Will King Charles Really Keep His Mouth Shut During Britain’s Economic Crisis?

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As his subjects endure the dire costs of Britain’s floundering government, what can King Charles III do about it? Nothing. Doing nothing in political crises is precisely what Queen Elizabeth II always practiced—and sternly advised to her heir.

What the new monarch really thinks about the pain of a plunging pound sterling, the pensions of millions of people being jeopardized, a welfare state starved of funds, a winter in which many will find it hard to be warm and fed, and in Liz Truss a prime minister who seems as oblivious of peril as the captain of the Titanic—of all of this he cannot speak.

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Ironically, for years the fear was that, as king, Charles would not be able to keep his mouth shut. This was based on his record, as Prince of Wales, of sending notes, called the “spider memos” because of his arthropodic scrawl, to various government ministers, with comments on policy.

In 2018, Charles vowed it would be different once he ascended the throne: “If you become Sovereign, then you play the role as it is expected. So clearly I won’t be able to do the same things I’ve done as heir…It’s a different function.”

In his first speech as king, Charles acknowledged his new world of enforced polemical restraint, saying: “My life will of course change as I take up my new responsibilities. It will no longer be possible for me to give so much of my time and energies to the charities and issues for which I care so deeply. But I know this important work will go on in the trusted hands of others.”

On Saturday, we saw that Truss was quick to take a hard line in enforcing the gag, and on an issue that Charles has long made one of his most passionate causes—climate change. The king had planned to join the twenty-seventh United Nations climate change conference at Sharm el-Sheik in Egypt later this month.

But, according to the London Sunday Times, he canceled after Truss “advised” against it. A palace source was quoted saying that the decision was taken “entirely in the spirit of being ever-mindful as king that he acts on government advice.” It’s clear that Truss is making an unusually robust interpretation of what the constitutional power of prime ministerial advice actually means.

Truss has been swift to exercise her new powers. The queen died within days of accepting the resignation of Boris Johnson, the prime minister who organized a boozy party in 10 Downing Street on the eve of Prince Philips’s funeral, and her anointing of Truss as successor. With the royal family still in mourning, the new Tory prime minister set about sweeping aside anyone who opposed her draconian ideas.

Her first victim was Sir Tom Scholar, who ran the British Treasury. He was summarily sacked. I asked one of the wisest of Britain’s elder statesmen, Lord Robin Butler, who served as private secretary to five prime ministers and then headed the civil service, what he thought about this. He said it was “a petulant and foolish gesture which I believe that the Truss government will come to regret. If ever there was a time when the government needed stability and experience in tackling the national and international problems it faces, that time is now.”

It took little time for that alarm to be justified. And it’s a fair bet that the most seasoned of the king’s advisors, with the same experience and world view as Lord Butler, feel the same way. But they are as gagged as the man they serve.

Although she was environmental secretary from 2014 to 2016, Truss has no interest in appearing green in thought or action. She has complained that wind farms are “filling” the sylvan landscapes of Britain, even though they occupy less than 0.1 percent of the land. She intends to scrap green taxes on energy bills, overturn a ban on fracking and ramp up the production of fossil fuels. In this, she is more extreme than many members of her own party.

In addition to being battered, like much of Europe, by energy shortages and price inflation as a result of the war in the Ukraine, there is the ever-increasing economic price of Brexit. Truss was forced to confess that a much-vaunted trade deal with the U.S. was not going happen. It joined a long list of other delusionary lifeboats that successive Tory governments promised would show up but didn’t. In fact, Truss’ fiscal policies are so reckless that they received the kind of rebuke from the International Monetary Fund normally reserved for banana republics.

The danger now for Charles is that the bleakness of the British economic future could present a growing peril to the monarchy itself. The British people, possibly facing years of austerity, could get as pissed off with the opulent trappings of the royal family as they are becoming with the Tory doctrine of pampering the rich with tax cuts while deliberately unraveling the social safety net on which millions depend to survive.

The optics of the monarchy therefore become critical. In previous times of hardship, the queen remained an emollient head of state, always seemingly sympathetic and herself a legend born out of the wartime “keep calm and carry on” national spirit. Charles has none of that appeal. Moreover, his mother left a human resources nightmare for him to immediately deal with.

He inherited three royal courts, not one—the queen’s, his own at Clarence House that gradually accrued power the longer he remained the understudy, and the smaller one serving Will and Kate at Kensington Palace - now, as the Prince and Princess of Wales, they have moved to Windsor and their independence has been curtailed by their being absorbed into the new court of Charles III.

There is no modern courtier to match the long dominant influence of Tommy Lascelles, the man who kept an iron grip on the royal household the last time it transitioned from one reign to another, from George VI to Elizabeth II. Then, the young and inexperienced queen was ready to accept the guidance of a deeply embedded and conservative power broker.

It is very different this time. Shortly after the queen’s death, her private secretary, Edward Young, had to yield power to Charles’s minder, the far more politically deft Clive Alderton. But any idea that this would lead to a migration of staff from Clarence House to Buckingham Palace was soon confounded.

While royal funeral rites were still going on, around 100 staffers at Clarence House were warned they could lose their jobs as the two principal courts were merged. Some had worked for Charles for decades. (Charles’s private staff at Clarence House included four chefs, three valets and two butlers.) They were furious, and this mishandling of the pink slips does not augur well for a smooth and bloodless transition. Turf battles between the two courts will be bitterly fought, but decimation of the headcount is inevitable because there was so much potential redundancy.

Long before the current national crisis, Charles acknowledged that the monarchy needed to be downsized. It has become more urgent now. And that must include the surfeit of palaces and castles, which conveys something of the extravagance of the Sun King. More than $500m has been spent on renovating Buckingham Palace without knowing what its future role will actually be.

When republicanism stirs, palaces fall under closer scrutiny. Charles could anticipate that problem by making the palace and its extensive gardens more open to the public, keeping the iconic balcony for ceremonial purposes but otherwise making it more the administrative hub of his reign rather than a family residence, something for which it was never suited. He and Camilla are said to much prefer living at Clarence House.

During the queen’s last year, as she moved from the palace to Windsor, power shifted with her, but it is back in London now. Windsor will revert to being an odd mix of ancient battlements, shrines to royal corpses of highly variable quality, royal archives that serve more as a sealed vault for many family secrets than an aid to historians, discreet residences for closer kin (where the lurking Andrew remains an unresolved embarrassment), and a superb royal park reflecting the late queen’s equestrian interests.

Windsor also demonstrates another dilemma for a would-be reforming monarch. Is a “modern monarchy” really an oxymoron? Can the kind of grandeur that makes a spectacular setting for royal pageants, as Windsor does, avoid the charge of being offensively incongruous as a vast family playpen when few others enjoy such privileges? Or does the whole thing justify itself purely as one of the world’s most compelling tourist attractions, along with its celebrity residents?

And, talking of celebrity, have the Windsors got an unresolved star billing issue? It’s early days yet, with the family still mourning, but it is already obvious that when it comes to people the cameras love and people who are not so charismatic, the new Prince of Wales and his family are effortlessly eclipsing the king and his queen consort, hinting perhaps that there is a barely-suppressed yearning for Will and Kate as the best bet for delivering a twenty-first century monarchy.

Charles, of course, has never been as lovable as they are. And his personal shortcomings are not going to disappear because he wears the crown.

Sometimes a small event describes a larger habit, like the now infamous episode at Hillsborough Castle, Northern Ireland, when Charles and Camilla were signing a document using a fountain pen, which lived up to its name and began leaking ink. Charles testily exclaimed, “Oh god I hate this…I can’t bear this bloody thing, it’s what they do, every stinking time.” He then thrust the incontinent pen into Camilla’s hands, wiping his own hands as he walked away.

In effect, that has been his management style when things go bad, as at his charity, the Prince’s Trust, where his response to a scandal over trading honors for donations was to scuttle off into the bushes, claiming no knowledge of the problem, and blame others.

More worrying is that, to the public, his foppish attention to his wardrobe plants him firmly in the “posh” class in a way that the queen, in spite of her vast wealth, never seemed to reflect—indeed, in the last decade of her life, she went for a blaze of bright colors that blew away any whiff of courtly hauteur. In contrast, Charles was always uncomfortable with casual informality and prone to pull rank when he felt that the deference he demanded was lacking.

The aura of royal entitlement that clung to Charles as Prince of Wales was sometimes used for vulgar commercial purposes, as when, earlier this year, he consented to the name of his personal country estate, Highgrove, being used for a perfume, Highgrove Bouquet. The perfumer gushed: “His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales was inspired to create a fragrance that captures the scent of Highgrove Gardens in the summer.”

Now, finding himself as king of a nation on hard times, he might want to care less about fragrance than the pervasive stink of rotten governance.

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