Is this how the Commonwealth ends?

Five confusing, chaotic and contradictory days in the Caribbean with assorted politicians, King Charles and the royal press pack

Saturday October 31. Evening. As Air Force VIP Voyager touched down in Antigua and Barbuda, the country's main broadcaster goofed. The sound cut out, leaving only a fuzzily defined visual feed. Standing on the tarmac, Garfield Burford, the eastern Caribbean's dapper answer to Anderson Cooper, was unaware of the glitch. He continued to silently commentate in his hi-vis jacket and celebratory orange and red bow tie, as the royal plane disgorged its cargo: a small, blinking, pink-skinned figure in a tan suit.

Sweating in the night-time heat, the elderly man ran his tubular fingers through his hair, then moved along a route lined with soldiers in the white military dress uniforms of the Antigua and Barbuda Defence Force. Without any guiding context as I watched the scene unfold on my flatscreen TV two miles away, my mind began to drift through a series of questions. Why had Britain sent what looked like the world's largest plane to one of the world's smallest islands? Why was this all being filmed with someone's toaster? What was actually happening here?

Even when the sound was on, it seemed Antigua was having a hard time working that out. For months, preparations for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting 2026 had been conducted in an atmosphere of secrecy. You knew only what you needed to know about CHOGM, and what most Antiguans needed to know was nothing. Over the course of five days on the island, they repeatedly told me the only way they could work out where the events were due to take place was by noticing where the government had decided to re-asphalt the narrow, pockmarked roads. Like his mother before him, whose three visits to Antigua had inspired the same selective tarmacking, His Majesty King Charles III, head of the Commonwealth, would fear no potholes.

The title was invented in 1949, for his grandfather George VI, as a constitutional fudge: India wanted to become a republic without leaving the club, and so the King was made "head" of an association rather than sovereign of its members.

The Windsor monarchy "with its imperial memory keenly sought a Commonwealth role", as Queen Elizabeth II's biographer Ben Pimlott put it. Elizabeth turned the workaround into a vocation -- a role described as "revolutionary" at the time -- carefully tending it for 70 years.

There are no written rules, nor conventions, about what the Head of the Commonwealth says or does. But unlike the Crown, the headship is not hereditary. In 2018 at a CHOGM in London (the meetings are held every two years in a different member country), the Queen told the assembled leaders it was her "sincere wish" that her son succeed her. After her death in 2022, Charles got the job.

Nonetheless, the King's role in Antigua was a somewhat strained one, and when his plane touched down in the Caribbean, the mystery of his position deepened. He represented Britain, yes, but he was also something like a constitutional polycule, the symbol of sundry realms and common link between republics. When he spoke in Antigua, whom was he speaking for? Antigua and Barbuda is one of the 15 remaining Commonwealth realms: here, unlike in India or Singapore, Charles is not merely leader of the club, he is The King.

In 2026, obliqueness mattered more than ever. One definite fact loomed over this CHOGM. The Black nations of the Commonwealth wanted Britain to say sorry and then pay reparations for its centuries-long involvement in transatlantic chattel slavery. I was in Antigua to find out if they could succeed at this summit, or whether their demands would turn the Commonwealth's contradictions from a lazy joke into something more terminal.

Queen Elizabeth was no longer around to act as a charismatic stopper on the questions that arose from decolonisation in the realms and territories of Britain's empire. A concatenation of events: Barbados's vote to become a republic in 2021, which raised the question of whether Antigua and the Bahamas would follow; the claim that latent racism in the Royal Household may have led to the departure of Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, from the Windsor stable; the embarrassments that resulted from the Prince and Princess of Wales's tour of Jamaica and Belize in 2022. Each has piled pressure on the monarchy and the British government, while generating a furious debate at home. British institutions, such as the Church of England and the Bank of England, weathered heavy criticism as they made elaborate verbal and, sometimes, financial amends for their slaving pasts.

Invariably, this ultra-heterogeneous group of nations is described as a "family". A warm, organic, fleshy word for a multilateral body descended from the empire and still watched over by the turreted, crowned and crested monarch. ("Commonwealth" was itself a striking name for an association with such vast variance in GDP.) Yet its essential Britishness, enthusiastically denied by its governing officials, was creating grief.

What exactly is the Commonwealth holding on for? Its defenders talked about "opportunities" and "potential", but the only opportunity CHOGM seemed to provide was for infighting. It was not just a matter of whether the King or his prime minister would apologise to the Caribbean. For Britain, the Commonwealth, this lingering "imperial memory" was the reminder of a troubled past, a burden in a troubled present and an augury of a more troubled future. "The question is, at what point does the UK say, 'I can't be bothered with this any more,'" said Lord Jonathan Marland, the chairman of the Commonwealth Enterprise and Investment Council. If a Tory peer of 20 years' standing was saying this, then it did beg the question: are we witnessing the last days of the Commonwealth?

These sorts of thoughts do not preoccupy a certain section of the British media: the "Royal Pack", a collection of veteran broadcasters, laconic cameramen, tabloid footsoldiers and flimflammers who follow the monarch and his relatives from photo call to photo call. Earlier that afternoon, I had visited them in their Palace-appointed billet at the Royalton Hotel just outside St John's, the Antiguan capital.

With the exception of the crews from ITV and Sky, who asked tricky questions about reparations, the pack tended to report trivia, speculative fantasy, mawkish gossip and the menus of state dinners. They were the official narrators of every Royal progress, the organisers of the silence around the King. Wherever he went, they went too.

In the pack's version of the Carolean era, each overseas tour had the same soap-operatic narrative structure: the King lands in a country Britain had ruled a long time ago, but which is now filled with truculent elected politicians. Questions are raised about whether his appearances, and therefore the Crown, and therefore Britain itself, will be derailed by protests or diplomatic spats. Then, at the end of the tour, regardless of what has occurred, the adulatory message rings out: the King was stoicism personified, success embodied. All is well.

On this afternoon, however, the pack was irritable. The evening before, The Guardian had published an op-ed by Prime Minister Andy Burnham about reparations that had ruined all the "stories" Buckingham Palace had "given" them for the Sunday newspapers. Meanwhile, their accommodation appeared to have been set up for a different sort of clientele. Strange messages were stitched on to the pillows in the rooms ("A party never killed anyone"). Poolside, I watched a foam cannon operated by a trio of athletic women in hot pink T-shirts spray drifts of bubbles over nearly nude holidaymakers. Guests in the water started twerking to Beenie Man's classic "I'm Drinking/ Rum & Red Bull".

Fighting to be heard, one of the younger correspondents claimed, with some exhaustion, that CHOGM was notorious for being badly organised, for its last-minute changes and for bad news that never made it into reports. They were depressed because everyone back in miserable London could see that their job in Antigua seemed to be standing on a ludicrously paradisal beach saying the same thing every other member of the pack said, just into a different camera.

Cheer up, I said. At least you might be able to ask the King some questions. My own interactions with Commonwealth officials that morning had not made me confident that they liked having reporters hanging around. But the correspondent shot me a look, as if I were deranged. The Royal Pack weren't in Antigua to find anything out.

They didn't ask the King questions.

Day 2.

Sunday was the 45th anniversary of Antiguan independence, nominally a day of celebration. In the SJPC House of Restoration Ministries, an ugly yellow Pentecostal church on the northern edge of St John's, beloved by elite Antiguans for its air conditioning and spacious car park, the Commonwealth met to give thanks to the non-denominational, non-exclusionary and definitely non-imperial God that watched over them.

I listened to a steel band play outside the church and spoke to a guy called Ernie, who ran a charity building football pitches in ex-conflict zones. He said the King had visited once: there were two toilets on the site and Ernie's team had cleaned one of them into spotlessness. The King used the other one. Ernie grimaced, as if the faux pas would follow him to the grave.

Inside, the pews refused to fill up. A few minutes before the King arrived, dozens of schoolchildren and dozens of nurses were harried down from the church rafters to fill out all the empty seats behind cricketing legend Sir Vivian Richards, Rodney Williams, the governor-general of Antigua, and Shirley Botchwey, the secretary-general of the Commonwealth.

We stood. The King and Queen entered alongside one of the most powerful civil servants in Britain, Clive Alderton, the King's hawkish private secretary. The secretary-general took to the podium, wearing a glittering green floor-length dress. Botchwey used to be the foreign minister of Ghana, the country that spearheaded the successful effort to pass Resolution A/RES/80/250 in the UN in March, which declared that chattel slavery was humanity's gravest crime. (Britain abstained from the vote.) Days before, Botchwey had used a rare appearance on Sky News to say that a British apology for slavery "wouldn't hurt".

The service concluded with her reading of the Act of Affirmation to the Commonwealth. Few documents give a sense of the Commonwealth's cosmic scale, global ambitions and laudable intentions like the Affirmation. "We affirm that every person possesses unique worth . . . We affirm our desire for peace among all nations . . . We affirm our belief in the Commonwealth as a powerful influence for good . . . "

It was impossible to listen and not to ask: is this real? The Commonwealth is a voluntary organisation. It is not a trading bloc. It does not share a common currency or common political characteristics. Besides CHOGM, the Commonwealth's other trademarks seemed to be withering away. Birmingham had to hold the Games in 2022 after Durban was stripped of the honour in 2017, leaving the city with substantial debts. In 2026, a low-key Games was held in Glasgow, after the Australian state of Victoria junked them as "a waste of taxpayer money".

Soaring rhetoric seemed the institution's most obvious output. Judged by Botchwey's announcements, the Commonwealth can claim a sweeping interest across an awesome spectrum of public policy: climate, infrastructure, trade, transport, logistics, education, science, artificial intelligence. Her claims reminded me of all the notables who had promised before Brexit that trade with the Commonwealth could make up for trade lost by leaving the EU. The Commonwealth takes the same share of British exports as it did in 2015.

This Commonwealth was always on the brink of doing . . . something. Its officials, whether they are grouped in the secretariat, or the foundation, or in any number of accredited organisations, truly believe that they speak on behalf of 56 nations and 2.7 billion Commonwealth "citizens". In 1971, at the first formal CHOGM, the Singapore Declaration of Commonwealth Principles was adopted by the heads of government. The principles included a commitment to oppose "all forms of colonial domination and racial oppression". Britain's history in the Commonwealth ever since might be interpreted as a continuing tension between accepting these principles and implementing them.

Margaret Thatcher's last-ditch holdout against placing sanctions on apartheid South Africa led to bitter intra-"family" arguments at CHOGMs in the 1980s. Buckingham Palace did not back Thatcher -- or accept "the right of the British government to impose a view of the Commonwealth upon [Queen Elizabeth]", according to Pimlott.

Before Antigua, British officials had started to talk darkly again about the Commonwealth. Queen Elizabeth had been gone long enough for questions to be asked. At the last CHOGM in Samoa in 2024, where climate change was earnestly discussed in the shadow of an expanded airport built for attendees, the British were ambushed by other members of the "family" over reparations. After a 28-hour flight, a shocked Keir Starmer found himself surrounded by hostile Commonwealth leaders. It played terribly back home. The meeting, billed by the Foreign Office as the UK's chance to convene the world on good terms without the interfering presence of China, Russia or the US, had made Britain look weak.

In the "polycrisis" era, everyone wanted to convene. The African Union, the EU, the Pacific Islands, the Islamic Nations, the Gulf States: all held summits and forums. There was the G20, the G7. Davos still existed, even if globalisation had become a little déclassé. The Saudis had the Future Investment Initiative known as Davos in the Desert. Vladimir Putin pushed on with his international forums in St Petersburg, even under attack from Ukrainian drones. India had the Raisina Dialogue; China the Xiangshan Forum. And the British, even though it simultaneously wasn't British but was also clearly very British, had the Commonwealth. They had CHOGM.

After the service, the small press pack was driven back to the American University of Antigua. The press centre was there, along with press officers who bemoaned the local media in scandalised terms (they knew all about the sound cutting out yesterday) and insisted on all journalists donning fluorescent, musky bibs.

I put on mine and walked through security to the hall where the students usually sat their exams. I met the wild-haired German doctor who ran the place, a thin man who could have been one of those Joseph Conrad characters brutalised by years living in a faraway outpost. He explained that the campus was locked down, students' security vetted, exams cancelled, curricula curtailed and a chain-link fence stretched around the accommodation building. Oh, what bliss it was to be a young person in the Commonwealth.

A meeting of small states' foreign ministers was under way. They sat with their bottled water and miniature flags in a square made of tables. The press, fewer than 10 of us, were let in, after some hissing about not asking any questions.

I wanted to stay: this was the Commonwealth in action, proving its value, functioning out in the open. But after less than five minutes of listening to Botchwey talk about "ocean economies" somebody changed their mind. It was time to leave.

Rain had not been forecast that evening. The Sir Vivian Richards stadium, designed and built by the Chinese like so much of Antigua's infrastructure, was about half full -- a poor turnout for what had been billed as a historic celebration: King Charles came to inspect a few more platoons of Antiguans. As soon as the Royal Standard reached the top of its flagpole, the deluge began.

Camilla stalked away, leaving Charles alone on a ceremonial plinth. The hot rain howled and swirled, omnidirectional, a Valhalla of vengeful water dumped on the King. I stood a few metres from him, in my bib. He was shouting for his flunkies, really screaming at them for an umbrella. The Girl Guides and Boy Scouts in the field looked shaky, as if they might break for cover.

What a nightmare it was to be the King, the whole scene seemed to say. Your quasi-bankrupt kingdom being banged over the head with a Commonwealth begging bowl. Your family split, sundered to the point where the British Isles were now home to two competitive royal houses, Windsor and Sussex. Your reign a soon-to-be-forgotten fag end between the glorious rule of your mother and the uncertain future promised by your son. In this moment, underneath his titles, Charles seemed very human. The head of the Commonwealth alone in the rain in a half-empty stadium. His kingdom for an umbrella.

Day 3.

A few hours before sunset, select leaders of the reparations movement gathered in the Trade Winds hotel overlooking Dickenson Bay Beach towards the north crest of the island. Here was Ralph Gonsalves, the prime minister of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines from 2001 to 2025, a twinkly Marxist and friend of Fidel Castro. Also, Sir Hilary Beckles, the cerebral, softly spoken academic who drafted the Caribbean Community's plan for restorative justice 13 years ago; some representatives from the Repair Campaign, one of the social movements calling for reparations; and a power lawyer from Leigh Day, the firm that represented more than 5,000 survivors of torture during the 1950s Mau Mau uprising against the British colonial administration in Kenya.

The Caricom 10-point Reparation Plan called for a full formal apology from Britain and the total cancellation of legacy debts in the region. It had been accepted by Caribbean politicians for more than a decade. They believed the argument was already won and that the debating tricks used against them were no different from the knots Tory anti-abolitionists had tied themselves in 200 years ago. That Kemi Badenoch, who had implied it would be better to abandon CHOGM than pay up, was no different from Robert Peel and, like Peel, her predecessor as leader of the Conservative Party, she would lose the argument.

The reparationists were secure in their version of history. They gave far more weight to the fact that the 1833 reparations to slave owners were still being paid off by Britain in 2015 than the fact that the Royal Navy's West Africa squadron had intercepted slavers and freed slaves in the 19th century. Limestone mills, where slaves processed sugar, were left all over Antigua. Nobody in the Trade Winds believed the past was over.

They spoke for about an hour. Burnham's announcement two days before that Britain was open for negotiations and they could all meet to talk about debt restructuring, had gone down very well. Badenoch's post on X was greeted less warmly. In contrast to every other talk or speech I heard over five days, there were few platitudes on this panel. Strikingly, most of the panellists seemed to believe that Britain and the British were a happy and just people, with deep consciences, not an angry and cynical people who looked out only for themselves.

The campaigners thought "Great Britain" could be persuaded. Reparations were "catalyst and catharsis", Gonsalves said slowly, as if he wished to convey the impression that history was with us in this room. They would buttress the "goodness and glory of British civilisation". But if persuasion failed, and Britain did not come to the table willingly, that would not be the end of it. Other pressures were imaginable. "Do not think this will not be enwrapped in power politics globally." The Chinese and the Russians were supporting the Caribbean nations in the UN. Willingly or unwillingly, persuaded or coerced, Britain could no longer "stand askance".

The evidence of that rival support was everywhere. As well as the stadium, Beijing had built the hospital in St John's, the island's lone airport terminal and an embassy compound that locals believed had seven underground storeys. Recent bilateral agreements promised housing and solar energy. The metal detectors in every CHOGM venue were stamped with the words: China Aid. Chinese influence was not limited to Antigua, it was the region's background radiation.

By 2023, Chinese infrastructure contracts with eight Caribbean nations amounted to $32.2bn. Meanwhile, the UK-Caribbean infrastructure fund invested £350mn in the region between 2016 and 2026. According to another of Queen Elizabeth's biographers, Robert Hardman, "old Commonwealth hands" believed that the reparations agenda was nudged along by "the covert influence of Chinese paymasters". The Commonwealth was just a "nice club", Sir Lionel Hurst, chief of staff to the Antiguan prime minister, told me one night. Hard power gathered in other clubs.

A minivan drove us to Fort James beach where an 18th-century fortress overlooked the usual tourist stuff: games of volleyball, barbecues, sound systems, rum. The campaigners held a vigil. Speeches were made. The horrors of the Middle Passage, all the silent, faceless, storyless dead enslaved who haunted Antigua, were commemorated.

It was hard to hear the prayers led by Dr Bonnie EBW Smith over the sound system. A volleyball scudded into the prayer circle and a built white guy in swim shorts ran over. He shouted the right word: "Sorry!"

Gonsalves teased me for being an "empiricist". He believed the British were all utilitarians: a cold people weighing and auditing in their chilly northern island. He promised he would attend the "one Commonwealth concert" that night, but he didn't show up. Neither did many Antiguans. The seats were even emptier than they had been the night before. Where were all the Commonwealth citizens? Sir Idris Elba turned up in a blink-and-you'll-miss-him cameo that he did not post later on social media.

Botchwey's performance was more substantial. "Young people of the Commonwealth!" she exclaimed to a few hundred attendees. She called on "philanthropists" to open their wallets so that "300 million US dollars" could "train 10 million young people online across the Commonwealth".

"Let me hear you!" She paused. There was a scattering of polite applause.

Day 4.

The 56 heads of government gathered for a family photo the day before CHOGM officially ended. All the think-pieces, columns, debates and speeches about reparations led to the Antiguan National Performing Arts Centre, where His Majesty was due to make a speech. I already knew what the pack would write: high-wire act, diplomatic coup, hearts and minds, tour de force, the King's stamina, stoicism and humour.

St John's felt deserted. The streets were empty and the Burger King was closed. The government had told residents to stay off the streets. If anyone was having a good CHOGM, it was Antigua's prime minister, Gaston Browne. His wife served as a cabinet minister. He'd recently named a beach after his daughter. Now he would speechify to an audience of presidents and prime ministers.

As the leaders emerged, it was possible for the first time to judge which members of the Commonwealth family valued this CHOGM. India's Narendra Modi had not turned up. Nor had the president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa. Cyprus had sent its minister for culture; Kenya its deputy president. Pakistan rolled out its high commissioner to Canada, Nigeria its "secretary to the government of the federation". Burnham took his seat.

The King appeared. There was a fanfare. The largely Black audience stood up, a moment that a factotum with the African Investment Bank later told me made him feel ashamed. The King delivered a standard joke. The room felt poised for a surprise. Then came the key passage: "History also teaches us that evil need not have the last word; that character and courage can combine to overcome the most monstrous injustice, as they did with the determination to end international trade in enslaved people, in which the Royal Navy played such a leading role."

There was no apology. The room rustled. Dignitaries suddenly developed coughs. As head of the Commonwealth, it was something Charles could have chosen to do. The old line about the Royal Navy drove everyone I spoke to from the region mad, and had done since the days when Eric Williams was the prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago. "British historians write almost as if Britain had introduced Negro slavery solely for the satisfaction of abolishing it," Williams observed in his 1944 book Capitalism and Slavery. During the reign of King Charles I, early English colonies in the Caribbean had shifted away from the use of white labourers towards the use of Black slaves. King Charles II had issued the charter for the Royal African Company, cutting the ribbon on the expansion of transatlantic slavery. Now King Charles III came to the Caribbean, and though he felt "sorrow" for what his ancestors did, he was not exactly sorry.

I returned to the American University of Antigua and found the prime minister of the Bahamas. Philip Davis was a typical regional leader. He liked the King, liked the Commonwealth, was happy to make the Bahamas a republic and wanted Britain to say sorry and pay reparations for slavery. It is often said that holding opposing contradictory ideas in one's mind is a sign of intelligence. Davis, then, was a many-sided genius. Who better to ask the biggest question, would the Commonwealth be around in a couple of decades?

"Yes," the prime minister smiled. His team, a group of guys in suits and safari suits, also smiled. Would it be here in 50 years then?

"I won't be here."

Everyone laughed.

Day 5.

Of the many wings in the Commonwealth's mansion, one was spoken about as a success: the Commonwealth Enterprise and Investment Council, or CWEIC. Led by Samantha Cohen, the late Queen's communications secretary and later assistant private secretary, and Lord Marland, the Tory peer, the council was responsible for making capitalists aware of the business opportunities provided by the Commonwealth's global network.

I did meet some happy capitalists at the Commonwealth Business Forum. Within the thicket of invite-only roundtables, networking zones, fireside discussions and plenaries that sprang up in a cricket ground near the airport, a few billionaires and their lackeys cruised dreamily around. It was easy to see the appeal of CWEIC from their perspective. There were a lot of government ministers at CHOGM, the director-general of the World Trade Organization was here, and there was a lot less attention and mediation than at, say, Davos. Connections might be made, deals might be struck.

The forum, no doubt boosted by the halo of the British monarch, also attracted the presence of Australian mining billionaire Andrew Forrest, crypto tycoon and Reform UK donor Ben Delo and Niccolo de Masi, the CEO of the quantum computing company IonQ. Cherie Blair was chairing a panel inside a freezing pavilion ("Sir Viv Richards Plenary Stage") with a powerbroker from Dubai, Dr Ahmed Bin Sulayem, chair and CEO of the Dubai Multi Commodities Centre.

Blair sat with an iPad on her lap. Like many before her who have considered the puzzling matter of the economics of the Commonwealth, she was a bit confused: "I thought the Commonwealth secretary-general's speech last week put it very starkly," she said. "She reminds us that 10 countries conduct 90 per cent of the trade between Commonwealth members. When you think the Commonwealth is 56 countries and 2.7 billion people," (she flicked an adhesive glance down at the iPad), "What's going on? That's a huge opportunity for trade that is untapped . . . we're not turning those advantages into practical economic opportunities."

I went to see Samantha Cohen in the VIP clubhouse. When she worked for the Queen, the Australian's nickname was, apparently, "Samantha the panther". She had agreed to an interview on the condition that I did not bring up the subject of reparations.

Cohen is a true believer in the Commonwealth. It was "vast", "big", "unique", "precious", "emotional", "cultural", she said. It was getting bigger. There were a few new members with no connection to the British empire.

I asked how the Commonwealth measured its achievements. Questioning what it had achieved was just cynicism, she said. "British people don't understand the Commonwealth. They don't get it." They don't understand that Commonwealth scholarships, funded by the Foreign Office, are a "lifeline for many people".

I felt bad. I said that I understood the club aspect of the Commonwealth. She corrected me: "I don't like the word club. We're not a club."

A few minutes later I met another CEO. What did he like about the Commonwealth? He began to talk about how it all felt like a club.

If the Commonwealth wasn't a club, a networking jolly, a bit of a low-stakes lark in the sun, then what was it? As CHOGM closed, the secretariat announced $500mn in new partnerships and investment commitments had been made this year. It did not seem like a thrilling number.

The Commonwealth was not British, but its central dramas revolved around the redemption of British history by way of an apology and any money the British felt like handing over to the descendants of slaves.

The Commonwealth was a ghost ship, set on its course a long time ago by British leaders humbled by the end of their empire and unsure of their future. There was only one point of agreement I found about this vessel, after five days trapped inside its bowels: it had "potential". It was, in the King's words, "a unique opportunity". Confronted by the Commonwealth's senescence, observers and true believers alike mistook its infirmity for growing pains. Just give it a few more years. Never say never. The Commonwealth might really matter one day.

Will Lloyd is a senior writer for FT Weekend