the Monarchy must act.
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 them 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 prick we are 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 revolution of the British state in the three hundred-odd years since it was all invented. He writes, in particular, about the absolute necessity of the intimate but always at-arms-length relationship of Britain’s disputatious, deliberative assembly with the Crown.
In Nairn’s account a condition of this tight coupling is that Parliament is at all times prevented from intruding into the lives and conduct of the Monarchy and that the only serious threats to the stability of the Crown over the years have always come at times when Parliament had 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 politicians – 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 institution. MPs like Charles Dilkes, who was a liberal, and Willie Hamilton (a Labour MP who wrote a brilliant and funny book about all this) were berated by monarchists and labelled traitors by the popular press. 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 (almost) total expulsion of one of their own – the stripping away of titles and other oraments of power known to be so important to this very vain and thin-skinned man; the seriousness and severity of the response – has surprised some but when understood in this context, when seen as an attempt to repel an attack by Parliament on the Crown, it all makes sense.
- I’ve written about the Monarchy here before. In fact it’s beginning to look a bit obsessive.
