After the far-right rioting of last night failed to materialise, there is hope that we have now seen the worst of the public disorder that flared up following the Southport stabbings. This is certainly what the Prime Minister will be thinking today, but his new good friend the King could well have exactly the same perspective on the situation, too.
The King initially commented on the stabbings, expressing his horror at the ‘utterly horrific’ atrocity: ‘We send our most heartfelt condolences, prayers and deepest sympathies to the families and loved ones of those who have so tragically lost their lives, and to all those affected by this truly appalling attack’. But since then, as rioting has spread all over the country that he rules, he has been conspicuously silent. Is this the right approach, or should the King have come forward and offered a strong statement of condemnation?
A written statement would be welcome, a personal address to the nation even more so
Those who are defending Charles’s apparent dithering in the face of civil unrest point to the fact that, when Britain was last engulfed in riots in 2011, his mother did not offer any public comment, waiting instead for the violence to die down before matters could resume as usual. Yet Britain in 2024 is a different place to how it was thirteen years ago, and not just because we now have a Labour government and a new King.
Back then, while social media and smartphones and the immediate rush of information undoubtedly played a part in people’s lives, they were not as all-consuming as they are today; Instagram and WhatsApp, for instance, were in their infancy, and TikTok did not even exist. The famous line about how a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its boots is several times as true now as it was back then.
Nobody is expecting the King to be on hand to offer public statements on every single minor news development. It would be beneath any understanding of royal dignity to turn the monarch into an all-purpose commentator, a rent-a-quote who can be called upon to add a line or two to any opportunistic writer’s story.
Yet there is also the question of whether holding oneself above everyday concerns can lead to an Olympian detachment that is a poor look for the monarchy that Charles has, implicitly, suggested he will rebrand for a new era. Both the Christmas addresses he has made so far as King have emphasised the difficulties of social cohesion and poverty in Britain. The riots have exposed these issues in the most public and glaring way; it should be down to Charles to address this very serious problem in his country.
It has been suggested that a combination of his ongoing cancer treatment and a desire not to overshadow the government’s efforts to quell the unrest have led to his silence. But he is receiving daily updates and wants to be kept informed as to what is being done about the wider issues around community cohesion and interfaith dialogue. This is all very well, and indeed commendable, but it does not go far enough. A written statement would be welcome, a personal address to the nation even more so.
Charles has, by and large, been a popular King over the past couple of years, and the news of his illness engendered a vast amount of public sympathy. It is surely now time to repay this sympathy with a clear, open and heartfelt expression of solidarity with the law-abiding and a condemnation of the violence that has taken place in his country. Continued silence will only increase republican suggestions that the King holds himself above his people, and it will be that much harder to refute such a claim in the future should he remain apparently aloof from this most pressing of situations.
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