The royal family and the public imagination

The Paul Richards column

A Tory in Number 10. Riots in the streets. An economic downturn. And now a royal wedding. For anyone over a certain age there’s a Groundhog Day feeling about the last few weeks. The analogy breaks down fairly quickly, though. Some middle-class student anarchists smashing up 30 Millbank is hardly analogous with the eruption of inner-city violence in Brixton, St Pauls, Toxteth and Moss Side. The downturn is not a recession. Cameron is no Thatcher. But next year’s royal wedding does have the potential to capture the popular imagination as fully as Charles’s and Diana’s in 1981.

In 1981, the royal wedding was an antidote for millions to the sheer misery of the first Thatcher recession. The street parties reminded those over 40 of the Coronation, and anyone over 60 of VE Day. In a Britain without CDs, DVDs, video recorders and only TV three channels, it was a mass experience, shared by an overwhelming part of the population, like the Morecambe and Wise Show. In most neighbourhoods, especially working class areas, whole communities sat down at street parties to eat sausage rolls and chicken drumsticks and celebrate Charles and Di’s wedding. Just three years later, the same communities were pooling tins of food to support striking miners. Very few did not share in the hysteria, and guess what? They were mostly on the left. In the metropolitan CLPs, there was a fashionable anti-monarchy sentiment. John O’Farrell recounts a comrade whose anti-monarchism extended to a one-man boycott of the Jubilee Line of the London Underground.

Will it be the same for Wills and Kate? The royal family has been through so much since 1981 – the Windsor Castle fire, the divorces, the adultery, the death of Diana. Our view of monarchy is no longer deferential. So much daylight has shone on the monarchy, there’s little magic left. The monarchy is what Professor Giddens would call ‘post-traditional’: struggling to justify its position to a querulous public. There’s also the small matter of who pays. Wills had the decency to give Kate a second-hand ring. But who will pay for the rest of the wedding? Tradition decrees that the bride’s parents foot the bill, but I don’t think Mr and Mrs Middleton will be getting a bill from the Dean of St Paul’s and the Commissioner of the Metropolitan police. Yes, the taxpayer will be picking up the tab, as usual. My bet is that the wedding will be tasteful, but not lavish. And like the young David Cameron in 1981, thousands will pack their sleeping bags and thermos flasks and head for the Mall.

The Labour Party has always had a conflicted attitude towards the monarchy. AJP Taylor identified the very moment when the Labour Party ceased to pose any threat to the monarchy. It was when Keir Hardie spoke out against the royals and was banned from royal garden parties; the NEC’s response was to lobby for his reinstatement onto the guest list. Labour leaders have been there ever since. Wilson’s biographer Philip Zeigler hints that he was slightly in love with Queen Elizabeth. The PM carried a picture of the young Queen in his wallet, until it nearly fell to bits. Callaghan used the Silver Jubilee in 1977 to lift the nation’s spirits. Tony Blair hoped that Her Majesty’s golden wedding anniversary in 1998 would boost his already stellar ratings. His ‘People’s Princess’ moment was a defining part of the decade. You can be sure that Cameron is hoping for a successful royal wedding next year (and praying for a royal baby just before the general election).

In logic, there should be no monarchy. In any notion of social democracy or egalitarianism there is little space for a hereditary institution. Yet the monarchy exists, and no one has ever mapped out a realistic route to it no longer existing. No republican as ever surmounted the obvious mass appeal and support that the royals enjoy. That’s not to say there aren’t some sensible reforms that could be made. For example, the royal wedding could be funded from a voluntary levy of the public, rather than general taxation. That would stop people moaning about the cost in these straitened times. Then there are the serious issues about the royal prerogative powers inside the system, the anti-Catholicism inherent in the coronation oath, the nature of the honours system, and the secrecy surrounding members of the royal family’s lobbying of ministers. As the government moves to reform the House of Lords, some of these issues can be ventilated. Better than a piecemeal approach, all aspects of the monarchy could be looked at. Reform is in the Royal Family’s best interests. Their only real tradition is change.

Perhaps a Royal Commission?