Times change but one institution shows us how to adapt and survive: our Royal Family
Since it’s just you and me, i’ll let you into a little trade secret: the months of July and August are known to journalists as the ‘silly season’. This is because every famous and important person in Britain is on holiday.
Politicians abandon their mistresses and the bars of Westminster and head home to wives, children and – shudder – constituents. Pop stars helicopter off to yachts in the Mediterranean with soap actresses.
The zillionaire financial elite gets as far away as it can from us ordinary Joes, with our mortgages and NHS teeth and Asda home deliveries. in short, the news stops happening.
in all this, consider the plight of the hack, that humble seeker of truth who, while others loaf, must call upon every ounce of his rat-like cunning to find or fashion something that will pass muster with the seething dragons of the newsdesk.
This is where silly comes in. i have a friend who once filled the front page of a national tabloid with a story about a woman who drank 100 cups of tea a day.
There was no sillier moment than the summer of 2013, when the Duchess of cambridge was due to give birth to her first child. Kate was thought to be in the Lindo Wing of St Mary’s Hospital, London.
if i recall correctly, no one was entirely sure she was there, but it was rumoured, and that was good enough – there was nothing else going on anyway.
The sweaty hounds of Fleet Street and the blow-dried queens of the 24-hour news channels plonked themselves outside, and waited.
For days, if not weeks – it felt like years – our TV screens showed one fixed image: the pair of glass-panelled swing doors that serve as the entrance to the Lindo Wing.
Occasionally, someone would emerge – usually an astonished porter immediately reconsidering his need for a sneaky fag – to face a blizzard of flash photography and hollered questions about whether the majestic nipper had arrived yet.
Doyenne
none of the hacks knew anything; nobody official who knew anything would say anything; nobody, anywhere, was doing anything – least of all, it seemed, the duchess.
The great Kay Burley established herself as the doyenne of free-association live broadcasting as she stood in front of the camera in an elegant suit and comfortable, out-of-shot training shoes and talked nonstop for days without a single new fact presenting itself.
Occasionally, some poor tourist would wander down the street to see what all the fuss was about and find himself in front of the camera: ‘So, esteban, what do you think the baby’s name should be? Really? We’re now going live to Ladbrokes for the odds on “esteban”…’
And then it happened. A future king was born. The announcement was made by Kensington Palace, a board was put up at the gates of Buckingham Palace, and William and Kate came through those glass-panelled doors to show little George to the world. That was the end of silly season: we had a big, global showstopper of a story. if i’m honest, i didn’t find any of it silly. i enjoyed the flim-flam of the long wait, cheered the news of the birth, and found myself grinning helplessly when they brought the baby out.
i was exactly the same during the couple’s wedding. What wasn’t to like: the brothers handsome in their uniforms, the commoner bride and her slinky sister, the pomp, ceremony and music of the church of england at its highest, the open-topped landau that carried the newlyweds, the balcony kiss.
And best of all, the moment when William and Kate suddenly zoomed through the gates of the palace, up the Mall towards clarence House, in a classic two-seater sports car with a rear number plate that read ‘JU5T WED’.
They are no longer just wed. Wednesday marks the couple’s fourth anniversary, and their second child is due before the end of the month. i doubt there will be the same public elation at either event, but it is nevertheless a useful opportunity for reflection. Best of all, it’s a chance to stop droning on about Scotland for a second.
it’s quite something to be able to say, without fear of contradiction by anyone sensible, that the most uplifting public celebrations of this decade have had the Royals at their heart.
The Diamond Jubilee of 2012, marking the 60th anniversary of elizabeth ii’s accession to the throne, with its public concert outside Buckingham Palace and Thames Pageant, saw a heartening outpouring of warmth towards a woman who has spent her life in service to her country.
The Olympics opening ceremony starred our Monarch as a skydiving Bond girl. The wedding brought cheer in the depths of a dismal economic contraction, and the baby gave us another lift. And so it goes on.
As the world has changed around us – has accelerated into the future in a few short years – i’ve changed my view on many aspects of the British constitution.
House of Lords reform, perhaps even the chamber’s abolition and replacement with a senate, was an idea i disliked intensely during the Blair years, but now accept is necessary.
We will have to find a new voting system for Westminster elections, even though we rejected such a move in a referendum only a few years ago. A lot of the stuffy traditions of Parliament, which i once regarded with fondness, now feel old fashioned and inefficient, and only create an unsafe distance between electors and elected.
The Union itself is growing looser and may grow looser still, in an effort to match the changing aspirations of the people.
When we observe the great institutions of society today, the scene is one of smouldering wreckage and dazed survivors.
One by one they have been sacked by the march of modernity, old habits and methods exposed as woefully inadequate by the 21st century’s non-negotiable demand for transparency, accountability and fairness – the banks, big business, the police, MPs, the intelligence agencies, the military, then NHS, our newspapers, the BBC, the c church of england.
But the Royal Family was there first. Throughout the 1990s, amid a drumbeat of social change and the end of traditional deference, marriages fell apart and feuds were brazenly fought out in public. Daylight was let in on magic as the story of ‘The Firm’, from the Queen’s use of Tupperware breakfast cereal containers to sex scandals, was excavated.
With the death of Diana, it was no longer clear our constitutional monarchy was going to make it to the new millennium.
in hindsight, what all this revealed was something we didn’t properly understand at the time: that behind the gates and the guards were ordinary human beings facing ordinary challenges in extraordinary circumstances. Divorce, bitterness, tragedy – these are, sadly, commonplace. it’s just that, for the rest of us, they don’t require a PR strategy or end up on the front page of the new York Times.
Stability
The Monarchy got it. it listened, adapted and opened up and, in doing so, made itself relevant again. now, as the foundations of other national institutions shake, it is a rock of stability.
it has provided a route map to the others for how to move with the times, learn from your mistakes, let go of what you must and renew your purpose.
And it helps, of course, to have the right chief executive. Remember: even the separatists, as they seek to destroy the United Kingdom, want to keep the Queen.
As one leaves the glittering Jewel Room at the Tower of London, one is confronted with something rather affecting. in a glass case are kept the boxes used to transport the crowns when they leave the Tower. When the imperial State crown is removed for the annual opening of Parliament, it is replaced by a sign that reads ‘in USE’.
That’s the thing about our Monarchy – it is ‘in use’. it is hard at work, both constitutionally and via the old shoe leather, maintaining stability through wars and depressions and political upheavals, tying our present to our past, changing so that everything may stay the same.
You know what? That’s precisely the function played by families.
it seems fitting and wise to me, therefore, that the ultimate safeguard of our democracy and guarantor of our liberties is not a grasping, self-aggrandising, here-today-gone-tomorrow politician, but just that: a family. Good times and bad, warts and all, war and peace, death and birth. Let Royal Baby Watch begin.