Could King Charles be our last monarch?

It’s more than two years since the death of Queen Elizabeth II at her beloved Balmoral Castle, and, in May, it will be two years on from the coronation of her first son, Charles. The period of mourning that engulfed the House of Windsor has passed. The honeymoon period for the new monarch has come to an end.

So, what kind of king is Charles at this juncture? It has been neither an easy run nor an easy reign for him thus far. There were the cancer diagnoses that threatened to take him out along with the Princess of Wales, and the domestic dramas that threatened the stature of the monarchy. Prince Andrew has become akin to a tumour the royals are keen to remove, or relegate to a frugal exile at Frogmore Cottage, in the grounds of Windsor Castle. (His links to sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein continue to haunt him.) Meanwhile, the manoeuvres of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have become less malignant, and may soon be in remission.

For some of us, the monarchy has always been an anachronism. But it only became an object of ridicule when Prince Edward overreached himself by having an idea and acting on it – namely, the one-off charity show, It’s a Royal Knockout, staged at Alton Towers in 1987. Today such ridicule is routine. The shenanigans of Prince Andrew, the grifting of the Sussexes, have made a mockery of the monarchy.

It should be said that the star the Sussexes hitched their wagon to is beginning to wane. The ‘feminist’ Meghan Markle is fronting a lifestyle series on Netflix that, like her global fame, came her way because of the man she married. The couple’s race-baiting has lost its bite. While a small clique of Hollywood insiders continue to cast Markle as Rosa Parks, many more Americans think she’s closer to Rachel Dolezal. The recent backlash to their grandstanding photo-op ‘consoling’ victims of the Los Angeles wildfires only confirmed their fall from grace.

With all the noise generated by Andrew and the Sussexes over the past two years, not to mention the royal family’s health struggles, it’s been difficult to gauge what kind of king Charles intends to become. Yet it is still possible to discern a trajectory and ideological direction.

Compared with the reign of his mother, his time on the throne will be brief. During her 70 years as monarch, she managed to make a superfluous role appear significant. So much so that even the most notorious republicans among us mourned her passing (‘Send her victorious’, tweeted the former Sex Pistol, John Lydon / Johnny Rotten.) The previous generation of royals saw their position as a divine right; she saw it as a duty.

Queen Elizabeth II was regarded as a unifying influence, symbolic of a culture and identity synonymous with Britain, even among those who were ambivalent about its traditions. She came to the throne when the era of reverence for the upper classes was receding. This despite the stubborn class system, at the bottom of which, paradoxically, existed the most ardent patriots and loyal royalists. Whatever security and stability was absent in their lives, they believed there to be a certainty about the character of the British nation despite the flaws that were as evident to natives and foreigners as the qualities.

When Elizabeth ascended the throne it marked the beginning of an age of comparative tranquility and freedom. Those of us whose parents were embarking on marriage or parenthood in 1953, the year of her coronation, remember the stories of life during wartime and evacuation. While the fathers and husbands recalled conscription and national service. We, their offspring, are the last generation to carry knowledge of the experiences of those immediate antecedents, as the memory of that generation died along with Queen Elizabeth. It was the last of England, or an England that had a unique character, and a natural confidence. A spirit that crossed partisan political lines, which George Orwell understood when he wrote the words, ‘My country right or left’.

Whatever developed or occurred in Elizabeth’s personal life throughout her reign, by adopting Disraeli’s ‘never complain, never explain’ motto, she ensured it didn’t cloud the image she presented to the country. When Charles ascended the throne at 73, he arrived with decades of personal baggage that defined him, in the minds of his subjects, more than any achievements from the years when he was the man who would be king. There was the marriage to, and divorce from, Princess Diana, which he handled badly throughout. There was the untimely, tragic death of his ex-wife, which he handled with dignity and more nous, when it came to gauging the mood of the people, than his mother. Throughout this, there was the spectre of Camilla Parker-Bowles, assigned the role of the king’s mistress. Details of their intimate relationship made It’s a Royal Knockout appear regal. Notably, ‘Tampongate’, the explicit six-minute telephone call between Charles and Camilla in 1989, in which the future king imagined himself as her Tampax, while they were both married. It materialised into a lead story in the tabloids four years later.

Sympathetic supporters might highlight King Charles’s early efforts to champion environmentalism, before it morphed into the cultist ideology and going concern it is today, as a positive. Others will point to Poundbury, the Trumpton-like town in Dorset he established in the early 1990s, and which represents his utopian vision of village life. Arguably, his most ambitious achievement has been transforming his former mistress from ‘the most hated woman in Britain’ into a bona-fide royal bestowed with national-treasure status, and the title associated with his mother: the queen. Her presence removes the gravitas his late mother brought to the title, and is without precedent, but it’s a move that Charles insisted on. (Whatever rules and restraints were imposed on the royal family in the past, the current royals tailor them to suit their own ends.)

Charles’s desire to modernise and downsize the monarchy, along with his championing of environmentalism and multiculturalism, found a captive audience among celebrities he courted in the past. These include left-leaning royalists Emma Thompson and Stephen Fry, whose Oxbridge pedigree entitled them to BBC royalty status early on. Back in the 1990s, there was a joke doing the rounds at the BBC that Jonathan Dimbleby’s head was ‘so far up Prince Charles’s arse, he can see Stephen Fry’s shoes’. This fawning loyalty has paid off for Fry, who was knighted in the New Year’s Honours list.

Along with the BBC and the Church of England, the monarchy finds itself at a crossroads that could lead to a crisis. They believe the country has lost its moral compass along with its confidence. The traditional identity that once defined Britain is fading in the presence of a changing population, globalisation.

But it’s actually these aforementioned institutions that have lost their moral compass and confidence. Many Britons, young and old, some with long memories and short futures, may feel abandoned, but they themselves are not lost. They continue to live with the decorum of their forebears, and encompass honourable qualities absent in the government, the national church, the judiciary, the police force, the mainstream media and increasingly, the monarchy. In attempting to embrace the modern world, the royals have aligned themselves with the discredited trends around identity politics.

King Charles has continued to champion immigration and expressed concerns at the alleged lack of welcome given by Britons to refugees. He pays lip service to a hackneyed multiculturalism, informing us we are ‘a community of communities’. And he harbours a desire to be ‘the defender of faith in general’ rather than solely the head of the ailing Church of England. He seems happy to go along with our cultural elites’ attempts to erase or rewrite Britain’s history and bury its rich and varied past.

His sons, especially his youngest, have also boarded the identitarian bandwagon. Indeed, despite being the product of an unelected elite in which bloodline and pedigree dominate, Prince Harry believes he’s equipped to educate us on race because he married a B-list TV actress with a black mother. King Charles clearly feels he too has insight into racism, having once danced with a Three Degree. From the monarch’s privileged position, multiculturalism appears as harmonious as his utopian Poundbury. For us commoners, with a more intimate experience of such things, recollections may vary.

Charles’s approach to Islam is particularly ‘on message’. The Labour government plans to adopt a controversial definition of ‘Islamophobia’, and effectively ban it throughout the UK public sector. In practice, this amounts to an ersatz blasphemy law to protect the Islamic faith and its advocates from criticism. Presumably this is something King Charles supports. In 2006, after worldwide riots led by Muslims angered at the publication of a cartoon of Prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper led to at least 200 deaths, Charles sided with the rioters. ‘The true mark of a civilised society is the respect it pays to minorities and to strangers’, he said at the time. ‘The recent ghastly strife and anger over the Danish cartoons shows the danger that comes of our failure to listen and to respect what is precious and sacred to others.’

These comments should perhaps not be a surprise. King Charles has long been an enthusiast for Islam and has been described as an ‘Islamophile’. He has talked of what the West can learn from Islam, and made headway in learning Arabic to attain a greater understanding of the Koran. In 1993, speaking at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, of which he is a patron, he said: ‘If there is much misunderstanding in the West about the nature of Islam, there is also much ignorance about the debt our own culture and civilisation owe to the Islamic world. It is a failure which stems, I think, from the straightjacket of history which we have inherited.’

There are clearly negative aspects of the monarch’s embrace of Islam for his subjects. Despite the king’s eagerness to offer an opinion on contemporary events, leading to fears he will be a ‘meddling monarch’, he has been less than forthright on terrorist attacks by Islamists – attacks that have led to the murder of an MP and too many members of the public to list here. On the grooming-gangs scandal, involving mostly British Pakistani Muslim men, he has been as reluctant to say anything as the Labour Party, the BBC and the Church of England.

Although Charles is keen to toe the official line on race and faith, he has been responsible for the odd faux pas on these topics in the past. In 2010, a black employee complained to a tribunal of the lack of opportunity and preponderance of discrimination within the royal household. As with ‘Tampongate’, Charles’s private thoughts were leaked to the public by the press:

‘What is wrong with people nowadays? Why do they all seem to think they are qualified to do things far above their capabilities? This is all to do with the learning culture in schools. It is a consequence of a child-centered education system which tells people they can become pop stars, High Court judges or brilliant TV presenters or infinitely more competent heads of state without ever putting in the necessary work or having the natural ability.’

The royal family are now actively supporting diversity hires and ethnic quotas, which amount to another form of privilege – one that will not surpass that which royal bloodlines and pedigree bestow, but nevertheless a system that leaves merit a poor second to inherited characteristics.

In 2018, Charles incurred the ire of a black journalist he met, after telling her she didn’t look like she came from Manchester. It provided her with sufficient fuel and bile to fill her Guardian column. In December 2022, Lady Susan Hussey, a former lady-in-waiting to the late queen, was forced to resign after asking the founder of charity Sistah Space, Barbadian-born Ngozi Fulani (née Marlene Headley), where she was from, during a reception at Buckingham Palace. (If you’re an elderly white woman in the rarified atmosphere of royal circles, it’s perhaps not unusual to think that someone with an African name dressed like an extra from The Lion King might be from foreign parts.) On the back of a resignation came the obligatory apology from Hussey, who happens to be Prince William’s godmother. ‘There is no room for racism in society’, said a spokesman for her godson. Society rolled its eyes and stifled a yawn.

The royal family may have always isolated anyone that proves to be a threat to ‘the firm’, even members of the family, as Princess Diana and Prince Andrew, among others, discovered to their cost. But never before have they turned on those that line the streets and wave flags when the royals marry, die or go walkabout, but that’s changing.

They are drawing ever closer to our cultural and political elites, who have shown themselves time and again to be estranged from and antagonistic to much of the populace. They seem all too keen to erase the country’s history and culture, but too short sighted to have a plan to replace it, and too blinkered to understand that what might fill the abyss could destroy the freedoms, rights and privileges they take for granted. In this climate, abandoned Britons are looking for the leadership that is absent in government and elsewhere.

Many of those the government and the king are attacking in the name of identitarianism and multiculturalism will be royalists. Unlike the rising generation Charles and others are trying to appeal to, who are not. Currently, 62 per cent of Britons are in favour of keeping the monarchy, but only 37 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds share this view.

By alienating those that traditionally support the monarchy, and embracing those that never will, King Charles is making a better case for the abolition of his role than the ardent republicans among his subjects.

Michael Collins is a writer, journalist and broadcaster. He is the author of The Likes Of Us: A Biography of the White Working Class.