“The moment of maximum opportunity for repulcanism opens,” warns Catherine Mayer, author of “The Heart of a King”, the book that sparked a great controversy by revealing Elizabeth II’s fears in the face of the possibility that her son Carlos would break with the proverbial neutrality of the monarchy and became a “militant king”.
Born in 1961 in the United States and British national, with her “republican” heart but close for more than three decades to the monarchy, Mayer acknowledges her personal appreciation for King Charles and stresses how she has been able to become “more popular” in a short time than many thought.”
Even so, his rise to power comes according to Mayer in the midst of a “perfect storm” for the Republican cause, with the Prince Andrew sex scandal still raging, the resounding failure of the “Meghan project” and growing disdain for the monarchy among British youth (almost 40% are in favor of its abolition).
According to his biographer, Carlos is also waging “his personal struggle against the ghost of his mother, trapped in internal battles in the style of Hilary Mantel’s “In the Court of the Wolf” and forced to modernize the monarchy and break the secular veil of secrecy and lack of transparency.
Everything that has happened in recent months, from the lack of a response to Prince Harry’s allegations in his autobiography “In the Shadows” to the official silence in the face of The Guardian’s revelations about the King’s personal wealth (which could exceed 2,000 million euros), has been in his opinion to the detriment of the perception of the royal family by the British in the midst of the cost of living crisis.
“Guillermo and Kate have decided to maintain a “dignified silence” in the face of Enrique’s revelations, which have also greatly affected Camila’s “rehabilitation”, “warns Mayer. “His story has served to bring to light something that I already told in my biography in 2015, and it is the competition that exists within the royal family and how the people who work for them are capable of manipulating the press and stabbing themselves by the back”.
Mayer assures that the “Megxit” could be “the beginning of the end of a monarchy that can trust to be popular”. The biographer lived through the breakdown of royal marriages in the 1990s and the drama of Diana’s death. Elizabeth II took almost two decades to restore the lost luster to “the firm”, but the succession of unresolved scandals in her last years has been the worst “inheritance” that her son has been able to collect.
“The Royal Family has not yet known how to respond to the accusations of institutional racism that have surfaced as a result of the Enrique and Meghan fiasco, which was the bet on which they had relied to modernize the monarchy,” Mayer stresses. “What happened has had a serious impact on ethnic minorities and on the perception of the monarchy in the “kingdoms” where Carlos is still head of state.”
Mayer comes up against the topic of the “reluctant king”, which also surfaced as a result of his book, and remembers that it was Diana who came to say at the time that Carlos did not want to be king. What the biographer perceived, in her direct access to the then Prince of Wales, was a personal tension due to “his great involvement in his charitable organizations and in issues such as the environment” and the obligation of having to give all that up when the time came. time to pick up the baton from the Crown.
The biographer assures that finances, beginning with the ease with which he accepted donations for his foundation, may be the Achilles heel of his reign, and what contributes most to encourage pro-republican sentiment, which rarely exceeded the bar of 25% during the reign of Elizabeth II.
“The monarchy has been for decades the institution most revered by the British next to the National Health System (NHS),” says Mayer. “The reputation of the NHS has fallen to the ground in just a couple of years. Political instability, lack of confidence in institutions, the rise of populism… All of these are factors that can generate convulsive changes in the UK Let’s see if the monarchy can weather the turmoil.”
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
