THE recent visit by Britain’s King Charles III to Washington was essentially a repair job to reduce the schism between a disgruntled US President Donald Trump and two of King Charles’s prime ministers — British Prime Minister Keith Starmer and Canada’s PM Mark Carney.

This latest détente royale is between two septuagenarians: Charles is 77 years old, and Trump 79. At times, the glittering display of gilded pageantry appeared no more (to adapt playwright John Osborne’s aphorism) than a gold filling in the cavity of a relationship in decay.

Before King Charles’ arrival, the otherwise sober British paper Financial Times tried to derail the visit by revealing an aside made by UK Ambassador Sir Christian Turner to some schoolchildren in mid-February this year, soon after he had taken over, after the recall of the disgraced Lord Mandelson.

With more truth than the discretion that distinguished his tenure as high commissioner in Islamabad (2019-2023), Sir Christian described the UK-US special relationship as “nostalgic” and “backwards-looking”, adding that if the US has a special relationship, it is probably with Israel. The Foreign Office instantly sprang to his defence, explaining that his comm­ents were “private” and........

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