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I had a ringside seat to history this week.
Yesterday there was a 21-gun salute on the south lawn of the White House, a military flyover and the two national anthems played one after the other.
The King stood beside President Trump in the morning sun.
The Queen stood beside the First Lady.
The choreography was flawless.
It always is.
Hours later the King stood in the US Capitol and addressed a joint meeting of Congress.
Only the second British monarch ever to do so.
The first was his mother, in 1991.
That fact alone tells you what kind of day this was.
The politics, for once, were not the point.
The point was the man at the despatch box.
A king, addressing the legislature of the country his ancestor George III once tried to keep within the Empire.
The room knew it.
So did the President, watching from the White House, who afterwards told Charles he was jealous of the speech.
He was right to be.
It was the speech of a man who had waited a long time to deliver it.
This visit has been a triumph.
I do not say that lightly.
State visits are difficult things.
They are choreographed to the inch and remain at the mercy of any stray remark, any fluffed line, any breach of protocol.
Charles did not put a foot wrong.
Camilla, working alongside the First Lady on an education event, was warmth itself.
The white-tie state dinner in the East Room was precisely the picture Buckingham Palace wanted on the front pages.
But these trips are not just the bells and whistles of pageantry.
Before the dinner, Charles hosted a reception at Blair House for the chief executives of America’s biggest technology companies.
Jeff Bezos.
Tim Cook.
Jensen Huang of Nvidia.
Lisa Su of AMD.
Ruth Porat of Google.
Marc Benioff of Salesforce.
He spoke to them about AI guardrails.
About the funding of British start-ups.
About sustainability.
And later this week, in New York and then in Bermuda, he will host two further events under the banner of the Sustainable Markets Initiative — the SMI — the body he founded to push private capital toward the planet.
Saving the planet has been Charles’s life’s work.
Long before the world caught up with him on climate, he was talking about it.
He gave his first major environmental speech in 1970.
He was mocked for it for almost 30 years.
Then the science caught up.
Then the markets caught up.
In January 2020, at Davos, he launched the SMI: a coalition of more than 250 chief executives, all committed to mobilising private capital for the transition to a sustainable economy.
The founding premise was simple, and at the time it was heretical.
Governments do not have the money to decarbonise the planet.
Governments do not have the expertise.
Big business has both.
You will never solve the climate crisis by writing cheques from the Treasury.
You will solve it by re-routing the trillions that already move every day through the world’s capital markets.
Climate campaigners hated the idea.
Business hated it back.
Charles brought them into the same room and made them shake hands.
Six years on, every serious climate institution in the world says the same thing he said.
He was first.
He was right.
He gets very little credit for it.
This is why the City of London matters.
The Square Mile is, with Zurich, the global leader in green finance.
London writes the rules.
London moves the money.
The Lloyd’s market — at the heart of the City — chairs the SMI’s Insurance Task Force, working with the United Nations to close the protection gap for the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries.
Charles understands all of this in his bones.
So does the British government, which is why the Foreign Secretary, Yvette Cooper, was at the Ambassador’s residence in Washington on Monday evening.
The King is the door-opener.
Whitehall walks through it.
In front of the most powerful technology executives on Earth, he opened a very large door.
That is why this trip matters.
Not only for Britain, but for London.
The capital is fighting to keep its place as a global financial centre against fierce competition from New York, Singapore and the Gulf.
The King’s convening power is one of the few advantages we still hold that no rival can manufacture.
You cannot fake a monarchy.
You cannot buy a thousand years of continuity off the shelf.
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I have covered the Royal Family for 35 years.
I have stood at coronations and at funerals, on the Mall in mourning and in celebration.
I have followed this King across five continents.
This week ranks with anything I have ever covered.
Outside the Capitol afterwards, I saw a little girl.
She could not have been more than four.
She held a Paddington bear.
Hat, coat, label and all.
She had come, I suppose, because her mother had told her about the Queen.
The Queen has been gone three years.
The bears are still there.
Some things outlast politics.
Robert Jobson’s latest book, The Windsor Legacy, is out now (Blink, £22)
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