Here’s why King Charles is coming to America. And it is not the reason the President thinks |
Here’s why King Charles is coming to America. And it is not the reason the President thinks
Falling into conversation with a London-based American banking chief executive in the chaotic aftermath of the financial crisis, I was asked about the vagaries of the British establishment. “It is very difficult to understand where power really lies, there are all these networks and signals that hardly any of us are clear on,” he said. I agreed, it was indeed a tricky matter. Six months later, that chief executive had quit, returning with relief to a country where a spade is actually called a spade.
Britain and America, George Bernard Shaw said, are “two countries divided by a common language”. The divide is becoming clearer. Not just between the U.S. and the U.K., but between the U.S. and the whole of Europe.
Yesterday, President Trump pressed again on the bruise, already inflamed by the Gulf conflict. The act? Suggesting that King Charles would have backed the attacks on Iran if he were able to speak freely. For the U.K. establishment, such a suggestion is, as we say here, “below the salt” (a reference to medieval England where salt was a rare commodity only available at “high table”, leaving commoners left on “low tables” literally below the condiment).
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“I like him,” Trump said of King Charles in the interview with the Telegraph, the right-leaning British news organization. “I always liked him as a prince. He’s a good man, a great representative for your country. I think he would have taken a very different stand [on the war against Iran] but he doesn’t do that. I mean he’s a great gentleman.”
The headline duly trumpeted: “The........