It requires an effort to keep reminding yourself of the sheer historical oddity of monarchy’s healthy survival into the modern democratic age. Yet so rooted is the monarchy in the mental furniture of Britain that most people in our politics barely think about it. This week, however, the modern British monarchy has stood up and demanded to be counted, doing something new and perhaps genuinely consequential.
Judged by any yardstick, Charles III’s visit to Canada was an audaciously disjunctive event. The idea that a vibrant democracy such as Canada, with a highly sophisticated sense of its own complex identity, might summon an elderly hereditary monarch from across the ocean to provide a focal point for its resistance to Donald Trump’s existential threat takes some believing. Yet that was exactly what played out this week, when the king travelled to Ottawa to open the new Canadian parliament.
