ninme

The Sunday Times - King Charles, Mr Fix-it for a broken Britain
The Prince of Wales is the man to reinvent the crown by making it the champion of self-help and stepping in where the state refuses to tread, by David Starkey (his Monarchy: The Windsors, will be broadcast on December 26 on Channel 4.)

The monarchy was in effect rebranded 90 years ago by the Queen’s grandfather George V to confront a double threat. … The monarchy became committed to the ethos of public service, of which it saw itself as the apex and exemplar. Crucially it became a “family monarchy” with morality at its heart. And it was morality, in its vulgar sense of sexual behaviour, that was to carry it to both its peak and its depths.

The thesis:

But Charles’s second marriage is only a foretaste of the problems that will arise with his coronation and accession. Will it be possible for Charles to have a coronation at all? Is it even desirable? Might it not be better instead to have a civil inauguration and let church and crown go their separate ways?

For who any longer believes in the central message of the coronation? That - as symbolised by the fivefold anointing - the monarch is personally chosen and consecrated by God? The Queen does, of course. But for the rest of us it seems an absurd way to proceed at the beginning of the 21st century.

Which is a load of crap, IMHO. The nub:

It was his great-great-grandfather Edward VII, during his 60-year stint as Prince of Wales, who began to develop the royal role as patron of good causes. The resemblances to Charles’s situation are striking. Edward was the 60-year-old heir to a revered female monarch, Victoria, who had sat on the throne for decades. Edward also had tense relations with his father and a radically different vision of monarchy from his parents.

And he had already begun to sketch it out as Prince of Wales. He and his wife Alexandra were assiduous in travelling the length and breadth of the country to open people’s parks and people’s palaces. These were the fruit of local self-help and municipal enterprise. In medical charities, however, Edward was proactive, using friends among the new plutocracy in the City to help finance the London hospital in the half-century before the National Health Service.

In that sense, Charles will be a reversion to type. Edward’s successors found themselves unable to develop his pioneering role, as the burgeoning welfare state began to marginalise voluntary works. But now the tide is turning. The arts and universities are slowly being weaned off state funding. Alternative forms of finance are being sought for schools. Even the NHS is being subject to covert privatisation. Most important of all, perhaps, the state has lost confidence in itself. State welfare is seen as part of the problem rather than the solution. Suddenly a much wider foreshore appears.

And in Charles we have, for the first time since Prince Albert in the 19th century, a royal patron who could occupy it. Charles’s good causes used to be greeted with mockery, but suddenly there’s a realisation that practically everything he has sponsored has become mainstream.

So, obviously the “rebranding” wasn’t sustainable (this is why you don’t mess with an established brand (and after 1,000 years I’d say that qualifies as “established”)), so maybe the best thing to do would be to just go back to how it was, rather than further tinkering (because, after all, we’ve seen how well that has and is worked with the Lords).

For most of his life Prince Charles has looked a man out of his time. But now perhaps his time has come. Politicians are discredited and the machinery of state malfunctioning or broken. If the state can’t or won’t help, voluntary action, charitable giving and self-help are the only resort. But they need someone to inspire, direct and honour their efforts. No politician who attempted to do it would be taken seriously for a second. Maybe King Charles III could. It would be a new kingdom – of the mind, the spirit, culture and values – and would not be unworthy of a 1,000-year-old throne.

ninme angles for that barge