The King and Keir: Is Charles about to get a British prime minister he likes?

LONDON – Nearly 20 years ago, a wry young human rights lawyer, Mr Keir Starmer, told a documentary film-maker that it had struck him as “odd” to receive the title of Queen’s Counsel, since he “often used to propose the abolition of the monarchy”.

Mr Starmer, now the leader of Britain’s Labour Party, has long since disavowed his anti-monarchy statements as youthful indiscretions. In 2014, he knelt before King Charles, then the Prince of Wales, who tapped him on the shoulder with a sword and awarded him a knighthood.

If Sir Keir Starmer is swept into No. 10 Downing Street in the general election next week, as polls suggest he will be, he may end up more politically in sync with King Charles than the past two Conservative prime ministers, Mr Rishi Sunak and Ms Liz Truss, whose terms have overlapped with the king’s reign.

On issues including climate change, housing, immigration and Britain’s relations with the European Union, experts say Mr Starmer is likely to find common ground with a king who holds long-standing, often fervent, views on those issues but is constitutionally barred from taking any role in politics.

“A Labour government under Keir Starmer will be more attuned to the plight of people as a social issue,” said Mr Ed Owens, a historian who studies the royal family. “These kinds of issues have long been on the radar of the king. There’s a meeting of minds in terms of the social issues at stake.”

If elected prime minister, Mr Starmer would hold a weekly meeting with King Charles, the contents of which would be strictly between them. But people who know Buckingham Palace and Downing Street said they could foresee a fruitful relationship between the 75-year-old monarch and the 61-year-old lawyer, who was knighted for his services to criminal justice as director of public prosecutions.

Beyond Mr Starmer’s progressive politics, scholars said that King Charles would appreciate the stability that a Labour government might restore after the divisions, political upheaval and revolving door of leaders that followed Brexit. In less than two years on the throne, after all, King Charles could soon be on his third prime minister.

“The monarchy seeks to be a unifying force, holding the country together, so it favours consensus rather than division,” said Mr Vernon Bogdanor, a professor at King’s College London and an authority on constitutional monarchy. “That is how the king sees his role.”

Mr Bogdanor added: “While his mother represented the wartime generation, the king is more representative of the (1960s) generation.”

As sovereign, King Charles does not vote. But in his decades as heir, he was outspoken about issues he cared about, such as organic farming and architecture. Occasionally, his views on more politically charged issues leaked out.

In 2022, King Charles – then the Prince of Wales – was reported to have criticised the Conservative government’s plan to put some asylum-seekers on one-way flights to Rwanda as “appalling”.

His comments, made in a private meeting, surfaced in The Times of London and The Daily Mail weeks before he represented Queen Elizabeth II at a meeting of Commonwealth countries in Kigali, the Rwandan capital.

Clarence House, where King Charles then had his office, declined to comment on the reports, but it did not deny them.

That prompted Mr Boris Johnson, who was then the British prime minister and proposed the Rwanda plan, to complain to King Charles, according to Mr Johnson’s communications chief at the time, Mr Guto Harri. In The Mail, he described Mr Johnson “squaring up to the prince and confronting him about what he – as unelected royalty – had said about the actions of a democratically elected government”.

King Charles said nothing about Rwanda after that. In April, after Parliament passed a revised version of the legislation under Mr Sunak, the king gave it his royal assent, as is his duty, making it law. But Mr Starmer has vowed that a Labour government would scrap the plan, calling it costly and unworkable.

Climate policy is another area where the king might find a Labour government more aligned with his views.

Ms Truss asked King Charles not to attend a UN climate change conference in Egypt in 2022, depriving him of a platform to speak out on perhaps his most cherished issue. Mr Sunak later backtracked on some of Britain’s emission-reduction targets, citing their onerous cost during a cost-of-living crisis.

Labour, by contrast, announced a green investment plan worth £28 billion (S$48 billion) a year, though it has since suspended the spending targets until Britain’s public finances improve.

“It does sound like a new Labour government and Charles would be in step on these issues,” Mr Owens, the historian, said. “But Labour has many fine words on the importance of a green agenda. Can they match those fine words with action?”

Mr Starmer’s devotion to the law might also spare the king the kind of quandary his mother faced in 2019. Mr Johnson had asked her to suspend, or prorogue, Parliament at a time when lawmakers were manoeuvring to delay his plan to pull Britain out of the European Union.

The queen assented, but the British Supreme Court later ruled that the decision was unlawful. Critics assailed Mr Johnson for putting Queen Elizabeth in an untenable position, since she could not defy an elected government.

Ms Truss raised similar questions of governance when she proposed sweeping unfunded tax cuts in 2022, which set off a backlash in the financial markets that sank her premiership.

“These prime ministers were able to run roughshod over the rules,” Mr Owens said. “Generally speaking, the monarchy doesn’t like it when too much attention is focused on” constitutional issues, he added.

As counterintuitive as it might seem, historians say that Queen Elizabeth had more cordial relations with Labour prime ministers than with Conservative ones. She was viewed as particularly comfortable with Mr Harold Wilson, a down-to-earth Yorkshireman, while her exchanges with Mrs Margaret Thatcher, a Conservative icon, were said to be occasionally prickly.

To be sure, the early Labour Party had an anti-monarchy strain. Its first parliamentary leader, Mr Keir Hardie, once wrote: “Despotism and monarchy are compatible; democracy and monarchy are an unthinkable connection.”

Conservative political operatives dusted off the video of a young Mr Starmer and put it in advertisements suggesting that Labour hated the monarchy. But even before Mr Starmer took over, Labour had evolved into a reliably constitutional party. And analysts say that residual anti-monarchist feelings were most likely swept away by his purge of the party’s hard left after he became leader in 2020.

At Labour’s party conference in 2022,

after the queen’s death,

the national anthem was played for the first time. Mr Starmer, the man who once talked of abolishing the monarchy, raised his voice and sang God Save The King. NYTIMES