Charles could adopt his mother's quiet, moderate ways, for stability in a time of crisis, or use his power to act on his passion for environmental issues. (Photo by Paul Edwards - WPA Pool/Getty Images)
NEWS ANALYSIS
Even for a republican, albeit a moderate rather than a militant one, Queen Elizabeth II was a figure who invoked respect, rather than indignation, for her dignity and composure more than anything.
And despite the obvious distance that the monarchy places between itself and its subjects, Elizabeth seemed to understand the innate conservatism of the British people very well.
For all the creativity and irreverent humour in which Britons can feel justifiable pride, the citizens of the United Kingdom do not, in general, seek dramatic change. Most of the time, they like and accept the general order of things, however much they might grumble or offer spiky, sardonic commentary.
In that sense, as their queen, she reflected their worldview rather than led it, recognising no doubt that hers was a brand that was popular across the class spectrum.
Working-class Brits are as besotted with the queen as they are with “country” (and its armed services) – something that, for instance, Tony Blair understood well, but was beyond Jeremy Corbyn’s grasp – and as much, if not more so, than upper-class members of the aristocracy or the broader establishment, of which the monarchy is of course a part.
Hence, although during her reign the queen and most of her family members supported numerous charities, many of which had real positive impact on the lives and livelihoods of less fortunate people, it should be remembered that these “good works” were purely charitable, following the ethos of the patrician sense of public service instilled in the wealthy during the Victorian age: the poor will always be with us but let’s at least bestow a little of our largesse to make their lives a little more bearable.
It was a portfolio of activities and patronage that was philanthropic, but not remotely transformational in the structural sense, with significant exceptions, such as Prince Charles’s focused devotion to sustainability.
How could it be otherwise? By definition a monarchy is a non-democratic form of authority and power. In this context, one of Elizabeth’s smartest political choices was to do as little as possible – or at least to appear to do as little as possible, an acknowledgement that her good reputation was based on stability, and that change, when it was absolutely necessary, should be cautiously evolutionary rather than revolutionary.
On Wednesday, she received the outgoing Boris Johnson and then the new prime minister, Liz Truss. It’s possible that, had she had the choice, she would have opted for something else to have been her final formal duty as queen – though one would never have been able to tell, because of her remarkable public inscrutability.
Elizabeth’s death comes at an unfortunate time, as Britain faces tough headwinds from all directions – from its Brexit own-goal, to a hapless governing party that has just replaced one comic, yet dangerously narcissistic, prime minister with one, Truss, who appears singularly ill-equipped to cope with the mounting energy and cost-of-living crisis the UK is facing.
Elizabeth’s eldest son, Charles, the Prince of Wales, who will now become king, has at times appeared to want to adopt a more interventionist role, sometimes swimming vigorously towards the boundaries of the lane within which his mother seemed so determined to stay. He even put his name to a book about sustainability, which began with, “We need a revolution.”
Whereas Elizabeth might have sealed her lips, or merely nodded enigmatically, perhaps Charles will offer more challenging conversation at the weekly meeting between monarch and prime minister – a curiously, and cryptically, British institution with no constitutional grounding and certainly no policy mandate. Maybe the new king will not be so shy to offer a view when the new prime minister informs him of her government’s intention to resume coal mining and step up fracking.
Given his commitment to environmental protection and, in recent years, a broader conception of sustainable development, it will be interesting to see how, or even whether, King Charles is willing to deploy the soft power of the crown in service of a more overtly public policy or even activist agenda.
To be fair to him, he has invested his soft power wisely and, given the climate emergency, appropriately. Indeed, in many ways, he was ahead of his time when ardently raising serious issues concerning conservation and industrial pollution three decades ago and well before Al Gore’s seminal documentary An Inconvenient Truth came out soon after the turn of the century.
Charles really does get it. I have at close quarters heard him speak with great passion and perspicacity on some of the key future issues of sustainable development, such as infrastructure. Will he ramp up his sense of social purpose and activist instincts on the climate now that he is king or will the powerful royal court persuade him to rather adopt the moderate mantle of his predecessor in the name of stability at a time of great crisis?
It presents the new king with a tricky dilemma, at a critical time. He has been preparing for this role for a very long time, thanks to the resilience, sense of duty and longevity of Elizabeth, and the broad popular support that she enjoyed, despite, rather than because of, her increasingly erratic and dysfunctional family whose various shenanigans have in the past 20 years undermined the dignity on which the legitimacy of the crown depends – the central credo of Elizabeth’s seven-decade reign.
Richard Calland grew up in London and is a British as well as South African citizen. An associate professor of public law at the University of Cape Town, he is also a Fellow of the University of Cambridge’s Institute for Sustainability Leadership, whose patron is Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales.