Queen Elizabeth II’s annual Christmas Day speech, when the British monarch treats her subjects to a recap of the year almost ended and her aspirations for the one coming, could be more gripping than usual this year.
Britons are anxiously awaiting whether Elizabeth Alexandra Mary will seize the opportunity to abdicate. If she does, she shouldn’t stop there; she should engineer a deal to disenfranchise Prince Charles and put her grandson, William, and his wife, Kate, on the throne.
That is not as far-fetched as it sounds. Last week, Coral, the British bookmaker, stopped taking bets on whether the queen will quit the throne after 15 punters wagered a total of about £3,000 (Dh17,137) on the possibility — at odds of about 10-1. The company said the hour-long splurge “set alarm bells ringing”.
The internet duly caught fire with speculation.
The queen has unarguably earned a rest. She has had the job since February 1952 and is just months away from surpassing Queen Victoria, who reigned from 1837 to 1901, as the longest-serving monarch. She is currently on her 12th prime minister. Her Diamond Jubilee two years ago was an unqualified success, marking a resurgence of public affection for the royals. Charles’s disastrous marriage to Lady Diana Spencer, and their subsequent affairs and divorce, had turned into a distasteful soap opera unbecoming of the head of state’s family and history.
The Buckingham Palace public-relations machinery bats away the abdication question by referring to the queen’s 1947 pledge, on her 21st birthday, that her entire life would be in service to the nation. The uncomfortable truth — not quite taboo, but close to it — is that even monarchists are less than enthused by the prospect of Charles, who turned 66 last month, taking over. It would be easier to skip a generation while the queen is alive.
Easier, but still not easy. “I’ll run out of time soon,” the longest-serving heir apparent said in 2012. “I shall have snuffed it if I’m not careful.” I have huge sympathy for Charles’ position, but I’d argue his life in the antechamber means he is uniquely unqualified to do anything, including being king.
Political meddling
In May, he compared Russian President Vladimir Putin’s actions in Ukraine to those of Adolf Hitler’s Nazis, necessitating a meeting between the Russian embassy and the Foreign Office. The Guardian has unsuccessfully waged a nine-year legal battle to force the publication of 27 letters Charles wrote to ministers in seven departments, which the newspaper says will show him interfering in government policy.
While political meddling, talking to trees and bizarre sexual innuendo with your mistress do not amount to an automatic disqualification, they do not exactly augment the heir’s almost nonexistent CV.
By contrast, Wills, as his son is affectionately known, has been expertly groomed since birth to be a modern king for a modern world. He married a commoner, Kate Middleton, adding some variety to the royal gene pool. Their biggest scandals to date involve a couple of photos of Kate’s in a windblown skirt and some privacy-busting paparazzi nude shots of them on holiday. Handily, William’s brother Harry is much more likely to be caught playing strip billiards in Las Vegas, giving the newspapers a royal playboy to pursue.
As any chief executive officer will tell you, the best time to quit is when you are ahead. Even Pope Benedict XVI understood that. What is more, Britain Inc., its CEO Liz, and its board members in the Royal Family are in an unusually sweet spot right now. I am agnostic on the monarchy’s cost-benefit ratio, but an orderly transition to ‘King William’ and ‘Queen Kate’ may just be the thing to turbocharge the British economic recovery and ensure that the Royals maintain their current popularity.
— Washington Post
Mark Gilbert is a Bloomberg View columnist and member of the Bloomberg View editorial board.
