So Prince Charles is to be the first real king for the Facebook age. The heir to the throne, we are told, does not intend to maintain the iron self-restraint of his mother but to share his feelings with us.
When and if he becomes king, he will make “heartfelt interventions” on issues he feels strongly about, rather than discreetly avoiding politics as the Queen has endeavoured to do for 60 years. He will be “true to his beliefs”. The future monarch does not wish to be inscrutable and remote but human and understood, a king for a nation that increasingly wears its heart on its digital sleeve. Or, depending on one’s view, a king for a nation that never quite knows when to shut up.
To which one can only say that if he wants to bring his lobbying out into the open, then good for him; countless lobbying scandals have proved sunlight is always the best disinfectant. Better we all know what’s going on than that he shapes policy secretly via the handwritten “black spider memos” he sends privately to ministers. But one can only hope the Prince of Wales knows exactly what he’s starting here.
There is an element, perhaps, of making a virtue out of a necessity. Queen Elizabeth came to the throne aged only 25 and virtually unscrutinised by the media: her subjects knew little of her opinions, which made it easy to pretend she didn’t have any. Her son simply doesn’t have that option. Having already spent four decades in public life, and quite rightly having found useful things to do in it, he inevitably brings a lot more baggage to the throne.
The great irony of the official line that the Prince’s extensive correspondence with government should remain private to preserve his “political neutrality” is that he has invaded his own privacy – rampantly – already. We know exactly what he thinks about climate change, organic farming, the countryside, alternative medicine; who now thinks these views would change if he became king? Even if the Wizard of Oz wanted to pull the curtain back around him, there’s barely any curtain left.
And to give him the benefit of the doubt, perhaps Prince Charles knows that. Perhaps he’d gladly trade the deference shown to his mother for the joy of being his own man; perhaps he won’t mind when people disagree rudely and loudly with him, when he divides the nation rather than uniting it. (The downside of having public opinions, as Myleene Klass has just discovered, is that people will insist on having them right back at you). Perhaps he’ll simply accept it gracefully if future governments dismiss homeopathy as quackery, rather than funding it on the NHS.
And perhaps, having had 40 years with little to do but think this through, he already realises that the constitutional settlement would inevitably evolve in response to an activist monarch and is comfortable with that. In which case, he shouldn’t be criticised for meddling but applauded for sacrificing ultimate private power in favour of strictly limited public influence – because that is what he’d be doing. But one doubts that’s quite what he has in mind.
Not everything would change, of course. Take the weekly audience with the prime minister, at which the monarch exercises the royal right to “advise and warn” in private. Downing Street can be a lonely place, and the value of being able to chew things over in strict confidence with someone outside the eye of the storm means the ritual will probably endure even if a future monarch took it upon himself to “advise and warn” publicly too. But the royal relationship with parliament is a trickier matter altogether.
One couldn’t blame the Queen for occasionally approaching the Queen’s speech with all the enthusiasm of a hostage reciting a propaganda statement written by her captors. But what keeps things just this side of plausible is that when she reads out “my government’s” legislative plans with a commendably poker face, we can’t be sure if she thinks it populist nonsense or pitifully thin gruel; we don’t know enough about her private views on austerity, or immigration, or Iraq. But few would doubt how King Charles III felt about, say, announcing plans to scrap all climate change targets because “my government” doesn’t believe in global warming. What then?
It would be wrong for a democratically elected government to ditch a manifesto promise – even a stupid promise – to avoid embarrassing an unelected king. But repeatedly forcing him to read a king’s speech contradicting his public wishes would render him an oddly weakened, powerless figure: healthy for democracy maybe, but altogether less comfortable for him. I wonder whether both sides wouldn’t begin to ask if parliament really needs a state opening at all, if unromantically bunging the year’s legislative plans out by press release might be easier all round.
And where it gets really awkward is with the monarch’s historic powers to choose the prime minister and to refuse a government’s request to dissolve parliament and call an election. We’ve traditionally fudged the blatantly undemocratic nature of all this via a tacit agreement that the Queen can keep her ancient powers so long as she doesn’t actually use them, or not outside of some unimaginable emergency. Our unwritten constitution is built on a deep and peculiarly British desire to avoid any awkwardness; an acceptance that republics too have flaws; and crucially, on faith in the monarch being uniquely capable of acting in the public interest rather than her own. Were she to start forcibly expressing her own interests like any other politician, that faith would evaporate faster than mist over Balmoral.
The reason the Queen refused to speak out on Scottish independence, despite the importance of what was at stake, was surely that the monarch cannot be both in the fray and above it. You can’t be “true to your own beliefs” without people who hold radically opposed beliefs concluding – not unreasonably – that you don’t act in their interests; you cannot be partial, yet still somehow claim to be the impartial power of last resort when it suits you. All of which means that if Prince Charles chooses to be a very different kind of monarch, his subjects may quite logically choose to have a new relationship with him. Speak up, Your Highness, by all means. Just don’t expect the crowd to stay silent.
