The Platinum Jubilee will, if all goes to plan—never a given—represent a triumphant demonstration of the royal family’s soft power. Republican grumblings will be ignored; street parties will be in full flow. But once the confetti has been cleared up off the Mall, and the final echoes of the terrifying-sounding Platinum Party at the Palace have died away, any residual glow of goodwill will be countered by the realisation that existential matters concerning the future of the Firm have not been addressed, and perhaps cannot be until it is too late.
Public affection towards the Queen herself cannot be overstated. Her seven decades on the throne have seen her become someone who plays a symbolic role in the lives of pretty well every British citizen, and the adulation which she receives at home and overseas will never diminish as long as she lives. But she is now 96 years old, and suffers from what the Palace communications team has described, with an obituarist’s skill at euphemisms, as “episodic mobility problems.” She is, to the chagrin of those around her, all too mortal. And when she dies, and the question arises of what the monarchy will be like without her steady influence, all bets are off.
Anyone who has seen Jesse Armstrong’s excellent Succession will be aware of the grubby jockeying for position that occupies the wealthiest and most influential families in the world. Alliances are formed between apparently opposed parties; self-interest dominates every decision, and the unfavoured find themselves becoming terrifyingly irrelevant. Courtiers, purposefully ignoring the gaping chasm that is about to appear, concern themselves ceaselessly with absurd questions of protocol, all the while wondering what is going to happen to them with the passing of the ancien régime.
By rights, the royal family should not be concerned with such matters. When the Queen finally dies, Prince Charles will become the oldest figure to ascend the throne in British history (he was born in 1948), and when he dies, Prince William—with no small measure of reluctance, judging by his recent remarks about the future of the Commonwealth—will take up the mantle. There will not be another queen in the lifetimes of anyone reading this article, barring an unexpected development. The line of succession is one that seems inalienable. Unfortunately for monarchists and traditionalists alike, the once-comforting certainty of hereditary monarchy has now become a source of concern, even fear, because of the unpredictable nature of what comes next.
There have always been iconoclasts and troublemakers in the Firm. In the 20th century, Edward VIII’s Nazi sympathies made him a dangerous figure at a time of international tension, and an unsuccessful MI5-sanctioned assassination attempt on him in July 1936 merely worsened matters. More recently, and rather less seriously, Princess Margaret’s invincible sense of noblesse oblige combined with an unusually egalitarian attitude towards sexual partners to make her activities a perpetual source of embarrassing scandal. And, naturally, Princess Diana’s loathing of an institution that she (correctly) believed would be a terrible source of frustration and repression for her children manifested itself in a considered attempt to destroy the prestige of the royal family from within, which was only thwarted by her premature death.
Post-Diana, matters seemed to become less eventful. But the dual-pronged disaster of Prince Andrew and Prince Harry—the one blinded by privilege and arrogance like his aunt, the other setting himself up as a disruptor and rebel in the vein of his mother—has proved a public relations nightmare for the royal family. All the desperate talk of a “slimmed-down monarchy,” with the implicit promise that the hangers-on and minor royals will be consigned to the margins, is a sop to the increasing number of people who are weary of the unaccountable sideshow that the hereditary monarchy embodies. Propaganda constantly informs the taxpayer that the royal family represents excellent value for money. Many disagree.
When Prince Charles becomes king, nobody knows what he will represent. He has already ignored his mother’s famous edict of “never complain, never explain” and has styled himself as an energetic, interventionist figure, freely offering his opinions on anything from modern architecture to environmental issues. Some may consider this a refreshing change from the Queen’s decades-long opacity. Yet the idea of a monarch who does not regard himself merely as a symbolic figurehead, made available to his people for pieces of pageantry, but actually occupying a constitutional role is an alarming one. Even as it was revealed last year that over a thousand laws have been vetted by the Queen or Prince Charles via an archaic system known as “Queen’s consent,” there is understandable anxiety as to how an unaccountable king could decide to intervene in national life, and what the consequences might be.
There is no serious republican movement in Britain, nor is there likely to be anytime soon. Whispers that some well-funded and shadowy cabal is ready to pounce after the Queen’s death and try and engender public sympathy for their cause are amusing but inaccurate. It is more likely that, if the royal family is to become nothing more than an anachronistic relic of a feudal time, the damage will have been done most effectively by its members’ actions. When rising bills and out-of-control inflation are driving even more families into poverty, it is that much harder to care about Prince Harry whining about whether or not he is allowed to pay his million-pound security bills, just as it becomes ever-easier to be driven to anger by Prince Andrew’s multi-million pound pay-off to Virginia Giuffre.
Royalists, and everyone else, should enjoy the Platinum Jubilee celebrations. If the current trajectory continues, they may be the last of their kind we ever see.
