Trump for the Commonwealth? He’d make the Iron Lady seem soft-hearted

In late 1989, we boarded the Royal Australian Air Force’s old VIP Boeing 707 and flew from Canberra to Kuala Lumpur, prime minister Bob Hawke wreathed in the smoke of his cigar in the forward cabin.

It was my first overseas trip as a political correspondent.

We were off to a gathering of leaders of the remnants of the British Empire, the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting: CHOGM.

Bob Hawke and Margaret Thatcher.Credit: AP Wirephoto

The term “British Commonwealth” was dropped in 1949 as colonialism became a sour word. What remained in 1989 was 49 countries bound into an organisation calling itself simply the Commonwealth.

Still, because India’s 1 billion people, Britain’s 60 million, numerous heavily populated African countries, plus Canada, Australia, New Zealand and various islands and outposts were members, the Commonwealth represented almost a quarter of the world’s people.

The beauty for journalists was that CHOGMs were held over a relaxed week or so every two years in a roundabout of wonderfully exotic places: the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, the Pacific, the subcontinent, South-east Asia and Africa, plus the UK.

We only half-joked that CHOGM – an acronym sounding like the slap of a cricket bat into a wet lettuce – actually stood for Chaps Holidaying on Government Money.

There was, however, a deal of serious business undertaken within the apparently anachronistic organisation.

The CHOGM in Kuala Lumpur was marked by a furious row between Britain’s Maggie Thatcher and the rest, headed by Hawke, over sanctions to force South Africa to end its apartheid system.

Thatcher, “the Iron Lady”, was the only leader of the 49 nations opposed to sanctions. “If it’s one against 48, I’m very sorry for the 48,” she jibed. Take that!

As history showed, hers was wasted breath: Apartheid was soon gone.

Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990. He met Bob and Hazel Hawke in Canberra that year.Credit: Craig Golding

Still, Thatcher took no retribution against the nations opposing her, and the Commonwealth survived, growing to its current 56 members.

Which wouldn’t be the case, you might be sure, if Donald Trump were to be admitted and didn’t get his way.

Among the loopiest ideas tossed into the international whirlpool caused by Trump’s second coming is that the United States should be invited to join the Commonwealth.

The proposal is supposed to have come from within the Royal Commonwealth Society, an independent charity promoting literacy, equality and environmental causes across Commonwealth nations.

If so, the society has not just lost its mind, but its sense of history.

The boosters of the idea that the US could become an associate member of the Commonwealth, leading to full membership, seem to fantasise that this might help heal the strife between Trump’s USA and Canada, like Australia a founding Commonwealth member.

Given that Trump is currently assailing Canada because it won’t accept his demand that it become the 51st state of the US, it’d take more than a cosy CHOGM to heal that bit of petulant bastardry.

Those imagining a Trumpland membership also seem to have been swept away by Trump’s gushing comments about King Charles III – the head of the Commonwealth – during a meeting in the White House with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

Trump, a noted fawner over British royalty, called Charles a “beautiful man” and described Britain, which he is to visit later this year, as “a fantastic country”.

Meanwhile, Trump’s hired public service hitman, Elon Musk, has been busily undermining Starmer’s government with tweets such as “America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government”, and calling for Starmer to be imprisoned.

Perhaps the royal society’s strange grasp on history is explicable.

The society built from the mid-1800s an immense library, the single most comprehensive source on the history of what had been the world’s most extensive empire.

In 1993, short of cash and vision, the society sold its collection of more than half a million items – books, manuscripts, correspondence and more than 120,000 photographs.

The headquarters of what was then the Royal Empire Society, now the Royal Commonwealth Society, after being hit by a bomb in April 1941, during the London Blitz.Credit: University of Cambridge Digital Library

Cambridge University, recognising a treasure, purchased the lot. It caused a frightful stink among society historians, who remembered the great loss and subsequent determination to carry on when, during World War II, Hitler’s Luftwaffe dropped a bomb into the library, destroying 20,000 volumes of British history.

A cursory trawl through the collection, if the society hadn’t sold it, might have reminded members that the US severed all ties with the British Empire in 1776 by declaring its independence.

This enabled the American colonies to form an alliance with France, which funded their war with Britain, ensuring the existence of the US in the first place.

(This, of course, was lost on Trump’s Generation Z press secretary Karoline Leavitt after a French member of the European Parliament called for the return of the Statue of Liberty. Leavitt reminded us of the meaning of ignorance when she declared the French should remember “it’s only because of the United States of America that the French are not speaking German right now, so they should be very grateful to our great country”.)

Old history, of course.

Newer history would have informed the Royal Commonwealth Society that the Commonwealth adopted a formal set of principles at a meeting in Singapore in 1971.

And Trump’s approach offends every one of those principles.

The Commonwealth’s doctrine requires support for strengthening the influence of the United Nations in striving for peace and for global free trade. What? No tariffs?

Members must believe in equal rights for all citizens regardless of race, colour, creed or political belief, and recognise racial prejudice “as a dangerous sickness … and unmitigated evil”. There goes Trump’s loathing of diversity.

“We oppose all forms of colonial domination.” Greenland, Canada, Panama, anyone?

And this: “We believe that the wide disparities in wealth now existing between different sections of mankind are too great to be tolerated; our aim is their progressive removal.”

Trump and Musk and their billionaire mates would spontaneously combust at the very thought.

And given the chance, they would almost certainly ensure the Commonwealth and all it stands for is melted down, too.

Cut through the noise of federal politics with news, views and expert analysis. Subscribers can sign up to our weekly Inside Politics newsletter.