a little over a week ago, the more eagle-eyed attendees were to be found salivating over the seating plan as much as the menu boasting poached Scottish langoustine and Cornish turbot.On the one hand, just which white-tie clad dignitary gets to make small talk with another dignitary over quail eggs and claret is routine royal scuttlebutt.
that the Sovereign stays far above the political fray by refraining from expressing any directly partisan views. It was a balancing act at which the late and doggedly inscrutable Queen Elizabeth, with barely a handful of exceptions, excelled. Nonetheless, many spot an elision between the ideas and policies of Sir Keir and the outlook – both spoken and unspoken – of a king reluctant to entirely swap theEd Owens, a leading royal historian, said: “There is little doubt that Charles has proved to be more confrontational in terms of his constitutional positions. He has taken public positions on key issues in a way that Elizabeth II would never have dreamt of doing.
What remains to be seen is the extent of that meeting of minds, and indeed whether Sir Keir’s government emboldens any veins of social liberalism lurking not only within the Palace but also elsewhere within the House of Windsor. For all Charles’s social awareness, it is unlikely that the Sovereign with a personal fortune estimated at £610m is in a hurry to embrace wholesale wealth redistribution. Instead, any affinity with Sir Keir is likely to be born firstly from his status as the sort of bookish and considered public servant that the King himself aspires to be, and secondly the monarchy’s longstanding preference for being the figurehead of a nation on an even keel.
It is one of the ironies of the current overlaps between royal and Labour agendas that in his own more radical past as a young human rights lawyer, Sir Keir routinely proposed the abolition of the monarchy, a position from which he has since resiled, describing it as a youthful indiscretion.