Better a pope than a king? A president over a prime minister? Who has the right to tell us how to lead our lives and who do they speak for? What is legitimacy?
That last question lies at the heart of the British monarchy’s recent exposure to the warped logic of cancel culture. It arises thanks to the explosive charge made by Meghan to Oprah Winfrey; that a member of the royal family expressed ‘concern’ about the colour of her unborn, mixed-race baby when she was pregnant. A lot’s been written about the ambiguity of such a serious allegation. Later in the interview, Harry said a version of the remark was actually made to him – not to Meghan – and before he and the Duchess of Sussex were even married.
As prima facie evidence of hate-speech goes, none of that would have survived cross-examination.
The Winfrey extravaganza was hagiographical, not judicial. Meghan’s reluctance to name the ‘senior royal’ who’d asked about the baby’s colour was pure sophistry. A cloud of alleged bigotry now lies over the heads of – not one – but many royal heads. The institution itself is tainted.
In a multi-racial country like Britain, this matters.
The hereditary principle that underpins monarchy means it cannot undergo the transformation demanded of other organisations at the heart of national life. A campaign called #BBCTooWhite can get instant results. A bit of affirmative action here, a little pensioning off of an old white man there. But the monarchy? Even if you could mandate Prince George to marry inter-racially, change could be decades away. Is that quick enough for culture warriors on their quick-march through the institutions?
The monarchy is a living embodiment of British history, at a time when depictions of British history are subject to unprecedented retrospective examination. Diversity is now a visual and compulsory leitmotif; from the trenches of Flanders to the inns of Poldark’s Cornwall. An all-white line-up like the one we still see on the Buckingham Palace balcony will strike some activists as anachronistic and unsustainable.
Democratic institutions don’t face this dilemma. Two of the four highest offices in the UK government have BAME occupants. Political parties are responsive to the emergence of new groups of voters whose electoral habits may not, initially at least, be colour blind.
The monarchy can’t change quickly, but it can respond. The sovereign may be anointed by God – as the Church of England professes – but the royal household is chosen by an HR department, and senior courtiers can reflect the changing face of modern Britain. Lieutenant Colonel Nana Kofi Twumasi-Ankrah was born in Ghana but, in 2017, became the first Black equerry to serve the Queen.
The monarchy, however, has taken a hit.
Some Commonwealth countries may now accelerate their plans to ditch the sovereign as head of state. But the damage is probably less serious in the UK, where the silent majority of BAME Britons don’t buy the idea of racist royalty. As a former royal correspondent I saw the regard in which organisations like the Prince’s Trust were held among black Britons especially.
A 25-year-old keyboard warrior may have no memory of Prince Charles’ pioneering multi-faith work in the 1980s, but many older first and second generation British Muslims will remember his determination to be “Defender of all faiths”. It was a position widely mocked at the time but Charles, whose warnings on the environment and farming have arguably proved prophetic, can make another claim for prescience when it comes to reading Britain’s religious road map.
And in all this we might try and remember what purpose the monarchy serves. Even if republicans get their way (and the polls show only about a quarter of the British population is interested in abolition), change – if it comes at all – will come slowly and peacefully. This isn’t Myanmar.
And even if the meritocratic impulse grows irresistible, it may be impossible to dissolve a modern monarchy of the media age. In the last century, when the royal houses of Europe were being destroyed, there was no such thing as rolling news and Twitter.
You could strip away some of their titular constitutional prerogatives, but you couldn’t march the Windsors into the forest to face the firing squad. There would always be a noisy rump of the country that was royalist. That impulse to be a subject would take centuries to disinvent.
Perhaps more importantly, we now live in an era of identity politics, where class matters less than a slew of protected characteristics. Many of the migrants or children of migrants who’ve arrived in Britain in recent decades are aspirational. They do not see the royals as sitting at the apex of a class pyramid, but as symbols of continuity and stability.
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