Ruling the Void

Walter Bagehot famously divided the British constitution into two parts: the "dignified", represented by the monarchy, and the "efficient", represented by the executive. This was always a dubious distinction, suggesting a symbiosis between conservative and progressive impulses that was rarely visible in practice. The reality, since 1688, is that the monarchy has served as cover for an oligarchic executive. Over time, the House of Commons has made some inroads against that oligarchy, but this has been repeatedly compensated for by the steady absorption of the remaining powers of the monarch into the office of Prime Minister. As the monarchy has become more circumscribed and purposeless, its political utility has seen a shift in focus from the functional (what it can actually do) to the emotional (how it feels). This has led to a growing confusion in the media between the Crown and the person (to the point where it has become a sub-genre of romantic fiction). The monarchy is an institution, the Royal Family is not. 

The claim by parts of the commentariat that the latter has "the power to unite people", or that a group of unworldly artistocrats embody the "un-divisive" in public affairs and so stand in virtuous contrast to grubby politicians, is obviously ridiculous. But this type of thinking also reveals an unwillingness to engage with the Crown as a residual institutional component of the British state. The monarchy serves to obscure a void within the constitution: a zone of power where the executive is able to operate largely untramelled through the exploitation of royal prerogative. For example, Boris Johnson's calculated insult to Parliament when he prorogued it in 2019, which should be seen in the context of the long-running struggle between the Commons and the executive, was quickly diverted by shocked liberals into a barren discussion about whether he or Jacob Rees-Mogg had personally misled the Queen, as if lese-majesté mattered more than the muzzling of democracy.

The monarchy has always been divisive, not just in the sense that republicanism retains a stubborn foothold, but in the symbolic sense that the royals perform hierarchy and the deference due to privilege. Above all, they validate the division of society by inheritance. This week's debate about the racist overtones in an anonymous comment on the skin-colour of a yet-to-be-born child should really be about why an accident of birth entitles anyone to be called a prince. In foregrounding the quotidian - that the British upper class is habitually racist and the press is systematically bigoted - we ignore the absurdity of aristocracy and its obsession over status and slights. We also allow a debate that ultimately boils down to who among a small number of already rich people should be allowed access to the taxpayer-funded trough of the Civil List to distract from the larger issue of which politician's unqualified and incompetent friends should receive the largesse of government contracts and sinecures.

Support for the monarchy increasingly aligns with age, with the young being far less sympathetic either to the institution or the personnel. Of course, age increasingly correlates with socio-economic status. The war on the woking class is all about the defence of the haves against the have-nots, and the royals increasingly play a divisive role in this because they symbolise both the inheritance of unearned wealth and flagrant nepotism. The monarchy will eventually be abolished (de facto if not de jure) because its commitment to unearned status is non-negotiable. The history of British royalty is essentially the history of status: an evolution from personal aggrandisement (the internecine conflicts of the Medieval landed elite) through emblematic national status (the Tudor representation of the early modern state and fledging empire) to the reconciliation of absolutism and capitalist constitutionalism in the defence of oligarchic privilege (the Stuarts). By the time of the Georgians, the monarchy was unabashedly a champion of reaction and political repression, which was barely toned-down during the compromises of the Victorian and Edwardian periods. 

The arrival of the democratic era after 1918 saw a desire to be more "relevant" and "modern", specifically in the vain and shallow person of the then Prince of Wales. This impetus, which has echoes today in the current heir to the throne's supposed plans to "streamline" the firm, was less about reform than shoring up popular support following the termination of the continental dynasties and the emergent threat of Bolshevism. Edward VIII is remembered for his foolish flirtation with Nazism, though his rightwing sympathies and racism were all-too typical of the Britsh aristocracy of the period. The contemporary establishment's worry was not antisemitism but the drift towards populism, which led his banal comment as king, that "something must be done" for the unemployed during the Depression, to cause dismay among politicians. This culminated in the abdication crisis of 1936, when support for the king dangerously split along class lines: the working class being more sympathetic to his desire to marry the woman he loved; the middle class more insistent on his duty to Crown and empire. 

The subsequent determination to restore the monarchy's conservative reputation, which dovetailed with the appetite for a consolatory nostalgia in the face of geopolitical retreat, would produce a terror of political entanglement and a paranoia about public exposure that continues to this day: "They live in high luxury and low autonomy, cosplaying as their ancestors, and are the subject of constant psychosocial projection from people mourning the loss of empire." That judgement is both accurate and entertaining, but perhaps it misses out another dimension that has become ever more salient, which is that the monarchy is increasingly estranged from power. Much as the Church of England's influence was eroded by the welfare state, globalisation and the emergence of a pan-national capitalism has diluted national loyalties (in this sense, the Sussexes are very much in tune with the zeitgeist). Likewise, the reduction of the British establishment to a politico-media core has toppled the monarchy off its ideological pedestal and made it a divisive artefact in the street-level kulturkampf.

The idea that the royals are representative of the nation is a modern conceit, not an archaic tradition. It can be dated pretty precisely to Tony Blair's comment about "the people's princess" in 1997, when monarchism once more fatally collided with populism. This was bound-up in New Labour's attempt to reinvent Britain as a geopolitical and cultural force "punching above its weight", which would run into the sands of Iraq but enjoy an afterglow in the 2012 Olympics with its nostalgic combination of postwar myths in the persons of the Queen and the fella who plays James Bond. Some try to date the idea of the royals as the "first family" to the Second World War, but this is largely a retrospective gloss. When the then Queen remarked "I am glad we have been bombed. Now we can look the East End in the eye", she was exhibiting the "all in it together" cynicism of her class, which found a notable echo in the aristocratic vocabulary of David Cameron and George Osborne in 2010, not proposing a direct engagement with working mothers in Stepney. This was a woman who retained a retinue of 40 servants until she died.

In the event, the royals remained hermetically sealed-off from society in the postwar years, as their occasional forays into PR, such as the infamous 1969 BBC documentary, inadvertantly showed. The Diana era provided the framework of a soap opera, but one that existed more in the media's imagination than reality. Aristocratic infidelity is no more interesting than the common sort. Some imagine that the "mystique" of royalty, which is carefully maintained by "royal experts" performing discretion and divination in  a manner that echoes both Kremlinology and the older tradition of the inspection of the king's chamber pot, is intended to obscure the Windsors' notorious lack of intellect. But this is to ignore that the royal omerta would be just as important if the heir to the throne spent his days reading Theodor Adorno rather than Laurens van der Post. The monarchy's role is to give the appearance of something where nothing exists: the void.

And this is why the monarchy has a simultaneously symbiotic and destructive relationship with the tabloids. Without the fawning support of the media, the Royal Family would quickly become no more important to the mass of the population than county cricket: something seen as quintesentially English but of marginal interest and whose passing would be the occasion for only mild regret. But the demands of the tabloids, not only for drama and backbiting but for the legitimation of their own bigotry and snobbery, means that the Royal Family will always be constrained in the range of permissible personae, which means that anyone who steps beyond these bounds will be forcibly exiled. The monarchy we have is the one that the press has sculpted: conservative, anti-intellectual and defined by its property. They are the embodiment not of the nation but of a spurious middle-class hegemony that both the politico-media caste and the wealthy elite, aristocratic and otherwise, snigger about in private.