he pillars of the British state are not the bastions of conservatism they used to be. The Church of England, flagellating itself over its “links with slavery,” bends the knee to the gospel of BLM. The headmaster of Eton College—which educated 20 of our prime ministers—declares himself “woke.” Judges still don their robes and wigs, but now they spout the dogmas of critical race theory. Britain’s Civil Servants, once known for stiff-upper-lipped efficiency, fritter away their time in endless diversity lectures. And presiding over all this is a so-called Conservative Party that has allowed UK immigration, both legal and illegal, to reach extraordinary new highs. So total has Britain’s cultural revolution been that it “has emptied every symbol of its former nature so that nothing is any longer what it claims to be,” as Peter Hitchens, its foremost chronicler, wearily concludes.
Nowhere is this grim reality starker than in the figure of King Charles III. Earlier this month, King Charles addressed the annual COP28 climate-change conference in Dubai, the capital of the United Arab Emirates (the world’s climate clerics, it seems, do not see the contradiction in piously jetting off to the gulf petrostate to spread their gospel of decarbonisation). Charles has long been obsessed with environmentalism, having addressed COP26 in Glasgow back in 2021, while still Prince of Wales. But now that he is Britain’s constitutional monarch, he is obliged to be politically neutral, following the example set by his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, throughout her long, stoic reign. “Me, meddle as King,”he assured the BBC in 2018, “I’m not that stupid.”
Charles’s speech, however, was rather more than meddling. He called for trillions of dollars to be poured into attempts to transform the global economy in order to reach Net Zero carbon emissions. And, to gin up support for the cause, his speech was suffused with climate apocalypticism, the ever-favoured alarmist motif of green elites. Attributing various recent extreme weather events to climate change, he called the burning of fossil fuels a “frightening experiment” that is taking the world into “dangerous, uncharted territory.” The “hope of the world,” he said, rested in COP28, lest we face a “starker and darker” future.
There can be no doubt that the King’s speech was a political intervention. The global liberal press certainly seemed to acknowledge it as such: the Guardian hailed it as a “call to arms;” the New York Times praised Charles’ “evangelical urgency;” and for Politico Europe, it was a “rallying cry.” After all, the climate-change agenda is quite clearly political. The quest for Net Zero would see the world abandon the fossil fuels which account for over 80% of the world’s energy, choosing instead to embrace unreliable, expensive renewables. This would have enormous implications for the economy, for industry, and for people’s standard of living. Climate rationing—deemed necessary to achieve Net Zero will mean eating less meat, travelling less, and generally being colder and poorer. There are people up and down Britain who are far from on board with this agenda for eco-austerity, even if they have scant representation in the Westminster uniparty. By recklessly tying the Crown to this contentious issue, Charles erodes the ground of neutrality on which his constitutional role rests.
Yet it isn’t only in the area of green ideology where Charles has emerged as an activist king. Recently, the British government has been embroiled in a row with the Greek government over the British Museum’s continued ownership of the Elgin Marbles, excavated from Athens in the early 19th century by the Earl of Elgin. During his COP28 speech, Charles, a known Hellenophile whose late father was Greek, wore a tie embroidered with the Greek flag—signalling his sympathy with the Greek cause. The gesture went far from unnoticed, with the Greek press crowing about the “obvious message” of support. This is no mere eccentric sartorial choice, then, but an act of betrayal: the King has sided with a foreign power in a diplomatic dispute. His bizarre decision suggests that he sympathises with the perennial leftist demands to return the Marbles to assuage Britain’s alleged colonial guilt (not that this logically follows: the Marbles were recovered, legally, while Greece was under the rule of the Ottoman Empire).
In his first year as King, Charles has proven himself more than willing to lay his crown at the feet of the woke mob. He got off to a bad start last December, when a flimsy accusation of racism by a charity worker and black activist was all it took for Buckingham Palace to fire the long-standing aide to Her late Majesty, 83-year-old Lady Susan Hussey. Last month, at an event shortly before Armistice Day, Charles wore a “Black Poppy Rose” in addition to the traditional red Remembrance Poppy, ostensibly to commemorate the contributions of Afro-Caribbean servicemen in war. However, the Black Poppy Rose organisation is rather less than benign: it commemorates black Marxist dictators and leaders of the brutal Haitian Revolution, and its founder is an advocate for slavery reparations. It is a worrying sign, indeed, that Charles would subvert Britain’s remembrance tradition in order to curry favour with such people.
Moreover, having expressed his “personal sorrow” at the slave trade earlier this year, Charles has opened the door to reparations. With his blessing, historians are combing the royal archives in order to investigate the royal family’s possible links with the transatlantic slave trade. Already, Caribbean nations are demanding $33 trillion in payouts from Western countries, so when some links are inevitably found, the reparations chorus may prove impossible to ignore. Such a spectacle, should it happen, would be a humiliation from which the monarchy may never recover.
Yet for all this posturing, the monarchy will never be woke enough. No amount of green rhetoric or ritual humiliation will convince its detractors that an institution that has embodied tradition, religion, and hierarchy for over 1,000 years is a friend to the Left. Instead, King Charles’ embrace of leftist causes simply alienates the monarchy’s natural supporters—conservatives—while proving an embarrassing liability to Britain on the world stage. In years to come, Charles and his successors may well regret his decision to bend this institution, which ought to transcend politics, to the transient political winds of the present moment.
https://europeanconservative.com/articles/commentary/an-activist-king-is-bad-for-britain/