After the Queen, A King Who Will Not Learn?

It seems as though she has always been there and—though reason and mortality tell us otherwise—always will be. Queen Elizabeth II, who turns ninety-six this month, and is beginning to show signs of frailty, has been on the throne longer than any other British monarch. Next year is the seventieth anniversary of her coronation. This year, as it would be hard not to be aware, is her Platinum Jubilee. She has reigned seven years longer than the previous longest reign, that of her great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria.

You’d have to be churlish indeed not to feel that congratulations were in order. We’ll come to that in a moment.

To paraphrase the song, we won’t know how much the Queen will be missed till she’s gone. Like the weather and Anzac Day, she has been part of the background against which the great majority of Australians have lived their whole lives. Even quite elderly people have memories of royal visits when they were young, of watching the graceful royal yacht Britannia sail to her berth, of crowds in cities and country towns cheering as the young Queen and her handsome husband drove slowly by, waving, of being lined up as schoolchildren in elaborate formations with bossy teachers blowing whistles and pushing everyone into place to spell out “Welcome”. Then Charles came to Timbertop, cementing the bond with Australians of his age (if of a limited social stratum) as an Old Geelong Grammarian. Younger Australians can remember the Queen’s later visits, by plane instead of ship, until the strain of travelling so far became too much of a risk for an octogenarian, and her grandson William and his wife came here instead, watched more on television than in the streets, but still enthusiastically received—not least by the Labor and republican politicians scrambling and elbowing each other to get a place of honour beside the royal personages.

And from our point of view she has never put a foot wrong. She has never “interfered” in our local politics, whatever “interfered” might be taken to mean, and no matter how much ageing Whitlamite maintainers of their rage might try to wrench the facts to implicate her in the dismissal of their vainglorious idol. She has never backed any party or faction or taken sides in a local argument or pushed a particular barrow, even when the future of the monarchy in Australia was itself in question; indeed, did not her husband remark, after Australians voted no to a republic in 1999, “Don’t these people know what’s good for them?” The Crown, in other words, would have accepted with good grace the sovereign will of the people, even if that meant the termination of its Australian connection. As Queen of Australia, Elizabeth II has for all these years impeccably observed the limits of her constitutional position.

As is only right, the congratulations from Australians on her exemplary reign have been legion and sincere. But not from everyone. Where, to start with, are the feminist cheers for this remarkable woman as she celebrates the Platinum Jubilee of her accession? Where is the recognition, when “women’s leadership” is so assiduously promoted by feminists and their public address systems in the media, that this woman has been the head of state of one of the world’s most important nations through decades of its history and through crises internal and external, and still works daily at her duties at an age when other working women are long since retired? Where are the expressions of satisfaction from the “sisterhood” that the Queen, in anticipation of her own passing, has specifically indicated that her daughter-in-law Camilla should be Queen Consort instead of being kept in the shadowy background as a kind of mute appendage to Prince Charles? (This might turn out to be one of the best decisions the Queen has ever made. When she made it, did she have her own mother in mind and the strength that strong Scot imparted to the nervous King George VI? Camilla is one of those capable women all men rely on at times who will be not only a support but a restraint on the sometimes erratic Charles when he is king.)

But feminists ignore all that. Despite their protestations of admiration for women who stand out for their achievements, feminists only admire sour leftist women like themselves. If you are a high-profile woman with the wrong opinions on politics or anything else you hardly qualify in their view as a woman at all. You are whatever the equivalent in sexual politics is of Uncle Toms to race-baiters. The achievements don’t count. Look at Margaret Court, Lady Thatcher, Condoleezza Rice when she was American Secretary of State. If they were on the Left they’d be female icons and role models (indeed, Condoleezza would be a patron saint of Black Lives Matter as well).

Cheers from another quarter too are deafeningly absent. Australian republicans can’t wait to be rid of the Queen. They stop short of publicly wishing for her demise, but you know they are thinking with satisfaction that it can only be a short time now. Then, while cranking up the republican propaganda that this would be a good time to bring the “royal connection” with Australia to a “dignified end”, the more civilised among them may even permit themselves to express a few crocodile tears for the monarchy—it has “served us well”, it was a “reasonable constitutional arrangement for an Australia emerging from a colonial past”—but now we have “come of age”, are “diverse and no longer Anglo”. “entitled to govern ourselves”, as though we don’t do that already, with an Australian citizen as governor-general and head of state of our “crowned republic”.

The cult of the republic is the cult of mediocrity. Republicans want to dismantle an arrangement that has worked well since federation—and that no one complained about until they started up—and replace it with extended rule by our not spectacularly gifted politicians with, as a figurehead president, either a washed-up one of themselves or, and here the heart really quails, the kind of individual who gets chosen as Australian of the Year.

Perhaps they will get their way, though it seems that younger Australians are more content with the monarchy than their elders and rather like the idea of William and Kate eventually succeeding to the throne. More immediately, the essential Australian identity of the governor-generalship could be underlined by the appointment of an Aborigine to represent the Queen. This would be a demonstration of national unity and an encouragement to genuine reconciliation. It might help defuse some of the explosive rancour building up in our racial politics. Republicans ought to welcome that, but don’t expect them to. In fact they won’t know what to say without appearing to be either opposed to Aboriginal advancement or supportive of an institution they pretend doesn’t represent them.  

Nevertheless, this is no time to feel confident that the future of the monarchy is guaranteed. It is perhaps less in danger of being abolished in Australia than it is of losing popularity in Britain. This will turn on how King Charles III conducts himself. For those who attach any significance to omens, the fact that his first royal namesake was beheaded and his second was unpopular and probably saved only by his early death from exile does not augur well.

Charles’s problem, as theirs was, is that he, unlike his mother, is an interferer. He takes sides on public issues, which a constitutional monarch should never do. The most egregious case is climate, about which he knows no more than anyone else and risks making a fool of himself. He is always warning, fatuously, of forthcoming doom. He announced last year that the world has only a “dangerously narrow window” of thirty-five years to reverse “global warming”. This supersedes his previous dangerously narrow window of “a hundred months” in 2009. That window shut five years ago without any apparent apocalyptic consequences.

Charles will not or cannot learn the lesson so ably taught by his mother’s career, that the royal family, and especially its head, should be above politics and ideology—and the climate “crisis” is nothing if not ideology. Unless Camilla tones him down, even loyal subjects will eventually lose patience with a monarch who uses his unelected prestige to take sides and deliver personal opinions on divisive issues.

The Queen has never done that. She represents stability in a world that has changed enormously in her seven-decade reign, and often for the worse. Of course, some things relating to the monarchy have changed too. The Queen inherited an empire; this has dissolved into an amorphous Commonwealth, with the only thing in common between all its members the status of the Queen herself (two members of what she likes to refer to as a Commonwealth “family”, India and Pakistan, have actually been at war with each other). We no longer have knighthoods: all those captains of industry (and their wives) glorying in a title now have to content themselves with a few letters after their name. The royal cypher has vanished from post offices—and what happened to all those framed copies of Sir William Dargie’s 1954 portrait of the Queen in her “wattle dress” and Pietro Annigoni’s 1955 painting with Windsor Castle in the background that used to hang in public offices and schools? Somehow they were surreptitiously removed at some time after the Whitlam revolution, presumably as a result of creeping republicanism deep in the public service. It is instructive how republican victories can most easily be achieved undemocratically.

For the first time in decades, the Queen’s health is a worry and the subject of daily medical scrutiny. Her brush with Covid hasn’t helped. Australians will wish her well, while being glad of our political good fortune in having Elizabeth II at the centre of a unique and benevolent—at least in theory—system of government and as a reminder that we don’t exist just in our own big backyard but are part of a wide and venerable civilisation. 

Christopher Akehurst, a frequent contributor, lives in Melbourne. He wrote on the ABC in the March issue