Thoroughly Modern Monarchy

It would be difficult to name a great British institution that hasn’t, in the past five or so years, undergone one or other traumatic, existential scandal. The economy has transformed in the popular imagination into some kind of financial horror movie, featuring zombie companies, vampires of all shapes and sizes, and profits that melt when exposed to sunlight. Expenses have done for Parliament, Leveson for the press. The NHS have their Mid-Staffs; the BBC have their Jimmy Savile; and, although the police retain some level of respect, it’d be hard to argue that dodgy tactics, dodgy payments and (God forgive me for typing this word) Plebgate haven’t put a patina on those metal badges. Membership in political parties is at an all-time low, and confidence in economic recovery can’t be far behind (which, owing to the ‘clap-your-hands-if-you-believe’ principle on which modern capitalist economies operate, is actually hampering growth in and of itself. High finance is increasingly starting to resemble a branch of theology.)

The overall effect has been to create a kind of institutional gridlock: the level of generalised disillusionment in the country is so high that broken systems stay broken, simply because everyone else who might be in a position to fix them suffers from the exact same public mistrust. Venal politicians can’t regulate an irresponsible press; an irresponsible press can’t hold venal politicians to account. Breaking up institutional cosiness within the police by allowing external candidates to bypass the normal process and come in at the top seems like replacing the devil you know with the other devil you also know. The Bible warns us against attempting to cast the mote out of our neighbour’s eye before we’ve first removed the beam from ours: what we have here is a room full of people with beams in their eyes the size of California redwoods, occasionally colliding and blaming the other each time.

One institution seems curiously impervious to this growing malaise, however. It’s hard to remember a time when the monarchy has been more popular – with the royal wedding in 2011, the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in 2012, and the impending birth this year of the next heir to the throne, we’ve been in an ever-renewing cycle of Royal pageantry for almost as long as the present Government has been in power. At a time when the day-to-day running of the country covers all who involve themselves in it in opprobrium, the Queen seems to rise above it all, as unimpeachably pristine as the façade of Buckingham Palace. It’s not that the stories haven’t been there – between Prince Andrew's friends, Prince Charles' lobbying and the many escapades of Prince Harry, there’s been enough to report upon. It’s that people don’t care. (When the Queen was reported as having enquired of the Home Office why Abu Hamza remained a fixture of these fair isles, and wouldn’t it be nice if something could be done about the situation, the nation – myself included – collectively set a new world record for ‘largest synchronised shrug’.)

I’m not a political republican, for the same reason that I don’t make a habit of banging my head against a wall. There is no mood in this country for abolition of the monarchy, and anyone who says otherwise is deluding themselves. (During the wall-to-wall coverage of the royal wedding back in 2011, I recall reading a desperately hopeful press statement from a republican pressure group, which expressed the view that people were – despite all appearances – getting quite sick of the Royal Family. This was around the same time that Harold Camping was insisting that the end of the world was definitely nigh on May 21, with much the same degree of accuracy). 

It’s quite trendy to take pot-shots at the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, but neither’s done anything to harm me, and so I wish them the best in the same way I’d wish the best of any young couple expecting the birth of their first child. Who, it seems now, will almost certainly be our future monarch: born to reign over us, be they King or Queen. The recent proposal to equalise succession for men and women represents another step in the ongoing process - you could put it back to the Magna Carta, if you liked, but I think the cat was really out of the bag with Royal Family in 1969 - of proving that the monarchy and modern sensibilities can coexist without issue. 

The problem is that they really, really can't. Fortunately, the solution is that no-one seems to mind that much. 

If you know what you’re looking for, the haphazard liberalisation of the monarchy is quite an entertaining spectator sport. Specifically, it’s fun to identify the points at which token concessions to contemporary sensibilities run up against relics of a political ideology that is pre-Renaissance, never mind pre-modern. Discrimination on the basis of sex is unjust (and quite right too), but discrimination on the basis of primogeniture is apparently acceptable – if the first­-born daughter can succeed, why not the second-born? 

Heirs to the throne remain prohibited by Act of Parliament from marrying a Catholic: a nasty little bit of bigotry lodged at the heart of our constitution, and one that there’s been a lot of recent noise about dislodging. The most recent proposal is to remove the ban on heirs marrying Catholics, but to retain the ban on Catholics succeeding: a fairly pathetic half-measure, one would think, but short of disestablishing the Church of England (which I personally think is a rather good idea, and the last Archbishop of Canterbury agrees with me), it’s hard to envision how a hypothetical Catholic monarch could be the supreme ruler of the Church of England and at the same time defer spiritual authority to the Pope.

If these questions put you in mind of the kind of political debate that seems better suited to the 1600s, rather than the 2010s, it’s because any detailed consideration of the monarchy’s place in the modern world throws up questions like these. When it was being seriously mooted that a second-born son might challenge a first-born daughter’s right to the succession, my very first thought was ‘Wasn’t this a plot in Game of Thrones?’ The debate has focused around the marriage of a Protestant heir to a Catholic lad or lass, but a truly modern monarchy would have to be equipped to deal with a bevy of issues above and beyond this. What if the heir wished to marry outside their religion entirely, and raise their children as Jews or Muslims? What if the heir were openly gay or lesbian, and wanted to adopt, or employ a surrogate parent? (I call this the Maildämmerung scenario.)

The Queen is the Queen because, once upon a time, we believed that God chose our rulers for us (and that God’s preferences generally favoured the person who could put the biggest army into the field, for some reason). We sing ‘God Save the Queen’ at our sporting events; we put Dieu Et Mon Droit on our currency; we link God and the monarchy in a hundred different ways every day, and I suspect that the British people as a whole don’t believe particularly strongly in either, but like having them around nevertheless. There is a point at which attempts to modernise the monarchy founder in their own self-contradictions. This isn’t to argue against them – anything that removes a little bit more prejudice from the laws we all live under is a good thing – but, rather, to gently send them up. 

In an increasingly secular nation, we’ve knocked away the fundamental justification for monarchy, and what we’re left with is almost the opposite of the institutional gridlock I described earlier: something supported only by the instinctive feeling of mild goodwill it engenders amongst the populace. The Royal Family would be unsustainable if its members exerted any influence on the democratic process: therefore, when they do, we agree to pretend they didn’t. Perhaps, with our waning faith in every other institution in the British political landscape, we simply can’t bear to be disappointed again.