Britain is said to be a divided and unhappy country but yesterday evening I felt blessed to be British.
The spectacle of the King welcoming Volodymyr Zelensky to Sandringham, after the doubtless exhausted Ukrainian President had flown by helicopter from London, moved my heart. It was a generous, courteous and kindly act.
As the visit had been arranged at the last moment, there is no doubt that King Charles wanted personally to show solidarity with Zelensky, who was so vilely abused by President Trump and his venomous deputy, JD Vance, on Friday.
Like most people, the King was evidently appalled by the orchestrated humiliation of Zelensky by the two thugs in the White House and wanted to demonstrate his moral support.
Zelensky may be an imperfect politician, but he is a brave man who leads a country ravaged by a war in which many thousands of its people have been killed. It was truly sickening to watch him being hounded by these pampered bullies secure in the Oval Office, so far from danger.
Thank God, I thought to myself when the King shook hands with Zelensky outside Sandringham House before their private meeting, that our head of state is a decent and reasonable man and not a mercenary braggart incapable of observing basic civilities.
To be fair, I had a similar reaction when I saw footage of Sir Keir Starmer embracing Zelensky outside No 10 on Saturday afternoon. For all our Prime Minister’s many shortcomings, he showed human feeling for a visibly stricken Zelensky.
And yet there’s no denying the PM has put the King in an awkward position by extending an invitation to Trump for an unprecedented second state visit to Britain. Admittedly, Buckingham Palace had accepted the ill-conceived plan, offering a night at Balmoral or Dumfries House in Scotland, the country where Trump’s mother was born.
King Charles gives Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a particularly warm welcome at Sandringham today
Is Sir Keir now regretting his eager invitation, which was delivered in person to Trump last Thursday in what seemed an undignified and ingratiating manner? He has saddled the King with a task to which no one other than Trump himself is now looking forward.
Charles’s private distaste for Trump may surpass that of the late Queen. According to a book by my colleague Craig Brown, a few weeks after Trump’s state visit in 2019 she confided to a lunch guest that she had found him ‘very rude’. She reportedly particularly disliked ‘the way he couldn’t stop looking over her shoulder, as though in search of others more interesting’.
Doubtless the long-suffering Queen diplomatically kept her feelings to herself when in the presence of Trump. His frequent extolling of her is surely genuine. He is too much of an egotist to have divined what she really thought of him.
The King’s own opinion of Trump may be glimpsed in his decision not to attend the reopening of Notre Dame cathedral along with Trump and others last December. Rather than travel to Paris himself, he delegated the first post-US election meeting between the Crown and the then president-elect to Prince William.
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King Charles, a fervent believer in man-made climate change, may not have been eager to rub shoulders with the bombastic, bouffant-haired climate-change denier. In the event, poor Prince William was patronised by Trump in his ghastly, overbearing way.
By contrast, the King’s positive views about Zelensky are clear. He met the Ukrainian President when he visited Britain in February 2023, and told him: ‘We’ve all been worried about you and thinking about your country for so long.’
As heir to the throne, Charles felt freer to talk about political issues than he does as monarch. After Russia seized Crimea in 2014, he caused a rumpus when a private remark about Vladimir Putin doing ‘just about the same as Hitler’ became public. Three years ago he described Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a ‘brutal aggression’.
So his sympathies are clear – though as King he is rightly careful not to appear political – and the enthusiasm for Zelensky is sincere. One thing is certain: he won’t feel the same enthusiasm for Trump’s state visit, assuming it goes ahead.
Where do we go from here? The hurriedly arranged summit of European leaders in London yesterday endorsed the proposal that a group led by Britain and France will work with Ukraine ‘on a plan to stop the fighting’ with Russia, as the Prime Minister put it, and then ‘discuss that plan with the United States’.
‘Like most people,’ says Mail columnist Stephen Glover ‘the King was evidently appalled by the orchestrated humiliation of Zelensky by the two thugs in the White House and wanted to demonstrate his moral support.’
Most of the world looked on horrified as Donald Trump publicly berated Zelensky in the Oval Office
Trump’s vice-president JD Vance also weight in on the Ukrainian president
In other words, one way or another the US is bound to remain involved, not least because it is hard to see how Ukraine could ever be safe without its support. However detestable Trump may be, before long Zelensky will have to return to the White House and do business with him.
Next time he should insist on having an interpreter by his side. The truth is that his English, though workable, is not good enough for him to converse with aggressive interlocutors, such as Trump and Vance, speaking in their own language.
If he’d had an interpreter on Friday, he would not have been treated as he was. Tirades of Trumpian abuse would have been slowed down by the process of translation. Even more important, with such assistance he would have been able to express himself more precisely, and therefore have been less liable to misunderstanding.
I don’t know whether yesterday’s London summit will lead to the end of war in Europe. It’s not clear that the Russians want to make peace or, if they do, whether their terms will be acceptable to Zelensky and the government of Ukraine.
Nor can anyone in the world confidently predict how the mercurial Trump will behave. Despite his unforgivable treatment of Zelensky on Friday, it’s not impossible that he will start acting like a rational person – though one shouldn’t depend on such a transformation lasting for long.
What I am certain of is that we should be eternally grateful that Trump isn’t our head of state – and that the one we have is decent and sane, and asked the beleaguered Zelensky to his country home to offer him some human sympathy.