People with nothing better to do or think about, and with a penchant for triviality, seem obsessed with every aspect of the British Royal Family. And (if the Daily Mail is to be believed), also with the seemingly ever expanding number of foreign, but mainly European, royals and even dispossessed royals on their various social whirls and occasional do-gooding exploits.
The hot current UK royal topics of what type of cancer the King has and what type of operation the, still missing from action, Princess of Wales has had fill the MSM daily, surely only further encouraging readers to believe that they are owed answers? As money is no object perhaps Buckingham Palace could employ some better PR support? Some observers and self-declared ‘royal experts’ – aka journalists who drew the short straw (and their paid informers) – feel that intrusion into the private health status of others, far more elevated in status than us, is really none of our plebby business, and keep telling us so.
Such a debate raises interesting, but conflicting, thoughts upon the extent to which taxpayers are entitled to know the physical, and indeed mental, condition of those costly figureheads they fund. That debate is however for another day. Go back a century though, would private matters or mere rumours have even entered into the supposed rock-solid relationship between the Monarchy and the citizenry?
To be specific, are the current Royal Family now show business celebrities or still embodiments of tradition, service and stability? Unfortunately it seems to me that these royal persons (some more than others, but I won’t name names) have clearly forgotten the answer themselves, and are both confused and encouraged to think they can have a foot in both camps whilst seamlessly segueing according to which particular metaphorical hat they are wearing. Sorry, it really doesn’t work.
We’re just emerging from an unprecedented, and never likely to be repeated, seventy years of demure stability (although give it time and some awkward history will undoubtedly emerge, indeed some already has). No one I think though would accuse the late Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh of being show business luvvies, but most of the others from the Windsor stable demonstrate daily by their actions, fads, interference, undesirable friendships and general demeanour that they are now first and foremost show business celebrity products.
When did this change first happen? Personally I’d point to the 1890 Tranby Croft Baccarat Scandal that saw the future Edward VII called as a witness in Court, and so publicly demonstrating to all and sundry that he had knowingly broken the law, given that Baccarat was then an illegal gambling card game. But Royal Scandals have always been ten-a-penny and examples from every Reign could equally be cited as proof of the slide into decay of the unrealistic idealised ideal.
Apart from died-in-the-wool royalists (and the royals themselves) the argument most cited for an hereditary constitutional and regal Head of State being preferable to an elected one (why is President Blair always used as a warning rather than say President Cameron?) still holds sway, but surely now increasingly creakingly. No one yet seems to think it might be possible for a modern nation to operate without a Head of State either as an individual above the Prime Minister/Head of Government or as an Executive President as in the USA. Even Republic (the campaigning organisation) seems to advocate for the replacement of one type of figurehead with another, and it’s difficult to find any real rationale behind their arguments except thinly veiled jealousy that they themselves weren’t born royal, and certainly exhibiting no sympathy for the bizarre dysfunctional lives that royals routinely live.
Given the intellectual calibre of our current Royal Family and their dangerously very public espousal of ‘the latest thing’ (whatever that may be) I for one am now finding it very difficult to show any allegiance, or indeed much respect. And considering this is unlikely to change anytime soon, surely the majority will soon reach the same conclusion?
Perhaps the solution is to first force rationalisation and a massive reduction of the working, or so-called senior, Royal Family by increasing the Sovereign Grant (formerly the Civil List), yes really, but paid directly, and only, to the King (or reigning Queen) and let them decide how to apportion it for all royal related expenditure including the upkeep of their siblings (if they decide this is even necessary) but mandatorily to the heir to the throne, their spouse and their offspring. All Royal tax and special confidentiality dodges should be removed immediately.
Surely we can manage just as well with a slimmed down monarchy and then also not expect too much of those who aren’t as young as they used to be, their spouses and ex-spouses and their children and grandchildren or in particular the spares who will never inherit the throne, and slip ever further down the Table of Precedence. If this didn’t work out (and it still might not), I think the Romanians have hit upon the right compromise – make the person who would have been ruling King or Queen ‘Keeper of the Royal Crown’ a ceremonial titular non-executive sort of semi-Head of State (without huge cost).
A national conversation on these matters is surely now long overdue. We can hardly expect turkeys to vote for Christmas themselves nor just to keep repeating what Walter Bagehot said when we’ve finally seen the person trying (and failing) to hide behind the curtain.
Martin Rispin has had a career in many different sectors, most lately in the fields of English Tourism and Heritage based Urban Regeneration. He now lives, retired, in Kingston upon Hull.
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If you want to understand the relation between royalty and celebrity, read Thomas Mann’s Royal Highness. It even has the monarch’s second son marrying a chippy, mixed race American girl with an ethnically German father. (Markle is Merckel anglicised.) But Thomas Mann isn’t Jeffrey Archer, of course.