Born to Be King: Prince Charles on Planet Windsor by Catherine Mayer Page A

monarchist but as a pragmatist. I believe all humans are born equal except for the natives of Planet Windsor, who arrive in the world at a huge disadvantage to the rest of us, burdened with expectation and duty. If I were designing a country from scratch, it would be a republic. I was born into such a country, but for most of my life I have lived in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and have come over the years not only to appreciate the public service that some—not all—royals perform, and the pageantry—and comedy—they supply, but also to understand the upheaval their replacement would represent. Monarchy doesn’t make sense but the system still, mostly, works quite well. “If you chuck away too many things,” says the Prince, “you end up discovering there was value in them.” 1
    Republicans are convinced that the point of transition from the Queen to her son—if and when this comes—will be the moment of maximum danger to the Crown. They are not wrong. But some British republicans also argue that the transition from Crown to elected head of state could be quick and painless, a matter of crossing out “Her Majesty the Queen” or, far more likely, “His Majesty the King” and writing in “President.” The overseas Realms already have inbuilt structures to deputize for the nonresident sovereign. Their national identities are not so intricately interwoven with the Windsor brand. Despite the William and Kate effect, it seems likely that Australia or Jamaica or New Zealand may begin to disentangle themselves from the hereditary system after the Queen has died, perhaps even before that. The Commonwealth faces questions in the longer term not only about its titular head but its purpose.
    If Britain begins to unwind its constitutional settlement, the process will surely be messier. “If you get rid of the Crown, you have to write a new constitution,” says Graham Smith of the UK campaign group Republic. “The key point of the constitution is that the people are sovereign and all power starts with them so if the constitution doesn’t assign power to the sovereign then it has to stay with the people. We could say, ‘Look, there are certain powers which were with the Crown which are now with government, certain powers which are now with parliament, some powers are now with the head of state and everything else is just not there.’ You can have it however you want it.” 2
    I remain skeptical about this. Big constitutional changes are difficult and lengthy and absorb energies that may be better deployed elsewhere. They also risk unintended consequences, so must be thoroughly thought through and minutely plotted. There are, as the Prince observes, no quick fixes. The reason British politicians continue to squabble about how to reform the House of Lords—and since Scotland’s referendum, about how to devolve more powers across the UK—is not only that vested interests have impeded progress. It is that in replacing self-evidently flawed systems such as an upper chamber stocked with the beneficiaries of naked political patronage and still (ye gods) with a rump of hereditary peers, entitled by accident of birth to make, revise, and reject laws, the architects of reform instead threaten to introduce self-evidently flawed replacements.
    The current House of Lords, for all its weaknesses, complements the House of Commons. Its members need not seek election and so their time horizons are extended. They are more independent of party affiliations and bring a wider range of experiences to bear than MPs. “The thing about being here for life is that you are not so bound to your party,” says Labour peer Tony Berkeley. “Because over a time of thirty years some people are here, each party changes its policies. They all do. And the older people say, ‘Hang on, you’re all doing it wrong’ and they have ways of expressing their view, they don’t vote so often. They abstain. Or they speak their