It’s hard to say how much King Charles was enjoying his first State Opening of Parliament. As constitutional monarch, he is above the political fray. But something in the posh-bot delivery of the Government’s legislative agenda for the next year hinted at disdain or worse. The pomp and circumstance have transferred from one monarch to another. It is hard for those of us with a few decades of this event behind us not to miss the late Queen’s cut-glass tones.
One of the mischievous joys of Parliament’s autumn set piece was listening to a figure who delivered every word or phrase sparingly reading out the political jargon of the era, from “traditional values in a modern setting” under Tony Blair, to forging “the big society” from the Cameron clique. The weary thought “is there much more of this?” must frequently have passed through the head that wears the heavy crown on the big day.
King Charles’s debut coincided with the Government’s determination to use this parliament to set out clear differences with Labour and to demonstrate to MPs that, contrary to the polls to date, he is not taking them on a water slide to electoral oblivion.
I watched Rishi Sunak chatting amiably to Keir Starmer on the way into the chamber. Jeremy Hunt and Rachel Reeves seemed to be having a conversation that was not entirely performative for the cameras – chancellors and their shadows often have a better bond than leaders, because they are stuck with the job of putting the pound signs on the schemes and dreams.
This cordiality belies a formidable fray opening up between the parties. It accounts for both the relative thinness of legislative content – the reannouncement of a smoking ban phasing out tobacco availability stood out as a policy which, while controversial, is at least, as one minister put it, “a real thing that could happen”.
Inconveniently for a monarch who has long worn his green credentials prominently was the pledge to grant new North Sea oil and gas exploration licenses. The Sunak script also repeatedly linked security, anti-terrorism and a general Tory desire to lock up offenders and deter “illegal migrants”.
King Charles has held an eclectic and at times contradictory set of political views – shared before he ascended the throne in “green ink” letters to MPs and policymakers, with decidedly retro views on education and building manifestoes, forward-focused on planet-saving and international development.
He has more recently voiced disdain for the Home Secretary’s proposed policy of shipping asylum seekers to Rwanda and found the topic an inconvenient distraction for his Commonwealth-boosting agenda on a visit to the central African country earlier this year.
He is also the most devoted believer in next month’s Cop28 summit’s net zero push, and yet condemned by his office to announce more fossil-fuel exploration licences in the North Sea, on top of a delay in plans to reach carbon neutrality targets by five years.
In fairness, Sunak’s is far from the only government going cold on rushing to address the climate crisis as energy instability rises in the wake of war in Ukraine and latterly the serious strife in the Middle East and shelving of a Saudi-Israel rapprochement. But he might well have been thinking, as many Tory MPs most certainly were, that this was the same government that vaunted net zero as one of its flagship policies.
Inconsistency is Sunak’s problem. A lot of it is down to the wandering policy mix of his two predecessors. Outside some niche areas like AI, curing this tendency in a fissiparous party has defeated him. So tactics now supersede strategy and the plan is to make light of the many Tory areas of shortcomings (some of it is being openly offloaded onto his wayward predecessors – when I interviewed Sunak last week and mentioned Liz Truss, the response from a usually restrained leader was a short bark of a dismissive laugh). The rest will be laid at the door of global crises and unpredictable economic impacts.
Much of Tuesday’s speech was focused less on heavy-lift legislation and more on zoning in on the areas where the Government intends to test Labour. So crime, terror prevention, longer sentences and tackling illegal migration featured heavily in a Magimix of areas where the Conservatives feel their finger is closer to the pulse than the Opposition – or where it pays to make smaller differences loom large.
It’s a moot point whether the focus on crime and justice (which feels like a late lurch to this hardy perennial area on the Right) will convince voters, but it does mean drawing Labour out on areas it is also less keen to talk about.
There are also a slew of policies intended to show that a government accused of catering to Boomers and pensioners “gets” the problems of Generation Rent. Banning no-fault evictions is unpopular with landlords, who feel it can saddle them with unpleasant tenants who have not broken the law but misbehave. It makes it harder to paint the Tories solely as the redoubt of landlords and homeowners.
Altogether, think of this week’s grand plan as a last-ditch attempt to keep the Tories lodging at the Number 10 address. When the pomp is packed up and the King and Queen safely back in the golden coach, the courtesies end and the bare-knuckle fight begins. Charles may well feel relieved to be above the fray – or at least formally out of it.
Anne McElvoy is executive editor at POLITICO
