THIS Christmas Queen Elizabeth missed two major scheduled events due to ill health. The 90-year-old monarch had already cut back her public engagements to the bare minimum, and newspapers have begun actively debating whether she should abdicate on health grounds. This raises the grim prospect of President Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin being joined on the world stage by King Charles in a sort of mad, reactionary super-group from hell.

Elizabeth’s era, so romantically portrayed in the Netflix drama the Crown, has actually been one of rapid then steady decline in British world power. She oversaw the loss of colonies to liberation movements, the disaster at Suez, and the collapse of most major British industries. Measured in those terms, Elizabeth is arguably the least successful monarch in Britain’s history.

However, she won’t be remembered that way. Precisely because Britain declined so heavily, Elizabeth’s timid waving from the back seat of a Bentley came to stand for solace and continuity. She has been often absurdly popular in a way that seems to cut across classes, ideologies and social divisions.

And during her reign, Britain has just about kept a modicum of imperial dignity. At the very least, the link with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland survived the collapse of the Empire, and Elizabeth remains monarch to many former colonies. Her popularity has probably helped stave off complete collapse.

Although like all royals she holds deeply conservative convictions, she has rarely intervened in politics even when Britain moved sharply to the Left. Rather than openly meddle, under her watch the British monarchy has become a seemingly apolitical global celebrity brand, the topic of endless novelty T-shirts, making them the posh precursors to the Kardashians.

Prince Charles, however, holds different convictions about the monarchy’s role in public life. The daily churn of vacuous, plastic celebrity culture is unappealing to him. He probably couldn’t name a single Kardashian. He doesn’t care. He favours nobler ideals of duty, tradition, honour, chivalry.

For decades our king-in-waiting has been a one-man protest movement against the evils of modernity. “I was accused once of being the enemy of the Enlightenment – I felt rather proud,” he once said. “I thought, hang on a moment, the Enlightenment started over 200 years ago. It might be time to think again and review it and question whether it is really effective in today’s conditions.”

In the Prince’s view, 200 years of progress has been a ghastly error; it’s time to take stock and have a rethink. To this end, the Prince writes thousands of scrawled letters to senior figures in public life warning of the evils of modern living. That is to say, our future monarch is a crank. The sort of oddball who, if he weren’t destined to rule the country, would spend his days writing long angry letters to the local newspaper complaining about bad mannered teenagers.

In his defence, many people say the Prince is an environmentalist. And this is true. But environmentalism may be divided into the good, the bad, and the darkly misanthropic. The Prince clearly belongs in the latter category. He’s an environmentalist because he distrusts, maybe even detests humanity. He’s a killjoy, a sniveller, a listless grouch and he happens to like the English countryside just as much as he hates the pace of urban life.

Monarchy depends on the principle of accident of birth. By accident, 1952 produced Elizabeth, a Queen quite happy to keep her political interventions to a mere "purr" and sell the institution down the road of plastic celebrity kitsch. Equally by accident, our coming monarch is an interfering windbag of a man who fancies himself the distinguished professor of all the ills of progress like a bilious old colonel in an Ealing comedy.

Since the institution is partly hostage to individual personality, quirks matter. But we can’t choose which quirks. They’re foisted on us. Monarchs are like relatives – good or bad, you don't get to choose them. You know you’re getting a toff, a militarist and a Tory. But what sort of militarist Tory toff will you get? It’s all down to the luck of the draw.

So what’s the effect of replacing our cheerful, kitschy monarch with a sinister, plotting misanthrope? Hopefully, it will awaken people to the absurdity of British institutions. Perhaps the accession of Charles will inspire Britain’s weakling liberals and divided leftists to rise to the challenge of sketching out better institutions.

The imaginary continuity of the monarchy, let’s remember, is often the one symbolic thing keeping Britain together. The Empire is gone, foreign wars are increasingly unpopular after Iraq, and the welfare state has been gradually cut to ribbons. With an outright reactionary on the throne, perhaps we’ll start to notice that this Emperor has no clothes.

Or, pessimistically, maybe Charles will fit with the times. Capitalist liberal democracy is failing, and so is its myth of progress, and in most cases organised reactionaries are profiting. Maybe Charles will find his place, with his misanthropic green politics, his fear of science, his yearning for a rural idyll and his way-out paranoiac tendencies.

Regardless, if and when King Charles becomes a thing, it will be another bumpy landing to reality for Britishness. In the Brexit movement, Britain has tried to retreat into the so-called Golden Age of the 1950s.

But Charles’s Golden Age of Britishness is positively medieval, a world where superstition rules, peasants turn to rulers to keep out strangers, and everyone knows their place. The Royals represent everything that’s wrong with Britain today – the idea that if you’re white and born into privilege then you’re simply better than anyone else. Add into that mix a paranoid misanthropy, and before we know it, under Charles, we’ll be eating mud and worshipping our born-to-rule landlords. The monarchy is already a reactionary, racist and outdated institution, where who rules is an accident of birth – so let’s get rid of the whole institution before Charles gets near the throne.