so, he is creeping up on the throne like one of his plants; he is stealthy, and he should be. Some people still think he had his first wife killed; and he has never clarified whether he will – and I think he will, because he is a nostalgist of the worst kind – crown his second wife Queen Camilla.

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Charles has been Prince of Wales for 61 years. That is a long overture, even for monarchy, which copes in centuries. And he has been Prince of Wales for longer than any other; the runner-up in this competition which no one wants to win – a metaphor for futility – was Edward VII with a mere 60 years.

I have my own theory why Elizabeth II is sane, and has projected reluctance, and, slightly less successfully, thrift, to great acclaim. She did not know she would be queen until she was nine, with the Abdication Crisis in 1936; and Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother (two queens in one title is very telling about a character) prevented her daughter being spoilt, for she would rather be spoilt herself.

That is why the Queen is practical, and doughty with her spade. The only job she has had besides head of state was as a truck mechanic in the Women’s Auxiliary Territorial Service, and I hope obituarists remember it. It is important. It is possible that, to her, the United Kingdom is just another truck.

Charles is something else, though: neglected by his mother, spoilt by his grandmother, and the heir since birth, he projects an unease and depression that would be touching in almost anyone else. That is his primary misfortune.

He dresses as exquisitely as his great-uncle Edward VIII – the last, unlucky Prince of Wales – but he seems to take no joy in it. His homes at Highgrove and Clarence House – I have seen both, for republicans are as obsessed with monarchy as monarchists, although I was confined to a gazebo containing his watercolours at Highgrove (they are much better than Hitler’s watercolours) – are likewise tasteful.

But a monarch is not a still life. It is an insane system dependent on a shared – and fragile – national myth, and, to prevent this being stated too often in public, Charles must have a brand. If the Queen’s is duty plus reluctance plus thrift (“that is not really my crown”) what is his?

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Hagiography is no help here, for it grows from what the object is presumed to be, and with Charles the material is thin. He wasn’t even a particularly functional adulterer: because he is a romantic. There was a fantasy about what kind of king he will be in a play – and then a TV film – called Charles III.

Monarchy is insidious, like all dreams – even I believe the Queen is kind, after her portrayal by Penelope Wilton in The BFG, which promised that she would save us from flesh-eating giants and give orphans shelter in her palace, if only she knew of their suffering. (“If only Comrade Stalin knew of our suffering.”) But Charles III was ridiculous as hagiography. It suggested that Charles would imperil his throne for – of all things – freedom of the press.

It is essential that Charles develops a brand of his own, beyond laughing at vegetables while wearing good suits. I saw that with my own eyes, but I live in Cornwall, where it is hard to escape him. You might pass a farmers’ market in Penzance, as I did, and have a Union Jack thrust into your hands which you will then wave limply, having nothing better to do.

It is tempting to define him as what he is not. He is not as stupid as Prince Andrew. He is not as angry as Prince William. I suspect William is principally angry with him, but that is not abnormal. Almost all the Hanoverians hated their fathers; George I locked his wife Sophia Dorothea up in a castle for 30 years and her son, George II, was understandably unhappy about it.

But not being something is not a brand, and I have often thought that Andrew, if happy – if the heir – would be a good king. Stupidity can make you convincing; we have had fat, jolly kings with big teeth before. Anne too; she would be like her mother with slightly worse manners. Charles’ obvious sensitivity – why praise homeopathy if you don’t want to be healed? – is his problem. Easily bullied princes – he was bullied into marrying Diana – are not effective for myth-building; Hamlet, for instance: great lines but would you want him on the throne?

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He won’t have long; and so I think of his style and suggest a last, crabby burst of Hanoverian grandeur to bear Charles III towards his ancestors in the crypt. Let his children talk about mental health to national surprise; few things are worse for mental health than being a member of the royal family and, in their hearts, people know it; hence the widespread “pity” for the Queen, as if she had an embarrassing hereditary condition. Monarchy is supposed to make the monarchist feel happy – what else is it for? – and I doubt the flag-wavers will be made happy by listening to Prince William tell them it’s OK to have the mental health problems they are, in any case, trying to avoid by waving flags at him. But empathy in poverty is no good – it exposes royal hypocrisy. Empathy in glory is better.

Brexit is a response, however cracked, to the loss of British glory; or rather the idea of it, for I doubt the profits were distributed as fairly as we like to pretend. Since monarchy is likewise dishonest – it is not apolitical but predicated on its own survival – I suggest that Charles fuse his myth to that of Brexit, and become, at least outwardly, a glorious king of England.

He has the golden tools and he should use them; it would be better if he didn’t say too much. He could build an ideal palace – a vast Poundbury – and crown his scatty wife under a mountain of diamonds. That is a solution to Charles III, who is temperamentally unsuited to his future: let the crown wear him.