How we view the Royal Family is just another legacy of Covid

IN one respect, the Duke of Edinburgh was the first millennial. Back in 1947, when he and Her Majesty tied the Windsor knot, men were very much in the ascendency.

Women were expected to know their place, which was generally assumed to be always in shadow of the keeper of the family testosterone.

The challenge facing Philip was that, while men ruled the roost, his wife was destined to rule the country.

The Netflix series The Crown has catalogued, in its own fanciful way, Philip’s early struggles to deal with living in his wife’s shadow. In the end, he did.

Like your average millennial male, he got over himself and got on with doing his own thing — while, at the same time, supporting his partner.

It would be fair to say that, in the Duke’s case, this stemmed not so much from a passionate belief in gender equality as in a sense of duty.

That old thing. Actually, I’m not sure that the concept of honour and duty is really as outdated as it’s sometimes made out to be.

There are plenty of examples around us of people who embody service to the public. To quote Meghan (as I am always loathe to) service is universal.

The national anthem’s hope that the Queen would live long has been fulfilled. But the likelihood is that, when that very much older generation of the royals — particularly Elizabeth herself — finally passes on, the relationship between the monarchy and the people will change utterly.

Charles can only ever be a stepping-stone monarch; too late to stamp his mark upon an era. And it’s fair to say that he and Camilla are lacking somewhat in the stardust department.

Part of the mystique and indeed popularity of royalty is anchored in its glamour and dazzle and the fairytale fascination of it all.

Not that that always works out. Two words: Harry, Meghan.

While that pair have been riding high on the seesaw of transatlantic celebrity success, posing artfully beneath a “tree of life”, plucking from its branches lucrative deals with various streaming services, William and Kate have been forced to go the other way. They’ve had to ground their end of the seesaw in restraint and an ever-increasing attempt at “relatability”, which, in Kate’s case, seems to involve an awful lot of bargain buys from H&M.

Charles used to argue that the threat to the monarchy lay in it being treated as a soap opera. Now it’s facing soft-soap Oprah amid warnings that Meghan and Harry’s upcoming tell-all interview will be a shocker. But if Harry’s bus outing on James Corden’s Late Late Show is anything to go by, it will just be more of the usual “how inspirational, caring, important and unfairly treated by the media we are”.

Besides, an institution which has endured hundreds of years of wars, regicide, decapitations, in-house fighting and tabloid intrusion should be able to weather an hour-and-a-half of Californian cattiness.

So, I doubt that this alone will be the straw that breaks the corgi’s back.

A bigger challenge to the institution is how our world is changing. Pandemic has upended old ways, old attitudes, old complacencies.

The Royal Family is transitioning at the same time as people are questioning everything about the way we were.

If anything, Megxit caused many people to feel outraged on behalf of, and protective towards, the elderly Queen and her consort.

The monarchy can’t take it for granted that, in the years ahead, that same affection will be passed like a baton to her heirs.

‘Charles is too late to stamp his mark upon an era’