…the Crown must act
How to explain the persistence and apparent indestructibility of the British monarchy. More to the point, how to explain its desperate and paranoid response to the scrutiny of Parliament.
Secular moderns – rational British grown-ups, middle class people who feel a bit uncomfortable about the Monarchy but wouldn’t go so far as to call themselves republicans – mostly don’t get the whole Royal family thing. They classify the Royals as just another elite clan – albeit one with a bit of extra social media clout – and tend to understate their importance in the contemporary British polity. They classify them as just another ancien régime holdover; an inbred aristocratic tourist attraction; something we ought, at most, to ignore and leave to its own devices. They generally support the idea of demoting or defunding the royals but would never seriously suggest removing them all together. Consequently they think of the present crisis in the British Monarchy – the one involving the hideous sex-offender prick we’re no longer even allowed to call a Prince – as mainly a kind of show-business spat that will be resolved once the King has achieved the necessary public distance from his stupid and unpleasant younger brother.
What they’re missing, of course, is the absolute centrality of the Monarchy to Britain’s awkward constitutional settlement. Tom Nairn, one of the most important intellectuals of the republican spasm that came before this one, back in the nineties, called the arrangement the ‘Crown-Constitutional’ state. He describes, in his beautiful book The Enchanted Glass, the awkward but vital binding together of Parliament and Crown (the Executive is a third, less vital, element) in a formation that has, to a large degree, guaranteed the stability and resistance to unrest and revolution of the British state in the three hundred-odd years since it was all invented. He writes about the absolute necessity of the intimate but always at-arms-length relationship of our disputatious, deliberative elected assembly with the Monarchy.
The 1688 settlement, which is misremembered by most of us, and especially by the Whiggish liberal mainstream today, as a kind of bourgeois update to Magna Carta, didn’t abolish the Monarchy – it positioned it as the existential precondition for Parliamentary authority. Parliament became sovereign, but only once it had first been granted that sovereignty, sacramentally as it were, by a now non-absolutist Crown. The deal is that the Crown ceases to rule but it confers legitimacy upon the rulers. So Parliament is permitted to tax, legislate – even depose dynasties – but may not scrutinise the living body of the Crown as if it were a water company MD or an errant QUANGO or the Director General of the BBC. That’s the arrangement. It’s the hinge on which the whole settlement turns, in fact. We don’t behead Kings any more, we don’t exile them and we definitely don’t haul them before select committees. The Crown is not incidental to this system, it’s at the absolute centre – not powerful in the old sense but untouchable in the constitutional sense. And this is what defines this moment and what explains the conduct of the King and his court: because the Crown is the source of legitimacy in this system. Parliament cannot itself claim the right to interrogate the Crown. If it could, the source and recipient of power in the system would be inverted, and the 1688 machine would blow up. This is what’s behind the present panic. It’s not about privilege, or the ignorance and arrogance of a handful of MPs, or the conduct of the stupid and wicked former Prince: it’s about securing the constitutional reality of modern Britain.
Nairn explains that a condition of this agreement is that Parliament is forever prohibited from intruding into the lives and conduct of the Monarchy. And the only serious threats to the stability of the Crown over the centuries have always come at times when unruly Parliamentarians have disrespected the golden rule and developed an unhealthy interest in the business of the Monarch. At various points since the late 19th Century, for instance, articulate and often very effective legislators – mostly but not all from the left – took on the Crown, often with the protection of Parliamentary privilege from the chamber itself. In every instance these attacks have been publicly dismissed and often ridiculed but have been inwardly treated as genuine existential threats to the institutional arrangements. MPs like Charles Dilkes, who was a Liberal, and Willie Hamilton, a Labour MP who wrote a brilliant and funny book about all this (that would have got him hanged a couple of hundred years ago), were berated by monarchists and labelled traitors by the popular press. The list of MPs who have deliberately, consciously taken on the Crown is a short one. The British machine of state has always understood that this awkward and inherantly unstable relationship – Crown and Parliament – must be sustained at all cost because, despite its apparent fragility, it’s the only really durable guarantee of the state’s survival.
So, whenever Parliament develops an interest in the Crown, whenever it steps out of its lane and threatens to intrude, there’s always a powerful reaction. In the present crisis, the threats of various uncooperative back-benchers and committee chairs to go so far as to summon the former Prince to Parliament have produced an equal and opposite reaction of surprising ferocity. The King can’t act against Parliament, of course – that’s prohibited – but the (almost) total expulsion of one of their own – the stripping away of titles and property and other oraments of power known to be so important to this very vain and thin-skinned man; action more severe even than that taken against a rogue who was already on the throne – has surprised many but when understood in this context, when seen as an attempt to repel an attack by an uppity Parliament that’s forgotten its place in the hierarchy, it all makes sense.
- I’ve written about the Monarchy here before. In fact it’s beginning to look a bit obsessive.
