Читать книгу The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor - Penny Junor - Страница 6

Once upon a time kings and queens ruled the land. There was nothing mysterious about it; some of them invaded to take up the throne, others inherited via one route or another, but once installed they governed, they were the executive, they were all-powerful, they had their own armies and they chopped off the heads of anyone who thwarted them. People may not have liked their monarch, they may have grumbled about taxes or the extravagance of the court, or been tired of endless skirmishes with France, but no one was ever in any doubt about what their monarch was for.

Twelve hundred years later, after many changes (and a brief period in the seventeenth century when there was no monarch at all), we have a Queen who has no executive power, who acts entirely on the advice of ministers, who reads speeches that others have written, and who relies upon government for her keep. Four years after she came to the throne, a poll suggested that 34 per cent of the population believed that Elizabeth II had been chosen by God. Today you’d be hard pushed to find anyone who believed that God was involved in the process – it’s becoming enough of a challenge to find people who believe in God, full stop. Under these circumstances, in an age when our social order is based upon merit rather than inheritance, it is not surprising that we should ask what monarchy is for. Most children haven’t a clue, wouldn’t recognize members of the Royal Family and probably couldn’t care less. Their local football team or the latest contestants in I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out Of Here! are more relevant to their lives. There is indifference among the younger generation that must make the future of the monarchy highly questionable.

Republicanism is nothing new. There has always been a minority chipping away at the credibility of the monarchy, and although they seem to be increasingly vocal, they are still very much in the minority. But today even monarchists are beginning to question whether the institution, steeped as it is in history and tradition, can survive in the current climate of indifference and disrespect towards institutions and authority. And perhaps more importantly, as the newest member, the controversial figure of Camilla Parker Bowles is finally welcomed into the fold, as HRH the Duchess of Cornwall, whether the Royal Family, as individuals, can survive the ever more intrusive and destructive demands of the modern media.

The world has changed during the course of the present Queen’s reign, arguably more radically in the time span than at any period in history. Television was in its infancy when the Queen came to the throne in 1952. Many families, my own included, bought their first television set to watch the coronation – tiny little black and white sets that had to warm up before you saw a picture which then shrunk to a white dot when you turned them off. Fifty-two years later even the most modest mobile home has a colour television with a satellite dish on the roof, and in most households people would sell their granny before parting with the TV. It sits in pride of place, chattering away every waking hour, and defines our view of the world. News rolls seamlessly into drama, fact into fiction and all that is remembered is the sound bite.

And what television has created is the cult of the celebrity. People whose faces we recognize from the screen are the new idols, no matter whether they have talent, wit or wisdom. If their face has been on the box often enough for it to become familiar, they have instant status and national fame. And the public is greedy to know everything about its celebrities – which is where newspapers come into their own.

Newspapers have also changed since the fifties. When the Queen first came to the throne the newspapers, reflecting the age, were deferential towards the monarch. Proprietors could be relied upon to keep any whiff of royal scandal out of the papers. There were two court correspondents employed by the Press Association who went to Buckingham Palace for briefings – dressed in morning dress and top hat – and meekly lapped up official notices and announcements.

Today’s equivalent is a tabloid ‘rat pack’ charged by their editors with finding exclusives – gossip, scandal and as much personal detail as possible, and, in some cases, by whatever means possible. And the Royal Family is considered to be fair game, as the Countess of Wessex discovered to her cost when a reporter posing as a Middle Eastern sheik tried to employ her PR company. Actors, footballers, pop stars, politicians – many have suffered similar stings or found themselves unwillingly making headline news. And for a family that is dependent upon an army of staff to run their lives, it was only a matter of time before some of them became disgruntled or found irresistible the opportunity to make money by speaking to the press.

This is the environment in which today’s monarchy has to operate. It needs the oxygen of publicity no less than actors, entertainers and politicians, or anyone else with something to sell. The Queen understands this only too well, from history as well as her own experience. Never has the monarchy been so unpopular in modern times as when Queen Victoria vanished from sight after Prince Albert’s death in 1861. In her grief, she hid herself away at Balmoral and, although she carried on the affairs of state perfectly well, she did not make a public appearance in London for three years. The people were furious and when they did finally catch sight of her they pelted her carriage with stones. It was apparently not enough that she saw to her constitutional duties. The present Queen stayed away from London after the death of the Princess of Wales – she was also at Balmoral – and the public was again furious. They wanted to see their Queen. The newspaper headlines during the week before the funeral were the most critical of her reign and it was not until she returned to London and spoke to the nation on television, both as a grandmother and as Head of State, that the crisis, possibly the most serious of her reign, was averted.

The question is why? Why did so many thousands of people flock to Buckingham Palace in their grief rather than to Kensington Palace, which was where Diana had lived after all? Why did the nation want to see the Queen so badly? Strictly speaking, at the time of her death Diana was no longer a member of the Royal Family, and anyway, ought it not to have been her former husband to whom they should have looked?

The reason, I suspect, goes to the very heart of what monarchy is all about. It goes far beyond the constitutional. The Queen provides the focus for the nation’s emotion. When the nation is in mourning, it looks to the monarch to lead the process. In every major disaster, from Aberfan in 1966, where schoolchildren were buried beneath tons of coal slag, to 9/11, in 2001, when al-Qaeda suicide bombers flew passenger aircraft into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, or the Asian tsunami that killed over 120,000 people on Boxing Day in 2004 and left millions homeless, the Queen or another close member of the Royal Family has been there to express the nation’s grief. When the nation is jubilant at having won the World Cup or gold medals at the Olympics, the Queen congratulates and honours the winning teams on our behalf. When the East End of London and other cities were bombed during the Second World War the Queen’s parents, George VI and Queen Elizabeth, went to visit the devastation and much of the warmth that attached to the Queen Mother throughout her life came as a result of the solidarity and concern she and the King showed to the people of London.

The magic of monarchy is in the seeing. And it is magic – despite what cynics might say. Many of the people who work for the Queen and accompany her on away days and foreign tours describe their jobs as being the ‘Feel-Good Business’. And there is no doubt that people do feel good when they meet her. It doesn’t seem to matter that the papers have been filled with tawdry details of her children’s domestic disasters – the day she comes to town they stand for hours in all weathers clutching Union Jacks. They cheer when her gleaming Bentley with its royal flag on the roof appears with its police motorcycle outriders down the car-free high street. They cheer again when she steps out, smiling and waving; they reach forward at perilous angles to offer flowers and posies, proffer their children, and click frantically at their pocket Pentaxes when she comes within range. Everyone is smiling, everyone is elated and everyone takes away with them a memory to treasure for the rest of their lives. And for those who strike lucky and are the ones the Queen stops and talks to, they will probably never have an experience to match it.

Of course, the people who want to see the Queen on these visits already like her and probably approve of the institution. If they didn’t they wouldn’t bother standing and waiting in all weathers. But there are other occasions on which the Queen meets people when that is not the case. Not every worker in a factory, hospital or school is a monarchist; not everyone who is invited to a garden party or a reception at Buckingham Palace is a devoted fan, but there are not many who fail to be impressed when they meet the Queen, or who are indifferent to the recognition of their work and worth that such a meeting implies.

Recognizing, thanking, praising and rewarding citizens for their bravery, dedication, charity or work is another part of the monarch’s job. At one end of the scale outstanding service is rewarded to an individual with a peerage or a knighthood – although most of that is on the Prime Minister’s say-so and overtly political – but at the other end a visit to a factory is no less significant, and for the people on the production line to be asked to explain what they do by the Queen or the Prince of Wales, her heir, or even another member of the Royal Family, is a real fillip. It’s like as a schoolchild being singled out for praise by the headmistress when you didn’t even think she knew your name. People feel that their effort has been noticed and is appreciated, and in the lower-paid jobs that tend to be vocational, such as nursing or care work, that matters.

During the nineteenth century the family became an important part of monarchy, as Benjamin Disraeli, Prime Minister in 1868 and again from 1874 to 1880, acknowledged: ‘The influence of the Crown is not confined merely to political affairs. England is a domestic country. Here the home is revered and the hearth sacred. The nation is represented by a family – the Royal Family; and if that family is educated with a sense of responsibility and a sentiment of public duty, it is difficult to exaggerate the salutary influence they may exercise over a nation.’

Walter Bagehot was the first to note this. A Victorian economist and political analyst, Bagehot is often quoted from his book The English Constitution, first published in 1867 and which still provides the most enduring analysis of monarchy to date. ‘A family on the throne is an interesting idea,’ he wrote. ‘It brings down the pride of sovereignty to the level of petty life. No feeling could seem more childish than the enthusiasm of the English at the marriage of the Prince of Wales. They treated as a great political event, what, looked at as a matter of pure business, was very small indeed. But no feeling could be more like common human nature as it is, and as it is likely to be.’

The Prince of Wales he was referring to was the future Edward VII and the marriage that of Edward to the Danish Princess Alexandra in 1863, but he could just as easily have been writing about the first marriage of the present Prince of Wales to Lady Diana Spencer in 1981, 112 years later. There was a great display of childish enthusiasm for the event: the newspapers talked about little else for weeks beforehand, London’s Oxford Street hosted the biggest street party in the world in the couple’s honour, there was a massive fireworks display in Hyde Park and celebratory beacons were lit up and down the country. On the day of the wedding – declared a public holiday – millions lined the route between Buckingham Palace and St Paul’s Cathedral; the first arrivals had staked their claim to a piece of pavement three days before the wedding and an estimated seven hundred million more watched it on television. The Royal Wedding, as it was referred to for many years, notwithstanding the fact it had not been the only one, was a major landmark in most people’s memories, and until the cracks began to show it was an event that reaffirmed the monarchy’s place in people’s hearts.

Those were halcyon days. For the first thirty-five years of the Queen’s reign the Royal Family had been everything the nation could have wished for, a model for us all. But since then three of her four children have been through a divorce, with all the tawdry details paraded by the press, and the influence they exercise over the nation today is perhaps less than salutary. The troubled private life of the Prince of Wales, who finally, in February 2005, announced his intention to marry Camilla Parker Bowles, has made international news on and off for nearly twenty years. The breakdown of his marriage to Diana – according to her because of his obsession with Camilla – her revelations about their life together, his admission of adultery on prime-time television, their divorce and her subsequent death, split the nation’s loyalty. Some people recognized it to be an ill-starred match from the start and felt nothing but sympathy for everyone involved. Others, for whom Diana was an icon, roundly blamed the Prince, as Diana had done, for having destroyed her happiness. And the question of whether he should marry Camilla Parker Bowles, the figure at the centre of it, caused even greater division in the country.

But their private lives are a distraction. What the Royal Family does do, divorced or not, is work tirelessly for the people of Britain. First and foremost they give an inestimable boost to charity. The Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and each of their children, as well as several more distant relations, are all attached to charities – hundreds of them – to which they give time and support, and those charities benefit demonstrably from their royal connection. The profile goes up and so too do the donations; and there are many areas of national life, including education and health, that rely heavily upon the charitable sector.

Then there is tourism. Again, it is demonstrable that having a real live Royal Family who walk the corridors of Buckingham Palace, the Palace of Holyroodhouse and Windsor Castle is much more of a draw to visitors than empty buildings steeped in history; in Britain visitors get the best of both worlds. Hotels, shops, restaurants, pubs, trains, planes, taxis, car hire firms, not to mention galleries, museums and the regular tourist attractions and street stalls, all reap the rewards of having a town full of tourists.

But there are other functions of monarchy. Representing the nation to itself is another important one. The fact that the Royal Family has been a fixture in the life of everyone born and bred in either Britain or one of her dominions means that we associate the Royal Family with our roots, with home. They are familiar, just as red telephone boxes and double-decker buses are familiar, or driving on the left-hand side of the road, and for many people those familiars are comforting and define who we are and what we stand for. You may dislike buses, think phone boxes old-fashioned and think we would be better off driving on the right, but those fixtures still denote home and form part of our identity.

And because they are a fixture and change only imperceptibly, their very presence creates stability and continuity. The Queen has appeared in our living rooms on Christmas afternoon for more than fifty years; she has been Trooping the Colour on her official birthday on Horse Guards Parade for as long, and laying a wreath at the Cenotaph every 11 November. She and the Royal Family spend August in Scotland, Christmas at Sandringham, Easter at Windsor Castle and the Queen hasn’t missed Royal Ascot since 1945. It takes a birth, a death or a disaster to alter the routine of the Royal Family, and when so much else in life is turning upside down, that permanence and predictability provides an anchor, a national reference point, which makes people feel secure.

But her most obvious role is Head of State; she is also Supreme Governor of the Church of England, Colonel-in-Chief of the Armed Forces and Head of the Commonwealth. As a constitutional monarch, the Queen has no executive power – everything is done on advice from her ministers – and she reigns rather than rules, but she has great capacity for influence. She keeps her ministers in check and the system keeps the monarch in check. She undertakes ceremonial duties such as opening Parliament – and has the prerogative, among other things, to close it too should the need arise – she receives visiting heads of state, goes on state visits to other countries, receives diplomats, holds investitures and keeps abreast of affairs of state by weekly audiences with her prime minister and ‘doing the boxes’, her daily digest of Cabinet papers, Foreign and Commonwealth telegrams and ministerial papers. And having spent more than fifty years steeped in state papers, travelling the world, visiting cities, towns and villages, meeting everyone from presidents to farm and factory workers, she has more experience than anyone else in government. She has worked with eleven prime ministers and was discussing affairs of state with Winston Churchill before Tony Blair was even born.

That, in a nutshell, is what monarchy is for. Its critics say the system is outdated, that the hierarchical and hereditary nature of the institution is unacceptable in modern society, that the Royal Family lives a life of privilege and luxury at public expense and does nothing to earn it; individuals have been accused of abusing their position. All points that need to be addressed in assessing whether the monarchy is relevant in twenty-first-century Britain and whether it is likely to have a future beyond the reign of Queen Elizabeth II.

What follows is highly subjective. Having written about the Royal Family on and off for more than twenty years I have seen a lot of change, met a lot of people who have worked with and for members of the Royal Family, and seen the effect that they and their work and activity have had on individuals and society as a whole. I was not a dedicated monarchist when I started twenty years ago, and I am certainly not without criticism now. Nor am I without fears for the future. But I am convinced that this system that has stood the test of time, hierarchical and hereditary though it is, enriches our community beyond measure and Britain would be a poorer place without a monarch at the helm. And this is why…