Royal train tour raises questions on role of monarchy

The Royal Family’s absence from view during the pandemic has been striking writes Martyn Mclaughlin

Afew months ago I was on a Zoom call with a retired newspaper reporter in the United States who was helping me navigate my way around some court records.

He’s been an occasional contact for a few years now, and though we’ve yet to meet in person, he fully inhabits the hard-headed persona of his trade’s halcyon years.

Gruff, curt, and possessed of an inexhaustible collection of swear words as part of his vocabulary, all that is missing is the pork pie hat.

Yet it was during this call, before we got down to chatting proper, that something unexpected revealed itself through the idle small talk which cut through his various affectations.

“How are the Queen and the Royal family doing?” he asked. Come again? “How are they holding up through all this, it must be hard for them, right?”

I wasn’t sure how best to answer. Not because I had absolutely no idea, but because it would never have occurred to me to pose the question.

The casual enquiry was a reminder of how differently the British monarchy is viewed from afar than it is at home.

In many countries, and the United States is a better example than many, it goes beyond mere veneration for the institution of the monarchy.

There is a genuine belief that the royals are part of the fabric of our everyday life, and that the members of its family are essentially extended relatives of all of us.

There was a time when, for the overwhelming majority of the country, that was partly true.

That bond, or at least the perception of it, was keenly felt, and no more so in times of strife.

It is in times of crisis that the role of the royal family has tended to become clearer, when its protagonists fulfil the simple purpose of reassurance and encouragement to the nation.

But over the course of the past nine months, that implicit contract between the monarchy and the people has felt strained, and its power and profile diminished.

It has drawn its ever-renewing strength from the idea that it is uniquely placed to galvanise the nation through torrid times. Yet throughout the coronavirus pandemic it has failed to do anything of the sort.

Of course, there are plenty of people able to shoulder their burdens without the monarchy’s helping hand.

Equally, it would be careless to so easily dismiss the solace the Queen and her family offer to those who are older and living alone.

That makes their absence from public view during the pandemic all the more striking, and it is why the three-day train tour across the country by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge seems incongruous in so many ways.

Yes, there is some merit in the minor political stooshie surrounding their travel at a time when vast swathes of the country remain under extensive restrictions, particularly after the justified criticism of Prince Charles travelling to Birkhall in March, despite the fact he was displaying mild symptoms of what would later be confirmed as a positive Covid-19 diagnosis.

The most jarring thing about it, however, was not the idea of rules being flouted, or familiar grievances about “one rule for them and another for the rest of us”.

It was something simpler and subtler: a sense of an institution over