Kingly Doings in Trumpland

Ben Wildsmith 

Over the UK’s liberal breakfast tables this week, a familiar sentiment floated across the organic granola. ‘I’m not a Monarchist, but…’

Buoyed by their spiritual leader, LBC’s James O’Brien, the nation’s handwringing bien pensants found themselves euphoric with relief at the opportunity to express their ingrained conformity without betraying the milquetoast social mores that have driven them to fall for every centrist chancer from Tony Blair to Keir Starmer via David Cameron’s transparently fraudulent, hug-a-hoodie pose of decency.

For the easily charmed, King Charles’ performance in the USA this week was catnip. The smooth delivery, immaculate language, and arch humour of his speeches pressed buttons that jolt alive latent royalism in many who would ordinarily style themselves as democratic fundamentalists.

It’s all so soothing for beleaguered Britishers, whose usual experience of the nation on the world stage is of incompetence and the ritual humiliation of a once great power reduced to a vaudeville parody of itself.

Who amongst us hasn’t cringed at successive Prime Ministers performing their routine about ‘our shared values’ in the hope of a few dollars to keep our knackered society from the breadline?  It’s the diplomatic equivalent of a Bank Holiday Summer Special from 1978 played on repeat forever.

Carlo, though, is an A-list entertainer. Even the gruesome prospect of a gig in front of the world’s most vulgar man couldn’t knock him off his choreography. Calm, disarming, and masterfully oblique, he managed to deliver a couple of digs about checks on power that had the Waitrose Guevaras engorged with joy.

‘I mean, I can hardly believe I’m saying this, but I was proud of the king…’

‘Trump didn’t even realise that Charles was criticising him. It was so refreshing.’

The problem here is that when you are criticising someone, they should know that you are doing it. To smirk behind your hand to their underlings is to rank yourself with them.

Right enough, once someone had explained to Trump that Charles had been taking the piss, he was straight out with the claim that his sparkly-hatted oppo was specifically opposed to Iran’s nuclear programme.

By the following morning, the Donald reckoned that if ‘his friend’ Charles (‘a great guy’) possessed monarchical power, then the UK would have joined in with the illegal war in Iran. The king, of course, said nothing. He’s not allowed to say anything.

This silence gives the lie to claims of ‘soft power’ that have been ascribed to the monarchy this week.

Having a constitutionally constrained monarch as head of state mutes the United Kingdom at the highest tier of diplomacy. Trump, characteristically, has zeroed in on the fatal weakness of the UK’s constitution.

By taking our shambolic, unwritten conventions at face value, he has been able to denigrate and humiliate the elected Prime Minister, whilst pretending to honour his formal superior: the king.

So, he loves the UK, and the monarchy, which is forbidden from directly addressing any damaging rhetoric he comes out with, but has contempt for the mandated government. How convenient. This, potentially, is a trick any world leader could pull.

Genocide

‘Yeah, my pal the king would probably be fine with Uyghur concentration camps/the genocide in Gaza/the invasion of Ukraine. I can’t hear him objecting, can you? No, didn’t think so, especially with you guys being structurally bankrupt and needing access to our markets/intelligence/energy. Best your PM stops running his mouth, eh Brits?’

Out there in the real world of naval blockades, currency manipulation, and illegal wars, the UK’s constitutional dysfunction is a weakness to be exploited.

The irrational adherence that many have to the aesthetics of arcane traditions is causing them to connive in the nation’s manipulation by powers that are playing a game in which the UK is no longer equipped to participate. It is an indulgence that has become dangerous.

Thoughtful

For the record, I like Charles Windsor. He’s a thoughtful man who seems genuinely to care about the world around him.

In a serious country, I might be tempted to vote for someone like that.

In basket-case Britain, his existence at the top of society allows the democratic will of the people to be ignored on the world stage, whilst foreign leaders use the nation’s fictional history to dignify their misdeeds.

The UK has very few options in its weakened condition, but whoring out its head of state to despots should not be one of them.