Down With the Royals (3 page)

The royal family depends for its existence on such milestones, which provide a series of public spectacles designed to suggest that the institution is essentially ceremonial and harmless. This is a fantasy, concealing the extensive influence of the royal family on public life, but it means that the then Archbishop of Canterbury spoke with greater accuracy than he knew when he described the marriage of the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer as ‘the stuff of which fairy tales are made’. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that fairy stories and gossip are what we get in relation to the royals: even during the family’s
anni horribiles
in the late 1990s, we heard a great deal more about schisms within the extended family – Diana versus Charles, Diana versus Camilla Parker Bowles, Charles versus Earl Spencer – than any serious interrogation of the institution. In that sense, ‘modernisation’ of the royal family consisted not of a conversation about democracy, representation and accountability, but of soap opera-style reporting of conflicts between individuals.

Something similar had happened before, when George IV excluded his estranged wife, Caroline of Brunswick,
from his coronation in 1821; Caroline was refused entry to Westminster Abbey and fell ill that same evening, dying less than three weeks later amid rumours that she had been poisoned. Caroline’s popularity with the masses is a reminder that factionalism has always existed in the family and is survivable, perhaps even more so in an age of mass media, when the public’s emotions are so easy to manipulate. The failure of Diana’s marriage, her death and her ex-husband’s relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles provided reams of material for celebrity culture, humanising figures who would otherwise have appeared cold and distant; predictions that the public would ‘never accept’ Camilla always seemed wide of the mark, not least because there was nothing much they could do about it. And while becoming fodder for gossip magazines may not have been entirely comfortable for older members of the family, the willingness of the next generation to cooperate with the kind of journalism pioneered by
Hello!
magazine demonstrates how easily they have adapted to it. The benefits are enormous: the phrase used by so many people after Diana’s death – ‘She was just like us’ – is telling, for of course
members of the royal family are categorically
not
like us. Diana had an unhappy marriage but she was one of the most privileged single mothers in the country, able to command the attention of politicians, prelates, editors and foreign dignitaries.

One of the reasons the monarchy has survived, in other words, is the near-complete suspension of normal journalistic scrutiny, either in terms of the cost of the institution or the archaic assumptions on which it rests. Thus Prince Charles is mocked – somewhat affectionately, it has to be said – for his unfamiliarity with the functions of everyday life, but the contradiction of having an unelected head of state in a 21st-century democracy goes almost unquestioned. This should be borne in mind when monarchists cite opinion polls showing overwhelming support for the royal family, sometimes reaching a figure as high as 80 per cent in recent years. No mainstream political party has
ever
called for a debate on the monarchy, let alone come out against it, leaving a vacuum at the heart of public life. At the same time, opinion poll questions are often posed in a way that favours the status quo; it is a well-known fact that responses are influenced by how
a question is asked, and respondents are rarely offered a viable-sounding alternative. There is a world of difference between asking ‘Do you support the Queen?’ and asking ‘Would you like to vote for the person who represents the country?’ Nor is it safe to assume that the popularity of the monarchy is written in stone: huge social changes often come about, in retrospect, in a relatively short period of time. Take just one example of how British attitudes have altered radically, and for the better, in my lifetime: I was born in a period when homosexuality was punishable by law; since then, I have watched it go through a process of decriminalisation, growing public acceptance, legal recognition of civil partnerships and finally gay marriage. Who but the most committed campaigner for social justice would have envisaged all that in 1957, when it was first suggested that gay people should not face criminal sanctions?

The British monarchy is an aberration in the modern world, a point I shall return to in a later section, but for the moment it is worth noting that there is far from universal confidence that it will survive. An Ipsos MORI poll in 2012 suggested that three out of five Britons are
confident it will last half a century, but the figure falls to 42 per cent when people are asked about one hundred years’ time.
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We also know that in nation after nation, once the supposedly unthinkable happens, public opinion adapts to the new situation. Elected presidents have proved popular in many countries, including Ireland, where two of the people who have held the office – the human rights campaigner Mary Robinson, and the poet and former culture minister Michael Higgins – are widely admired; in South Africa, Nelson Mandela achieved a species of secular sainthood, while Liberia’s Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has been one of the leading voices urging the world to take action against the Ebola outbreak.

This makes it even odder that arguments for a different constitutional arrangement have barely been aired
in the UK. Republican voices are mocked or silenced in a way that would be regarded as an assault on free speech in more enlightened countries, even on the supposedly neutral BBC. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard ‘debates’ about the monarchy which exclude voices questioning its existence; one of the most recent was a discussion on Radio 4’s
Today
programme about whether Muslim as well as Christian texts should be included at the next coronation, with no one asking the obvious question of why we should have such an event in the twenty-first century. Even seasoned broadcasters struggle to achieve ‘balance’, as I found when I was invited to appear on another Radio 4 programme, the
Moral Maze
, in the run-up to the diamond jubilee. I had barely been introduced by the presenter, Michael Buerk, when the former Conservative Defence Secretary Michael Portillo launched into a barrage of sneers; his opening sally was that my opposition to the monarchy must be motivated by envy of the Queen. Portillo interrupted me time after time, to the growing agitation of Michael Buerk, who finally grabbed him by the arm in an attempt to shut him up. The programme prompted
dozens of complaints from listeners as Roger Bolton, the presenter of Radio 4’s
Feedback
programme, acknowledged in a blog:

It’s that word again: ‘feisty’ is always used about women who stand up for themselves, and rarely, if ever, about men. But an accurate critique of Portillo’s behaviour wouldn’t focus on his manners, appalling though they were. Republicans are entitled to free speech, just like anyone else, and I had been invited onto the programme to explain my reasons for opposing the monarchy as an institution. Portillo’s reaction to my presence in the
studio felt like an attempt, conscious or otherwise, to exclude the argument for an elected head of state from the mainstream media.

Even something as reasonable as putting the current royals in a historical context is liable to be grotesquely misrepresented. In February 2013, the novelist Hilary Mantel gave a lecture at the British Museum, published a couple of weeks later in the
London Review of Books,
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about the anachronistic status of the royal family in modern life. Mantel, who had previously achieved near ‘national treasure’ status for her Booker prize-winning novels set in the reign of Henry VIII, looked at the royals almost as zoological specimens, comparing them at one point to pandas (‘pandas and royal persons alike are expensive to conserve and ill-adapted to any modern environment’). She compared Princess Diana to Marie Antoinette, and suggested that Kate Middleton ‘appeared to have been designed and built by craftsmen’.

The lecture was clearly a reflection on the unchanging nature of royalty, not a personal attack, so Mantel must
have been astonished to find herself pilloried in the
Daily Mail
.
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Under the headline ‘Bring Up The Bodies author Hilary Mantel’s venomous attack on Kate Middleton’, the paper pulled no punches: ‘A best-selling author who has based her literary career on writing about the Royal Family has launched a bitter attack on the Duchess of Cambridge. Hilary Mantel used her position among the novel-writing elite to make an astonishing and venomous critique of Kate.’

Other papers quickly piled in.
The Sun
described Mantel as a ‘snooty writer’ and said she had ‘insultingly dismissed’ the Duchess;
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the
Daily Express
detected a ‘backlash’ against Mantel as ‘a host of politicians and celebrities … rallied to defend the honour of the future Queen’.
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There was such a storm that the Prime Minister decided to get involved, despite the fact that he was on an official visit to India and might be assumed to have more important things to talk about; Cameron
condemned Mantel’s observations about the Duchess as ‘completely misguided and completely wrong’. Even the leader of the Labour Party, Ed Miliband, felt he had to say something, describing Mantel’s remarks as ‘pretty offensive’ and saying that ‘Kate Middleton is doing a brilliant job in a difficult role’.
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A few months later, my book
The Public Woman
was published. One of the chapters, which picked up themes I had written about in my earlier book
Misogynies
, used Middleton as an exemplar of the remarkably limited role of women in the royal family. The rest of the book looked at the continuing failure across the world to grant women full human rights, ranging across subjects such as FGM and trafficking for labour and sexual exploitation. But it was my remarks about the Duchess that were picked up and misrepresented, just like Mantel’s, as a personal attack. The
Daily Mail
returned to the fray, describing my observations as a ‘blistering attack’.
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The paper’s columnist, Richard Kay, wrote:

Kay barely bothered to conceal his wish that critics of the royals would just keep quiet. But the refusal of the media to give a fair hearing to rational analysis of the royal family reached its
reductio ad absurdum
when an American showbiz blogger, Perez Hilton, came swinging into the ring. Why on earth would I express reservations about Middleton or Princess Diana? Hilton had
no doubts: ‘Wow,’ he exclaimed. ‘Talk about harsh!! It might be time to retract the claws, Joan!’
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It was an unintentionally pertinent observation, exposing the journalistic impulse to turn each and every critique of the UK royals into a cat fight.

In an atmosphere so inflamed on the subject of monarchy, any perceived ‘insult’ to a member of the family runs the risk of prompting irrational and disproportionate reactions. I thoroughly dislike the kind of childish prank played by two Australian radio DJs, Mel Greig and Michael Christian, during the Duchess of Cambridge’s first pregnancy, but not because it involved one of the royals; it would have been indefensible no matter who the target was. In December 2012, Greig and Christian called the London hospital where the Duchess was being treated for extreme morning sickness, pretending to be the Queen and Prince Charles; I don’t suppose they expected to get very far, but an Indian-born nurse, Jacintha Saldanha, was taken in. She put them through to a colleague, who disclosed details of the Duchess’s
condition and treatment; it was a distasteful breach of privacy but no lasting harm was done to any member of the royal family. The radio station went ahead and broadcast the stunt in Australia, where listeners mocked the DJs’ dreadful attempt at upper-class British accents, and it was subsequently reported around the world. The whole thing was a storm in a tea cup but the impact on Ms Saldanha was catastrophic. A couple of days later, she hanged herself.

To anyone who is not invested in the ‘specialness’ of the royal family, it is hard to comprehend that someone would take so much responsibility on themselves as a consequence of accidental involvement in a stupid hoax. In September 2014, a nurse at the same hospital told an inquest that Ms Saldanha felt responsible for the release of private information about the Duchess, while another colleague said she received an email in which Ms Saldanha talked about feeling ‘ashamed’.
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Even so the coroner, Dr Fiona Wilcox, did not criticise the DJs and made the important point that Ms Saldanha’s death ‘was
not reasonably foreseeable’.
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Yet, in the days immediately after her suicide, some users of social networking sites moved swiftly from shock to rage and began to make the absurd claim that the DJs had ‘wanted’ this outcome all along. Greig apologised to Ms Saldanha’s family at the inquest but she also told the BBC’s
Newsnight
programme about the death threats she received: ‘I was in lockdown for months. There were bullets with our names on it sent to police stations.’
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She said that the threats to herself and her family continued for eighteen months.