Down With the Royals (4 page)

This is a tragic story but it raises a subject which is sensitive and rarely discussed. Ms Saldanha seems to have felt genuine affection towards the royal family, but that is not automatically the case among immigrants to the UK. Some people who were not born here feel there is an expectation that they should defer to its institutions, to the extent of internalising a kind of patriotism even more onerous than that which is placed on the
indigenous population. Even on the left, some people defend immigration by pointing out how much recent arrivals to this country ‘love’ the royal family. It is a form of stereotyping – a demand that they should display their adopted ‘Britishness’ – which makes many first-and second-generation immigrants uncomfortable. Some of them might reasonably argue, in an atmosphere of growing hostility to foreigners, that they don’t feel able to say that they have no particular admiration for the royal family. If home-grown republicans regularly risk the wrath of the
Daily Mail
, a newspaper not known for its warm embrace of immigrants, how much harder is it for foreigners to criticise the monarchy?

At the very least, this tragic sequence of events is a reminder that we should be acutely aware of the danger of investing royal personages with exaggerated significance. There is a dark underside to a constant diet of royal trivia, encouraging people to regard the royals as not just different from the rest of us but creatures who need to be wrapped in cotton wool. Some individuals identify with members of the family to an extent that isn’t healthy, as the reaction to Princess Diana’s death
showed in 1997. On that occasion, bunches of flowers and sentimental messages outside Kensington Palace coexisted uncomfortably with outbursts of anger towards those of us who were not in mourning and did not feel personally touched by the death of someone we had never met. This fluctuation between sentimentality and intolerance is among many reasons why we urgently need a calm, rational and grown-up discussion about the monarchy in this country. What would such an unthinkable conversation look like? That’s the subject I’m going to address in the next section.

I
F WE FORGET
about the Windsors as individuals for a moment, the most powerful arguments against a hereditary monarchy are that it is undemocratic, expensive and unaccountable. I am going to address the arguments in that order, and the first two are easily dealt with. The third element, the royal family’s extensive political interference and influence, needs more space because it has been quite deliberately concealed from us. At a time when most public institutions and individuals, including MPs, have been held up to minute and often painful scrutiny, it is an extraordinary fact that since 2010 the monarchy has enjoyed complete immunity from requests under the FOI Act. Even when members of the family
are
told to hand over correspondence
from an earlier period which shows the extent of their influence, ministers are on hand to veto publication, leading to lengthy (and publicly funded) court battles. But first I want to look at the nonsensical idea that a single family should own the privilege, in perpetuity, of providing heads of state for a country of more than 60 million people.

If we were told that the UK’s prime ministers would in future be drawn from a single family – the descendants of John Major, say, or Tony Blair – there would rightly be an outcry. Even when family members of former PMs harbour political ambitions, as one of Blair’s sons does, there is no automatic route into the House of Commons; they are expected to state their party allegiance, reveal their political views and stand for election to the House of Commons like anyone else. And while the prospect of the Prince of Wales going on the stump, addressing meetings in town halls and draughty community centres, is admittedly quite appealing, it is also improbable. What could he say? In 2013, Charles reached what used to be the standard male retirement age of sixty-five without ever having had a proper job. Most of his
political interventions are shrouded in secrecy, as we shall see, and his credentials amount to little more than the single word he uttered at the diamond jubilee concert: ‘Mummy’. As Charles knows very well, the whole point of hereditary monarchy is that it allows people like him to bypass the inconvenient chores associated with democracy, such as knocking on doors and trying to persuade sceptical voters. The consequence is a system that fails every single test of diversity and equality, a fact that has been dimly grasped by at least some of Europe’s remaining monarchies. In several countries, elderly kings or queens have started worrying about their dwindling popularity and abdicated in favour of the next generation; so far it has happened in Belgium, the Netherlands and Spain. The latter’s King Juan Carlos I – of whom we shall hear more later – is said to have observed that he didn’t want his son, the Prince of Asturias, ‘to grow old waiting for the throne like Prince Charles’.
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But even such limited acknowledgements of the system’s shortcomings are too radical for the UK,
where the Queen clings tenaciously to office after (as I write) almost sixty-three years on the throne. Once she dies, the
de facto
list of people excluded from becoming head of state for at least three generations will go like this: no women, no black people, no Asians, no Jews and certainly no Catholics (still barred by law). I also doubt whether we’ll see an openly secular or gay king, unless the royal family changes dramatically.

As well as being unrepresentative, the system is unnecessarily expensive. The cost of providing for an entire family is obviously much greater than funding the office of an elected head of state, whose relatives would rarely, if ever, be required to undertake public duties. The royal finances are another area where most of the British media fail to do their job, producing annual good-news stories with headlines like this one: ‘What a bargain! How the royal family costs you just 56p a year’.
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That figure is arrived at by dividing the ‘cost’ of the monarchy, estimated at £35.7 million in 2013, by the population of the UK. This means of calculation is 
very useful to the monarchy, producing quotes like this one from the editor of a royal magazine: ‘The monarchy is exceptionally good value at 56p per person. We are looking at money for the Royal Family performing all their official duties. I know some people won’t agree but I think it still represents an excellent use of public money.’
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Most of this is nonsense, as a closer look at the royal finances shows. Even if we were to accept the figure of almost £36 million at face value, the British monarchy is still one of the most expensive in Europe. A report published by Republic
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suggests that Sweden’s monarchy has an annual cost of £15 million, Denmark £13 million and Luxembourg £9 million. The Netherlands and Norway are above the official UK figure, at £40 million and £41 million respectively, but the problem with such comparisons is that the British total excludes huge costs to taxpayers. One significant element that doesn’t appear in the official estimates is the 
cost of providing security for numerous members of the British royal family, along with the bill for royal visits. The security figure is particularly contentious because it includes providing protection for the Queen’s relatives when they are not performing official duties, which is almost certainly why we are banned from knowing it; at a time when public services are being cut to the bone, taxpayers might look askance if they knew how much of their money is spent on police escorts for shopping trips and visits to nightclubs. Republic estimates the cost of royal security at around £100 million; adding in other likely costs, such as £21.5 million for royal visits, Republic believes that the annual cost of the British monarchy is in the region of £300 million. Of course, we can’t know this for certain, and I’m sure the royal household would question its accuracy, but the answer is simple: if the monarchy has nothing to fear, why doesn’t it publish full accounts instead of leaving out the most expensive elements? No other public institution would get away with this sleight of hand, denying essential financial information from the public which bears the cost. But then it is not even as if the royal household manages the
Queen’s finances efficiently; a report published by the House of Commons public accounts committee in 2014 showed that the royal household had been dipping into cash reserves to cover overspending, with the Queen’s contingency fund falling from £35 million in 2001 to a historic low of £1 million.
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The committee concluded that the royal household was ‘not looking after nationally important heritage properties adequately’, allowing too many of them to fall into disrepair; almost 40 per cent of the royal estate’s buildings were not in an ‘acceptable’ condition in 2012. The committee heard that the state rooms at Buckingham Palace had not been redecorated or re-wired since 1952, while the boilers were sixty years old; asbestos needed to be removed from significant areas of the building; there were leaks in the roof of the picture gallery.
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So much for the idea that the royals are fit and proper custodians of the country’s heritage.

Opaque accounting, regular overspending and crumbling palaces: this is the real story about the state of the 
royal finances. There is no doubt that we could adopt a cheaper and more transparent option, with no loss of prestige. But the secrecy around royal finances needs to be seen in the context of an even larger problem, which is the extent to which the monarchy is allowed to withhold important information across the board. That’s why we now need to look at the myth that they are ‘above politics’, a fiction colluded in not just by royal aides but by government ministers, historians and most of the press.

There is an ignoble tradition here which stretches at least as far back as the 1930s. In those days a new king, Edward VIII, courted popularity with ordinary people by visiting impoverished communities but managed, for the most part, to conceal his support for the Nazi regime in Germany. This was, to be fair, an enthusiasm shared by the owners and editors of some British newspapers, most notably the
Daily Mail
; its proprietor, Lord Rothermere, wrote an article for his own
paper in 1934 entitled ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’. When Edward succeeded to the throne in 1936, diplomats at the German embassy in London cabled Hitler with an assurance that the new King urgently wanted an alliance between Britain and Germany.
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Edward’s reign was disastrous and thankfully short-lived, ending in his abdication after only eleven months so he could marry an American, Wallis Simpson; in 1937, shortly after their marriage, the couple ignored the advice of the British government and visited Germany. The new Duke and Duchess of Windsor met Hitler, had dinner with his deputy, Rudolf Hess, and visited a concentration camp. FBI documents released many years later appeared to suggest that Simpson’s pro-Nazi views had alarmed the British Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, and it was those connections – not her status as a divorced woman – that meant that the King could not marry her and remain on the throne.
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Despite all this, Edward VIII continues to be widely regarded as a misguided but
tragic figure who gave up the throne because he fell in love with a divorced woman. His brother, George VI, has recently been eulogised in a sentimental film,
The
King’s Speech
; the movie ends with the King overcoming his speech impediment in time to make a radio address to the nation after the government’s declaration of war on Germany, a patriotic gesture which neatly erases his elder brother’s dubious political sympathies.

In the twenty-first century, no one suspects members of the royal family of fascist sympathies, but the fact that they have partisan views is carefully spin-doctored out of public debate. In party terms, it is hard to believe that they are anything other than natural-born Tories, as an entry in the diaries of the former Labour MP Woodrow Wyatt, a close friend of the Queen Mother, appeared to confirm. In 1986, during a conversation with Wyatt about the following year, the Queen Mother suddenly asked whether it would ‘be all right’; she was asking for an assurance, he explained, that Margaret Thatcher would win the next general election.
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Wyatt recorded that the Queen Mother ‘adores Mrs Thatcher’, an admiration apparently shared by other members of the family who often drank ‘a toast at the end of dinner’ to the Conservative Prime Minister. Another person the Queen Mother admired was P. W. Botha, the leader of apartheid-era South Africa who refused to release Nelson Mandela and was later found responsible for gross violations of human rights; she thought it was ‘awful how the BBC and media misrepresent everything that Botha is trying to do’. She was less keen on the leaders of Commonwealth countries who argued for sanctions against South Africa, once describing President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia as ‘an idiot’. Wyatt also recorded that she liked Jews but thought they were a ‘separate’ and ‘strange’ people; he said she had ‘some reservations about Jews in her old-fashioned English way’.
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Such views would have been common among upper-middle-class women and indeed men of the Queen Mother’s generation, where anti-Semitism and racism were never far below the surface. But they are hard to square with the unblemished reputation she enjoyed in her lifetime, casting her in the role of a wise and kindly matriarch. Nor is it easy to imagine her grandchildren or great-grandchildren voting Labour, even if they were eligible to do so.

Something happened in the autumn of 2014, however, that finally exploded the myth of an apolitical monarchy. Thanks to the Scottish referendum on independence, we now have an unequivocal example of the Queen intervening in politics at a moment of constitutional crisis. Naturally, she did it in such a way that it was left to the media to ‘interpret’ her remarks; given that the Queen’s ‘neutrality’ is supposedly one of the strongest arguments for a constitutional monarchy, she is expert in letting her feelings be known without explicitly crossing the line into controversy. Here is what happened: just four days before the vote, when it was beginning to look as though the Scots might actually decide to break up the union, the Queen emerged from Crathie Kirk, the small parish church where members of the family worship when they are staying at Balmoral. Speaking to ‘well-wishers’ – that
mysterious category of persons who only ever appear at royal events – she uttered these gnomic words to someone who asked about the imminent ballot: ‘Well, I hope people will think very carefully about the future.’

Sensation! Hold the front page! The Queen and her advisers knew perfectly well how this apparently anodyne remark would be interpreted by the press, which duly reported it as a gesture of support for the ‘no’ camp. At the time, her intervention was widely reported as unexpected, although the context – a sudden surge in popularity for the ‘yes’ vote, suggesting that Scotland might choose independence – strongly suggests otherwise. Indeed, the fact that the whole thing was carefully staged was confirmed by the
Daily Telegraph
, which reported as follows:

The same paper did the job it was supposed to do, spelling out what the Queen’s words meant in a strapline: ‘The monarch breaks her silence on Scottish independence four days before voters go to the polls, with her comments interpreted as support for a No vote.’

The
Daily Mail
went even further, describing the Queen’s observation as a ‘stark warning’
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about independence.

What actually happened behind the scenes emerged three months later, when
The Guardian
laid out the high-level planning that went into her apparently off-the-cuff remark.
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The paper reported that ‘senior figures in Whitehall’ were panicked by a YouGov poll published two weeks before the vote that showed a six-point drop in support for the ‘no’ campaign in the previous
month; they approached Buckingham Palace, suggesting that an intervention from the Queen would be helpful. The situation became more critical during a subsequent visit to Balmoral by the Prime Minister, when the
Sunday Times
published the first opinion poll to show the ‘yes’ campaign ahead, if by the narrowest of margins (51 per cent). The shift in public opinion led to last-minute negotiations between the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood, and the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Christopher Geidt; they came up with a ‘carefully worded intervention’ as No. 10 experienced what the paper described as a ‘meltdown’ over the prospect of a ‘yes’ vote.
The Guardian
then described precisely the process I outlined above: