I admire the Queen as much as the next Sex Pistols fan. I saw the Pistols at the Lafayette Club in Wolverhampton in 1977. I didn’t realise who they were and thought they were dreadful. You would have thought “God save the Queen/ The fascist regime” might have been a clue, but I may have missed the start of their set.
Anyway, I never thought hers was a fascist regime. I liked Sunny Uncle Jim Callaghan, and voted for him in my first election two years later. Which was still, if you must know, closer to the end of the Second World War than to the present day. And the Queen has been Queen all my life, so I am used to her. I don’t mind continuity and have always been respectful of her “less is more” approach to shooting her mouth off. She has long been like a royal and female Clement Attlee – a semi-mythical figure based on a real historical person into whom people can read the qualities they most revere.
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Comment: Why do we put up with the Royal Family?
I disliked the younger members of the Royal Family – except Anne, because she told photographers to get lost, from a horse – but thought Elizabeth herself had a wise line in discretion and in keeping too much light from getting in on the magic. She managed the mystique of the monarchy reasonably well (even when her children’s marriages collapsed) until the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997. That brought on a bad wobble – although, looking back, talk of a republican moment was probably overdone. There was an emotional reaction to Diana’s death, and the Queen was briefly on the wrong side of it because she failed to see the symbolism of not flying the flag on Buckingham Palace at half-mast. But she recovered quickly enough, thanks not least to advice from her 10th prime minister, Tony Blair, who had a better instinct for public opinion. She put the flag down and went on television to talk about her feelings.
Blair’s was an act of selfless service to the monarchy for which he was never forgiven. So he and Gordon Brown weren’t invited to William and Kate’s wedding in 2011 but Margaret Thatcher and John Major were. The vindictiveness and partisanship of the ruling classes knows no bounds, and now has passed to the new generation, the otherwise cannily presented and tactfully taciturn William.
So I am glad the Queen has lived so long, although length of time on the throne is not like being Prime Minister: it is not a competition. She is right to refuse to mark the arbitrary date on which she overtakes Victoria. And long may she continue to reign over us (without any executive power).
Ever since I bought My Queen and I, the polemic against the monarchy by the republican Labour MP Willie Hamilton, in 1975, I thought she should be allowed to serve out her time. The question was always what would come next. The succession might be the time, if not for a republican moment, for an unwinding of the mystique and myths around the real person of the monarch.
When I was a leader writer for this newspaper, I once wrote an editorial calling on the Royal Family to become more like a normal family, modelled on the bicycling Dutch monarchy, and concluded with the injunction: “On your bike, Ma’am.” Sadly, this appeal fell on deaf ears, and the Queen has not yet been filmed on a Santander Boris bike pedalling around London.
I can’t see Prince Charles going Dutch either. I have long been resistant to the idea of having that shrub-botherer as my king. I am more hostile to him than to his mother, mainly because of the way he treated Diana, but I am not implacably opposed to him. I agree with him about architecture, and remember the time he visited a Brixton youth club in the 1980s. One youth, delighted to see him, exclaimed, “You gonna be king, man, you gonna be king!” Charles replied drily, “That’s the general idea.”
He can play the part, then, but for what purpose? A change of face at the top is a chance to bring this undignified and over-long reality TV series to an end. I do not find a hereditary monarchy as offensive in principle now as I did when I was younger. As long as they have no power, there is nothing too terrible about inherited titles and a bit of harmless pageantry.
But what has turned me against the continuation of the Royal Family is the difficulty of their becoming a family like any other while the monarchy is at the top of a hierarchy of celebrity.
The clinching argument for a republic is that a monarchy requires child cruelty. It is unkind and wrong to bring up children in the public eye, in such an artificial environment, being told that they are different from (and by implication better than) their fellow citizens.
The last argument against a republic, the last refuge, is that an elected president would be too awful. Well, most countries manage it and it doesn’t involve cruelty to anyone under 18.
It doesn’t matter what I think, of course, because Charles’s succession is going to change the popularity of the monarchy in any case. The Queen is respected; Charles is not. His well-meaning activism has given him a reputation as an interfering bossypants. If Charles has any sense, he will scale back the royal operation, move it out of the big houses and try to promote equality of respect among all citizens. That doesn’t seem likely, but when Charles eventually succeeds, I will be there to say, “On your bike, Sir.”
