It was a wintry and ominous November Tuesday. A crowd of 50 or 60 republicans waited outside Westminster for the state opening of parliament. “Not my king”, read their big, yellow banners. Even if you didn’t care about the existence of the monarchy one way or another, there was something ineffably sad about the whole fandango. King Charles, pushing 75, was about to perform this duty as king for the first time. He was charged with reading out unhinged oil and gas policies that directly threatened the only thing he has ever publicly cared about – the environment. Figurehead of the country, or the puppet of a hooligan regime?
Maybe, at the moment, those two things are the same. Only one of the protesters, a woman in her early 60s who declined to give her name, had zero sympathy: “He should have the guts to speak his mind,” she said, in a meld of anatomical metaphors.
The protesters were cheerful: theirs was the only visual impact in a Parliament Square otherwise shorn of activity. The police had put up barriers to make way for the impending cavalcade. In trying to contain the dissenting voices in a way that respected democracy and health and safety, the police had made the “Not my king” rally look densely populated. When Charles rolled around in his ridiculous gilded carriage, it would have been one of the only things to catch his attention – people whose king he wasn’t.
You could say that Republic, the organisation that brought these protesters together, had shot the opening scenes of the monarchy’s disaster movie, the bit where the smouldering cigarette is dropped in the parched forest and no one notices. Graham Smith, who has run Republic for 20 years, is a softly spoken, unexcitable man. When we meet, he walks me through the numbers. There was a membership surge in 2011, when the Prince and Princess of Wales got married, and another two years later, during the queen’s diamond jubilee. “These big events are really helpful to us,” he says. “We get a lot of exposure.”
There was a deliberate change of tack to make more noise during royal celebrations: “That plays into the idea that the whole country is celebrating. We decided to keep on campaigning all the way through the big events. Even over the birth of Prince George, we did a Born Equal campaign.” During the 10s, membership grew by about half, to 2,000 people. The number of registered supporters also started growing in 2018. (Members pay dues, while registered supporters just get emails. Many supporters donate, too, though, so there is little practical difference.)
Really, though, this story takes place in the past four years. “We’ve now got 140,000 registered supporters – up from 30,000 – and 10,000 members,” says Smith. “Membership has doubled since the coronation. In 2020, our income was £106,000. It was £172,000 the next year; last year it was £286,000. On the death of the queen, we had £70,000 in donations that month. This year, income is hitting £560,000.”
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The case against having a monarchy is simple. As Smith puts it: “Most people in this country believe in democracy, equality, accountability and so on. The royal family stands firmly against those values.” But all that has been true for a very long time; it’s more or less what the Levellers said in 1647. What has happened to galvanise this ambient, abstract disapproval?
All the protesters I spoke to at the state opening of parliament had joined Republic in the past two years – more than half since the Queen died last September. There was a sense among them that her death should have represented a break in the clouds, a moment of clarity in which to examine the institution and see how it might change for the better, even if that didn’t necessarily mean the family “tiptoed away and said sorry, so we could all stop genuflecting”, as Peter McLoughlin, 69, put it. That opportunity was emphatically passed up by King Charles, who has given no indication that he is a wind of change.
“I was a realist,” said Brian Woolneough, 57. “While the queen was alive, it was much harder to convince people that getting rid of her was a good idea.” Even among people who were lukewarm about the royals, she was seen to embody the spirit of public service and the connection to the past – its greatest hits – by which the institution justifies itself. King Charles is seen as a character more likely to please himself, whether in his personal life or his public stance.
The death of the queen encouraged people to follow the money, which the Guardian has been doing since its Cost of the crown investigation began on the eve of the coronation. It isn’t just their wills that have been sealed from public scrutiny for more than a century; nothing is transparent. Under a custom that dates to the medieval period, the king claims the assets of anyone who dies intestate in the duchies of Cornwall or Lancaster. The royals have long claimed that they give the proceeds to charity, after deducting costs, but much of the money has in fact been used to renovate the king’s own properties.
Their money is held in shell companies; much of their art is rarely, if ever, publicly exhibited; and the jewels … well, what is a family to do with diamonds looted from Lahore nearly 200 years ago? They can’t easily wear them in public (although Queen Camilla made an exception for the coronation). They don’t want to give them back. They must just wear them around the house.
But the political context is as important, if not more so. The anonymous female protester traced a straight line from the deference expected by the royals to a culture in which people think “Jacob Rees-Mogg is better than them because he speaks posh, when he’s not – he’s a slug.” I think back to King Charles’s palpable reluctance when he had to meet Liz Truss as prime minister for the first time. He actually muttered: “Dear, oh dear.”
It may not have been as personal as it looked: he could have had a hunch that the Conservatives, in their present incarnation, spell disaster for the monarchy. As Nick Weatherill, 28, said at the protest: “The Tories have tried to make patriotism a concept that only exists on the right.” I sincerely doubt that any of them (except maybe Prince Harry) want to be on the frontline of the culture war at all, but they have become its cannon fodder.
During the coronation – indeed, since the queen’s death – a lot of political authoritarianism that had nothing to do with the royal family was ventriloquised through the heavy-handed treatment of anti-royal dissent. Despite having been in conversation with the Metropolitan police for four months before the coronation, Republic’s Smith was arrested in London on the day, along with five colleagues, which brought a full beam of attention – and another surge in donations.
Symon Hill, a 46-year-old peace activist, was arrested at a proclamation for King Charles in Oxford last September, just after the queen’s death, for saying: “Who elected him?” (Two weeks after he was charged with breaching the Public Order Act 1986, the case was dropped.) A woman was arrested on the same day in Scotland for a similar act. I met Hill on the protest this month; it would be impossible to describe a man less likely to pose a serious threat to public order.
Whether these arrests were intended to flex the powers of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 or to engender a post-pluralist ambience, they had the side-effect of seeming unBritish, thus generating an appetite for a conversation about what Britishness looks like. The police, meanwhile, seem to have become fed up with acting as the heavies in this political confection. According to Smith, when a protest was organised against the Scottish coronation in July, the police liaison officer reportedly called his counterpart in the Met and said: “Can you tell us what you did, so we don’t do that?”
This predictable juxtaposition – hysterically royalist politicians tarnishing the royals with their hysteria – is underpinned by something more serious: the Boris Johnson hangover. Whatever you think of the contradictions of the British monarchy – a putative democracy with an inherited figure at its head and an unwritten constitution dependent on trust, in which the final arbitrating institution is opaque – you probably didn’t lose much sleep over it until you were forced to learn the word “prorogue” and witness the consequences of a queen who could only assent and a prime minister who could lie to her without facing meaningful censure.
“Those constitutional outrages have shown the power of the executive – the prime minister in particular – when the monarchy is basically an empty chair,” says Smith. “For me, the principle of an effective, independent head of state was always so important – it just so happens that the powers recently have been so bad that they’ve helped the argument.”
Over the same period, the Black Lives Matter movement has hit not just the UK, but also the Commonwealth, crystallising what may have seemed like specific, bordered arguments into a coherent international whole. King Charles’s visit last month to Kenya, his first to Africa as king, was “marked by questions about Britain’s colonial legacy”, said one report. He expressed “deepest regret” over the Mau Mau uprising in the 50s, during which British forces detained 1.5 million people, subjecting many to rape and torture. But the question is more complicated than whether or not he apologised (he didn’t); it is broader than the outrage in Kenya and goes back a lot further than 75 years.
Republic has taken a back seat in the debate about slavery and colonialism. Smith says it wants that to be led by people calling for reparations, some of whom have spoken at its conferences. “I think it’s going be a real problem for the royal family. It’s not that they are the head of the state that did these things – it’s that they are the family and they celebrate their legacy: ‘We’re 1,000 years old and that’s why we’re here,’” he says.
“This family started the slave trade, invested in it, rejoiced in it. The £600m that Charles inherited last year, tax-free, would have been inherited monarch to monarch, going back, uninterrupted, to when they were making money out of slavery. This is why a lot of those Caribbean states are saying that if they can’t get an answer out of the British government, they’ll go straight to the monarchy and ask for reparations. Unless they apologise, it’s never going to go away.”
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At the protest in Parliament Square, a load of horses and ceremonially dressed riders heralded the king’s approach. (They probably had a regimental name; I declined to discover it. The end of my deference started then, apparently.) Cameron Baillee, 22, noticed that some of the horses didn’t look too happy, tossing their heads and whatnot. None of us knew whether or not that was typical of horses in military formation. “I did ask a police horse once, on a demo, whether she was sure she was on their side and not mine,” Baillee said.
Hill’s main objection to the monarchy was its connection to militarism, he said: “Members of the armed forces swear allegiance to the monarch.” He was training to be a Baptist minister; part of that faith is “a belief in the equal value of all human beings. My pacifism, my anti-monarchism, my activism – all of it proceeds from my faith and my understanding of history.” The horses thundered past. “See?” he said. While the charges against Hill relating to Oxford were dropped and the consequences weren’t grave professionally, he didn’t enjoy the death threats.
All of a sudden, the king and queen were right there, so close to us that we could have been looking at them from the far end of a pub. “Not my king!” everyone shouted. Stumped for a response, King Charles waved at us. The funny thing is, we all waved back. Nobody means him any harm.
“When I started doing this, people used to say: ‘I agree with what you’re doing, but I don’t think the end of the monarchy will happen in my lifetime,’” says Smith. “Nowadays, people don’t say that. The monarchy no longer looks solid – it looks vulnerable. The spell has been broken.”
