In his long previous life as a prince, Charles exploited the ample opportunities his privileged position afforded him to promote various, often quixotic, causes dear to his heart – including horror of horrors, the defence of fox hunting.
In his first speech as king, Charles gave assurances that he would now accept political neutrality completely. “My life will of course change as I take up my new responsibilities,” he said. “It will no longer be possible for me to give so much of my time and energies to the charities and issues for which I care so deeply.”
As the new king, he will not intervene in anything, promising to not even attend the upcoming COP27 climate summit, on Prime Minister Liz Truss’ “advice”. She obviously wants to make sure he is kept in his place and keeps his mouth shut.
Though her representatives made sure she had full deniability, Charles’ late mother, Elizabeth II, played a dodgy role in the dismissal of Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam by her in-country representative, then governor-general Sir John Kerr. In the days of empire, Kerr would have been called the queen’s viceroy. Often described as the country’s worst constitutional crisis, its consequences have been far-reaching, to this very day, not only for Australia but the world at large, as we shall see.
Compromising details about Buckingham Palace’s role in the sorry affair have only recently come to light. But if you want to understand the dirty politics of the Commonwealth, Australia’s role in the so-called Five Eyes Anglo-American intelligence-sharing network, and how the country became a vassal state of the United States insofar as its foreign and defence policies are concerned, an understanding of the collapse of – some may even call it literally “a palace coup” against – the Whitlam government is indispensable.
But who was Whitlam? A Labor Party leader and prime minister who won the 1972 election with 53 per cent of the vote, he withdrew Australia’s last troops from Vietnam; openly criticised the administration of Richard Nixon, especially its deliberate bombing of Vietnamese civilian areas; and tried to pursue a non-alignment policy away from Washington. He also threatened to shut down the Pine Gap spy base in Alice Springs, which was jointly operated with the Central Intelligence Agency. Netflix has a whole spy series centred on the eponymous Pine Gap.
Unsurprisingly, he was the bete noire of Washington – from the White House to the Pentagon and the CIA – and the British royals, though perhaps less so with the Labour government of Harold Wilson. After provoking the Americans, was it pure coincidence that Whitlam was out of office by the end of 1975?
After dismissing Whitlam, Kerr commissioned Malcolm Fraser of the Liberal Party as prime minister who duly called a general election and won. Conveniently, Fraser was a staunch defender of the British Commonwealth and strong ally of the US.
At least until recently, the official story was that the queen didn’t know anything about the dismissal until it actually happened, even though Kerr’s office acted in her name and that he certainly had communicated with the queen’s loyal and longest-serving secretary, Martin Charteris, beforehand. But thanks to the tireless efforts of Australian historian and Whitlam biographer Jenny Hocking who successfully sued the National Archives of Australia for the release of the so-called palace letters in 2020, we now know better.
From the start, Kerr had taken all the blame and responsibility in dismissing Whitlam. Understandably, he became a hated figure in his own country. When he tried to set the record straight in his memoirs, Buckingham Palace talked him out of citing all references to the queen and Charteris in relation to the 1975 crisis.
Whitlam was dismissed in late November. We now know that during the former Prince of Wales’ visit in September to Papua New Guinea to celebrate Independence Day in Port Moresby, Kerr raised his concerns with Charles that Whitlam might try to recall him from office while he was considering Whitlam’s dismissal. Upon his return to London, Charles kept the queen fully informed, as did Charteris, as we know from the “palace letters”.
The matter came to a head when the Whitlam government’s budget bills were passed in the House of Representatives but blocked in the Senate. Innocently, Whitlam told Kerr he was thinking of launching what in Australia is called a “double dissolution” to dissolve – that is, shut down – the Senate. Kerr dismissed Whitlam, in the queen’s name by virtue of his office, before Whitlam could act.
The obvious question is, if the queen had known about the plot against Whitlam all along, wasn’t it her constitutional duty to put a stop to it? Her omission amounted to a commission to overthrow the Australian government.