The Narnia book "The Last Battle" would be better with an evil King of Narnia as the villain

Today I re-read the last Narnia book The Last Battle for the first time in a couple of decades. It occurred to me that the story would be much stronger if the whole donkey-posing-as-Aslan scam was masterminded by an evil King of Narnia, rather than Shift the Talking Ape.

First let me summarise the situation in the actual book. Shift puts his lackey, a dimwitted Talking Donkey named Puzzle, in a lion skin and claims that Puzzle is Aslan, with Shift speaking "on his behalf". He uses this to order other Talking Beasts around and grift them out of riches and luxuries. He's also backed up by a group of about thirty Calormene soldiers, to whom he's selling Talking Beasts into slavery, and the Calormenes are cutting down forests and thus killing dryads: to justify this, Shift claims to the Talking Beasts that Aslan and Tash (the Calormene god) are one and the same. (The leader of the group of soldiers, Rishda Tarkaan, knows it's all a scam and doesn't believe that Tash or Aslan are real.) So our small band of heroes get into conflict with the Calormenes here in the west of Narnia, then decide to go east to meet with reinforcements but find out that the Narnian capital of Cair Paravel on the east coast has been invaded by the Calormenes and everyone's been slaughtered or driven out into the countryside and all their reinforcements are dead. So they then turn back west and in their final confrontation they find that a big army of Calormenes has turned up to support the baddies. So it all goes really badly until the whole thing gets interrupted by the world ending.

So, first of all it's questionable how an ape living in the western outskirts of Narnia whose best friend is a donkey would be able to get in contact with the Calormenes at all: it's basically handwaved in one sentence. But if you accept that, and that Shift and Rishda Tarkaan could arrange this whole thing within three weeks of Shift making the lion-skin disguise, then it's somewhat plausible because this whole thing is pretty small-scale at first. A group of thirty soldiers, a similarly-sized group of Talking Beasts, one particular forest in Narnia's outskirts: it'd seem like it's just the Calormenes' misfortune that our heroes discovered their scam. But then the frigging Calormene navy shows up and massacres the Narnian capital and then the goddamn world ends... There's a certain mismatch of scale in the different parts of this story, is what I'm saying. And that's why the mastermind behind the scam shouldn't just be some ape named Shift, but the King of Narnia himself: because the fake-Aslan scam should have taken over all of Narnia, not just one small section around Lantern Waste.

Picture this: the King of Narnia shoots a wild lion while hunting, and has it skinned. He then does the fake-Aslan scam from Cair Paravel, making himself richer, becoming more tyrannical in Aslan's name, selling Talking Beasts into slavery, and inviting Calormene soldiers into Narnia to help quell civil unrest. Aslan hasn't appeared in Narnia for hundreds of years, but this King has grown up on stories of how Aslan helped his distant ancestors Caspian and Rilian through sending children from Earth, and so he believes that if Aslan does exist then he must favour the King's bloodline: and so the King convinces himself that what he wants must be what Aslan wants, and so the fake-Aslan scam is actually Aslan's will. It comes up at least once in earlier Narnia books, I remember, that you can convince yourself of a lie if you really want to believe it. And he has support from other Narnian lords who want the same sorts of things he does, as well as characters like Rishda Tarkaan and Ginger the Cat who don't believe in Aslan or Tash but take advantage of the scheme for their own personal gain.

And when the kids from our world arrive in Narnia, they're sent to help the outlaws who are hiding out in the forests and fighting against the King: no royalty, just ordinary Talking Beasts and dwarfs and humans who don't believe what the King is claiming in Aslan's name.

I really think the problem here is CS Lewis's conservatism wouldn't let him consider the possibility of a rightful King of Narnia being the bad guy. Sure, Narnia's had evil rulers, but the White Witch was a conqueror from the outside and Miraz was a usurper. And the Tisroc is bad, but he's, y'know, a foreigner. The villain in my version of this story would be a direct descendant of Caspian, who was personally blessed by Lion Jesus.