It’s good to talk, but there’s still a place for the royal stiff upper lip

When Harold Macmillan became prime minister in 1957, he tried to keep a stiff upper lip at all times. In keeping with masculine ideals of statesmanlike comportment (and following an over-emotive Anthony Eden), Macmillan deployed astonishing degrees of nonchalance and seeming indifference. As the historian Martin Francis has noted, according to one of Macmillan’s aides, ‘‘anyone who got excited got short shrift”.

Down the road at Buckingham Palace, a similar emotional economy was in full swing. As anyone will know who grew up watching the young Queen Elizabeth and her family (or watched The Crown on Netflix), there wasn’t a big show of emotional openness.

The palace and its people were about grandeur and repression.

’s

You were royal, you were not personal. I always marvel at that old footage of the royals, how stiff they seem, and indeed how contained and measured the Queen still seems.

Flash-forward to the present, and the total suffusion of our Royal family by therapeutic lingo. Thanks in large part to our princes, the rules of hygienic mental health have come to trump those of royal aloofness. If keeping a stiff lip and battling on used to be the Windsor way, the young generation is all for “talking about things”.

The Duke of Sussex, of course, has been a dedicated mental health campaigner for years. But last week, the Duke of Cambridge demonstrated just how deeply embedded the lingo of therapeutic wisdom has become for the rising

generation of Windsors. In Bradford with the Duchess of Cambridge on a series of visits, the elder Duke alluded to the recent rupture with his brother, caused by Megxit, speaking about the importance of families “coming together to talk”.

Rather than repress, people – including the Windsors – should opt for a path of acceptance: “It’s sometimes trying to get people to understand that it’s OK to have these challenges, we just need to deal with them and we need to move forward, rather than just be stuck in paralysis and pretend they don’t happen.”

These are soothing words and point to a regime of emotional modernising under the eventual king. But they’re also a bit wishy-washy.

He’s right, of course, that it’s best to get things out, talk them through, and support your loved ones. But part of me slightly hankers for the old way.

In a world of so much talk and so many feelings, I can’t help but wonder if there mightn’t be some relief for us all in a Royal family who still stood by and stuck out the good old stiff upper lip?