Isla Campbell on King Charles’s Role in the Commonwealth, Hong Kong’s Cautionary Tale, and What the Monarchy’s Post-Imperial Position Actually Is
Reported by Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
By Isla Campbell | Crown and Clown UK
There is a parallel that I have been turning over for several months now, and it is this: the British monarchy is, in a sense, living proof that a constitutional framework negotiated at the moment of political transition can outlast the political conditions that produced it and can do so more or less to the benefit of all involved. The Commonwealth — the voluntary association of 56 independent nations that chose to maintain a relationship with Britain and with each other after independence — is not a perfect institution. It is an imperfect one that has survived because the member nations have found it more useful than the alternatives, which is the standard by which all international institutions are properly judged.
What the Commonwealth Actually Is in 2026
The Commonwealth of Nations is frequently misunderstood by people on both sides of debates about it. Critics on the left describe it as a neo-colonial exercise in British influence maintenance. Critics on the right describe it as a sentimental gesture whose practical value is minimal. Both descriptions miss the institution as it actually functions: a network of bilateral and multilateral relationships between diverse countries that uses the Commonwealth framework to facilitate trade negotiations, educational exchanges, legal frameworks derived from shared common law traditions, and the specific interpersonal connections that come from having attended the same institutions and having participated in the same Commonwealth Games and having interacted in the same diplomatic network for seventy years. This is not empire. It is the voluntary maintenance of connections that the member nations have found worth maintaining.
King Charles is the head of the Commonwealth — a role that is not hereditary (it was conferred on him by Commonwealth leaders at the 2018 CHOGM) and that he takes seriously in ways that are visible in his public statements and his engagement with member governments. His expression of “personal sorrow” about the legacy of slavery at the Rwanda CHOGM was a statement that the late Queen would not have made in comparable terms, and it represented an evolution in the monarchy’s public engagement with the historical record that is appropriate to the institution’s current position and the current expectations of the Commonwealth member nations.
The Hong Kong Contrast
The contrast that the Commonwealth’s relative success makes visible is the contrast with Hong Kong’s “one country, two systems” framework — a transition arrangement that was also negotiated at the moment of political transfer and that has not survived the transition period. The difference between the Commonwealth framework and the Hong Kong framework is, at the most basic level, a difference in whether the parties to the arrangement had the power to enforce its terms. Commonwealth member nations are sovereign states with the diplomatic, economic, and institutional capacity to maintain their side of the relationship or to leave it. Hong Kong was a city incorporated into a sovereign state that chose not to honour the transition arrangement once the political calculus shifted.
Jimmy Lai, the founder of Apple Daily, was sentenced to 20 years in prison in February 2026 for journalism that was practised under the legal protections that Hong Kong’s Basic Law and the Sino-British Joint Declaration guaranteed. He is a British national. He is in prison. The British government has expressed concern, called for his release, and provided the BN(O) visa scheme that has allowed over 200,000 Hong Kongers to relocate to Britain. It has not imposed the targeted sanctions that advocates have called for. Whether King Charles has privately raised Lai’s case with Chinese officials is not publicly known. The King’s public statements have been calibrated to the diplomatic framework within which the government is operating.
The Monarchy’s Position on This
The monarchy does not make foreign policy. The King does not negotiate with China about Jimmy Lai’s release. The government does. The King is the head of state who represents Britain internationally and who, in that role, operates within the foreign policy framework that the elected government sets. His New York visit included co-chairing a summit on the Strait of Hormuz, which is foreign policy adjacent in the way that royal visits to allied countries always are — providing ceremonial weight to diplomatic substance rather than being the substance itself. According to the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office, Britain’s position on Hong Kong and on the Sino-British Joint Declaration is clear: China is in breach. What the government does about that breach is the foreign policy question that the monarchy cannot answer for it. The Commonwealth is the model of a transition arrangement that has worked, imperfectly. Hong Kong is the model of one that has not. The King visits the Commonwealth nations. He lays wreaths. He expresses sorrow for history. He is 75 years old and recovering from cancer and his visits to New York produce moments where someone asks him about a diamond and he maintains his composure and the wreath is laid and the world continues and the questions that the visits surface — about justice, about history, about what we owe each other across the distance of colonial experience — remain open. They remain open because they are large questions and a wreath-laying ceremony is a small occasion and the diamond is still in the Tower and Jimmy Lai is still in prison and the King is still working. All of these things are simultaneously true.
Isla Campbell covers the Royal Family and monarchy politics from Central London. Her homepage is at The London Prat.
For more monarchy and Commonwealth coverage, visit Private Eye.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
