King Charles and Keir Starmer, Britain’s diplomatic double act

APIA, SAMOA — One is a consummate politician who mellowed his public views before finally assuming Britain’s top job … and the other is Keir Starmer.

King Charles III — who is presiding over a biennial summit of 55 Commonwealth nations in Samoa Friday — and his newish U.K. premier are enjoying their first outing on the world stage as Britain’s latest iteration of a longest-running diplomatic double act: monarch and prime minister. 

With the king hosting a luncheon and dinner for Commonwealth leaders Friday, both attended by Starmer, the pair may well need all the diplomatic skills they can muster.

Charles, who paused cancer treatment to visit Australia and the South Pacific, was heckled by an indigenous senator in Canberra, while Starmer has tried to rebuff Caribbean nations’ calls for slavery reparations, choosing to focus on growth and climate assistance instead.

Charles used his opening speech at Friday’s summit to call for action to combat the “existential threat of climate change,” including “cutting emissions, building resilience as far as possible to both the current and forecast impacts of climate change, and conserving and restoring nature, both on land and in the sea.”

Centrist PM, centrist king?

At first glance, there is little in common between the PM and king, men only 13 years apart but with upbringings a world apart. Starmer, 62, often speaks of the humble origins of his toolmaker father; 75-year-old Charles’ mother was the most famous woman on earth — and one of the richest.

But both wear their roles heavily, occasionally gloomily. Observers note similarities in their style and — whisper it, because constitutionally the king does not have any — perhaps their politics.

“My guess is that they would hit it off quite well,” said Jonathan Dimbleby, a personal friend of Charles and author of a 1994 biography. “Starmer is a thoughtful, serious person who can communicate in a way that he, the king, I think would respond well to on issues of substance.”

At least it has been easier to present a united front between monarch and premier than at the last Commonwealth heads of government meeting (known as CHOGM) in Rwanda. Charles’ private views on the immorality of then-PM Boris Johnson deporting asylum seekers there were leaked days before the 2022 summit began. (The pair were later all smiles over a 15-minute cup of tea.)

By contrast, Starmer scrapped the Rwanda plan and leans into green projects beloved of the king. While Charles has to be strictly neutral on party politics, he has a sense of “compassion, social cohesion,” said Dimbleby. “He uses the phrase ‘a community of communities’ as a way of describing a social environment that is healthy.”

Of course, the multimillionaire who spent seven decades as heir to the throne is “not socially a radical,” added Dimbleby. Left-wing ex-Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn “would not have been to his taste, I suspect, as a future prime minister. If he has any politics, I suspect it’s pretty centrist, and therefore he will probably find it pretty easy to communicate in a useful way with Starmer.”

Swords and sleepovers

The pair’s first known meeting neatly sums up the British establishment — when Charles knighted Starmer in 2014 for his work as director of public prosecutions.

One person who knows Starmer said he and Charles have had a good personal relationship since, speaking periodically after the former became leader of the opposition and when polls suggested he was on course to become prime minister.

Being PM comes with the diary entry of a private audience every Wednesday with the monarch. In April last year, Starmer was invited to the king’s pre-Easter “sleepover” at Windsor Castle, and days before this year’s July election, he was placed next to the king’s Private Secretary Clive Alderton at a state banquet.

It is quite a change of tack for Starmer, who said in 2005: “I often used to propose the abolition of the monarchy.” But the person quoted above — granted anonymity, like others in this story, to speak about the sensitive issue — argued that the future prime minister’s views in the 1990s did not define how he felt to his core: “His small-c conservatism comes from growing up in a working-class or middle-class family in Reigate, not from being a radical human rights lawyer in North London.”

Charles, too, has mellowed his well-known views on issues such as climate change and housing, at least in public, as part of the strict convention of neutrality that comes with being king. 

His style in the past was far from laid back. One former minister recalled Charles, as prince of Wales, inviting them for tea at St James’s Palace, where they found themselves discussing policy for more than an hour. A second ex-minister recalled the future king questioning ministers on the detail of green finance — though never in a way that would lobby for a policy, they insisted. While he would occasionally “raise eyebrows” in private, they said, “what he will do is come up with ideas or offers. He will say, ‘This group of people deserve a pat on the back — would it be helpful to you, minister, if I did an event with them or I send you something on that?’”

‘He pulled me to one side’

George Brandis, Australia’s former high commissioner to the U.K., recalls how the then-prince of Wales was “very eager to see” Australia commit to a target of net zero carbon emissions by 2050. When Canberra did — days before the COP26 climate summit in 2021 — “Charles was delighted about that. He had made it pretty clear on a number of occasions that he was very much hoping that Australia would do that. In fact, as I read it, [he] was a bit impatient that we hadn’t done so until relatively late in the piece.”

Brandis added: “He is obviously very conscious of the constitutional limitations of his role as king, and I’m sure that his public or private advocacy of causes will be much less in evidence now that he is on the throne. But nevertheless … I found him very determined to make his views known and to be an advocate for the causes he deeply cares about, particularly environmental ones.”

That does not make the king humorless; like Starmer, he is said to be warm and cracks jokes in private. Charles also shows “strong emotions,” more than his late mother, said Dimbleby: “He can get very frustrated, and those around him sometimes see that. They also see his total commitment to issues that matter and his ability to speak in a very informed way about them, and in private he feels perfectly free to do that.”

In September 2023, a year almost to the day after his own mother’s death, the king wrote a deeply personal letter to then-Defence Secretary Grant Shapps, who had recently lost his father. Shapps told POLITICO: “He left it on my bed at Dumfries House [a royal residence in Scotland]. It was a beautifully written, hand-annotated letter from the king. Later, when I went downstairs for dinner, he pulled me to one side and said, ‘I know that there are no words that can match losing a parent, but I do hope you found my letter.’ … He is an unbelievably thoughtful man, and it was a heartfelt thing for him to do.”

Charles receives a daily private email on politics from a member of the government whips’ office, the vice chamberlain of the household. While Queen Elizabeth encouraged her vice chamberlains to fill their letters with gossip — and would ask ministers about individual staff in the Commons tearoom — people who have dealt with Charles in recent years say he is generally more interested in granular policy.

But the true nature of the relationship between Starmer and the monarch is, ultimately, unknown. The Wednesday audience is for the two of them alone, and Starmer’s office declined to even confirm ahead of CHOGM whether they would meet one-to-one. 

Starmer, for his part, keeps up his end of the traditional royal secrecy, even amongst his inner circle. “He never talks about the king. He’s very disciplined,” said one Cabinet minister.

A marriage of convenience

The relationship between a monarch and their government is a two-way street — as the king is ministers’ ultimate tool of soft power. Charles was expected to hold private meetings with other heads of state at CHOGM, and unlike those between Starmer and heads of government, there would be no readout afterward. This means leaders “can let their hair down a little bit” in the king’s company, said Dimbleby.

An MP who has worked alongside the palace pointed out that Charles knows the chief executives of oil companies — and when the king invites them in to speak, they are unlikely to say no. His close relationships with figures in the Gulf, where he has drummed up sometimes controversial donations for his charities, are helpful for delicate Middle East geopolitics. 

The second ex-minister quoted above said: “He will know people for decades, including high-power people who are moving through jobs. He has more of that continuity than anyone in any government. It is a tremendous help.”

Starmer and the king have even walked down the aisle together — literally. At an afterparty for the U.K. investment summit on Oct. 14, the PM escorted Charles down the grand nave of London’s St Paul’s Cathedral.

Some of the CEOs and investors waiting under the 18th century dome abandoned their usual poise to whip out their camera phones, said one person present. Those who spoke to the king included executives from the Qatar Investment Authority and Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the governor of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund who chairs the Newcastle United football club.

Down to business

This stardust helped draw focus to the king’s big moment — his speech at CHOGM’s opening ceremony on Friday. He was open about his past campaigning for the climate “for many years,” and appeared to nod subtly to the summit row over slavery reparations.

He said: “I understand from listening to people across the Commonwealth how the most painful aspects of our past continue to resonate. It is vital therefore that we understand our history to guide us to make the right choices in the future.”

Samoa’s government approved £84,000 to upgrade his accommodation, according to local media. The last time most leaders will have seen him was when he was draped in gold at his coronation. Starmer, who traveled to CHOGM on a separate plane and mostly did separate events, was a bit player by comparison.

But that has not stopped the question of whether the king’s realms will shrink further. Of the 55 nations attending CHOGM, 15 (including Britain) have Charles as king. Former member Barbados became a republic in 2021, and Jamaica “remains hopeful” that it will follow in 2025, Foreign Minister Alando Terrelonge told the Independent in April.  

Counterintuitively, though, this peeling away could help secure the future of the Commonwealth — by decoupling it from the vestiges of empire and turning it into a forward-looking body on climate and trade. Or so its supporters hope.

Samir Puri, an associate fellow at the British foreign affairs think tank Chatham House, argued Charles’ successor Prince William would understand the pace of global change as an “older millennial.” He added: “It would be in his interests … not to turn away from that de-linking of monarchy and Commonwealth, to allow the Commonwealth to survive.”