Letters to America: Lawn of the Free, King for a Day?

Hello again my lovelies!

This week’s Letter to America was going to be the second part in the series that was kicked off by Pete Hegseth’s outrageous speech on D-Day - and I almost certainly will publish that at the end of this week1 - but I really could not let Sunday’s White House cage fight/birthday party/opportunity for more grift and corruption/abomination and insult to You, The People, without comment.

Because, seriously?

Coming from the nation(s) that pretty much invented pageantary2, what we saw on Monday morning in our newspapers or on our social feeds - I suspect - caused a lot of coffee to be spat. Either in hoots of laughter, or snorts of utter disbelief

The White House has seen presidential birthdays before.

Of course.

At least one a year for every year it has been the People’s House and temporary home of your President - potentially two on inauguration years, if the outgoing Pres had a birthday between January 1st and January 20th3…

It has hosted Easter Egg hunts, concerts, receptions, and the odd politely enthusiastic sing‑along.

What it had never seen, until this last weekend, was a fecking cage‑fighting arena and motorbike display erected on the South Lawn so that an 80‑year‑old president could celebrate his birthday and the nation’s semiquincentennial in one rolling, made‑for‑television spectacle.

The obvious joke to those of us on this side of the pond - and possibly on your side as well - is that he’s a “pretendy king in the White House”.

Certainly my first reaction.

But the more I pondered, the more it became clear that the far more useful question is duller and more frightening: not “Is he trying to act like he thinks a monarch would?” but “Who, if anyone, is still able to tell him no?”

Though y’all will have no doubt where I stand on this by now, let’s clarify once again: I’m vehemently anti‑Trump, but not at all anti‑monarchy.

I’ve been privileged over my career to have worked closely with the Royal Household - which gives me a wee bit of an insight into both how absurd and how constrained/constraining it can be. Both for the members of the Royal Family, and those who work for or with them.

That gives me a soft spot for constitutional monarchy as a piece of political engineering, not as a fairy tale4. But, if anything, this makes me more, not less, suspicious of royal overreach.

My test for both kings and presidents is the same: how easily can the people around them say “no”, and what happens when they do?

The thousand quiet no’s

In a European constitutional monarchy, the deal is simple and brutal.

The monarch gets the role, the palaces, the titles, and a lifetime of walking into rooms where people stop talking and stand up.

In return, they surrender any expectation that their personal whims will govern the state.

They can suggest. They can hint. They can grumble in private, sometimes at length.

But the people who actually run the country - the ministers, the civil servants, the courts - retain both the legal power and the cultural permission to say: “No, Your Majesty, you can’t do that.”

That’s not an abstraction for me; it’s something I’ve seen up close when I was running Save our Squirrels, and the man who is now King Charles III was not only a major private donor to our cause, but hosted a private fund-raising dinner for us (and 24 of the UK’s wealthiest individuals) at Clarence House.5

When Charles was Prince of Wales, he was not shy about his opinions. He had definite Views, with a capital V - strong, detailed, sometimes exasperatingly specific - including on architecture, education, climate policy, conservation, and poverty in a wealthy country.

On the project where our paths crossed, red squirrel conservation, he was deeply engaged and stubborn in the best way. You didn’t work with Charles and wonder what he thought. You wondered (and occasionally exalted) about how loudly he might say it.

Inside his private office, there was a perennial topic of discussion: how on earth was this man, so full of conviction and frustration, going to cope with the muzzle that comes with the crown?

His amazing PPS, Elizabeth Buchanan, and I would talk about it. The question was not whether Charles would suddenly become apolitical or anodyne; it was whether he could learn the hardest lesson of kingship in a modern democracy - when to accept that “no” really does mean no, and that his future role would be one where he would not be able to speak his mind in public.

Not really speak his mind.

And certainly not as trenchantly as he could as Prince of Wales.

When the system lies to the monarch

But across on this side of the pond, institutional discipline does not only run towards the monarch. One of the most revealing episodes of recent years wasn’t about a king overreaching, but a prime minister abusing the monarch’s residual powers.

When Boris Johnson sought to prorogue Parliament in 2019, he did so by asking the Queen, through formal advice, to deploy one of the crown’s oldest tools. She did what constitutional theory said she must: accepted the advice of her ministers.

The courts later ruled that prorogation unlawful.6

That sequence matters.

It demonstrates both the strength and the fragility of the system.

Strong, because the remedy ran through independent courts and back to Parliament, not through the palace; the crown remained above the political fray, insulated even when its signature had inadvertently (as far as the monarch was concerned) been used as a political weapon.

Fragile, because it revealed how easily a determined executive could drag the monarch’s hand across an unconstitutional page.

The lesson is that “who can say no?” must include people brave enough to say it to the Prime Minister as well as the King.

Family fractures and a fragile crown

Look only at ceremonial photographs and you might think the crown’s position in the UK is impregnable. It isn’t. The 21st‑century monarchy lives in a glass house, whether it likes it or not, and every shattered relationship, every leaked text, every breathless tabloid headline chips away at its symbolic authority.

I hear this not just from newspapers but from people who served alongside the next generation. Friends who know Harry well and warm to Meghan, who think she’s been good for him, and that their decision to leave the UK was - under the circumstances and the constant negative press coverage - not only the right choice to make, but the only choice left to them.

These are not constitutional lawyers; they’re soldiers, pilots, officers who have watched both these brothers and their wives navigate impossible expectations under relentless scrutiny.

Layer that on top of the genuinely serious scandals - our own Royal resident in the Epstein Files, the Andrew formerly known as Prince chief among them, and you get a monarchy that can no longer rely on reverence alone for its long-term survival. Its hold on public affection is contested. Its capacity to embody the “dignified part” of the constitution is no longer taken for granted.

In that context, the thousand quiet no’s become even more important.

A monarchy haemorrhaging moral capital cannot afford to be seen wielding what little formal power it has left.

If you were ask me to place a bet, I’d say William will probably be the last monarch to occupy the role in the full, inflated form we recognise today. The institution will survive, but slimmer, less central, more obviously ornamental.

Influence will drain away, drip by drip, not because of any single crisis but because the cumulative weight of scandal and fatigue makes deference feel outdated. That, again, should temper any temptation to romanticise kings. The crown is surviving by shrinking and by obeying.

The cost of embodying the State

There is also a human cost to this model of constrained kingship, and our Queen, Camilla, illustrates it brutally. She has spent years making domestic abuse and violence against women one of her signature causes: as Patron of charities working with survivors, hosting them in royal residences, pushing to break the silence that allows abuse to thrive, fronting documentaries about the issue, even speaking publicly about an assault she experienced as a young woman.

This is not a passing interest; it’s a long‑term personal mission of hers.

Then, in 2025, she and Charles were obliged to not only host a State Visit7 from a man who has:

• Been held legally liable for sexual assault (or “rape as you would understand the term” according to the judge on the case)

• Publicly bragged about “grabbing women by the p*ssy” and forcibly kissing them

• Appeared in the Epstein documentation significantly more times than her own disgraced brother‑in‑law has.

And then, to put the cherry on the cake, she is required to accompany King Charles on a State Visit to the USA - hosted by Trump, on his home turf, only 7 months later.

If you think she relished that, you have almost certainly never spoken to any woman who has dedicated her life to this issue.

Yet there she was, because the job description for “Queen” includes being a human shield for decisions she neither made nor endorsed.

This is the piece Americans (and certainly the orange excrescence in your White House) often miss when they see royal pomp and assume it must be gloriously self-indulgent.

The price of all that velvet and gilding8 is a fairly large degree of self‑erasure. Whatever they feel, they must not show it. Whatever they believe, they must rarely say it. They are not consumers choosing a guest list; they are a mask worn by the State.

The ultimate embodiment of the British “stiff upper lip”.

And embodying the State means sometimes not only standing next to people you would never, ever willingly invite into your own home, but having them invited into your home anyway.

When the president thinks he owns the lawn

Now it’s time to shift our gaze back across the Atlantic.

On 14 June 2026, Donald Trump turned 80.

To mark the day - and the United States’ 250th anniversary - he presided over UFC “Freedom 250”, a private sector, corporate sponsor-fest, cage‑fighting card staged in a fecking purpose‑built arena on the fecking South Lawn of YOUR fecking White House.

The weekend bundled together tacky press events at the Lincoln Memorial, even more tacky fan “experiences” on the Ellipse, concerts and merchandising, a rolling media circus, and the usual security cordons that turn public spaces into controlled zones.

The nation’s symbolic heart was temporarily repurposed as a cross between a bloodthirsty fight festival and a campaign rally.

Bread and circuses - only you had to pay for the privilege of not only hosting it, but even watching it on TV. Even Nero recognised that keeping it free, and open to all, kept the people happy. Or at least not in open revolt.

It’s tempting to dismiss this as a one-off uniquely tacky event. And make no mistake - it was utterly and horrifically tacky, and a desecration of what I know many of you regard as an almost sacred space. A space that - no matter how he views it - is not Donald J Trump’s personal property.

So coming from the experience of monarchy that most of Europe has, the more unsettling questions are:

• How could this have been allowed?

• Where were the thousand quiet no’s?

And - for the love of all that is important in a democracy:

• Why were no staffers, counsel, chief of staff, ethics lawyer, or court unable or unwilling to say, “No, Mr President, this is absolutely not an appropriate use of public property”?

Now contrast this with John F. Kennedy’s famous 45th birthday celebration in 1962.

Yes, Marilyn Monroe purred “Happy Birthday, Mr President” in front of an ecstatic crowd. Yes, it was glamorous, and yes, it has since become part of the Kennedy/Camelot mythos.

But the event was a Democratic Party fundraiser, held at Madison Square Garden, ten days before his actual birthday, designed in part to retire campaign debt.

It did not involve building an arena on the South Lawn, or turning the Mall into a presidential funfair.

The symbolism of Kennedy’s birthday party stayed a step removed from the physical core of the state.

Contrast again with the birthday celebrations of our King Charles III - and indeed those of all our monarchs for at least the last 200 years…

His milestone birthdays (and those of his mother’s before him) have been marked by concerts and events, but they are structured around charities and public themes: the Prince’s (now King’s) Trust, youth opportunity, conservation, heritage.

When he uses his birthday as a platform, it is to raise money and attention for institutions with their own boards, governance, and beneficiaries.

Whatever criticisms you might have of royal philanthropy, the energy flows outward - to organisations, causes, communities - not inward to his own pocket or brand.

Trump’s Freedom 250 flips that pattern.

The energy, the cameras, the patriotic rhetoric all flow inward, towards the man himself and his network. The White House, the Lincoln Memorial, the algae-filled newly “American Flag Blue”-painted Reflecting Pool become props in his story, not symbols of a state that exists before and after him.

Are the standards symmetrical?

So am I judging like with like?

Monarchies have their own arsenal of inherited privilege: Crown Estates whose origins are murky, residual prerogative powers, tax deals, layers of courtesy and deference that no citizen can access.

There is no shortage of royal overreach in history, nor of present‑day arrangements that look suspiciously like the State quietly favouring one Family.

The difference I am trying to hold onto is structural.

When the monarchy misuses its position, the logic of our uncodified constitution gives us routes for shouting it down: scandals in the press, court cases, parliamentary fury, threats - sometimes implicit, sometimes extremely explicit- to cut funding or reform the institution.

You can think of the Johnson prorogation fiasco or of earlier crises such as the death of Princess Diana of Wales as examples of that immune system doing its clumsy best.

The US presidency, too, has had moments of restraint and self‑consciousness.

Most presidents have treated their birthdays as either private matters or opportunities for fundraising and issue‑spotlighting at arm’s length from the physical core of the state.

A “healthy” presidential symbolism, to my mind, looks like this: the person goes out into civil society (a concert hall, a community centre, a charity fundraiser), rather than dragging civil society into the Oval Office for a personal pageant.

The White House is supposed to be used as the backdrop for national ritual, not as the venue for the leader’s latest hobby or personal grift-fest.

That is the standard I am trying to apply consistently.

When monarchs or presidents cross it - when they bend public institutions to their personal brand - that is when the alarm bells should not only ring, but the institutions that are there to provide checks and balances should actually start doing their damn job.

The missing discipline

Strip away crowns and titles, and what we are really comparing are two different cultures of power.

In one culture, the person at the top is trained, sometimes painfully, to see themselves as a custodian.

Their tastes, friendships, and causes may shape how they perform the role, but the role always comes with an invisible wall. They are told “no” more often than we ever hear about. Their letters are read once, then quite possibly left to lie in unactioned splendour in ministerial in‑trays.

Their speeches are rewritten, redacted, sometimes cancelled because they are not saying the right thing - not saying what their Government wants or needs them to say. They are reminded - by their parents, by the actions of their predecessors, by private secretaries, by prime ministers, by tradition - that the State is not theirs to own.

In the other culture, the person at the top seems to be increasingly treated as a brand in their own right.

Their instincts become policy. Their likes become programming. Their birthday becomes a national event not by accident but by design. And the people around them - whether out of fear, loyalty, opportunism, or exhaustion - stop saying no.

Their advisors and strategists become, in effect, stage managers for one man’s ego.

This is why I find using the “pretendy king” line both satisfying and inadequate.

It is satisfying because it captures the sense of a president who wants the status and ceremonial dominance of a monarch without the humility and constraint that modern kings are forced to learn.

But it is inadequate because it obscures the institutional failure underneath. Trump is only able to treat the White House lawn as his personal arena because enough people, and structures, have either lost the habit of saying no or had it beaten out of them.

Constraint, not crowns – and the fate of “l’État, c’est moi”

I am anti‑Trump. I am not anti‑monarchy.

That combination can raise eyebrows, especially across the pond where you have a country explicitly founded on a rejection of kings.

But the distinction that matters to me is not between crown and ballot.

It is between systems that build constraint into their highest office and systems that reward indulgence.

From what I’ve seen, read, and experienced, the British monarchy has survived this long not because it is noble, but because it has learned, often the hard way, to accept a lifetime of being told “no.”

It is, in that sense, less Louis XIV’s “l’État, c’est moi” (I am the State or the State is me) and more “l'État demeure, même quand je n'en suis plus le Chef.” (The State remains, even when I am no longer its Head).

Our British way of putting it is: “The Queen is dead. Long live the King!”

So what has kept the crown intact through all the scandals and storms since 1660 and the Restoration of the last King Charles?

1. The recognition that the institution must always be bigger than whoever currently wears the crown

2. That the person at the top has no right - nor ability - to confuse the two

Those who do confuse them tend, historically, to come to unpleasant ends.

Charles I discovered that insisting on divine right and personal rule could lead, quite literally, to the chopping block.

The French monarchy collapsed under the weight of its own belief that the king’s person and the state were indistinguishable, and were welcomed into the sharp-edged embrace of Madame La Guillotine.

The German and Russian monarchies found, in different ways, that once you have taught your people that authority flows from one family’s bloodline, it is a short step from “we rule by right” to “we can be removed by force”.

In each case, the fatal mistake was not merely being authoritarian, but treating the machinery of state as a personal extension of the ruler’s will, and the population as being merely there to serve them and further their desires and will.

Donald J Trump is not a Bourbon King.

The United States is not pre-WWI Germany or late‑imperial Russia.

But the logic of “the lawn is mine, the symbols are mine, the anniversary is mine” belongs to that family of delusions.

It is the logic of “l’État, c’est moi” in a Republic that was designed, imperfectly but sincerely, to ensure no one should ever be able say that again with a straight face.

So the real question the South Lawn atrocity poses is not “Is he behaving like a king?” but “How many people around him, and around us, are prepared to behave like proper courtiers?”

The more I see of Trump’s antics - the more I am reminded of Mandy Patinkin’s awesome Huxley in Elmo in Grouchland:

© Mine (From “Elmo in Grouchland) (Official Music Video)

This is how Trump clearly views everything that is on loan to him whilst he is in the office of President: he’s touched it and it’s his - and that includes YOUR White House, its East Wing, and its South Lawn…

In the end, “l’État, c’est moi” only works if enough people agree to continue bowing, scraping, and keeping their mouths shut.

The health of a polity isn’t measured by whether there is a crown on the nation’s crest, but by whether anyone can still say “no” to the person at the top - and mean it.

À bientôt, my lovelies