Playing The Royal Card
First published: March 2, 2025
The flurry of recent visits by foreign leaders to meet President Trump at the White House reminds me of what the British still routinely do well. Flourishing the royal card.
Look at Sir Keir Starmer’s unexpectedly warm meeting with the president, made all the more so after charming his host with an invitation from King Charles to an unprecedented second state visit to Britain.
Compare that with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s road-crash encounter barely a day later. Zelenskyy’s very public mauling by Trump and Vance was shocking, and unprecedented in playing out on live television. The US president was absolutely right about one thing in that face off: the weak hand of cards Zelenskyy had to play. The Ukrainian leader rightly corrected his antagonists on matters of fact, but then made the situation worse with his unwillingness to fawn and genuflect before the Don.
President Trump is more overtly transactional than any of his predecessors in the White House. He is also more susceptible to flattery than others. But the warmth of every generation of Anglo-American relations, at least since the special relationship was forged between Churchill and FDR through WW2, has depended not only on the personal chemistry of their respective leaders – which has often been lacking – or on Britain’s willingness to back America’s military adventures. Time and again, it has been rescued by Britain’s playing of the royal card; a repeated act of flattery to America across the ages that no other nation can quite match.
And it has been needed. In the UK, we reference the special relationship between Britain and America so frequently, we tend to forget that diplomatic relations between our two countries have often not been that great in the quarter of a millennium since the Declaration of Independence.
Nadir of the special relationship
To give just one example, as the Vietnam War became increasingly costly in American lives through the mid-1960s, President Lyndon Johnson (LBJ) repeatedly called on the British prime minister Harold Wilson to commit UK troops to the conflict. Wilson was well aware of public opposition to the war in Britain, particularly within his own party. So, while he was supportive of America in public, to LBJ’s immense frustration, he steadfastly refused to send British combat troops.
Johnson had little respect for Wilson, and mocked him in private, refusing even to take his phone calls at key moments. Johnson reportedly described Wilson as “bouncing around like a ping-pong ball” over the war and, in one late-night call he did take from Wilson, dissuaded him from making further transatlantic flights to mediate for peace with these deliberately dismissive words: “We ought not to run back and forth across the Atlantic with our shirt tails hanging out.”
For his part, Wilson found Johnson crude and overbearing, and was not alone in finding his White House visits deeply uncomfortable. It was probably the worst relationship between a US president and a British PM, and the lowest ebb of the special relationship since the Second World War.
Uniquely royal gestures
Countering that, in the wake of JFK’s assassination, Queen Elizabeth II made an unusually personal tribute by dedicating a memorial to him in 1965 at Runnymede, near to Windsor Castle. She gave a speech honoring his legacy, in which she bequeathed the acre of land on which it stood “for perpetuity to the American people”.
Both the event, attended by Jacqueline Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, and its location – where King John signed Magna Carta in 1215 – were not only significant but deeply appreciated by America, symbolizing as it did the two nation’s shared democratic values. Queen Elizabeth also sent Prince Philip to the United States on several occasions to represent her, including to JFK’s inauguration and funeral.
LET FREEDOM RING!
To mark America’s Bicentennial in 1976, Britain went all out bestowing royal favor, with multiple symbolic gestures. Queen Elizabeth herself toured the US, spoke warmly about Anglo-American friendship, and presented an elaborate ceremonial bell, forged in the same ancient foundry in London’s Whitechapel district that cast the original Liberty Bell.
In her dedication speech, she most notably expressed gratitude to America’s Founding Fathers for teaching us “to respect the rights of others to govern themselves in their own ways”.
Then, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks in 2001, Britain’s gestures of solidarity included Queen Elizabeth breaking with protocol to have America’s national anthem played during the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace. It was an unprecedented mark of mourning and respect, made even more meaningful by members of the public placing thousands of floral tributes at the US embassy in London.
We shouldn’t forget that these grand gestures by Britain’s reigning monarch, in a subtle way akin to genuflection, are not those of the king or queen alone. They may occasionally give their prime ministers’ wise advice, and certainly they owe their popularity to their character and the example they usually set themselves of devotion to duty. But the British monarchy is a purely ceremonial one, so the boot is really on the other foot. They really act on the advice, and instruction, of their prime minister and the Foreign Office.
At the same time, it’s an irony of the post-Revolutionary relationship between Britain and the United States that the biggest and most eager audience for all things British and royal is in America itself. King Charles may lack the popularity of his late mother, but the British monarchy’s reserve of magic fairy dust, if a little depleted, remains intact. The popularity, particularly in America, of The Crown, one of the most expensive TV series ever made, and the record-breaking first-day sales of Prince Harry’s recent memoir are proof in themselves.