As Canada shows, Charles is pushing boundaries as king

It requires an effort to keep reminding yourself of the sheer oddity of monarchy’s healthy survival into the modern democratic age.

- Martin Kettle

Yet so rooted is it in the mental furniture of Britain that most people in our politics barely think about it. Last week, however, the modern British monarchy stood up and demanded to be counted, doing something new and perhaps genuinely consequential.

Judged by any yardstick, Charles III’s visit to Canada was an audaciously disjunctive event. The idea that a democracy such as Canada, with a highly sophisticated sense of its own complex identity, might summon an elderly hereditary monarch to provide a focal point for its resistance to Donald Trump’s existential threat takes some believing. Yet that was what played out when the king travelled to Ottawa to open the new parliament.

No monarch has made this trip for nearly 50 years. In this time, Canada has transformed itself into a global power and decisively slipped its old colonial bonds. Trump’s threat to Canada is such that its prime minister, Mark Carney, judged a summons to Buckingham Palace would send a useful signal about its national sovereignty.

King Charles was happy to oblige. As with the speech he delivers at Westminster, last Tuesday’s will have been scripted by the government. But the Ottawa speech had a far looser and more personal format. This allowed the king to speak words that clearly mattered to him.