A monarch who does not know his place would be a disaster for an unstable Britain
Elizabeth II has been on the throne for 70 years, as I am sure you have heard. She is 96 years old. There’s no delicate way of putting this, so let us be blunt: she will not reign over us for much longer. She will be succeeded by a man who has proudly announced his readiness to break the conventions controlling the behaviour of the head of state. Because there is no prospect of parliament jumping a generation and passing the crown to his son, no one can stop the forward march of Charles III taking the throne.
The design flaw in all systems of hereditary power is that they eventually throw up a duffer. Monarchy “indiscriminately admits every species of character to the same authority” Thomas Paine wrote in 1791. The reign of Charles III will be such a neurotic experience because we will have a monarch who doesn’t accept that his authority has nothing to do with his ability and everything to do with an accident of birth.
