Camilla, queen of the desert

March 26, 2005

The changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace will reinvigorate the republic debate, writes Greg Craven.

If you have been troubled by a persistent ringing in your ears lately, don't worry. It's just the sound of sherry glasses falling from the nerveless hands of Australia's monarchists. David Flint, Kerry Jones and co thought they were home and hosed. After confusing and confounding their way to referendum victory in 1999, they believed the republic was as dead as Mark Latham's leadership.

But they had not counted on the republic's most fearsome weapons. To gaze into the horsey, Home Counties eyes of King Charles and Queen Camilla is to see the slow, inexorable end of the monarchy.

The royal couple are the sort of republican dream that comes maybe once a century. With the popular appeal of measles, deeply self-obsessed and blessed with the media instincts of a couple of high-class lemmings, Charles and Camilla are welcome guests at any republican fund-raiser.

This can be seen very clearly in the monarchy's desperate attempts to deny that Camilla ever would be queen. Buckingham Palace clearly believes that "Queen Camilla" is the constitutional equivalent of strychnine.

But attempts to claim that she would be the "princess consort", the "Duchess of Cornwall" or the "Grand Mugwump of Tatyoon" were mere public relations. The legal reality is that whoever marries King Charles will be queen, in the same way that Shane's wife is Mrs Warne.

Flint has been spinning like a top, arguing with mounting desperation that it will be Charles, not Camilla, who constitutionally will be King of Australia and that Queen Camilla will merely be a courtesy title.

Both statements are true, and utterly irrelevant. Our future king will bring with him a partner who calls herself a queen, looks like a queen and with her hearty Harrods accent certainly talks like a queen. As she sits beside Charles at the opening of Parliament in Canberra, courtesy title or not, she will be ma'amed and majestied just like those other royal wives, Queen Mary and the good old Queen Mum.

The current furore reveals two things. First, the Australian monarchy's chief, and perhaps only asset, is the present Queen. Boring and frumpish Elizabeth Windsor may be, but she is also dutiful, honourable, dignified and notably sharp on constitutional matters. The prospect of her replacement by the composite CharlesandCamilla is like contemplating Rolf Harris succeeding the Pope.

The second is that monarchies, unlike other constitutional institutions, are utterly dependent on the personality of the incumbent. Whereas the High Court, for example, can survive a couple of bad chief justices, it is very hard for a modern monarchy to struggle through a dud monarch.

Charles, especially coupled to the deeply uncongenial Mrs Parker-Bowles, is about as unappealing as it is possible for an Australian sovereign to be without supporting New Zealand at cricket.

His character seems to have been designed by a quirky God to play badly at Tweed Heads. By all reasonable accounts he is a mixture of pomposity and diffidence, prone to bursts of bad temper, has a comic-opera Eton accent, shoots both cuddly and noble beasts, and has wacky beliefs about diet and medicines. Above all, he is determined to hitch himself to a deeply unpopular sportin' gel over the ashes of his dead marriage to the greatest soap star since Kylie.

Even his good points play badly. Charles is a man of evident intelligence and sensitivity, an outstanding gardener at his home in Highgrove, a breeder of endangered domestic animals and a real authority on traditional architecture. Rooty Hill it ain't.

All this underlines the utter folly of Australian monarchists, Prime Minister John Howard included, in believing that if they could just swat the 1999 referendum away, they were safe forever. Only six years later, it is clear that the character of our future king and his future consort will be a weeping sore for the monarchy.

In fact, the next republican round will probably be much worse for the occupant of the throne. One lesson drawn from 1999 by more ruthless republicans is that it is very hard to topple a monarchy while determinedly being polite to the monarch. If you want people to ditch the king, it is a lot easier if they hate him.

It would be very hard to muster much hatred for the decent Elizabeth II, but Charles III and his future wife are different matters altogether. Monarchists and moderate republicans alike shiver at the sort of referendum television campaign that could be unleashed at the Corgi and the Rottweiler.

Under the benevolent gaze of Elizabeth the Last, we should have peacefully translated our constitution into a moderate, lasting republican form. In the murkier world of Charles and Camilla, things may prove a good deal more difficult.

Greg Craven is professor of government and constitutional law at Curtin University in Perth and the author of Conversations with the Constitution (UNSW Press, 2004).


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