How the King is seducing Labour

As Lisa Nandy becomes the latest frontbencher to change their mind about the monarchy, John Rentoul says it’s funny how the radical egalitarians of the people’s party become ardent royalists in office

Culture secretary Lisa Nandy came right out with it. “I’m not afraid to say when I change my mind, and I have changed my mind about that,” she said when asked today on ITV’s Good Morning Britain about her assertion during the 2020 Labour leadership campaign that she would vote to abolish the monarchy if such a referendum was held.

“In principle, I believe that people should have the power to decide who rules them,” she said. “But I think the monarchy under the Queen and under this current King commands strong public support. If you look at the turmoil going on in the world, then we do need a royal family who are able to help us to deliver the benefits to Britain.”

As she spoke, King Charles was doing some of the government’s diplomatic donkey work, meeting Giorgia Meloni, the Italian prime minister, on a state visit to Rome. He also helped Keir Starmer on his mission to the White House, where the prime minister brandished an invitation from the King to Donald Trump for an “unprecedented” second state visit to the UK.

It is funny how the radical egalitarians of the people’s party become ardent royalists in office. Nandy said she had changed her mind since becoming a cabinet minister because she had worked with members of the royal family on tackling knife crime and projecting Britain’s cultural soft power abroad.

Keir Starmer’s conversion has been less explicit. He is haunted by a video clip of him from a 2005 documentary, in which he smirks about his elevation to the barrister elite: “I got made a Queen’s Counsel, which is odd since I often used to propose the abolition of the monarchy.”

But now he, along with Nandy, has conformed to the Labour tradition of devoted monarchism, which is as old as its history in government.

Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour prime minister, got on surprisingly well with George V in 1924. Clement Attlee was a great admirer of George VI. Attlee boasted in a limerick he wrote about himself that he had “ended PM, CH and OM, an Earl and a Knight of the Garter” – delighting in being made a Companion of Honour, awarded the Order of Merit and elevated to an hereditary peerage. Two of those (the OM and the Garter) were in the personal gift of the King.

Harold Wilson, the next Labour prime minister, was Queen Elizabeth’s unexpected favourite, and when Tony Blair arrived in No 10, he declared: “I am from the Disraeli school of prime ministers in their relations with the monarch.” (A reference to Disraeli’s obsequious flattery of Victoria, which served him well in politics.)

It is a familiar pattern in Labour history. Blair’s mouthpiece, Alastair Campbell, had once described Diana, Princess of Wales, as “the reasonably pretty, not very bright, very manipulative separated wife of our adulterous future king” – but by the time she died, she had become “the people’s princess”, co-opted to the modernisation project. The New Labour spin machine was thrown into top gear to help save the Queen’s reputation from the popular resentment against her “cold” response to national tragedy.

Blair’s anti-establishmentarianism was always more restrained. He had not joined Peter Mandelson and Harriet Harman on their “republican away-day” in France for the day of Charles and Diana’s wedding in 1981. So he was one of the more convincing monarchists of the last Labour government, but there was as much joy in Buckingham Palace at the sinners around him that repented.

Even the Conservatives got in on the “I’ve changed my mind” act, when Liz Truss briefly served, having to live down her own embarrassing historical video, of her call for the abolition of the royal family from the platform at the 1994 Liberal Democrat conference: “We do not believe people are born to rule.”

It should be no surprise, then, that the Starmer government is as royalist as any of its Labour predecessors. Labour prime ministers have always seen respect for the monarchy as essential to their core mission: to reassure the voters that they can be trusted, and that they are not guillotine-minded revolutionaries. It is of a piece with fiscal rules, union jacks and posing on nuclear submarines.

For some Labour ministers this comes easier than it does to others. Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, I am told, is “extremely comfortable” when at the palace, or accompanying the King on his recent visit to his housing development in Cornwall.

For Starmer and Nandy, on the other hand, it requires a little bit of intellectual humility. When Nandy was asked this morning if she had changed her mind from five years ago, she said: “I have, actually, yeah.”