BOARD THE PRIME MINISTER’S PLANE TO SAMOA — As a symbol of the decline of British power, it could hardly be more stark.
This week King Charles III and his prime minister, Keir Starmer, will host 55 nations in Samoa for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM), a biennial gathering of state leaders associated with the fraying ends of the British empire.
But a glance at this year’s guest list highlights how the British monarch’s convening power is not what it was.
Indian PM Narendra Modi and South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa, two of the most powerful Commonwealth heads of government who would normally be in attendance, both plan to skip this year’s summit in favor of BRICS — a separate gathering of major developing nations hosted by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, in Kazan, where Chinese President Xi Jinping is also in attendance.
Sri Lanka, which is applying to join BRICS this week, is sending neither its prime minister nor foreign minister to Samoa, an official at the High Commission in London said.
Not even Canada, a close ally of the U.K. and fellow member of the powerful “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing network, will send its prime minister or foreign minister to CHOGM. The head of its delegation will be Ottawa’s high commissioner to the U.K, a Canadian official confirmed.
Even Starmer’s own trip — his first to Britain’s former colonies in the southern hemisphere — has been cut short. A U.K. government official confirmed the PM had scrapped plans to add in a stop in Australia, as aides feared it would keep him abroad for too long ahead of a pivotal government spending package being unveiled in London next week.
Speaking to journalists on board his 28-hour flight to Samoa Tuesday evening, Starmer appeared in good spirits. But he has brought up the summit’s grueling flight time in conversations with fellow MPs, two of them told POLITICO. The 9,400-mile journey each way is by far his longest since taking office in July.
‘Not my king’
Also struggling with the epic flight time is 75-year-old King Charles, who — while still recovering from cancer — did at least make it to Australia ahead of this week’s summit.
Charles, officially the head of the Commonwealth, remains the king of 14 nations aside from the U.K.
But here too the direction of travel appears less than promising for Britain’s soft power. Barbados became a republic in 2021; Jamaica plans to follow suit next year.
The debate erupted again Monday when an indigenous senator heckled Charles in Australia, repeatedly shouting “not my king” and demanding: “Give us what you stole from us — our bones, our skulls, our babies, our people.”
Australia’s written constitution requires a double majority at national and state level in a referendum to activate change. George Brandis, Australia’s former high commissioner to the U.K. and a monarchist, argues the appetite was quelled last year, when a referendum failed to change the constitution around indigenous people’s rights despite “yes” initially having a large lead in the polls.
“When the queen [Elizabeth II] died, I think naturally the question was asked ‘is this now time for Australia to become a republic?’ That discussion basically fell away within a few months,” added Brandis. “The wind has really gone out of the sails of Australian republicanism.”
Reparations loom over summit
The Commonwealth itself, formed 75 years ago, shows no sign of breaking up. It remains, in theory, a supreme networking club for small states to meet regularly with Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and India.
Strikingly, Barbados stayed in the club in 2021 despite ditching its monarch, and two nations which joined in 2022 — Gabon and Togo — have no historic links to the U.K.
And this year the Commonwealth’s smaller members are demanding more than just goodwill from their hosts.
Multiple Caribbean nations have used the run-up to the summit to call for reparations from Britain for the legacy of slavery, with Bahamas Prime Minister Philip Davis calling CHOGM the ideal forum to “make progress.” Nations have been in talks about whether to reflect reparative justice in their communique, to be finalized by leaders Saturday.
All three African leaders vying to be the Commonwealth’s new secretary-general — a choice leaders will make Saturday — said last month the issue should broadly be on the table. It is part of a “long history of using Commonwealth summits as a forum to air broader grievances which often have Britain involved,” said Harshan Kumarasingham.
No one really believes the U.K. will hand over reparations worth alternatively £200 billion (according to one leading academic) or £18 trillion (per a United Nations judge). In truth the conversation is moving away from calls for “pure” reparations and toward help combating wider issues like climate change, which hits developing, small and island states hardest. The issue is firmly on the agenda at CHOGM, alongside a declaration for a “sustainable and resilient ocean.”
One of the three candidates for secretary-general, Ghana’s Foreign Minister Shirley Botchwey, said last month: “We’ve all moved from financial reparations … to what we can get out of in terms of our development, in terms of our resilience building.”
A No. 10 spokesperson insisted the U.K. does not pay reparations and that the issue is simply “not on the agenda.” They said there would be no apology for Britain’s role in slavery at CHOGM.
The fight for relevance
The rows over reparations at least give the Commonwealth some sort of relevance in the modern age.
Outcomes from these grand gatherings are otherwise notoriously hard to pin down.
The vague-sounding theme of this year’s event, “One Resilient Common Future: Transforming our Common Wealth,” will do little to dissuade critics who paint CHOGM as a platitudinous talking shop of increasingly disinterested members.
Indeed, the next iteration of the Commonwealth Games, a kind of post-colonial Olympics, has already been dismissed as an albatross by the Australian state of Victoria, which scrapped plans to host the sporting championship in 2026. (Glasgow eventually picked up the baton.)
But some back in the U.K. still maintain a more positive vision for the Commonwealth.
The grouping contains almost a third of the world’s population, and aside from the United Nations is arguably the most diverse of any group of states — by wealth, size, geography and religious make-up.
This diversity can help Britain “revive” ties with smaller economies after Brexit, argued Kumarasingham. He added: “It is unquestionably a product of empire, but at the same time, it is not another version of it.”
The Commonwealth is not a mere “talking shop,” said Samir Puri, an associate fellow at the British foreign affairs think tank Chatham House — but its strengths such as education programs are “niche” and “it never fulfilled its promise of being a hard power bloc.”
The argument that the Commonwealth could become a focus for future trade and investment once Britain left the EU was made repeatedly by Brexiteers in 2016, and has now been adopted by the newish Labour government in London. Starmer’s official spokesperson noted the delegations from 55 countries represent “a combined market for British business that is worth $19.5 trillion by 2027.”
China’s might
But it’s hard to avoid a sense of the sun setting on the remains of the British empire.
Earlier this month the U.K. announced a deal to return sovereignty of the Chagos Islands, an Indian Ocean archipelago with a U.K. and U.S. military base, to Commonwealth member Mauritius. While the Diego Garcia base will remain under U.S./U.K. jurisdiction for at least 99 years, the decision prompted Tory fury over China’s trade ties with Mauritius and military muscle.
It’s not just Mauritius. Last year the Solomon Islands, another Commonwealth member, signed a police cooperation deal with China. “The Solomon Islands very obviously flipped to China and it caused massive panic for the Australians and the Americans,” said Puri.
U.K. officials are aware of the need to keep smaller states, many in Africa, from being too reliant on China. U.K. Development Minister Anneliese Dodds pledged last week to “accelerate” reform of development banks to help vulnerable states “escape the trap of unsustainable debt.” Puri added: “That concern is really at the forefront of why the Commonwealth is a valuable network for the U.K.”
Britain should seize the summit as a chance to shore up relations with these nations — giving them alternatives to Chinese investment, said former U.K. Trade Secretary Penny Mordaunt, who attended CHOGM in 2018. She told POLITICO: “There are massive opportunities for all: for trade and prosperity, for the climate challenges we all face, for security against and autocratic regimes, including China. Vision and common cause is needed to protect our collective interest over the long term.”
Yet all the candidates for secretary-general have said firmly it is not the Commonwealth Secretariat’s job to help “contain” China. Botchwey told a recent Chatham House debate: “It would be violating sovereignty and poking its nose where it’s not needed.”
Starmer, arriving at this week’s Commonwealth summit with several of his opposite numbers already lured away by Xi and Putin, will have got the message.
