entrangermercenary1 wrote:
LOL, I know you don't mean that really

The king over the water sits on his wooden throne in the watery wastes of the west. On a supportive tour of flooded Somerset, the never yet but perhaps, very soon, future king was photographed on a gnarly rustic seat mounted on the back of a tractor, in an image suggesting everything from a radical production of King Lear to a re-enactment of the life of King Alfred the Great.

Ancient images of British kingship float round Charles as he sits in swampy estate. In the dark ages, King Alfred took refuge in marshy nooks of southwest England as he evaded the Vikings, until in the end he was able to emerge and tame them. That really happened. In myth, the west of England and Wales were the realm of King Arthur who took the sword Excalibur from a pale arm that rose out of waters ever deeper than the ones now bringing misery to Somerset. And then there is King Cnut, ordering the waves to retreat in a wise ruler's demonstration of the limits of power.

If there is a Cnut in this story it is of course David Cameron and not Prince Charles, who has actually gone to Somerset while the prime minster hides and prays for the waters to vanish. It is unfair to mock Charles for offering what solace he can to people whose lives have been turned upside down by flooding. This bizarre photo-opportunity is presumably something he felt he had no choice about. If people went to the effort of putting a nice rustic throne on a trailer for him, how could he refuse it? Well – if he had an eye for the media he might.

Charles in Somerset has given a glimpse of what he will be like as king. In speaking up for a suffering community he has made a real intervention in politics – and a popular one. It is all starting to happen as his friends and enemies foresaw. He will not be a silent constitutional monarch. He will speak out on issues he cares about. If this embarrasses the government, so be it.

In upstaging Cameron and implicitly accusing the state of inaction, he has chosen a very strong popular cause. Everyone has been grouching about the weather for a month now, and here at last is someone with the authority to ask why, oh why, can't the coalition stop the rain.

It may seem as if he is sitting on a garden bench suspended above muddy waters. In reality he is on very strong ground in giving voice to the anger of the flooded. That throne is hewn of the people's rage.

This is more than a picture of a man keeping his feet dry. It is an image of a new kind of kingship – or an old one. With its Arthurian dreaminess, the countrified seat of our ruler in waiting speaks not of modern constitutional arrangements but a return to some hippie notion of the primitive roots of monarchy. Will there be morris dancers at his coronation? And a wicker man for the political class?

In an age that hates professional politicians, there may be real popular enthusiasm for a king who tells the government where to get off. Republicans who have dreamed for decades of a clumsy Charles becoming an unpopular monarch may be sorely disappointed. His canny stand in Somerset could mark the beginning of a powerful mystic repudiation of the bureaucrats and metropolitan elite. Speak for Olde England, Charles!

There's just one problem, for a democracy. Those Cnuts in Westminster are elected. The Prince of the Marsh is not. Somewhere in that mud there's a Monty Python peasant saying "Well I didn't vote for you."