Isla Campbell’s Assessment of King Charles’s First Year of Formal Reign: The Successes, the Continuations, and the Question of Whether He Gets Credit for Being Right All Along
Reported by Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
By Isla Campbell | Crown and Clown — Royal Commentary from Central London
It is more than a year since the Coronation at Westminster Abbey, and the question that royal commentators are now professionally obligated to ask is: what kind of King is Charles proving to be? The honest answer is that the reign is still being established, that the early assessments are probably premature, and that I am going to offer them anyway because premature assessment is what royal commentary is for and I have never claimed otherwise.
Charles is proving to be: more hardworking than his characterisation as a man of leisure ever suggested; more politically careful than his decades of public advocacy for causes would imply; more personally warm in formal settings than the public image of the remote intellectual prepared anyone for; and less willing to innovate in the ceremonial and structural aspects of the monarchy than reform advocates had hoped, which is both predictable (institutions reform slowly) and slightly disappointing (the opportunity to rationalise the monarchy’s working structure was real and has not yet been taken).
Being Right All Along
The thing about Charles that the Coronation anniversary prompts reflection on is the degree to which the causes he was mocked for championing have become the consensus positions that nobody disputes. Organic farming, which he advocated from the 1980s when it was considered eccentric, is now mainstream agricultural policy direction. Architecture and urban planning that responds to human scale and community context rather than architectural theory alone, which he argued for in ways that made him deeply unpopular with the architectural profession in the 1990s, is now the direction of urban design conversation in most serious planning discussions. Climate change, which he has discussed since before it was politically safe to do so in the circles where monarchs operate, is now the central policy challenge of his reign.
He has not been right about everything. His architectural interventions, while directionally correct, were sometimes expressed in ways that were more concerned with aesthetic nostalgia than functional innovation. His organic farming advocacy was sometimes accompanied by a romanticisation of pre-industrial agriculture that overlooked the food security challenges that modern agricultural productivity addresses. The causes were right even when the specific expressions were imperfect.
The Commonwealth Question
Charles’s approach to the Commonwealth — the association of 56 countries with historical ties to Britain — is the aspect of his reign with the largest structural uncertainty. Several Commonwealth member states are actively considering becoming republics, and the Coronation did not resolve the question of what the Commonwealth’s future relationship with the British monarchy will be. Charles has pursued a more consultative and less hierarchical approach to the Commonwealth than his predecessors, which reflects a genuine understanding of where the relationship needs to go. Whether it is enough, and whether the Commonwealth remains cohesive as its members make independent constitutional choices, will be one of the defining questions of his reign.
My Coronation coverage at The London Prat is the starting point for anyone wanting the full context. The year since has added texture to an initial assessment that was, I think, appropriately cautious and that the evidence since has partly confirmed and partly complicated, which is how good assessments age. Charles is doing the job. He is doing it with the preparation of someone who waited longer than he should have had to wait. Whether that preparation produces the reign that the preparation suggested it could produce is what the next decade will determine.
For monarchy analysis that resists premature conclusions, see NewsThump.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
