A New Britain Needs Old Symbols
Far from being "in crisis", the Royal Family is more relevant than ever
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Once again, “The future of the monarchy hands by a thread” and that thread is Katherine, Princess of Wales. So, at any rate, says “Royal chronicler” and top-tier gossipmonger Tina Brown. To which you may reasonably say, “What? Again?”
The recent furore over Kate - her health, her temporary disappearance from public view, the consequent speculation on the state of her marriage, the thumb-sucking pondering of What This Means For The Monarchy - has been as remarkable as it has chiefly been risible.
Not for the first time, I agree with Helen Lewis: “Kate has cancer at 42, is having chemo, and has three young children. Do you really have it in you to grade her media strategy and find it wanting?”
A surprising number of people have answered that question in the affirmative. The palace has handled the entire episode ineptly. At every turn they have contrived to add petrol to the inferno of speculation. They should have understood that silence is not an option in 2024. It looks furtive, not dignified. The people’s prurience is justified in the first place and doubly justified in the face of official obfuscation. If there was nothing to hide, they wouldn’t hide like this. And so on and so on forever and across acres and acres of coverage. It’s not our fault, ma’am, you made us do it.
Such, of course, are the wages of celebrity even, perhaps especially, when a person’s celebrity rests upon being more than doing. We demand daylight and the right to gawp. The palace’s failure to understand the true power dynamic at play here reveals how throughly ill-equipped they are for the relentless realities of the modern world. Everyone needs a PR strategy these days.
This, at any rate, appears to be the latest received wisdom. I think it is nonsense.
I strongly suspect that most people both sympathise with the predicament in which the Prince and Princess of Wales have found themselves and broadly agree with the manner in which they have chosen to handle it. They will instinctively feel that even Royals are entitled to a measure of privacy in such circumstances. They will have seen the mother of three young children explaining her situation with uncommon grace and I rather think they will have been impressed by the manner in which she has done so.
Many of these people, I warrant, will also be wholly unaware of much of the speculation and rumour and intrigue that has swirled around William and Kate since she had surgery in January. Most people are not Very Online and journalists, who often are, typically forget this.
Couple the Princess of Wales’s cancer with that of the King and you have a situation in which most people in this country will, I think, grant the Royals a considerable measure of latitude. At the very least, they will think this no time to be putting the boot in.
Over-thinking is something to guard against. Here’s Alan Rusbridger, late of the Guardian, writing for Prospect:
Kate’s announcement heightens the increasing sense of fragility about the institution of which she has become such an iconic member. Take two key members of the family out of action (four, if you include reduced participation from partners looking after them) and the whole operation begins to teeter a bit.
Granted, Rusbridger was following in the footsteps of Richard Kay, the Daily Mail’s Royal Editor, who darkly warned that “If the royal family is not quite at the 11th hour, it is perilously close” but little of this bears even the most cursory scrutiny. Royal correspondents and commentators are incentivised to swing from one extreme to another. Glory and crisis are the only acceptable states of being; anything else jeopardises the whole enterprise and risks leaving Royal-watchers redundant.
Rusbridger’s approach, though, is more that of the concern-troll. Why, with Charles and Kate unwell and the Sussexes off the board, the Duke of York in disgrace, and everyone else getting on a bit, isn’t there a risk that “The Firm” won’t have enough bodies to man all stations? Well, maybe. On the other hand, it is not difficult to imagine Rusbridger - or someone akin to him - arguing an alternative case: the Royal family is too bloated and urgently needs cutting down to size. Heads I win, tails you lose.
The plainer, duller, truth is that the monarchy will plod along, always subject to intrigue and strange fascination but generally, if sometimes imperfectly or too slowly, shifting with the times and much less will change than we think. The past is no certain guide to the future but it remains a useful one.
Hyperbole must be allowed, of course. Here is Tina Brown again:
It may not be a popular thought, but in many ways I blame the predicament and weakness of the monarchy today on Queen Elizabeth. It’s possible that future generations will see her as the Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the British monarchy. She stayed too long, and by doing so, left behind a legacy that may be the opposite of what she wanted.
The time for Elizabeth II to step down was not long after her Diamond Jubilee in 2012.
I do not think this is actually in the slightest bit possible. Save in the cases of obvious unsuitability - such as, say, lunacy though possibly not even then - the entire point of monarchy - at least in Britain - is that it’s allotted to you for life. Permanent things which are not permanent swiftly lose their value. They may order things differently elsewhere but here an optional monarchy or one from which you may retire without good reason compromises the entire institution. It may be a kind of glass prison but there it is.
The evidence for this crisis or Royal “weakness” extends no further than the fertile imagination of royal commentators. The idea Elizabeth inadvertently caused this by living too long has the advantage of novelty - and journalism loves novelty - but little more than that.
Journalism is also an ephemeral trade and it is best always to remember this. The death of Queen Elizabeth II felt like the ending of one era because, of course, it was. In the moment, it felt oddly discombobulating; a kind of rupture after which nothing would, or could, be quite the same.
I certainly thought - and wrote - something of that nature. But I now think I was wrong. Or at least half-mistaken. Elizabeth had been a point of stability, an unchanging fixture in a much-changed world. She was the only monarch most of us had known and so it was easy, I think, to confuse the personal continuity she offered with the institutional continuity she actually represented.
So long as the King or Queen meets a hard-to-define but easy-to-recognise baseline level of competence, the individual matters much less than the institution. They come and go, for that is the nature of the thing, but the institution rumbles on regardless.
All the talk over so many years of how Charles would struggle to rein-in his own impulses or escape the shadow cast by his mother’s legacy now seems like so much overblown foolishness. The transition has been remarkably smooth.
Here we may observe the distinction between the dignified branch of the monarchy and the soap-opera monarchy. The Duke of Sussex, poor fellow, is part of the latter; the Prince and Princess of Wales a core portion of the former. When push comes to shove, the public largely recognises the virtues of the dignified branch. They may party with Harry and his wife but they’ll settle down with William and his.
Institutions should be accessible but never frivolous. Understand this and you appreciate the difference between William and his brother and, indeed, the distinction to be drawn between Kate and her sister-in-law.
It seems gauche to speculate on the impact recent events may have on the House of Windsor’s standing but speculation - and gossip - has always attended royalty. The beast thrives on rumour and public prurience is, ultimately, insatiable. This is not just a phenomenon limited to this country. No other royal family anywhere in the world exerts comparable fascination.
This is something to be kept in mind when folk start twittering on about “Normal Island”. Typically, this is to be understood as a criticism. A “normal country” would not endure or tolerate this or that; this country’s inflated sense of its place and purpose is as delusional as it is insufferable and so on and so on. But as the Windsor obsession demonstrates, Britain really isn’t a “normal” or “typical” country to the extent such things may even be established or categorised. It is a deeply unusual country with, for better or worse, a history of disproportionate significance. Even today, it remains a middleweight power. Not exceptional in this, for sure, but not nothing either.
And there is an argument to be made, I think, that the royal family oddly matters just as much in modern Britain as it did in previous eras, albeit for different reasons. Because monarchy is a symbol and, as Queen Elizabeth demonstrated, a point of unity and continuity. That was easily grasped in earlier times when this was a very different country; it remains significant now Britain has changed so much.
The scale of that change is remarkable. Here, (though compiled at a much later date, hence the inclusion of “Pakistan”) is a table documenting the birthplaces of people living in England and Wales at the time of the 1911 census:
98.33 percent of people living in England and Wales in 1911 were born within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. (An even greater proportion of Scottish and Irish residents are likely to have been born in those countries.) Additionally, many of those born in India were also “white British” and most of those “Indian-Indians” were sailors or students, though there were also 67 Indian surgeons and doctors living in England. (Some fascinating data about all this can be found here.)
Britain has always been a multi-cultural country but not in the way this is currently understood. Yes, you could find curry houses in London and Brighton as early as the mid-nineteenth century and, yes, Britain’s first “asian” MP was elected in 1892 and, yes, of course there were black people in Britain before then too. But not, come on, in significant numbers. The multi-culturalism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was in large part peripheral. Literally so in the cases of Welsh and Irish and gaelic speakers.
Today, something like 14 percent of the British population was born overseas. Britain is not an immigrant country like the United States or Australia because most people here have not come from somewhere else within recent enough family memory (though of course plenty have at least one grandparent who did) but it is an immigrant country like America in the sense that a similar proportion of its current population first drew breath in foreign lands.
There is much truth in the post-imperial line, “We are here because you were there” but even this undersells the real transformation of the British population. To observe this is simply to note reality. There is nothing wrong or deplorable about any of this and I see no reason to regret it.
And, overall and with obvious counter-examples to complicate the picture, this transformation has been achieved with comparatively little trouble or fuss. That is not to downplay the experiences of black and asian Britons but, rather, to try and see the larger picture.
High-profile leadership positions are not everything but nor are they nothing. The prime minister is a Hindu whose parents hail from India, the mayor of London is the son of a Pakistani bus driver, the first minster of Scotland is Scots-Pakistani (and so is the leader of the Scottish Labour party), Kemi Badenoch, who may yet be the next leader of the Conservative party, was born in Nigeria, the next foreign secretary, David Lammy, is the son of Guyanese immigrants, and Vaughan Gething, the new first minister of Wales, is a black man born in Zambia.
It is exaggeration to say that among western nations only the United States has political leadership of such diversity (and even then, some of that American diversity is a matter of political appointment rather than electoral success).
Ten million people living in Britain today were born overseas. The paradox of immigration politics in Britain is that politicians talk tough on immigration while presiding over a system of unprecedented liberalism. The rhetoric may sometimes be ugly; the reality is rather different.
But here is the thing: this new Britain needs old symbols. The realm remains a community but its stability and continuity require points of universal commonality. Here, then, is the role of monarchy. It is precisely because this new Britain is so changed from that older Britain that it needs these points of agreed contact.
Charles, who though ex officio head of the Church of England, recognised this long ago when he spoke of being a “defender of faith” and it is a lesson I suspect is being absorbed by his son too. Monarchy is Lampedusan: for things to remain the same they will have to change. But only gradually and so often so quietly that many people will fail to notice.
Multi-culturalism means you can, no should, be whomever you wish to be while accepting that you are so within a larger whole. This is the real “Global Britain” and we see it on the streets of our cities every day. In turn, though, certain sticky things are required to hold it together. The House of Windsor is not the only one of these but it remains an important one, albeit one which chiefly exists as some kind of comforting, reliable, permanent backdrop.
The family’s present health issues are not unique to royalty but I fancy they will in some strange way draw the Royals closer. It would be vulgar and unkind to suggest this is an opportunity but I think it more likely to be that than any kind of crisis. For, however odd it may initially seem, the creation of this new Britain demands it be underpinned by songs and institutions from that older realm.
Charles, William, George: the line is already set because it is a permanent thing.
After the break: The Very Strange and Wholly Unreasonable Case of the Waspi Women.