The complaining, explaining royal
Prince William is thinking hard about how to modernise the monarchy. But has he got it right?
It seems fair to say that Britain’s royal family isn’t currently presenting itself as an oasis of calm.
Princes Charles and William, among other family members, were reportedly astounded and aghast to see the increasingly frail Queen on Prince Andrew’s arm as she walked to her seat at the memorial service for Prince Philip.
The Duke of York has been forced to retire from all his public duties because of the scandal which has engulfed him over his close friendship with the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein and his procurer, Ghislaine Maxwell. Walking the Queen to her seat has reportedly been seen by horrified fellow-royals as a brazen coup to place himself centre-stage once again. The Mail reports:
The Duke of York is understood to have got his way after lobbying to take his 95-year-old mother to her seat because she 'couldn't say no to her favourite son' despite objections from William and Charles, sources claimed.
Charitable observers might think this fuss overblown. Despite its very public staging, Prince Philip’s memorial service was fundamentally a family occasion. In her role as mother and widow, the Queen understandably wanted to show that, whatever Prince Andrew may have done, he is still her son and that bond is unbreakable.
While it may be correct to exile him from public life, the Queen was making it clear that he was not exiled from her family (and of course, the Queen’s great sadness must surely be that her grandson Prince Harry, who showed both his grandmother and his late grandfather the supreme disrespect of not bothering to attend the memorial service at all, has sent himself into exile from his family and his nation).
A more ominous potential royal problem, however, surely emerged after the recent tour of Belize, Jamaica and the Bahamas by William and Kate, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.
This was always going to be a tricky assignment for Prince William and his wife. Some Caribbean nations, which are part of the Commonwealth, are showing signs of wanting to cut their ties with the British monarchy and become independent republics.
The Cambridges are viewed by the Foreign Office as Britain’s most effective force of “soft power,” particularly because of the Duchess’s increasingly dazzling presence. There were hopes that the Cambridges might stop this particular rot and charm the Caribbean out of its incipient republicanism.
It didn’t quite work out that way. Sent into the lions’ den, the Cambridges duly got mauled.
There were various public relations gaffes with catastrophic optics — greeting Caribbean people through a chain-link fence, for example, and being driven while standing in an open-topped Land Rover, with Prince William in military uniform and the Duchess in a lacy white dress in a tableau that looked as if it had been cut and pasted from the imperial 1930s. This played into local protests about “colonialism,” and demands for apologies and reparations for Britain’s role in the slave trade.
Not surprisingly, Prince William was by all accounts furious. It wasn’t clear, however, who or what was the focus of his anger — the maladroit optics, the Foreign Office and his own staff who organised the trip, the Caribbean politicians and activists who virtually told him to his face that the British monarchy was no longer wanted, the media which reported the tour as a “catastrophe” despite the enthusiasm with which the Cambridges had been received by ordinary people; or all of these.
His public reaction, however, hit a very unwise note. He was said to want to rip up the “old school model” for such tours and do things instead “the Cambridge way”. And what would that way involve? Apparently it means junking the royal family’s mantra of “never complain, never explain”.
“The prince believes that for him, the days of ‘never complain’ are over,” said a source. “He won’t be speaking out regularly but believes if the monarchy has something to say, then it should say it.”
No, no, no!! The whole point of the British monarchy, the reason it exists and endures, is that it is above politics. It resolutely does not embroil itself in controversies. It never takes sides. It exists to unite the nation and thus inspire it.
As soon as an opinion is voiced on an issue — including Prince William’s emotional breast-beating about slavery — it divides people. Some people, for example, resent this constant imperial guilt trip being visited upon Britain, since much of the world participated in slavery and it was Britain that led the campaign to abolish it.
Even Prince William’s unprecedented statement that it was up to the Caribbean nations themselves to decide whether or not to become republics, and that the royals “will not be telling people what to do” — which was in fact no more or less than a truism and statement of the obvious — was unwise.
This was because it immediately invited differing opinions about his tone — too defensive? too bullish? too ingratiating? — as well as wrongly implying that the Crown makes British foreign policy. It doesn’t. That’s the role of the government.
The role of the monarchy is to be a blank page onto which the public can project its image of the nation — which then reflects back upon the public an image of itself, and thus unites it in a shared national identity and national project.
If Prince William is not prepared to accept this role, there will be no point in his becoming the monarch at all.
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