Down With the Royals Read online

  If we look at the marriage of Andrew and Sarah in July 1986, we find that across the year as a whole there were 4 per cent fewer visitors to Britain than in 1985, but that in July there were 8 per cent fewer than in July of 1985. While this and the results relating to 1981 are inconclusive, such as it is, the evidence points to royal weddings having a negative impact on inbound tourism [my italics].10

  The idea that foreigners who are planning holidays abroad sit down with a list of republics versus nations with hereditary heads of state has always struck me as implausible. If this proposition were true, you would expect to find the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Spain dominating the top ten destinations in the world, drawn up by the UN World Travel Organization.11 So which country has the highest number of international tourist arrivals? The answer is France, which has been a republic since Napoleon III went into exile (in England, of course) after being defeated in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. France easily beat every other country in the world in terms of foreign tourists in 2012, clocking up 83 million tourist arrivals; many more people visited France than actually live there (66 million). The US, which is also a republic, was in second place with 66.7 million. And where was the UK in all this? At number eight, with only 29.3 million visitors. There was a monarchy, Spain, in the top five, but that almost certainly had more to do with beaches, landscape and stunning tourist attractions than the country’s deeply unpopular royal family. The Daily Mail reported these figures with an unintentionally revealing headline: ‘France crowned [my italics] most popular country in the world with record-breaking number of tourists (and UK lags in eighth place, beaten by Spain, Italy and even Germany)’.12

  Even if we look at the economic impact of tourism, rather than the number of international tourist arrivals, there is no evidence that monarchy is a big draw. The US has the highest tourist receipts by far, amounting to $139.6 billion in 2013; in this top ten, Spain moves up a place to number two with $60.4 billion, but France ($56.1 billion) is close behind. The UK, sadly, drops a place in this table, coming in at number nine ($40.6 billion).

  As France has discovered, one of the advantages of becoming a republic is that the sumptuous palaces and huge land holdings which used to belong to the royal family can be thrown open to the public; the Palace of Versailles is the third biggest tourist attraction in the country, after the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower, with around five million visitors a year. According to the Labour MP Margaret Hodge, who chairs the House of Commons public accounts committee, Buckingham Palace is ‘only open seventy-eight days a year’ and ‘they only have about half a million visitors’.13 There is an option for an ‘exclusive guided tour’ of the state rooms during the winter months, but the cost – £75 per person, including a glass of champagne and a discount on purchases in the shop – is prohibitive for anyone who is on a low income.14 It isn’t even as though the royal family does a good job of looking after the many grand houses and palaces currently in its stewardship, as the public accounts committee discovered. I shall return to this point later, but let’s go back for a moment to the birth of Prince George, and the wildly over-optimistic predictions made about the impact of his arrival at home and abroad.

  The idea of a universally joyful populace, splashing money on souvenirs and dutifully waving Union Jacks, was uncritically reported by most of the UK media. Yet there was evidence, if anyone had bothered to look, that this notion was nowhere near the truth. A You-Gov report15 based on polling in July 2013 suggested that slightly more British adults (53 per cent) were uninterested in the birth, compared to 46 per cent who did take an interest. Almost a quarter of the population (24 per cent) was ‘not at all interested’, while another 29 per cent was ‘not very interested’. In the circumstances, any headline (and there were many) attributing positive feelings to ‘everyone’ or ‘the country’ was bound to be wrong. That didn’t stop the national tourist board, VisitEngland, publishing a breathless press release which claimed that ‘England is all in a frenzy over the arrival of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s baby son’.16 According to the organisation’s chairman [sic], Lady Cobham, ‘the Royal Family has long been an asset to English tourism, but never more so than right now, with people across the world in a fever pitch of excitement around the arrival of the royal baby’. The press release babbled about ‘global excitement’, apparently unaware of how tasteless and Anglocentric this view was against the background of a savage civil war in Syria and a refugee crisis of massive proportions in neighbouring countries. Were any of these tragic fugitives really inclined to go on VisitEngland’s website and click on a link to ‘royal baby-inspired breaks and packages’? Did they hanker after the Hilton hotel’s ‘Tot-ter around Kensington’ package where ‘guests can enjoy a two-night shopping break, ideal for mother-and-daughter bonding and mums-to-be’? Baby talk is an apt name for much of the nonsense spoken and written in the UK about the royal family, as another offer highlighted by VisitEngland suggested: ‘Meanwhile, one of the luxury suites at the Grosvenor House hotel on Park Lane has been transformed into a five-star nursery for jet-setting babies. The hotel has … transformed a Premium Park View Suite into a quintessential English nursery, designed and tailored with a royal baby in mind.’

  In November 2014, Lady Cobham was awarded a CBE for services to tourism by the Prince of Wales, an occasion only slightly marred by an altercation between her partner, the former Conservative Cabinet minister David Mellor, and a London taxi driver.

  Not long after the royal birth, the Evening Standard declared Kate Middleton’s child, by then aged all of two months, the ‘most influential person in London’ – quite a feat for someone who had yet to speak his first word. The paper gushed:

  The eight-week-old son of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge was chosen because he has become the capital’s biggest global ambassador.

  The baby Prince eclipsed Mayor Boris Johnson, who topped the list of London’s most influential people a year ago.17

  Inevitably, one of the reasons for this thoroughly undeserved accolade was the infant’s supposed impact on – you guessed it – tourism. The paper’s editor, Sarah Sands, who had previously been one of the Mayor’s biggest supporters, trilled:

  London is a magnet for the rest of the world and our newest power resident, Prince George, is a timely symbol.

  He is our greatest tourist attraction, along with his great-grandmother, which is why he has been chosen this year as the first among Londoners.

  How is a baby supposed to function as a tourist attraction? Are foreign visitors drawn to London merely in the hope of breathing the same air as this unusually gifted infant? Or are they supposed to think that London is a small, informal city where a royal baby might be encountered in shops or public spaces? If so, they might be in for a shock: the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are no more keen than any other parent to find their infant son the focus of unsolicited attention from strangers. In 2014, lawyers for the couple warned a photographer called Niraj Tanna to ‘cease harassing’ Prince George and his nanny after he was spotted by royal protection officers in Battersea Park. A statement from Kensington Palace accused Tanna of ‘placing Prince George under surveillance’ and suggested his behaviour amounted to stalking.18 The photographer denied harassment and insisted that he was entitled to take pictures in a public park.

  In fact, there has been a sea change in attitudes towards children’s privacy in recent years, and photographing them without their parents’ consent is regarded as beyond the pale by most editors. When adults die in tragic circumstances, family photographs are often published with children’s faces obscured, a practice which was unknown in newspapers three decades ago. There is also much greater sensitivity than there used to be about the need to avoid sexualising babies and young children. None of this seems to have registered with the editorial team at Vanity Fair magazine when they decided to produce an issue marking the first birthday of Prince George in 2014. The cover was given over to an informal photogra
ph of William and Kate, the latter grinning and holding their son. The strapline read: ‘Happy Birthday, Prince George! Raising the World’s Most Eligible Infant’.19

  Eligible for what? Inside, the magazine devoted nine-and-a-half pages to drivel about the Prince’s christening, revealing the make of pram chosen by the couple – ‘navy blue, top-of-the-line Silver Cross’ – and describing the baby blue monogrammed sweater given to him as a Christmas gift by his grandfather, the Prince of Wales. The magazine went on to claim that the baby had ‘united the royals with commoners’, a choice of language which was telling in itself. It suggested that the magazine is living in a fantasy version of the UK where cheerful working-class people doff their caps to the royals as they pass and food banks are unknown.

  Succession blues

  It was left to the YouGov poll I’ve already mentioned to pour a welcome bucket of cold water on such extravagant claims, while a breakdown of the results contained a warning for the future of the monarchy. The poll showed that Conservative voters were much more likely to be interested in the birth than Labour supporters, which is unsurprising; many left-of-centre politicians are instinctive republicans, even if they are reluctant to admit it publicly. But the gender difference was striking: many more women than men were following the event, and female commentators showed a marked preference for a female baby. If the scenes following Diana’s death had revealed a previously unremarked tendency among women to identify with female members of the royal family, it became apparent that a generation of women who had grown up in the meantime was now hoping for a new Princess. They were to be disappointed, and that is why the birth of a male third in line to the throne was and is bad news for the monarchy. The UK had a female head of state for almost half of the twentieth century and the Queen is still carrying out royal ‘duties’ – if looking tired and grumpy on occasion – in the first decade-and-a-half of the twenty-first. But the arrival of Prince George means that all the monarchy has to offer for the remainder of the century is an unbroken line of three kings: the Queen’s pantomimic eldest son, his eldest son and his eldest son. Even if they adopt different names on succeeding to the throne, as the Queen’s uncle David (Edward VIII) did, it is now written in stone that the UK’s next three heads of state will be Charles, William and George Windsor. Barring accidents, at least two of them are unlikely to ascend the throne before their sixties or seventies; age on its own is not a reason for ruling someone out of a job, but a royal family with genes for longevity, and access to state-of-the-art health care, is a recipe for what is effectively a gerontocracy. That is one of the reasons why younger members of the family have had to be deployed so extensively on ceremonial occasions, not just to lift some of the burden from the Queen but to obscure the fact that the country’s ceremonial head is approaching ninety. As I write, and assuming that Elizabeth Windsor remains in good health, that birthday is only a year away. No doubt the public celebrations are already being planned and cost will not be a consideration, however weak the state of the economy.

  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.20 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 th
e world to take action against the Ebola outbreak.

  Whatever happened to free speech?

  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:

  Michael [Buerk] seems to paddle calmly over the surface of the water, seamlessly directing affairs.

  However this week on Feedback we had a number of emails suggesting that he hadn’t done his job in last week’s edition about the monarchy, and allowed one of the witnesses, a particularly feisty Joan Smith, to be ‘trampled’ by Michael Portillo.21