King Charles, who is also King of Australia, was drenched at Antigua’s independence celebrations on Sunday. He was seen throwing up his arms and calling repeatedly for an umbrella:

He later joked: ‘I’ve started growing watercress on my trousers.’

Kinging in the reign, you might say.

There is an old line about bankers, usually pinned on Mark Twain:

They lend you an umbrella when the sun is shining and want it back the moment it rains.

It is the best short guide to this week’s Commonwealth summit in St John’s, which the Caribbean’s Reparations Commission calls ‘the reparations CHOGM’. Anthony Albanese flew in at what he called the ‘personal invitation’ of the King, while the Coalition grumbled about jetting off in a cost-of-living crisis. Australians watching from the couch may feel the whole thing is a Pom problem. It isn’t. Some of the money came here.

The King duly spoke. The slave trade, he said, ‘fills my heart with horror’ and his soul ‘with the most profound personal sorrow’. He reminded his audience that the Royal Navy ‘played such a leading role’ in ending the trade, which is true, and that ‘we cannot change the actions of those who came before us’, which is also true, and is generally what people say just before not paying. There was no apology, which was never his to give.

Andy Burnham supplied the rest. Britain’s latest Prime Minister says he is open to calls for a formal state apology, rules out reparations, and offers instead a ‘debt reset’: longer repayment periods, better interest rates, and £40 million for Caribbean infrastructure over three years, from existing budgets. Kemi Badenoch has christened him the ‘chief apologiser’ and warns that an apology is ‘a lever to wedge open the door to ask for cash’.

She is right, and a finance textbook would agree. An apology is a call option on a future claim, written free of charge by the party it will be exercised against. As the summit closed, the option acquired a term. The communique welcomed Britain’s agreement to a ‘structured, time-bound, inclusive and good-faith dialogue’, though officials will settle the time later. Ed Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, suggests it should be done within a year. Asked whether a formal apology could come before next November’s G20 in Manchester, he said: ‘Broadly speaking, yes.’ He insists British taxpayers will not pay more, while Mr Burnham declined to say whether other financial contributions might follow. Philip Pierre of St Lucia, who chairs the Caribbean Community, says a dialogue which leaves reparations outside the room is incomplete, and is reported to be ‘ready to engage’ anyway. Option holders usually are.

As for the reset, the city has a name for longer terms and lower rates: extend and pretend. It is what a creditor grants a borrower it wants to keep paying. The final point of the Caribbean Community’s ten-point plan asks for cancellation, and compensation besides.

Debt is a bold answer to slavery. In 1833 Parliament voted £20 million in compensation, about 40 per cent of government spending that year, to be raised through loans. All of it went to the owners and none to the enslaved. France had gone one better in 1825, when Charles X, with warships off the coast, billed Haiti 150 million francs for recognition of its independence, with the resulting loans running until 1947. Another King Charles, another umbrella.

Now for the local entries. The Legacies of British Slavery database identifies more than 230 people with links to the Australasian settler colonies. Compensation money, a professor in Western Australia reports, went directly into South Australian land purchases, and four of the nine Colonisation Commissioners appointed in 1835 were significant beneficiaries of slavery. Port Phillip’s Clyde Company and Niel Black and Co were founded on the same wealth. The free colony, it turns out, had an interesting line of credit.

Then there is Queensland. In August 1863 the Don Juan reached Brisbane with 67 South Sea Islanders. More than 62,000 were brought over four decades, some kidnapped, others induced into long indenture. The new Commonwealth’s Pacific Island Labourers Act of 1901 provided for most of them to be thrown out, and more than 7,500 were deported between 1906 and 1908. Mr Albanese calls blackbirding ‘a sorry chapter in Australia’s history’ and says his focus is on the future, which is the King’s speech with fewer adjectives. In St John’s he called British reparations a matter for ‘the countries that are directly involved’. Asked whether Pacific leaders had raised blackbirding with him, he said: ‘No, they haven’t raised that issue.’ Nobody has yet written that option.

And then there is the loan book. The Lowy Institute reports that Australia has become the Pacific’s largest source of new lending since 2021. Nobody is calling Canberra a loan shark: Lowy says most Pacific borrowers get highly concessional terms and that debt worries may be overstated. But according to the Devpolicy Blog, Papua New Guinea is repaying more than $200 million a year on five non-concessional budget support loans Australia has provided since Covid. We are now the ones holding the umbrella.

To its credit, Foreign Affairs committed to offering climate-resilient debt clauses on its sovereign loans by the end of 2025, letting borrowers pause repayments after a disaster. A pause, mind. The Devpolicy author suggests something braver: relieving some of those PNG repayments, at small cost to the budget, on condition that the money goes into maintaining infrastructure. That would be a release, with a receipt.

The sceptic has a strong hand, and this magazine’s readers will not need it explained. Nobody enslaved in the British Caribbean, or their owners, is alive today. Britain’s debt passed £3 trillion in September, with interest running above £100 billion a year, so any cheque would be drawn on a Treasury borrowing to pay the last lot. The Gleaner columnist Elizabeth Morgan complains that the Caribbean plan lets Jamaica’s post-independence leaders off the hook. Fair enough.

But none of this requires a cheque. Conservatives are supposed to believe in double entry, and an honest ledger needs only the entries. Sorrow is one. So are the South Australian land titles, the Mackay cane fields, and the loan book in Port Moresby.

The King got his umbrella in the end, a black one, from an equerry. Nobody asked for it back over a longer period at a better rate.

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