The Monarchy and the Media

In searching for something interesting to say about the passing of QE2, I've been struck by a paradox. The media is obviously highly prominent, in the the wall-to-wall TV coverage and the banal press tributes (there have been only a few exceptions worth your time), and we've even been treated to the sight of erstwhile champions of free speech insisting that now is not the time to express a heterodox opinion (I marvel at the ability of some liberal commentators to eulogise Volodmyr Zelenskyy and Emmanuel Macron while insisting that the UK has been blessed to have an unelected head of state). But at the same time the media has been almost completely absent from the discussion of either the historical development of the monarchy over the last 70 years (wheeling out the old anecdotes about the King's speech on the wireless, or how everyone supposedly bought a TV for the coronation in 1953, do not count) or its future prospects, which by any reasonable assessment must be considered uncertain. 

This is odd given that our understanding of the institution is almost wholly dependent on the media. You certainly don't get taught about it in school, and even courses in Modern History tend to avoid it outside of constitutional crises, all of which appear to end with "progress" and the monarchy largely unruffled as if Whig history were still a thing. The official and semi-official histories are obviously anodyne and the more structural works in the Marxist tradition, such as Tom Nairn's The Enchanted Glass, largely marginal to public discourse (and arguably out of date). Even the more polemical books, such as Christopher Hitchens' The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain's Favourite Fetish, are in the tradition of radical journalism, being denunciations of a lack of virtue rather than critical evaluations of the functional role of the crown. For such a central component of the UK state and establishment, the monarchy remains analytically opaque.

A good example of this occlusion could be found in today's Observer where Kenan Malik managed to make some sharp (if decidely undergraduate) points about the relationship of the monarchy to democracy while (almost) avoiding mention of the media altogether (the one mention points to its role as the self-appointed arbiter of decorum, which is a bit like saying the CBI has opinions about working from home - it hardly gets to the heart of the matter). According to Malik, "politics is the means by which ordinary people engage with the process of governance; to insist on the need for a hereditary monarch to stand above it, to embody continuity and the nation’s moral principles, is to restrain that process of democratic change. The monarchy may be deemed to be above politics, but its very presence is itself a profoundly political statement; a statement about the degree to which the people and the democratic process can be trusted."

What this omits is the role of the media in that elevation above the demos. Once the monarchy's practical political powers were curtailed in 1911, and it therefore no longer needed to be in the front-row of resistance to democracy, it adopted a largely ceremonial role, reflected in the steady invention of yet more dubious traditions, and a personal discretion (the shift from the aristocratic behaviour of Edward VII to the ostensible bourgeois mundanity of George V) that, absent the abdication crisis of 1936, continues to this day. All of this was public relations fodder that depended on a sympathetic media for broadcast to the nation. As we have seen on occasion, the press is more than capable of presenting a royal in an unflattering light, yet it rarely did so despite the family's notorious and persistent racism, classism and misogyny. The royals' embrace of the wireless and later television was not some grudging acceptance of modernity but an adroit recognition that they were now media properties.

The fawning towards the monarch is not independent of the press's more critical attitude towards our leading politicians but is in fact its corollary. If you are going to routinely denigrate politicians, not because of their individual failings but because you really don't like democracy and what that implies for the "free press", then you need some reference point "above the fray". This is most obvious when a politician comes along who is sympathetic to your hopes for an anti-democratic but populist coup. Consider the apochryphal froideur between Elizabeth II and Margaret Thatcher. What they actually thought of each other was irrelevant - what mattered was the media assumption that they were essentially in competition, which was a product of their slavish devotion to the Conservative Party leader in her pomp. Likewise the willingness of the press to turn on any member of the royal family short of the Queen was not simply a display of lèse-majesté but a reminder that the monarchy depends on its indulgence.

Ultimately, the view of the Tory press is not that "someone born into the right family is more fit to represent the nation than someone chosen by the demos", as Malik puts it, but that the most fitting is whoever has been anointed by the press. The crucial role that Tony Blair played in protecting the monarchy in 1997 from popular criticism was less a reflection of his own electoral authority on the back of a landslide general election win and more the confidence imbued by the backing of Rupert Murdoch. He knew that this was a rare moment when the press would back the politician over the prince, but he also knew that pursuing an aggresive line would make him ever more dependent on the press, and so jeopardise his plans to shut the Tories out of government for a decade. Given his own conservative instincts, it was no surprise that he indulged his favourite rhetorical trope of "modernisation" while carefully ensuring that the old order remained intact.

The Observer did publish a more insightful piece on the monarchy by David Edgerton, but I feel that in his desire to meet the brief (be disobliging about the Tories and you can promote your book), he also underplayed the role of the media. His central point is that the monarchy depends upon the Conservative Party and the changes in the latter since Margaret Thatcher have made the monarchy more vulnerable. He sets the scene by establishing the early twentieth century dynamic: "Monarchy was never above politics. It rested on it and on the Conservative party in particular. This was the party of the monarchy, the union, the constitution, the established churches and the empire. In 1936, it disposed of a king emperor who offended its bourgeois sensibilities, thus redirecting the royal line of succession down to King Charles III."

This is naming names in a way that Malik is reluctant to do, but noting that the modern Tory party "has taken up Powellite free marketism and nationalism rather than imperialism" is less about unpicking the contrary strains of globalising neoliberalism and its chauvinistic counter-movement than establishing the monarchy as an emblem of postwar modernity: "In 1953, the coronation was broadcast on television, to a nation of wireless listeners. The new Prince Consort started egging on the nation’s engineers in an era of heroic test pilots, sleek new jets and atomic power stations. That Dan Dare world is as long gone as the promise of the new Elizabethan age, but it had its moment." In truth, that moment was very short (though strangely formative), spanning little more than three years until Suez made the UK's reduced circumstances obvious to even the most obtuse journalist. I should also stress that any review of the monarchy that highlights the emblematic role of the wireless receiver and the TV set should be marked down for a lack of originality.

Just as Edgerton doesn't wholly buy Tom Nairn's thesis that the monarchy embodied an antique state (which is a bit of a simplification of the thesis), so I'm not convinced that it should instead be seen as imbued with modernity in the latter half of the twentieth century, from its exploitation of mass media to its encouragement of technology. This sounds too much like special pleading for his own history of the British nation. But what he does, via the historiography of invented tradition, is highlight the extent to which the monarchy in the age of Elizabeth II was a construct and above all one created by the media. Contrary to the claim that BBC newsreaders live in fear of negative newspaper coverage if they put a foot wrong, the truth is that the Corporation has always been heavily and willingly invested in the ritual of monarchy. Indeed, much of its own authority derives from those "I am speaking to the nation" radio speeches and that famously televised coronation.

Using the Guardian/Observer line - that democracy is imperilled by shadowy forces, from Russia to California, and only liberal journalism can protect us - as cover, Edgerton hints about the changing dynamic of media ownership: "The invented traditions that sustained the performance of monarchical presence have their outward pomp but have lost much inner meaning. The voice of the monarchical state is, post-Iraq and Brexit, assumed to be dissembling or mendacious. The once wholly cringeing media now often report to greater powers who are less inclined to respect the official royal version. They have bigger lies to tell." This reference to the media is welcome, after Malik's silence, but it's a misdirection to suggest that there has been a decline in its respect for the monarchy due to foreign ownership. If anything, the last few days of cringeing media coverage, despite a noticeable lack of the popular hysteria we saw in 1997, should have given the lie to that.

Political media remain firmly wedded to the nation state, even if entertainment has long since become a global industry. And in the UK that means that the monarchy retains its role as a rebuke to democracy. The press aren't going to undermine the monarchy, though they will take great pleasure in toying with it and will demand periodic sacrificial victims. At the end of the day, the monarchy remains the only component of an increasingly threadbare constitution capable of putting the brakes on democracy, if only by symbolic example rather than the exercise of real power. The only thing that might change the relationship of the press and the monarchy is if Liz Truss manages to truly revive the Thatcherite revolution and this time follow it to the logical end that Thatcher, as an unimaginative snob whose admiration for Hayek et al owed much to their anti-democratic credentials, resiled from, just as she eventually resiled from the logic of the single european market, namely the creation of a truly bourgeois political order. The Republic of Great Britain is coming and, like Nixon to China, it can only ever be birthed by a Tory government.