London: King Charles III’s health struggles following his recent cancer diagnosis will not stop anti-royalists making the case for an end to Britain’s monarchy, says pressure group Republic.
The organisation, which campaigns for an elected UK head of state to replace the monarch, says the end of Queen Elizabeth II’s record-breaking reign in 2022 boosted its cause.
Last year was “transformational”, the group’s chief executive Graham Smith told AFP.
“Excessive” media coverage of Charles’s cancer battle and speculation over its impact will buttress their arguments for the abolition of the centuries-old institution, he added.
“We’re sensitive to the fact… that he’s got cancer, but it’s the institution that’s the problem,” he told AFP in a recent interview.
“There are bigger issues than the individual.”
Smith believes “big” royal news, such as births, deaths, marriages and coronations, pushes the monarchy into the foreground — and that fewer Britons like what they see.
Opinion polls show heir-to-the-throne Prince William and his wife Catherine are among the most popular royals.
But Smith downplays the impact of any increased attention on the couple as William performs some of Charles’s public duties.
“I don’t think that William is particularly a harder target” for criticism than his father, Smith insisted.
Long a fringe group in Britain, the group seized on Elizabeth’s death — the biggest change to the monarchy in a generation — to press for reform.
Republic boosted its publicity efforts ahead of Charles’s landmark coronation last May. Heavy-handed policing also ended up increasing their profile.
Police arrested Smith and five other group members before a planned protest on the route, eventually releasing them without charge.
The police handling of the affair drew widespread criticism and Smith is suing London’s Metropolitan Police for wrongful arrest.
Republic has enjoyed a “massive” increase in income and members since the queen’s September 2022 death, he said.
“(That) September was one of the biggest months we’ve had since we started, and it just continued to snowball from then on,” Smith said.
Revenue last year was nearly £600,000 ($750,000), compared to £286,000 in 2022 and £106,000 the year before that, as its paying membership swelled to 10,000 alongside 140,000 non-paying supporters, he added.
“The monarchy is rapidly losing support,” Smith said, pointing to two polls last month showing an uptick in republican sentiment.
YouGov recorded 45 percent backing the monarchy and 31 percent favouring an elected head of state. That was a few weeks after a Republic-commissioned Savanta survey also found less than half of respondents supported the institution.
“This is huge,” Smith said at the time. “Royalists have spent years saying the monarchy has the support of the country. That’s no longer the case.”
Gideon Skinner, head of political research at the pollster Ipsos, acknowledged that the popularity of the royals had oscillated over recent decades.
But it still retains hefty public support in its surveys, he added.
“There are positives for the royal family,” he said.
“People broadly say King Charles is doing as they expected… (and) the prince and princess of Wales are still pretty popular.”
Skinner did however note that younger people were largely disengaged with the monarchy and clearly “more pro-republic”.
In an Ipsos poll last September, nearly one in four 18-to-34-year-olds backed an elected head of state, compared to just 15 percent of over-55s.
Winning over that demographic was the “more important issue” for monarchists, he said.
Smith explained the rise in republican support partly to a series of controversies.
They include the scandal surrounding the king’s brother Prince Andrew; the high cost of last year’s coronation; and disquiet at a planned 45-per cent rise in taxpayer funding for the monarchy from 2025.
Smith dismissed as “hot air dreamt up by royalists and commentators and so-called experts” suggestions that Charles would be a reformist.
William and Catherine, known as Kate, are in their early 40s and are seen as representing a younger, more dynamic, future for the institution.
But the Republic chief is more critical, in particular over the number of engagements they fulfil.
The Guardian last year found Kate, who is currently recovering from abdominal surgery, “does among the fewest events of working royals”.
“This notion that they’re young and savvy is misplaced,” said Smith.
Noting that polling suggested a certain ambivalence towards the couple, he added: “Most people don’t have a view, which itself is quite telling. “If they became the key focal point, I think that all these issues would come to the fore.”
