The monarchy: so what are they for?
Last week’s incendiary Oprah Winfrey interview with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex amounted to the most revelatory royal appearance since Princess Diana’s infamous Panorama interview 25 years ago. If it provided a welcome break in the tedium of lockdown for the public at large, it has also rattled Buckingham Palace and raised issues about the monarchy that could yet build into a serious crisis for the royal family.
Chief among these is a question of modernising values. Even her most voluble detractors would admit that Meghan Markle brought a muchneeded flavour of the 21st century to the Windsors. She spoke of inclusivity and diversity and, while she may not have been a nail technician from a Bradford council estate, she was avowedly not an identikit posh blonde from the home counties.
But how can an institution based and run on the hereditary principle, one that has luxuriated in great privilege and enforced social distance, accommodate the concepts, let alone the practices, of inclusivity and diversity?
This is the question facing all those who call for its reform. The answer, in our age of optics optimisation, seems to be that no one seriously expects the monarchy to be more egalitarian. They just want it tolookthat way.Meghan looked the part. A biracial Hollywood actress, she symbolised something new and under-represented, and the royal family is first and foremost a symbolic entity.
The breakdown in the relationship between the Sussexes and “the firm” may have more to do with personal animosities and a clash of cultures – stuffy royalty versus image-controlled celebrity, rigid team ethic against attention-grabbing individualism – than ideological differences. Yet it has dealt a damaging blow to the Windsors’ already limited youth appeal.
“If you’re thinking about it from the perspective of the younger generation,” says the literary critic Leo Robson, “the one person they’ve taken to who they think espouses ideas like their own is Meghan Markle. And she’s exiled from the royal family and is now essentially enemy number one.”
Monarchy works as a kind of fiction – the conceit is that in some way a single family represents a nation by standing above it – insofar as it requires us to suspend disbelief. So it makes sense to seek the opinion of the New Statesman’s lead fiction reviewer. The 35-year-old Robson rejects the idea of a clear-cut generational divide, noting that with the departure of the millennial’s favourite, “there is only one beloved member of the royal family and she’s 94 years old”.
Robson highlights the fact that both Meghan and Harry were careful to exclude the Queen from any suggestion of wrongdoing, much less racism, in their joint condemnation of the royal set-up. Her Majesty has now reigned for 69 years, longer than any other monarch in British history. And she’s arguably more popular than she’s ever been, consistently disarming even the most republican-minded critics. A poll last year found that two-thirds of Britons want to maintain the royal family.
Perhaps the Queen’s greatest strength is the sense of permanence she brings to the job, adapting just enough to appear unchanging. Timeless she may be; immortal she’s not. Thus any grievances about the institution she heads are bound to surface when she dies.
“The monarchy will have to reinvent itself in some way,” says historian Estelle Paranque from the New College of the Humanities. “It’s their greatest challenge. If they fail to do so it will lead to the end of the monarchy as people will only respect institutions that are inclusive.”
Inevitably, any gripes will first fall at the feet of her successor, her eldest son, Charles. Now 72, he’s been the Prince of Wales for over 50 years, a man whose future has been coming for so long, it’s very nearly behind him. Unfortunately, the wait hasn’t endeared him to his subjects-to-be. An odd mixture of pampered habits and new-age beliefs, he’s never captured the public imagination. From his ill-starred, rather cynical marriage to Diana Spencer to his clumsy interventions in public debate, he’s often looked uncomfortable in the role: overburdened by duty, undistinguished by character.
A recent YouGov survey found that more Britons want Charles’s son to succeed the Queen than want Charles himself to do so – a lack of public confidence that is decidedly more pronounced among the young. The Prince of Wales’s youth credentials took a further blow when his son Harry fingered him for not taking his calls – the kind of parental failing that is viewed nowadays as a contravention of human rights rather than an act of weary exasperation.
In any case, it’s not clear how a man who is said to have his shoelaces ironed and his toothpaste squeezed by his valet, someone who travels with his own toilet seat and is a stickler for protocol, can hope to modernise an institution whose fustiness he in many ways embodies.
The royal biographer Robert Lacey argues that the job of the monarch is to represent common values, and he believes that the Queen was ahead of her time in championing equality and diversity around the Commonwealth. He also thinks that Charles will do the same.
“It’s not his public image,” he concedes, “but I think that’s unfair to Charles because he stands for all the