Albares and Trillo analyze the history of Europe through the queen

The Foreign Minister, in fact, abounds in that reflection for this newspaper: “Probably the last great figure of the 20th century leaves with her. It is curious, because a few days ago she left Mikhail Gorbachev and now Elizabeth II… yes, the 20th century is ending.”

Albares’ words, on the other end of the phone, are better understood when he calibrates the challenge facing the new king Charles III: “He has had a lot of time to prepare. And knowing that this day would come, he too has had to adapt between two centuries, and two ways of understanding the world, Europe, positions… the 21st century, which is another way of understand the world and how positions are exercised”.

And therein lies the key: the UK after September 8 is a completely new element in a new world that is accelerating in its convulsions.

In reality, the world is no longer as “modern”, as the President of the European Council referred to, but rather more dangerous now. And the story stopped being so “global” the day London consummated Brexit, despite that perhaps ‘Europeanist’ hat that the queen wore at the parliamentary opening of 2017. But it is that fate seems to have conspired so that everything changes suddenly.

There is no EU for the British; the prime minister has been in office for three days; the king barely 24 hours on the throne… and meanwhile, neither the world nor Great Britain have had time to digest any of this, between pandemics and wars.

“Both in Downing street, with Boris Johnsonas in Buckingham, They are two succession processes that could already be seen comingAlbares continues. “I have spoken with the embassy in London and with the British ambassador in Madrid, and all the information that reaches us is that nothing is out of the ordinary.”

But, what is normality when all this had not happened since before the invention of television? “I am sure that both the new king, who has been with his mother for a long time, and Liz Truss, whom I know well as Foreign Secretary and who has enormous government experience, they are going to make the best decisions”.

101 years

With the death of Elizabeth II, the only female head of state known to 85% of British people, those who have so far blown out less than 70 candles on her birthday, disappears. Y the convulsion in the identity of the kingdom formed by four countries (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland), and whose sovereign was also sovereign of 14 more, is easily measurable by the 101 years that separate the date of birth of its first head of government, sir Winston Churchill (1874) and Her Majesty’s last Prime Minister, Liz Truss (1975).

His heir, Carlos III, is wearing the crown at the age of 73, and that also has another obvious meaning: that he will have to face a model of monarchy that is completely different from that of his mother. If she was stability, permanence, the symbol, eternity, she reigning from youth to old age, the new monarch arrives in Buckingham with more past than future.

That controversial past is all too well known: a publicly adulterous king arrives, a divorcee at the head of the Anglican Church, the most traditional among Protestant Christians. And if we quoted the new Conservative ruler to highlight the 101-year distance from Churchill that covered the reign of Elizabeth II –half of the 20th century and almost a quarter of the 21st-, that will not be among the assets that the new monarch can offer you.

“But he is a man with an open mind, much more than we believe in Spain,” he says Federico Trilloformer minister and former ambassador of Spain in London, when called by this newspaper.

“The British are monarchists as patriots… she embodied Britain, permanence. And he is a very prepared man and whose political positions he exercises the most, his environmentalism, fits very well between two extremes that could seem irreconcilablethe conservative tradition, which is very rural in the UK, and the more progressive movements against climate change.”

But it is true that everything changes suddenly. New king and new government -the fourth in just six years since the Brexit referendum- for the almost 70 million inhabitants of the United Kingdom, of which -according to its population pyramid- no more than a million of them remember the previous sovereign, George VI.

And all of them fed up with chained strikes that paralyze public services, sudden shortages in supermarkets, and eternal waiting lists in public health.

Fewer Brexiteers

Some citizens always proud and now upset because in the last year they have released long-forgotten paperwork to travel, study or work in Europe. Heirs of a financially buoyant world economy that is now decreasing in its global weight and presenting an insufferable inflation of 10.1%… which experts predict will reach 18% by the end of the year).

Everyone, if you are now looking for some permanent foothold to hold on to, there is none. Not even the European Union, the club invented after World War II so that the old continent would cease to be the epicenter of confrontation and death in the world.

Today, according to data from YouGov52% of Britons believe that to be again an island and leaving “the mainland” was “a bad decision”, while only 36% believe it was the “right” one.

…well, at least in the month of July, which is when this latest survey dates. And it is that, in view of the series of data accumulated from these polls, the British feel more brexiteers that remains when his Government leads them with determination than in moments of crisis, such as the worst of the pandemic or the months that have elapsed after the start of the war in Ukraine.

In any case, in this new era of great chained events, all of them convulsive for Europe, public opinions are noticeably changing. “And yet, I don’t think that if they voted again today, it would change nothing“replies Trillo. “If the British have been something, it is always insular: against Rome, against the Pope and against Brussels“.

Ireland and Gibraltar

In these days of mourning, the European Union has offered – through the mouths of all its leaders – its condolences to the British people. And it has been friendly with the first member state that challenged the integrating, political and economic process inaugurated in the same 1950s in which the deceased monarch came to the throne.

But Truss, who voted to remain and now assumes with “enthusiasm and determination” the management of the embers of the “withdrawal”, a poisoned inheritance falls to him: the challenge of developing the law promoted by Boris Johnson with which London will skip the trade agreement with the EU.

The absence of customs between the two Irelands saved the Good Friday Agreements and, with them, perhaps, peace on both sides of a border erased at the time. But, according to the leaders of the Conservative Party, it has created “a kind of single market” on the small island, “and, with it, an unbearable dysfunction in the British internal market”, in the words of the British diplomat David O’Sullivan.

On this point, Brussels is blunt. “The withdrawal agreement must be complied with in its entirety,” spokesmen for the Commission have expressed on numerous occasions. “And it never crosses my mind that something else is going to happen,” adds the Spanish Foreign Minister.

Albares recalls that with Truss on the other side of the negotiating table, he has dealt with “in intense conversations” the issue of Gibraltar, in which Spain has the last word after Brexit. “He always had a constructive attitude to achieve the space of shared prosperity that we wantAnd yes, she concludes that “nothing suggests that now that she is the head of government, she will not comply with the United Kingdom’s withdrawal agreement from the EU.”

The truth is that the 70 years of the reign of Elizabeth II have come to an end as if it were a cycle previously defined by destiny. as he said on thursday Ursula von der LeyenPresident of the European Commission, she “represents the whole history of Europewhich is our common home with our British friends”.

He picked up from the post world war II a ruined and humiliated country, in a dramatic situation. He attended and led the charge behind the scenes during the years of decolonization. He silently encouraged entry into the then European Economic Community (CEE) and, finally, it served as a symbol of stability when populisms won Brexit… and now that everything is done and the world changes its paradigm again, now it relinquishes the scepter.