Woke King Chuck: servant of the revolution?

A response to 'Abolish the Monarchy'

This article is in reply to George Ruska’s case for a right-wing republicanism, published in these pages on March 19, 4 Cha. III (or 2026 as Ruska would doubtless prefer).

Let us begin with a brief summary of George Ruska’s article. The author makes no pretence of doing so fairly, but the reader may read Ruska themselves if so inclined. Ruska asserts that the popularity of the British monarchy is overstated. He observes that ‘unassimilated foreign-born or foreign-descended populations’ within our unhappy realm have little affection for the institution of monarchy, but he cautions us that this fact alone is no good basis on which to found any fealty to Our Sovereign Lord Charles. From this, he spends some time developing the King’s tacit and explicit support for multiculturalism, diversity, and every other execrable shibboleth of our modern stakeholder kingdom: the burden of which is simply to say that Woke King Chuck is Woke, a fact which perspicacious readers might already have deduced from the fact that he is called Woke King Chuck. By invoking the tedious Mike Bartlett play King Charles III, he suggests that Woke King Chuck might try to make mischief for a future right-wing government.

Ruska then imagines a future Reform government and recommends to it a program of removing the vestigial powers of the monarchy and downgrading it to a sort of marionette of the state. Here Ruska’s proposal falls rather short of the sexier promise of his article’s headline ‘Abolish the Monarchy’. However, readers ought to be aware that it is editors and not writers who choose headlines, and for all I know I could presently be writing under the headline ‘A Gay Retard’s Case for Monarchism’, and so we should not hold this against Ruska.

If I may, Ruska’s argument boils down to: the Windsors are Woke; the Right should take revenge upon them for being Woke; and this will not all be an Iran-bombing waste of political capital because the Monarchy is not that popular anyway.

With respect to Ruska, the strawman just assembled is a weak case for abolishing the monarchy, and one that ignores the great utility the monarchy can offer to a future government of the right.

Is Woke King Chuck Woke?

Yes, of course he is. That is why he is called Woke King Chuck. His son is Woke too. So was his late mother, after a fashion. But his Wokeness is shallow and is largely a defence mechanism.

It is the stated view of distinguished former sports broadcaster David Icke that the Windsor family are intergalactic lizards. Of course, this is a fantasy, because their true and final form is that of the cockroach. Like the cockroach, popularly reputed to be hardy enough to survive a nuclear war, the Windsors’ chief instinct is survival.

In 1914, the professional head of the Royal Navy was Woke King Chuck’s great-grandfather, the Prince Louis of Battenburg, a German prince and career naval officer. Upon the outbreak of war, such was the anti-Teutonic sentiment in Britain that His Serene Highness was pressured by Churchill to resign as First Sea Lord. By 1917, he relinquished his German titles and anglicised his surname to Mountbatten. Three days later the Royal Family followed suit and changed their name from Saxe-Coburg-Knockwurst-Biershinken & Gotha, to just plain old Windsor, after a property they owned near Slough. The ignominy for the former Prince Battenburg did not end there, as he was then forced to become the Marquess of Milford Haven, a crap seaside town near Swansea.

Here we see the alacrity of our Royal family (and particularly the more intelligent cadet branch of it, the Mountbattens) in recognising the way the wind was blowing and tacking closely to it in order to survive. It is somewhat remarkable that a family of German aristocrats managed to cling to the throne during a vicious and highly destructive war against Germany and Austria, and it should also be remembered that the Windsors emerged from the war as the only surviving royal house of a European great power (assuming you do not count Italy as a European great power, which you shouldn’t).

After the end of the war George V — another of Woke King Chuck’s great-grandfathers — was sensitive to the growing democratic and socialist spirit of the age and thus adapted the Royal family to meet it. As a new king before the war, he had already intervened to secure the passage of the so-called ‘People’s Budget’. During it, he opposed his Government’s plan to offer asylum to his cousin Tsar Nicholas II due to concerns that this could provoke anti-monarchist sentiment in Britain (Nicholas II was then murdered along with his wife and children in a dirty cellar in Ekaterinburg in 1918). Following the war, he created new orders of chivalry specifically designed to co-opt and buy the powerful leaders of the trade unions without embarrassing their socialist scruples. He used his vestigial political powers to invite Ramsay MacDonald to form Britain’s first socialist government in 1924 after an inconclusive election, and cultivated friendships with leading Labour politicians. He enthusiastically took to addressing his subjects via the new invention of radio, establishing the Christmas broadcast as a royal institution.

Woke King Chuck’s promotion of the diversity agenda is rather unlikely to be any more sincere than Louis Battenburg’s abandonment of his German titles and possessions, or George V’s commitment to the People’s Budget’s populist tax raid on the wealthy. Much like his great-grandfathers, he simply senses the way the wind is blowing. Ruska’s ultimate prescription is that the government should insert its arm up the backside of his royal personage and operate his mouth like a sock puppet. But this seems to fail to understand what is already happening. The Royal Family has not led the state in promoting a diversity agenda: it has followed it. There has been no need to place the various royal press officers under direct Cabinet Office control, because they already say what the Cabinet Office would tell them to say without it ever needing to.

There are some matters about which Woke King Chuck is probably sincerely passionate. One of these is the environment, which as Prince of Wales he spoke about incessantly, and long before it was modish. However, his environmentalism is in the Scrutonian mould, which is simply to say that he is sentimental about the English (and Scottish) countryside, and that he (when not blasting them apart with his Purdey) likes cute furry animals. It is obvious to all except perhaps Ed Miliband that the Net Zero agenda will be cast aside and forgotten about as quickly as you can say ‘power cut’, and there is no way that Woke King Chuck would stake his crown on promoting hair-shirt miserabilism for his subjects from the comfort of one of his many palaces. He might have a Third from Cambridge, but he’s not quite that stupid.

His other great passion is architecture, and here, in fact, his aesthetic senses are far more in tune with the swinish multitude than the Royal Institute of British Architects is. Allow me here a digression from the main march of my argument for a brief flight of fancy. Whilst our housing crisis is largely a product of immigration, and should be solved as such, we still have a great deal of housing stock in the wrong places, and it is far too difficult to build industrial plant under our current planning system. A Reform government would be well advised to commission Samuel Hughes or Quinlan Terry or that Irish homosexual with the country house Instagram account to produce an architectural pattern book in the popular traditional vernacular style. This would be sponsored by Woke King Chuck and named in his honour. Projects which followed the King Charles Pattern Book would be exempted from the Town & Country Planning Act system. Data centres, nuclear waste processing facilities, and nerve gas factories would then spring up across the country in attractive neo-Georgian style, and with tacit Royal approval, so as to soften the blow for Nimbies, auguring in a new ‘Carolean’ age of prosperity.

Let us pause here and take a breath. So far, the author has taken you through a potted history of the House of Windsor, and has succeeded only in persuading you that they are craven and cynical survivalists. This, you might think, is hardly a promising foundation for a right-wing case for monarchism. However, dear reader, you are quicker than that, and you can already see the drift of the author’s case. The wages the Windsors pay for survival are the provision of stability and continuity to the government of the day. Let us continue.

The Utility of Monarchy

We are living in Britain’s century of humiliation. When the late Queen was crowned, the only head of state in the world with more subjects was Mao Zedong. She was queen not just of the White Dominions, but of independent states like Pakistan and Ceylon (Sri Lanka). It is true that Britain had been replaced by the United States as the world’s greatest power; however, Britain was still competitive with the Soviet Union, with a larger and more advanced economy, and with a Navy that would not be surpassed by the Soviet fleet until well into the sixties. When the Queen died Britain was barely within the top five of the world’s largest economies, with a Navy that (as recent events have shown) could barely put to sea.

There was nothing inevitable about Britain’s decline as an economy and as a military power. It was a policy choice made by politicians who, in ecumenical consensus, wanted to prioritise the indirect welfarism of a nationalised industrial strategy, and the direct welfarism of, well, welfarism, over Britain’s economic dynamism and military prestige. Britain’s great post-war poet Philip Larkin captured the age well in his acidic ‘Homage to a Government’ written in direct response to the decision to withdraw from East of Suez, and not long after Britain had cancelled its advanced ballistic missile, strike aircraft, and aircraft carrier programs.

Next year we are to bring all the soldiers home
For lack of money, and it is all right.
Places they guarded, or kept orderly,
Must guard themselves, and keep themselves orderly
We want the money for ourselves at home
Instead of working. And this is all right.

It’s hard to say who wanted it to happen,
But now it’s been decided nobody minds.
The places are a long way off, not here,
Which is all right, and from what we hear
The soldiers there only made trouble happen.
Next year we shall be easier in our minds.

Next year we shall be living in a country
That brought its soldiers home for lack of money.
The statues will be standing in the same
Tree-muffled squares, and look nearly the same.
Our children will not know it’s a different country.
All we can hope to leave them now is money.

We are, in fact, not the children Larkin wrote about, but rather the grandchildren. And Larkin was right. Like the fabled boiled frog, the transformation of Britain from a preeminent industrial and military power to a financial services sector with a welfare state attached has gone largely unnoticed by the public at large.

Less than ten years after Larkin wrote the above poem, he was asked to write verse for the occasion of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. His first attempt, shared privately with his friends, is widely reproduced by left-wing academics as proof of Larkin’s racism, and consequent unsuitability for the school syllabus:

After Healey’s trading figures,

After Wilson’s squalid crew,

And the rising tide of n---ers

What a treat to look at you.

His serious published attempt expresses a similar sentiment, albeit in a more sombre tone as an epitaph:

In times when nothing stood

but worsened, or grew strange,

there was one constant good:

she did not change.

It is from this that we can begin to understand why Larkin correctly predicted that the children of his generation would not know they were living in a different country, despite the enormity of the change which was occurring. More important than the statues standing in the tree-muffled squares was the sense of solidity, permanence and, most importantly, historical continuity provided by the institution of the monarchy. This provided an analgesic for the public during a transformation no less profound or humiliating (albeit less precipitant) than that experienced by Russia at the end of the Cold War, or even in the final years of the Qing Dynasty.

By the 1990s, the then Prince of Wales’s much-publicised infidelity, followed by the sudden death of his popular spurned ex-wife, brought the Royal Family to a crisis comparable with the Abdication Crisis of 1936, or the present crisis concerning Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. There were signs that vicious and doctrinaire republicans like Alistair Campbell might use the Royal Family’s weakness as an opportunity to strike. However, wiser and more subtle intelligences prevailed, and the Blair government nurtured and defended the Royal Family. In return, the Royal Family provided tacit and — eventually — explicit support for the cultural and demographic transformation that the Blair government was enacting. Again, the only thing more striking than the ambition of Blair’s transformation of Britain was how few noticed it was happening. The statues remained in the tree-muffled squares; we did not realise we were living in a different country. And throughout it all was the Queen, waving on her Golden Jubilee, grinning from her box at the Royal Variety Performance, parachuting into the Olympic Stadium, providing us with that false sense that we were connected to a continuous golden thread reaching back into forgotten mists of our history.

The author very much hopes that after the next election the Right will find itself in a 1997 moment, with a large majority, a demoralised opposition, a revolutionary agenda, and a Royal family suffering from severely damaged prestige. If that is the situation an incoming Reform government finds itself in, then it should seek to put the Royal Family to the work that Macmillan and Wilson put it to in order to conceal decline, and that Blair put it to in order to conceal left-wing cultural and demographic transformation. A genuinely reforming Reform government should use the Royal Family to maintain a veneer of continuity on the surface, whilst disembowelling and recasting the British state beneath it. That is the utility that the monarchy can offer to the Right. The alternative is to open yet another front in the war Reform will need to wage against the decaying institutions of the British state.

Our Republican Constitution

Consider the United States of America, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. One is a constitutional monarchy; the other is a republic.

The intelligent reader will soon recognise that America is the constitutional monarchy, and Britain is the republic.

After the failure of the Continental Congress, the United States ratified the constitution we know today. In so many ways, this was a return to a system of government which closely resembled that of Britain at the time. In the eighteenth century, the British constitution was comprised of three estates: a powerful executive King (albeit one who, by this point, selected his ministers from Parliament), a Parliament upon which he relied for legislation and supply, and a judiciary which was increasingly an estate in its own right, independent from the King. Having rejected the hereditary principle, the Americans established an elective monarchy, and called their temporary king the President, and a Parliament they called ‘Congress’, with an elected house representing commoners and an unelected house representing grandees of the state. The judiciary’s independence from the executive was enhanced and codified, becoming the true third estate, thus completing the three-legged stool in which each coequal branch checked the other, rendering any major reform almost impossible. The great irony of the American Revolution is that rather than overthrowing the British mode of government, it set the eighteenth-century British constitution in aspic and remains ruled by it to this day.

Conversely, Britain’s long civil war between royal and parliamentary power continued to rage well after the American Revolution, and by the reign of Queen Victoria it had largely realised its recognisable modern form. Parliament had wrestled from the King his executive functions, which were now exercised by what was effectively a sub-committee of Parliament called ‘the Cabinet’, headed by a senior parliamentarian for whom the (initially informal) title of ‘Prime Minister’ was invented. The judiciary remained culturally independent, albeit formally they were led and selected by a minister of the Government, and whilst the Government was constrained by law, Parliament had (effectively) the unfettered power to change any law at will. By the nineteenth century, it was possible to summarise the British constitution in a single sentence: whatever Parliament commands is law. As the franchise was expanded until suffrage became universal, Britain had the most radically democratic constitution in the world, as nothing constrained the power of Parliament, and Parliament was elected by the mob.

This radical democratic nature of our constitution (in modern parlance, the word ‘populist’ would be preferred to ‘democratic’, as a sustained attempt has been made to change the meaning of the latter word to something like motherhood, apple pie, and friendliness to international NGOs) had, in practice, been constrained by political rather than constitutional means. The advent of the party system, followed by the cartelistic collusion of the post-1945 Labour and the Conservative parties on matters as diverse as economics, demographics, penology, and law and order, expressly against the instincts and preferences of the British public, has acted to blunt the extraordinary democratic potential of our constitution. However, we find ourselves in an era pregnant with the promise of tectonic change, as both of the traditional parties have been surpassed in polling by radical and populist parties of the right and the left.

The Crown, however, has retained a small residue of power and purpose in our republican constitution, albeit the role it performs is not obvious, and is rather technical.

If the Cabinet is just an executive sub-committee of Parliament, why does the Government not dissolve with Parliament prior to an election? Why does anarchy not therefore follow? The answer to this is that the Government does not claim to be an executive sub-committee of Parliament: it claims to be the King’s Government, exercising powers delegated by the King. It is well understood that if the King was to cast doubt on whether he had in fact delegated such powers to the Government, or if he tried to exercise them personally, then it would be the very last thing he ever did. As such, the legal fiction of ‘His Majesty’s Government’ is vital to our republican constitutional project. This residual constitutional role of the monarchy comes with very little actual power. The only situation where the monarchy may be called upon to exercise any power is in circumstances where, through an inconclusive election, or the fragmenting of parliamentary political parties or coalitions, there is need for a referee to decide who may attempt to form a government, and whether Parliament should be dissolved and an election called. This role is performed in foreign ‘Westminster Model’ constitutions, either by a non-executive ceremonial president, or (as in Canada, Australia and New Zealand) by a Governor General.

So why can’t we guillotine Woke King Chuck and retain the rest of the constitution as the editors of Pimlico Journal would no doubt prefer? Or for Ruska, replace him with a president like that mad old man with those big dogs that they had in Ireland? The correct answer to this is nothing to do with Chinese tourists wanting to visit Buckingham Palace, nor is it the fear that a president might command a rival mandate to the Prime Minister. The answer is that the replacement of the constitutional role of the Monarchy with anything else, in the current climate — remember the temptation for many otherwise good enough politicians to buy into the ‘need’ to have a British Bill of Rights to replace the Human Rights Act (and would have strengthened the Supreme Court after the whole rigmarole of 2019) — will create overwhelming pressure to draft a written constitution, with or without a non-executive ceremonial president.

If a written constitution is promulgated, then it is the written constitution that will be sovereign, and not Parliament. And, as the constitution will be interpreted by judges, it is they who will essentially constitute a sovereign regency council. And thus, no longer will Parliament be sovereign, and as it is the people who elect Parliament, no longer will the people be sovereign.

The removal of the King’s vestigial constitutional function (either through abolition, or as Ruska suggests, his relegation to a Japanese-style figurehead) will finally complete the Blair project of subordinating the radically democratic character of our republican constitution beneath the yoke of judicial human-rights liberalism.

And so, dear and loyal reader, let us be upstanding, and together give two cheers to Woke King Chuck, servant of the revolution, and all his heirs and successors.

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This article was written by Dogbox, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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