What Does The Future Look Like For The British Royal Family_ _ Our History

On St David's Day last year, Prince William undertook his first official duties on a visit to Cardiff with his parents. Prince William is second in line to the throne and might be expected to succeed his father as King of Great Britain and Northern Ireland sometime perhaps in the third decade of the next century. But is his throne secure? It must be a year ago and I would have I'm not so certain now. It depends what happens over the next five years as to whether they get their act together more, whether they explain things to people better, whether they start behaving in a different manner. I would like to rethink and re-answer the question in five years. While the Queen's popularity remains fairly constant, after her there could be trouble. In this case translates to after me, they're all a bit of a shower. A whole range of factors have made the monarchy seem much less impregnable than when the Queen came to the throne. The enormous changes in Britain since then have meant that questions have increasingly arisen about the monarchy's position in a classless society, about its lifestyle and about its finances. All these problems have come to a head with the public unravelling of the royal family. Throughout the century the image of the British monarchy has been centred on its appeal as an idealised family. No one could fail to have noticed that in the Queen's 40th anniversary year all this has been shattered. The marriage of the Duke and Duchess of York has broken up in full public view and even more seriously the Prince and Princess of Wales have appeared to be in a state of civil war. There's scarcely anything that could be more damaging. The monarchy is about the family these days. The royal family is the phrase and it's no coincidence it's the phrase that we use for the monarchy these days. It's not a political or a constitutional institution very much more. The sort of image of the royal family in the 1950s and 1960s which the Queen managed to create, I mean she really turned it in from being a royal family to being a kind of respectable upper middle-class family that people could identify with. I think if it now becomes a collection of single-parent mothers, of children from broken homes, of Hooray Annerys and Sloane Rangers then I think that just undermines the purpose of having it. Why have it to see the worst aspects of family life? The other problem is not just the breakup but is the manner of the breakup. I mean the tabloids could not have made up the stories that surrounded the breakup. Indeed tabloids don't need to make up stories about the royal family anymore because what the royal family does is more ludicrous and bizarre than anything the tabloids could ever make up. The result is that while the older generation remains popular and respected there's a growing belief that the royal family's problems have gone so far that the long-term survival of the monarchy in Britain cannot be guaranteed. I personally believe the monarchy is going to end with the death of the Queen and I think the youth of this country who will be voters and the majority voters will say goodbye, thank you and goodbye. I don't think that if there was a referendum on the death of the Queen if that was in 20 years time the referendum would be anything but a yes vote to the end of the monarchy. This belief is echoed in opinion polls. Two years ago a Moray poll showed that three quarters of the population thought the British monarchy would still be in existence in 50 years time. By June this year the figure had fallen dramatically. Today only 46% of the country believe that Britain will still be a monarchy in the middle of the next century and more seriously only half the country think that Britain would be worse off without a monarchy. This is a pretty gloomy prognosis for the sovereign. So is abolition a real possibility? How do you get rid of a monarch? It's not easy. Last time they had to execute the monarch. Well that's inconceivable. Just think of trying to get a bill through the any house of commons to abolish the monarchy and set up a republic. There'd be room for no other legislation. It would dominate the issue for about two years. People's nerves would crack. Absurd things would be said on both sides. The whole political system would be paralysed. No prime minister in his right mind is going to allow or let alone introduce a bill to turn the United Kingdom into a republic. The idea that the British monarchy is in any way in danger is quite delusory and utterly absurd and I'm saying this at the moment when the tabloid press is inflamed to the point of fever by the travails, the personal travels of one or two members of the family. But just ask these people if you think there's going to be an end to the British monarchy in your lifetime, how's it going to be done and who's going to do it? And the question evaporates. So the continued existence of the monarchy is probably not in question but what may be is its position as a respected and significant institution. I have no doubt that the monarchy is going to survive but there is a real danger that it might survive on terms which would render it trivial and increasingly absurd. That the once great house of Windsor would become instead a kind of monoco monarchy which was just about scandal and frivolity and irrelevance and there is a real danger that that is what might happen. To avoid this possibility it is necessary for the monarchy to reposition itself. To win respect the younger members have to temper their behaviour so they become less interesting to the newspapers. The lifestyle of the monarchy has to become more low-key. The people who advise it need to be more in tune with the times and the monarchy has to convince the population that it really has a useful and serious role to play in the life of the country. The starting point for any scheme to rescue the royal reputation has to be with its finances. Much of the anger over the Fergie scandal was focused on the belief that the royals were living it up at the public expense. Whilst the rest of the country is having to adapt to reduced circumstances the monarchy is still seen to be living in a kind of 19th century opulence. If they weren't living at public expense rows like the recent Morton row would be very different. As long as they live at public expense the British people has a right to probe into things that some people think they shouldn't probe into. They are, they have to be held accountable for their behaviour, moral behaviour as well as public behaviour. If that dimension is removed the insatiable prying into their private lives might be much more controllable than it is now. Public opinion seems to be that the time has come for a more modest monarchy. A Moray poll in June showed that three quarters of the population now think the royal family should not receive as much money as it does. Two reforms in particular have been widely canvassed. First that the queen should pay tax on her private income and second that the monarchy should be less of a family affair and more of a streamlined working institution with fewer members receiving public money through the civil list. Last month at the height of the royal marriage scandals it was rumoured that the queen had finally instructed her solicitors to make the arrangements for her to pay tax. But both the palace and the Inland Revenue have denied the story and some royal critics believe the queen will fight this every inch of the way. For the last 40 years of the queen's reign she has resisted every endeavour of politicians, prime ministers to disclose any detail of her private fortune which has led to all kinds of speculation about it. I see no move on her part to start paying tax after 40 years. Any impetus for her to pay tax and the British public overwhelmingly want her to start paying income tax would have to come from the prime minister, have to come from the privy councillors, have to come essentially from the great and the good in the land. The civil list was fixed for 10 years in 1990 but now even the monarchy's strongest supporters concede that it will almost certainly be cut back. I think it might be one of the developments in the future that those who play a leading part in these events are very carefully selected and chosen. You might have a two-tier royal family if such a distinction would be recognised by the media and the press. Those who are undertaking public duties and are there on the civil list and those who rarely declare that they are private individuals and are treated in the same way as every other citizen. To some extent the royal family is already showing a lower public profile. In an earlier age Lady Helen Windsor, the daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Kent, might have been expected to have had a very grand and public wedding. In fact Lady Helen was married in the relative privacy of St George's Chapel, Windsor, the first royal wedding to have taken place there since 1919. Lady Helen is part of a trend of non-royal royals that includes most notably the children of Princess Anne and of Princess Margaret. I think there's a mood inside the royal family, certainly amongst the junior members of the royal family, that they know they are no longer prepared to tolerate the kinds of pressures, the kinds of intrusions into their lives that they have to do at the moment. So there is a mood, and we've seen it with the Duchess of York, whatever people think about her she wasn't so bad as to be crucified in the way that she was. Now she's left the royal family, other members of the royal family, the junior ones who could have been part of the function of it, just go their own way these days. They don't want to get caught up in that kind of malaise which seems to be affecting the royal family, and by the time we get through to say the year 2020, you will be back to Prince Charles, Princess Diana, if they're still together, Prince William and Prince Harry. That's happening inevitably. If these trends continue the monarchy of the future might look strikingly different. By the middle of the next century it could be a much more limited outfit, with less confusion between its public ceremonial and private family sides, and with a distinction between private residences like Balmoral and official ones like Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle, and the trappings of an opulent lifestyle may be trimmed back too. A royal yacht, certainly not as expensive a one as now. I doubt that they'll have lots of aircraft and trains and so on and so forth, and I doubt that they will have the special status. They probably won't be the head of the Commonwealth, they probably won't be the head of state of many other countries, if any, around the world. So it'll be a very much streamlined, more European monarchy doing a day-to-day job. If all this were to come about, the British monarchy could look something like the Dutch. While Queen Elizabeth and Queen Beatrix both play the role of ceremonial head of state, their styles are actually markedly different. Queen Beatrix gets barely a tenth of the public money received by the House of Windsor, and popular respect for the Dutch monarchy has been achieved by a low-key and modest lifestyle, and a greater emphasis on informality than on grand ceremony. I think the main difference, for example, is if you look at the birthdays of the Queen, you have your troop in the colour, it's terribly formal. The people come to the Queen, they see the Queen from behind crash barriers. Our Queen, when she has her official birthday, she goes to the people. This last birthday, she went to Rotterdam in the new vehicle, not in Rolls-Royce, not a little helicopter. She went in the royal bus. It is a luxurious bus, but still, it's a bus. And while the British royal family goes to great lengths to avoid being seen eating or drinking, Queen Beatrix quite happily accepted a drink from a stallholder. The Dutch royal family has found that presenting a less idealised and more candid public image has fostered a happier and more positive relationship with the press, and has minimised its intrusions. On an official state visit with her husband, at the time her husband was ill, he was suffering from depressions, and when there was an official reception, I was introduced to the Queen and I just asked her how her husband was, and she just answered. She didn't say, oh you grotty little heck, go away. She just said, well, he's getting better, but every morning we look very carefully at the schedule and we see what he can do and what he can't, and at a moment he can't really cope with meetings with lots of people, with large gatherings, so those are the gatherings he will not attend. And the result of that was that there was no gossip in the Dutch papers, there was no sort of backward rumours or whatever, all there was is that of course all the Dutch papers the next day opened with what the Queen said about her husband's illness, but the Queen was in control. We could quote the Queen directly, and you never ever see that in a British paper, it's full of gossip. But it's unlikely that Prince Charles would take the British monarchy all the way down this informal path, abandoning the trooping of the colour for a low-key European style. I think Prince Charles is aware that the pageantry, the pomp and ceremony of monarchy is absolutely essential to it. It's been there for hundreds of years, he's a great historian, he loves history, he loves tradition, and I can't in a million years imagine he would change any of it. But while Prince Charles may not tamper with the formal and ceremonial traditions of the British monarchy, the palace may decide that putting a greater emphasis on working royals, giving value for money, is the best way to regain public support. The monarchy is seen by the British public as a pretty serious thing, sometimes more serious than the media, particularly the tabloids, would let you think about it. Just look at the way the public attitudes to Princess Anne have totally turned themselves around over the last decade. 10, 15 years ago she was the among the least popular of the royals, now she's up at the top of the pops. She's done that by serious attention to save the children and other good works, and by not being seen as frivolous, even through her marital difficulties, that are now apparently more or less behind her, hardly ruffled a feather in the country. This transformation into a low-profile, hard-working royal has made Princess Anne the second most popular member of the royal family after the Princess of Wales. Through her support for unglamorous groups like alcoholics and aid sufferers, Princess Diana has herself achieved a change of image, from elegant clothes horse to compassionate healer of the sick. Princess Diana's popularity is remarkably stable, even her supposedly tacit support for the biography by Andrew Morton, tape recordings of her private conversations and allegations about assignations with men friends, have done nothing to dent her appeal. So perhaps more worrying for the future prestige of the monarchy is the image of her husband, the Prince of Wales, particularly in the event of the nightmare scenario, a divorce. Prince Charles has spent most of his adult life in search of a role. In an attempt to answer the question, what am I for? He has become a high-profile campaigner on matters such as housing, architecture, agriculture and the environment. His supporters say this has made him a popular and relevant figure. I think the general public admire and respect what Prince Charles is doing and I think they are delighted that at last there is somebody who is representing their views and saying what they think. You won't hear that from the leaders of industry, you won't hear it from the top echelons, you will only hear that from the people at grassroots because the prince, I believe, has really touched a chord with those people. I think he will be a brilliant king. I think he knows what people need and want and how he does it, living as he does in this rarefied atmosphere, is quite a feat. But I think that there is a positive campaign to make people believe that he's a pathetic creature and that the monarchy will die with him, that he has no followers in Britain. Other observers are sceptical about the prince as a credible working royal. Prince Charles does try to do something but I also have to say that his concentration span of trying to help these people is not very long unless he gets an instant report back of success, he tends to lose interest. He's quite selfish in the way he runs his official engagements which he undertakes. In the summer, for example, he has his polo fixture list. He might play 40 or 50 times in a two and a half month period, so that's most days, and that list is slung down in front of his private secretary and the private secretaries and the planning people are told, work round that list. One of Prince Charles's problems is that in his search for a relevant role he comes dangerously close to politics. It is almost incredible that in Shakespeare's land one child in seven leaves primary school functionally illiterate. But we must, I believe, accept that in some cases community care on its own is not the answer, that the environment is full of uncertainty. It makes no sense to test it to destruction. And if the prince continues to trespass into politics he may lose the support that sustains the monarchy's very existence. It's all very well for the prince to express his opinion on something and I hope he does that a lot, but to then get involved for campaigning for something quite specific and to be writing to government ministers, I think that is an abuse of royal power and actually people won't like that either because at the end of the day the political process has to be democratic and I think ministers will begin to resent it as well and I think that again the seeds of the destruction of the royal family are involved if it is seen to become a lobbyist group. But no amount of relevance on the part of the prince will be able to compensate for the damage done by a continuing rift with the Princess of Wales. Diana is an immensely popular figure. For him to have treated her as badly as most people believe he did begins to chip away at all the reasons why Charles is popular. Speeches about the rainforests pale into complete insignificance as indeed does community architecture alongside two-timing the most popular woman in the land and apparently being the only man in the land not in love with her. This may all be rather low-grade and emotional stuff but it's very very potent in the context of the monarchy and if Charles begins to lose his popularity he'll begin to lose his plausibility and his chances of being a popular and a successful monarch will be disproportionately damaged. The thought of the marriage ending in divorce has given rise to speculation that it would cause a grave constitutional crisis but such talk is dismissed by constitutional experts. The Church of England accepts the fact of divorce. It deplores it but accepts it. There are however penalties attached to divorce. The Prince of Wales as a future head of the established church would not be able to remarry in church. Other than that however there would be no constitutional consequences. On the other hand one can't deny that the effect on public perceptions of the royal family would be pretty considerable because it would be the third divorce amongst the Queen's children and it would be a very serious situation for the royal family and for that reason I don't believe a divorce will occur. The spectacular and public end to Britain's royal fairy tale has been a grave humiliation for the House of Windsor but the change in public attitudes that has resulted may actually be a change for the better. For years people have lived by various cozy ideas surrounding the monarchy. Over the last few months the myths have been exploded and people are having to come to terms with the reality of monarchy with the reality of the royal family raw sometimes in tooth and claw and in many respects people are having to absorb that as we speak. If we look at it with less rose-tinted spectacles and see that it is a group of people doing a very difficult job in the very trying circumstances to accept their faults and to not to try and make them perfect not to put them on pedestals not to make them icons I think that their lives will be that much easier and that much happier and that we as a society will be that much healthier. For this to be achieved the monarchy too has to be prepared to view itself in a less idealized and more realistic way but there are a few signs that this is happening. There are really two different and very contradictory versions of the monarchy on offer at the moment. On the one side there is the monarchy's view of itself as magical admirable splendid in some sense embodying the greatness and identity of the nation. On the other side we have as it were the tabloid or journalistic view of a family at war with itself very unhappy infirm of purpose not paying its taxes and so on and this gap between these two versions of the monarchy is just getting wider and wider and whether it can be indefinitely bridged it's impossible to say. The monarchy has to bridge this credibility gap if it is to survive as a respected institution of British life. Today it has a historic opportunity to reinvent itself and to introduce the necessary financial and other reforms and to see itself in a new and more practical light. If it doesn't and decides to try and weather the storm it runs the risk that by the time Prince William ascends to the throne it will be little more than a colourful irrelevance.