On 5 December 2019, about 400 representatives of the Jewish community met the then-Prince Charles. Officially, we were at Buckingham Palace for a pre-Chanukah reception for British Jews. The thoughts of most of the guests, however, were fixed on the general election a week later on 12 December.
A Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn could take power within days and fears abounded. Sadly, in my view, it remains controversial on the left to acknowledge that Jewish fears were real. Corbyn’s supporters still insist that antisemitism was “weaponised” by the British right, or Mossad, or both. Conspirators had spread vile lies to sabotage a virtuous movement and smear a Labour leader without “a racist bone in his body”.
If they were capable of changing their minds, the palace reception would have shaken them. A colleague went round the crowded hall talking to directors, authors and actors from the Jewish intelligentsia, who had once found voting Labour as easy as pouring a glass of Rioja.
They knew there was no good outcome, he said. Either Boris Johnson would win and push through a disastrous Brexit, or the Corbynistas, with their dark fantasies of Jewish — sorry, “Zionist” — power, would be in Downing Street. They must choose. They had to say which outcome was worse, which would punch them in the gut harder: Corbyn winning or Johnson winning.
Corbyn, they said, without hesitation.
I didn’t want to be there. When the invitation came, I said that I was not a Jewish figure.
I had done my bit in the anti-racist fight and my public stance and surname made me Jewish in the eyes of antisemites. But I had not experienced Jewish religion and culture in my childhood and thought it was wrong to adopt a false persona. In any case, I had devoted an embarrassingly large amount of my time as a journalist to criticising the future King who, I noticed as I glanced down at the invitation, was the host for the evening.
My family told me to stop being an idiot and to show solidarity with an embattled community. As soon as I arrived, I was glad of their advice. Hearing the despair of centre-left Jews at the state of Labour was an education in itself. As was our future monarch’s speech.
I was reluctant to admit it, but he spoke well of the pleasure he found in acknowledging all the UK’s religious minorities. He talked of how “immensely proud” he was that “my dear grandmother, Princess Alice of Greece, is counted one of the Righteous among the Nations” for saving a Jewish family in Nazi-occupied Greece.
He remembered his great uncle, Lord Mountbatten, telling him of the courage of Jewish servicemen who knew they faced execution if they were caught by German forces but went into battle regardless. It was well done, I thought. He did not mention the anti-Jewish racism bubbling in Britain. But his words were a reassurance that, if he had anything to do with it, ethnic minorities could always feel that the UK was their home.
I did not then — and do not now — think that criticisms of his political interventions were unjustified.
Our new King has a reactionary theology and ideology that damns all progress for ripping up the divine wisdom of traditional religion. His mysticism accounts for his outbursts against social mobility and for his belief that as a traditional royal, he has the right to instruct those modern creations, democratically elected leaders. In the words of one former courtier, he thought he had the right to meddle “in political issues and wrote sometimes in extreme terms to ministers, MPs and others in positions of political power”.
He says he will step aside from politics now that he is King. For his own sake he must, although any normal person would say it is inhumane to ask a man with strong ideas to suppress his thoughts and bite his tongue. The inhumanity does not end there. Do not think the most dangerous attacks on his crown will come from anti-monarchists. Crowds are always fickle.
The masses that applaud him today can turn on him tomorrow, as his mother found after the death of Diana. The adulation the monarchy receives is double-edged. Put a foot wrong, and royalist newspapers and commentators will devour the objects of their devotion. If you doubt me, look at the criticism directed at Prince Harry and his wife by the right-wing press.
Nominally I remain a republican. But it is hard to hear a man speak as well as Charles III and conclude that it is a matter of political urgency to ensure that he is Charles the Last.
I understand that the pressures on him from monarchists as much as anti-monarchists are hideous. He must live with restrictions on his freedom of thought and speech most of us would not tolerate. So I find myself saying, God save King Charles III. God save him from himself. God save him from the rest of us.
