Your most disobedient servant, ma’am

It’s not even politics confined to the Labour party, despite the privy counsellor David Cameron having so much fun at Corbyn’s expense in the Commons.

Reflect on another royal story — the Prince of Wales’s decision not to attend this week’s state banquet at Buckingham Palace for the Chinese president, Xi Jinping.

The prince, whose office gave no clear explanation for his non-attendance (though journalists were carefully briefed in advance), has form. He refused to attend a previous banquet for Jiang Zemin. Charles is a staunch defender of the Tibetan cause and an admirer of the Dalai Lama, who feels not nearly enough is done to protest about China’s human rights record.

And note that this quiet personal protest by the heir to the British throne comes just after George Osborne, the chancellor and putative successor to Cameron, had conducted an export-drive tour to China, where he conspicuously did not raise the usual human rights concerns — and was praised in the Chinese media for not doing so. The government has one view about trade and the world’s latest superpower. The Prince of Wales has another.

What will happen in the reign of Charles III? One imagines that, in private, Cameron and Osborne are irritated about the prince’s actions; and that, in private, so is the prince about theirs. And in the configurations of the new century, it’s hardly a marginal matter.

Yet, of course, most of the current difficulty around the politics of monarchy is focused on Corbyn. British republicanism has a long history, even if it’s one that is rarely discussed in the mainstream media. It has been a fissure running through the Labour party from the beginning.

One of the most ferocious republican speeches made in the Commons was given by Labour’s first leader, Keir Hardie, in 1894. There had been a pit disaster in South Wales, which had killed more than 250 people; but the Commons preferred to debate a loyal address to the monarchy on the birth of the baby who would become King Edward VIII.

Hardie predicted that the child would spend his life surrounded by sycophants and flatterers, and would cost the country dear. To general outrage he began his speech: “Mr Speaker, on my behalf and those whom I represent I am unable to join in this public address. I owe no allegiance to any hereditary ruler . . .” The value of the life of a single Welsh miner was greater than this “puling child”.

Hardie never backtracked on his republicanism and was seen as an extremist by most people outside the socialist parties; it was a lesson learnt by another Labour founder, Ramsay MacDonald, who, although he had been a pacifist in the First World War, was quick to recognise the fundamental conservative monarchism of many working-class voters.

By 1923 the party had brushed aside republicanism. During the first Labour government of the following year, MacDonald made great efforts to show himself loyal to the crown; bizarre arguments about the extent to which the untamed lefties would compromise with top hats, white ties and tailcoats prefigured the important question of what precisely Corbyn will wear at the Chinese banquet.

During the war-ridden 20th century, Labour prime ministers by and large strove to be more monarchist than the monarchs. Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson, Jim Callaghan and then both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown took the rituals of the weekly audience, the annual visit to Balmoral and even the kissing of hands exceedingly seriously.

The Queen has had more trouble with Tory prime ministers than Labour ones. In return, the British monarchy has bestowed a glowing, ancient authority on successive apparently radical modern leaders. Given the huge number of people supporting Labour in successive elections, this seems to have been a tacit pact endorsed by otherwise anti-establishment voters.

So what about the fissure? Labour has always been an alliance of disparate groups, from socially reactionary trade unionists to radical and sometimes Marxist intellectuals. And the radical intellectual strain has mostly been republican.

By far the most important exemplar of this was Tony Benn, in so many ways Jeremy Corbyn’s John the Baptist. Tony the Baptist wanted to remove the Queen’s head from postage stamps in the 1960s as part of a plan for radical, republican modernisation. This would have included — we are still living in an Ealing comedy, remember — “no dinner jackets for Labour ministers at Buckingham Palace, [and] mini-cars for official business”. At the time Benn exulted in his diary that “republicanism is on the increase” and wanted to strip away the honours system from the crown, substituting a system of parliamentary citations.

When, after Labour was elected in 1964, Benn arrived to take his oath of admission to the privy council, he recorded that he found it “terribly degrading . . . We then went up to the Queen, one after another, kneeling and picking up her hand and kissing it, and then bowing. I made the most miniature bow ever seen — I left the palace boiling with indignation and feeling that this was an attempt to impose tribal magic and personal loyalty on people whose real duty was only to their electors.”

These were views that Benn, like Keir Hardie, never renounced, not least because of the connection between state and royal power. Writing in November 2003, he said: “Royal prerogative, exercised not by the Queen but by the prime minister in her name, is seen as the final guarantee that democratic decisions by parliament and the people could never be allowed to undermine the hierarchical and semi-feudal system we have.

“The fount of honour has been re-routed from Buckingham Palace and now sprays the holy water of patronage on the chosen few . . . Declarations of war and Britain’s adherence to treaties such as the new European constitution are exercised under prerogative powers by the prime minister, who may or may not choose to consult the Commons or the electorate in a referendum.”

Sounding very like Labour’s first leader in 1894, he went on: “As an MP, my true allegiance was to my party, my constituents and, above all, my conscience. Therefore, in order to serve in the Commons and the cabinet, I had to tell 18 lies under oath, which I found deeply offensive. Above all, the existence of a hereditary monarchy helps to prop up all the privilege and patronage that corrupts our society; that is why the crown is seen as being of such importance to those who run the country . . .” And he concluded that getting rid of the monarchy “would transform the culture of Britain and radicalise the people by getting us off our knees”.

Knees feature heavily in this story. In 1974 Barbara Castle recorded the privy council swearing-in as long and boring, though adding: “It was comical to see Mike [Michael Foot] balancing on one knee.”

Given the rest of his political make-up, it’s reasonable to assume that in private Corbyn’s view of the monarchy is not a million miles from Benn’s; and that the embarrassment and kerfuffle over attending the privy council is to do with the physical act of a veteran republican kneeling to pay homage.

And, by the way, isn’t there something unattractively bullying about making a man in his sixties wear things and do things that are against his lifelong-held beliefs? There is an element of jeering mob monarchism here that I don’t believe they much like in Buckingham Palace, either.

Yet Corbyn’s republicanism is a big problem for him, as I think he himself recognises. When I asked him about the monarchy and the hereditary principle in a recent interview in Brighton, he did exactly what I would have done in his position — he fudged. It wasn’t a question for him, but for the people. He did speak out clearly, like Benn, against the undemocratic effect of the royal prerogative but he also “guessed” that most people were happy with the Queen, so “let’s leave it there”.

Given the views of millions of Labour voters, that’s entirely sensible. But it isn’t where this story ends. Now the longest-reigning monarch — well past the storms and white water of past family crises, and into the calm pool of her final years — the Queen is politically untouchable.

The same can’t quite be said, however, of the institution of monarchy itself. Prince Charles is a man of strong views and likely to come up against a future government in ways that are currently unpredictable. Fairly consistently, polling suggests less than a fifth of the population want the end of the monarchy. The number of republicans in the media, on the benches of the Commons (partly thanks to the success of the Scottish National party) and in the arts is rising and substantial. But these fights are won in the hearts and minds of the silent, voting majorities. My instinct is that republicanism was more of a threat to the throne in the 1880s and 1970s than it is now.

Whatever happens, it’s going to be a struggle involving unexpected alliances, for some of Charles’s strong views are more commonly held on the left than on the right. Although Corbyn does not plan to boycott the Chinese banquet, he has suggested using it to raise the question of human rights in China, making him sound a little bit more like the Prince of Wales than the prime minister.

In a rather brilliant new blank verse play by Mike Bartlett, King Charles III, which is now touring the country, the king takes on the government, but over the issue of press freedom and entirely on the side of the angels.

Where Bartlett is surely right is that the next monarch will choose his battles carefully, with a close eye on public opinion. On genetically modified food, the future of the Amazon rainforest and even architecture, he may well chime with the instincts of many of those who back Corbyn’s kind of politics. All institutions are biased towards their own survival and the British monarchy more than most. With bearded, demotic Prince Harry and the Cambridge family to the forefront, the Windsors are engaged in the latest act of wooing and attempting to captivate middle Britain. So many previous Labour leaders have concluded that it was in their best interests to go with the monarchical flow that even Corbyn may come to agree.

The most interesting parallels may not be Harold Wilson or Tony Blair, but Hardie and George Lansbury, the pacifist and social reformer who became Labour leader from 1932 to 1935. Lansbury was a republican, though he concluded it wasn’t a fight worth having at the time. In many ways, he sounds like Corbyn today. He had been at the forefront of the 1921 Poplar rates rebellion, a kind of anti-austerity protest that prefigured the battles the government had with the Greater London council in the 1980s. Even during the rise of fascism, he was a passionate advocate of disarmament. He is adored in the Labour party to this day, third only to Hardie and Benn in the pantheon of true believers.

Republicans all. Not a happy knee-bender among them. Lansbury served briefly as a minister in the Labour government of 1929-31 but Hardie never knew power. Benn did, but he got into the cabinet on the coat-tails of that arch-monarchist and friend of the Queen, Harold Wilson, before returning to a life of cheerful, outspoken opposition.

And that is the new Labour leader’s choice. If he is going to be in any way effective in the debates around defence and the dangerous conflict in the skies over Syria, Corbyn needs access to the private information granted to members of the privy council.

That means he’s going to have to join it and, whatever ungainly postural compromises are made in front of a sphinx-faced Queen, that in itself will be an acknowledgment of the reality — the surprising but important reality — of monarchical power in 21st-century Britain.