06.08.2026

Republics don’t grow on trees

According to pollsters the king is more popular than ever. So much for the reassuring reformist dream that Charles would kill the monarchy all on his own, writes Paul Demarty

The other day, when I was browsing a second-hand bookshop, as I often do, a particular item jumped out at me from the 50p bin. Reader, I simply had to have it. It dates from 1989, and is written by Maxwell Hutchinson, then president of the Royal Institute of British Architects. The title: The Prince of Wales: right or wrong? An architect replies.

I have not had a chance to read it yet, though I did chortle a little at the first sentence of Richard Rogers’ preface: “In a democracy it is extremely difficult to argue with the heir to the throne.” It is also difficult, one assumes, to argue with the Führer or the generalissimo or the party general secretary in a “democracy”. Yet it calls to mind what may be the first of the then-crown prince’s endless interventions in politics and culture (which, of course, concerned architecture).

The future king’s hatred of the contemporary state of the profession was quite intense. He compared a proposed modernist extension to the National Gallery to “a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend”; he noted that, for all the demerits of the Luftwaffe, at least they had the decency to leave nothing worse than ruins in their wake, unlike the post-war rebuilders. His obsession yielded, in time, the chocolate-boxy new town of Poundbury, and similar schemes up to the present day (and also strangled the National Gallery extension in its cradle).

Hobby-horse

After that, his little hobby-horses grew into a vast herd. There was the sentimental agrarianism, the vague sense that he should prefer to be king over a picturesque landscape of little hobbit shires; his dabbling in Eastern Orthodoxy and even Islam; his ecological opposition to genetically modified crops; the countless intrusive missives to ministers that got nicknamed “the black spider memos” after his distinctive hand. (In at least one of these, to his credit, he suggested that appointing then-Prince Andrew to a trade envoy role would amount to a ludicrously expensive, round-the-world shagathon for his errant brother - a judgment amply confirmed with the passage of time.)

In those days, mainstream anti-monarchist opinion oddly took heart. This was a peccadillo in a prince, the reasoning went, but would be a cardinal sin in a king. Elizabeth II was popular, but she took an extremely restrictive interpretation of her public role, remaining for the most part politically inscrutable, as if she were on a 70-year work-to-rule action. When her meddling eldest took the throne, the spell would finally be broken. People would see what a grotesque anachronism the whole thing was; it would be at an end.

That has never been the opinion of what would happen around these parts, of course, and one more piece of evidence appeared quietly last week. YouGov found that 68% of Britons have a favourable view of Charles’s performance as king. This is his highest ever rating. It comes in a year when the royals finally had to kick Andrew to the curb, as well, with the most intense wave of ‘monarchy is dead’ republican wishcasting since the death of Charles’s ex-wife Diana Spencer in 1997. For all that, he is sitting pretty.

How can this be? Even I - an old-time cynic, when it comes to monarchy self-destruction narratives - was taken aback somewhat. This really has been a dreadful year for the institution - surely it must have been. Does Joe Public really buy the idea that Charles and his (even more popular) heir, William, acted decisively in the case of Andrew? A frankly risible proposition, based on the timelines concerned. Does Joe Public want to buy a bridge?

Yet here we are. To be sure, the king has not been very much like the prince in practice. Whether he has mellowed with age, or his various infirmities - including a public battle with cancer - have reduced the energy he has spare to fight for his Quixotic causes, he has ended up reigning rather like his mother: a taciturn and solemn teleprompter reader for the government of the day. The conditions for the old liberal-republican scenario, with the monarchy ending itself in a grand auto-da-fé, have not in fact arisen.

Perhaps he was always cleverer than he seemed. His road to the throne was longer than anticipated; in those endless years, he had ample opportunity to soak up the tight-lipped statecraft of dear mamma - perhaps he simply did so. Yet to understand this is to understand the foolishness of the liberal-republican hope. It takes us to the threshold of understanding the monarchy as an institution, a load-bearing component of the British constitution, and not merely a strangely overpowered platform for the views held by the monarch of the day.

Constitution

The age of the monarchy is, of course, a political question: for Tories of the old school, we must go back at least to the unification of the kingdom of England under Æthelstan, and thus has proud Anglo-Saxon lineage; but a more appropriate starting point for the institution we know today might be 1688, when a rebellion against the restored Stuart dynasty called on an invasion from the Dutch republic, and William of Orange assumed the throne of England with strong constitutional limitations on his power. The Act of Union with Scotland in 1707 expanded this settlement, broadly speaking, to the whole of Great Britain (and the 1800 Act of Union extended it to Ireland).

The king enjoyed a freer role in those days, it is true, than he does today. Yet the essentials of the picture were in place - the king was the king in parliament, and ruled through a hybrid government of elected ‘popular’ representatives (barely deserving that adjective at all until at least 1832) in the House of Commons and hereditary grandees in the House of Lords. Already at this point politics was dividing into historic parties - initially the Whigs and Tories (which became, in due course, the Liberals and Conservatives). Given the agonistic conflict built into the system, the primary role of the monarch was ensuring continuity: the king needed the consent of parliament, but parliament needed the blessing of the king.

The monarchy is the principle of coherence of the British constitutional order. It intercedes in the decisive moments of our political life. The armed forces swear loyalty to the crown, as do parliamentarians and various civil servants and the primates of the Church of England. It provides the civic religion. One need not have a monarch to play this last role. Since departing from British imperial government, the United States has found the written constitution itself a suitable object of such veneration, for example. Yet this is the one we have.

Defence of the monarchy is thus defence of the overall social order: the two are not the same thing, but are not easily separable, given the particular historical development of Britain. It is thus mother’s milk to all the constitutional parties, the formal representatives of the capitalist class as such (the Confederation of British Industry and so forth), and the bourgeois media.

For this reason, all dreams of the mysterious self-abolition of the British monarchy are just that: dreams. The formal schemes among liberal republicans for the introduction of a written constitution with an elected presidency, have a certain sense: at least, in this view, someone will have to introduce legislation. Yet both American and French presidential ‘republicanism’ and British monarchy seem to have the same defects: a thoroughly and repulsively corrupt public life, and comprehensive alienation of ordinary citizens from administration.

This is the last and best disproof of the common idea that the monarchy is some kind of anachronism. Why would it be? We live in a capitalist society; as such, the boss is king of his own demesne. The liberty of the capitalist to dispose of his property how he desires, and the liberty of the worker to enter into contracts or else starve, is one part of capitalist rule - the domination of management and ownership over production is another. This is an unstable combination, fought out in political and economic struggle; thus various forms of constitutional rule, with radically truncated democratic elements, tend to result. It would be preferable, all things being equal, to have an elected president than a hereditary, constitutional monarchy; but only marginally. Both express more or less equally well the underlying relations of class to class.

Truly radical

The monarchy is not exactly in rude health, but then neither is the American constitutional regime, or for that matter the French. It is hardly surprising; recovery from the 2008 crisis has been sluggish across the board, and the signs are that we are in a prolonged period of crisis of a sort historically ended by great-power war. In this period, the effort given to royal pageantry has notably increased. To be sure, that is partly a matter of opportunity: we have had a royal wedding, a big jubilee, the death of Elizabeth and coronation of Charles. Yet the obvious decrepitude of the state places all the more weight on the shoulders of that precious principle of continuity.

The possibility cannot be excluded that the monarchy will find some way to self-destruct. Life is strange. But we must proceed on the basis that it will not; and we must take into account the reasons why it will not. Therefore, we need a truly radical republicanism - one that takes aim not merely at the superficial forms in which power is distributed among the branches of government, but the intrinsic tendency to domination in the elementary structures of capitalist society.

A democratic-republican constitution worthy of the name would, of course, have no king, but also no executive president (in the end, merely an ‘elected king’). It would not function by way of a cautious apparatus of checks and balances, but by investing all power in institutions where the popular will is most clearly expressed. That would be the elected legislature - elected proportionally, so as to actually represent that popular will - with short parliamentary terms and the right of recall through parties, at all levels of government from the local to the supranational.

The left in this country is oddly silent on the question of the monarchy. Most groups formally approve of its abolition; but in day-to-day agitation, constitutional questions are largely secondary. The reason is that it is divisive. A large, though not overwhelming, majority favour the monarchy to some extent; serious and sustained propaganda against it is taken to be a disadvantage in organising mass action (or the ‘Potemkin village’ version of mass action that sometimes substitutes for it).

But socialism is a project of the conscious masses. It is for that reason that we are republicans at all: our project is democratic self-rule all the way down. There can be no victory without confronting the system of rule, as it actually exists, consciously and not merely at the level of spontaneity (dodging police horses in a kettling, and so forth).

A permanent practice of republican propaganda and agitation is indispensable for socialist victory - a purely hypothetical republicanism, or one expressed only in shopkeeperish gripes about the cost to the taxpayer, will not do the job.