I have now finally managed to watch the BBC TV version of Mike Bartlett’s interesting play, ‘King Charles III’ . I saw it on the stage, with Robert Powell in the title role, at the Chichester Festival Theatre a while ago, and preferred the stage version – in which, as far as I can recall, the fictional Charles is *not* shown as saying ‘At last!’ as he contemplates the death of his mother. Nor is this in the original script, or at least if it is I cannot find it. So why did the TV version include it? I do weary of this ‘Private Eye’ view of Charles, as a man frantically waiting to succeed. I have my criticisms of the Prince of Wales, but I am completely unable to believe that he yearns for the death of his own mother.

In fact, as I explain below, I suspect Charles is increasingly contented with his role as heir. He must know that the end of his mother’s reign, which is of course inevitable, will be a severe crisis for the monarchy and so, if he lives that long, which is of course by no means certain, for him, a heavy burden for him personally when he is by no means young and vigorous . Michael Dobbs’s original fantasy on this subject, which I mention below, is now positively ancient. Many elderly gentlemen who wrote obituaries of the late Queen Mother died long before their words were eventually published. If we can speculate on the lives and deaths of others at all, which these dramas rather compel us to do, then why should we assume that Charles will necessarily outlive Elizabeth II?.

Mr Bartlett’s play, in blank verse, is very clever. But it is not a wholly original idea. Something quite similar was done in Michael (now Lord) Dobbs’s ‘To Play the King’, a book and then a TV drama, back in the 1990s. Once again a crisis was foreseen between Charles, newly King and impelled by a powerful conscience, and an unscrupulous Tory Premier. Once again, Charles lost the struggle and abdicated in favour of his own son.

In the Mike Bartlett version, the issue is a very clever one, namely, press freedom, much more cunningly chosen than the general vague differences in the Dobbs book. In my view, Mr Bartlett actually shies away from the conclusions of his own plot. Surely, if a government was proposing criminal penalties on journalists, as are mentioned in the Bartlett play, Fleet Street would be lined up against this, along with quite a lot of academic, legal and other influential opinion?

If the King refused to give his assent to such a law, he would not be alone. And if he dissolved Parliament rather than be forced to assent, how would the election then go? A King’s Party might be a good deal broader and deeper than the shouty republicans who Mr Bartlett portrays as taking to the streets to call for the King’s removal.

And I really do not believe that Charles or anyone in his position would permit tanks to be parked in the forecourt of Buckingham Palace to defend himself against such mobs.

I think Mr Bartlett has got carried away by the Shakespearean examples he seeks to follow, what with the ghost of Diana giving cryptic and easily misunderstood advice, and treacherous courtiers and princes ( and princesses) at every corner.

In real life, a well-chosen combat of this kind might well end up strengthening the Palace against Downing Street, as wise politicians well know. But it would have to *be* well-chosen.

The real problem for the Monarchy is not this at all. It is that the British people are no longer really grown-up enough to have a monarchy any more, and this will be brought home very coldly when the current monarch leaves us alone in a cold and altered world.

Hardly anyone grasps the simple point made recently by Prince Philip, that the monarchy exists for the benefit of the people, not for its own benefit. His own life, dutiful and taken up almost entirely with serving the interests of others, is a complete demonstration of this .

Yet millions think that the monarchy is a crude thing, a mixture of a Ruritanian playboy house and a Bourbon tyranny, living in gross luxury on the taxes of a groaning populace, while enjoying unfettered power. They absurdly think the monarchy is expensive, when it costs the taxpayer next to nothing, that it is luxury-loving, when the monarch lives frugally in small apartments in vast, decaying mansions, that it is snobbish, when the monarchy’s modern roots lie precisely in the bond between the Crown and the East End of London, forged in the 1940-41 Blitz. And its most fervent supporters have always been among the poorest, who have for centuries seen the Crown as a last court of appeal against the powerful. And they think it possesses secret, sinister power when in fact it is largely ignored.

The Coronation will be the moment at which the difference between the dead and gone Britain which understood and accepted a monarch, and the modern country, largely indifferent to and ignorant of monarchy, is demonstrated.

This ritual (you may read the service on the Internet, and there is a pretty full recording of the actual ceremony commercially available) simply could not take place today.

It is fiercely Protestant, aristocratic, proudly backward-looking, monocultural, conservative, traditional and, in its essence, harsh. At its heart are the sword of state and the Cross of Christ, justice tempered with mercy, and the rule of law. The modern world doesn’t much like any of these things, and if Charles wants to jettison quite a few of them, he won’t be opposed by the government or the church or the media, or the Equalities commissars. The real problem is that Charles, who is fashionably caught up in the real religion of our age, man-made climate change, is himself a pestilential innovator. And the crisis will not be between him and his ministers, but between him and the ghosts of his ancestors.

And his monarchy will be the empty plastic thing which his fictional character denounces in the closing scenes of ‘Charles III’. But then it very nearly is already. It is only the last trailing wisps and rags of majesty, like those ancient transparent battle-flags you find in cathedrals, left over from the imperial age and still clinging to crown and throne, which remind us of what a serious monarchy was once like. They symbolise a country which sees in its own revered monarch (regardless of his or her character) a living symbol of its sovereignty over itself, a free self-governing people with no other overlord, except God. They will soon be in a museum, where almost everyone except me thinks they belong.

Whereas egalitarian utopianism, which *ought* to be in a museum, if not in a hermetically sealed and guarded vault to prevent it from rising again, continues to flourish in the open air.