Down With the Royals (6 page)

The democratic deficit implied by these lobbying activities is breathtaking. It is mainly thanks to
The Guardian,
and in particular a reporter called Rob Evans, that they have come under the spotlight at all; in a rare instance of high-quality journalism about the monarchy,
The Guardian
has spent
ten years
trying to force publication of a small selection of lobbying letters written to ministers by the Prince. It is no secret that the heir to the throne has reactionary and indeed anti-science views; what the government doesn’t want us to know is
how
he lobbies on behalf of these causes, firing off letter after letter which have become known (because of his handwriting) as ‘black spider’ memos. Back in 2005,
The Guardian
made a modest FOI request to see
twenty-seven letters written in a seven-month period between 2004 and 2005. It was the beginning of an epic court battle which ended up at the Supreme Court in November 2014, where no fewer than six judges were asked to rule on the Attorney General’s decision to overrule a series of findings in favour of publication. At the time of writing, the Supreme Court’s decision has not been announced, but this epic battle has already produced remarkable insights into Charles’s autocratic behaviour.

Even before the matter reached the Supreme Court, the government had spent more than £250,000 in legal fees in a rearguard attempt to keep Charles’s views secret,
and
threatened
The Guardian
with an application for full costs if its legal action was ultimately unsuccessful.
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The reason ministers went to these lengths became apparent in September 2012, when an independent freedom of information tribunal ruled that the twenty-seven letters should be published. First of all, the tribunal dealt with the question of public interest, saying: ‘The
essential reason is that it will generally be in the overall public interest for there to be transparency as to how and when Prince Charles seeks to influence government.’
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It went on to argue that lobbying by the heir to the throne ‘cannot have constitutional status’ and should not be protected from disclosure. Crucially, its members said that the evidence revealed:

What the letters reveal, in other words, is Prince Charles using his position and status to force ministers to respond to his views, even though he has no constitutional right to do so. In normal politics, where
transparency is quite properly an issue, this kind of covert influence-seeking would be seen as improper, if not calling into question someone’s suitability to hold public office. The then Attorney General, Dominic Grieve, moved swiftly to protect the Prince, announcing that he was vetoing publication. Two years later, at the Court of Appeal, three judges ruled that Grieve had acted unlawfully. They said he did not have reasonable grounds to veto publication and ordered him to pay
The Guardian
’s costs, which by then amounted to £96,000. Grieve is a decent man who won a Lifetime Achievement Award from the human rights campaign group Liberty after his sacking from government in 2014, so it was sad to see him pursuing this battle against transparency with such vigour.

Fortunately for those of us who believe in accountability, Grieve’s explanation of why he went to such lengths to keep the content of the letters secret had already given the game away. Grieve frankly admitted that he used the veto because the public could interpret the letters as ‘disagreeing with government policy’. It is a cornerstone of the British constitution that the
monarch cannot be seen to favour one political party over another; hence any perception that Charles disagreed with a Labour government ‘would be seriously damaging to his role as future monarch because, if he forfeits his position of political neutrality as heir to the throne, he cannot easily recover it when he is king’.
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I don’t believe this is about perception: it is about a senior member of the royal family challenging the policies of an elected government. That alone makes him unfit to succeed his mother as head of state, when ministers will no doubt find his lobbying even harder to resist. Don’t forget that this case is about only a tiny batch of the hundreds of letters Charles fires off, which Grieve described as ‘in many cases particularly frank’ and reflecting the Prince’s ‘most deeply held personal views and beliefs’. They were addressed to ministers at a wide range of departments, including Business, Innovation and Skills; Health; Children, Schools and Families; Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; Culture, Media and Sport; the Northern Ireland Office and the Cabinet
Office.
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We also have some idea, from the information tribunal’s ruling, of the subjects he raised: ‘holistic’ medicine, genetically modified crops, cuts in the armed forces, architecture and agricultural policy.
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It does not take much ingenuity to guess his views on any of these subjects, which are doubtless typical of a socially conservative landowner with a prejudice against allopathic medicine. In a telling paragraph in their 126-page ruling, the three judges conceded that Charles’s activities ‘are not neutral and in a number of respects have been controversial’. The government has now imposed a blanket ban so that even if this batch of the Prince’s letters is finally forced into the open, later ones will remain secret.

But covert lobbying is by no means the only way in which the Prince gets his way on matters of public policy and indeed legislation. He also has special powers in his role as Duke of Cornwall, a title which makes him beneficiary of a private landholding which provides an annual income of just over £17 million. His consent is
required for legislation which affects the ‘hereditary revenues, personal property or other interests’
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of the Duchy, and in recent years he has been invited to give his consent to new legislation on everything from the London Olympics to shipwrecks. Documents released in 2012 show that the Labour government’s fisheries minister, Huw Irranca-Davies, wrote to the Prince’s private secretary in 2008 enclosing two copies of a draft marine and coastal access bill. He highlighted clauses which would require the Prince’s consent and got a response a couple of months later, informing him that ‘the Prince of Wales is content with the bill’.
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This archaic formula is bad enough – I am not ‘content’ with many pieces of legislation, such as the bedroom tax, but I quite rightly don’t have a veto over them – yet Prince Charles is not the only member of the family to benefit from these far-reaching powers. I’ve already mentioned the occasion in 1999 when the Queen vetoed a Private Member’s Bill, a fact which emerged as a consequence of another FOI request. Tellingly, the request, which revealed a treasure trove of material about royal interference, was not made by a journalist; it came from a legal scholar named John Kirkhope, who wanted to see papers relating to the royal veto for use in his graduate studies at the University of Plymouth. The government fought to keep the papers secret for fifteen months, and it isn’t difficult to see why.

After ministers lost the case, the Cabinet Office was forced to release an internal Whitehall pamphlet which revealed that at least thirty-nine bills had been affected by powers allowing members of the royal family to veto or consent to proposed legislation.
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The Queen and Prince Charles had been asked to approve bills on subjects as varied as higher education, paternity pay, ID cards, civil partnerships and even high hedges. Civil servants were warned that ‘a major plank’ of bills would have to be removed if either the Queen or the Prince withheld consent; even when consent was granted, any amendments to bills would also have
to be submitted for royal approval, a process which could delay progress of the legislation through Parliament. According to
The Guardian
: ‘Charles has been asked to consent to twenty pieces of legislation and this power of veto has been described by constitutional lawyers as a royal “nuclear deterrent” that may help explain why ministers appear to pay close attention to the views of senior royals.’
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The royals’ supposed lack of power and influence is the most pernicious of all public fantasies, worse even than the sentimental outpourings that accompany the family’s engagements, marriages and births. It allows the Queen and her relatives to retain a species of unaccountability denied, rightly, to all institutions which receive public funding – and many that don’t. We expect MPs, government ministers, the police, the legal profession, doctors, even the press, to be open about what they are doing and acknowledge mistakes. The British monarchy is an exception to this principle and many others, a relic from periods of history when all that mattered
was getting and retaining power. It is a system of government which has been tried and rejected all over the world, as we shall see in the next section.

I
T IS SOMETIMES
easy to forget, looking at monarchy from a purely British perspective, what a strange creature it is. The reality is that it’s on its way out, leaving only around twenty-five families in the entire world who enjoy these unique privileges by an accident of birth. Fewer than a quarter (forty-three) of the world’s nations are monarchies, and even that figure is inflated by the fact that Elizabeth II is monarch of sixteen Commonwealth nations. It is worth mentioning here that she is also Head of the Commonwealth, an organisation with a combined population of 2.1 billion people, yet her role is neither elected nor subject to a fixed term. The Commonwealth’s governance includes a vague statement that the choice of the next head ‘will
be made collectively by Commonwealth leaders’ but no mechanism is set out; the widespread expectation is that Prince Charles will seamlessly succeed his mother.

None of the world’s largest democracies – India, Indonesia or the US – has a hereditary head of state or displays any enthusiasm for having one. When India became independent in 1947, many of its maharajas agreed to sign over their ancestral territory and palaces to the new state; in 1972, the Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, stripped them of their remaining titles and privileges. Even when quasi-royal dynasties arise and dominate the political scene, as the Nehrus/Gandhis did for a time in India, the democratic process asserts itself in the end.

The list of countries that ceased to be monarchies in the twentieth century is too long to rehearse in its entirety but it includes Italy, Egypt, Tunisia, China, Germany, Yugoslavia, Turkey, Greece, Albania, Romania, Iraq, Libya, Vietnam, Portugal, Russia, Syria, Iceland and Mongolia. Kings, emirs, kaisers, queens, maharajas, grand-dukes, princes and czars found themselves out on their ears, sometimes in farcical circumstances; in 1952,
Egypt’s last monarch, the playboy King Farouk, was allowed to leave the country on the royal yacht as long as he promised to send it back when he arrived in exile in Italy. On paper, Farouk had abdicated in favour of his infant son, who became Fuad II, but the country was declared a republic the following year; Farouk continued to pursue a lavish lifestyle, swelling to almost 300 lbs in weight and dying of a heart attack, aged forty-five, in 1963. Russia’s last czar, Nicholas II, was even less fortunate, dying with his family in Yekaterinburg, a town in the Urals, when the revolutionary government ordered his murder in 1918. Nicholas was a relative of George V and looked uncannily like him, but the King refused his cousin’s desperate plea for asylum in the UK after his abdication at the time of the revolution a year earlier. Family feeling counts for less than one might think among the royals, but the gruesome fate of the Romanovs has since been transformed into a romantic myth, celebrated in films like
Nicholas and Alexandra
.

In Europe, around a dozen of Europe’s fifty countries retain some form of monarchical system, although three of them – Liechtenstein, Luxembourg and Monaco
– are almost too small to count. The Monégasque royal family has a public presence out of all proportion to the size of the principality, chiefly because the late Prince Rainier III made the astute move of marrying an American film star, Grace Kelly. Their children have a permanent presence in gossip magazines, where their marriages, divorces and indeed paternity suits provide reams of copy. The current incumbent, Prince Albert II, has two ‘illegitimate’ children and spent years refusing to acknowledge paternity; DNA tests in 2005 and 2006 established beyond doubt that he was the father of both children but they remain excluded by law from the royal succession. The Grimaldis are typical royal hedonists, in other words, enjoying an existence similar to that of the pop stars, soap stars and models who populate the pages of
Hello!
magazine. This is true of many of the world’s remaining monarchies, although some do a better job than others of concealing their excesses from the people they rule; in 2005, the town of Marbella in Andalusia declared three days of mourning for King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, who liked to spend his summers there rather than at home in his strictly
religious kingdom, where alcohol and gambling are forbidden. Fahd’s visits to Marbella began in the 1970s and he eventually owned a 200-acre estate outside the town equipped with a private clinic, a mosque, several palaces and a sports complex. After his death,
The Guardian
listed his entourage with something approaching awe:

Europe’s monarchies do not have wealth on this scale but they are self-indulgent in their tastes, even after the 2008 financial crisis. It accounts, among other things, for the dramatic collapse in support for Spain’s monarchy in recent years. Juan Carlos I was hailed as a bulwark of democracy in 1975 when he assumed the throne after the death of the dictator General Franco, putting an end to one of Europe’s most enduring tyrannies. Few people would have imagined, at the time, that his subsequent loss of public esteem would be so precipitous as to force his abdication almost four decades later. In 2014, Juan Carlos stepped down in favour of his son, whose accession as Felipe VI prompted republican demonstrations in many Spanish cities. Like Prince Albert of Monaco, Juan Carlos had been dogged by rumours of affairs and embarrassing paternity suits; shortly after he gave up the throne, the Spanish Parliament tried to cut off further scandals by passing a law to give him immunity from such actions.
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But these were far from being the only gaffes which humiliated his Queen and turned people against him; the most egregious was a free trip to Botswana in 2012 where Juan Carlos, who was then honorary President of the Spanish branch of the World Wildlife Fund, went on safari to shoot elephants. The trip came to light only because the elderly King fell, broke his hip and had to be airlifted back to a Spanish hospital.
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Then there was
the scandal around his son-in-law, Iñaki Urdangarin, a former Olympic athlete who married the King’s younger daughter, the Infanta Cristina. In June 2014, less than a week after her brother ascended the Spanish throne, a court upheld corruption charges against the Princess in a case involving Urdangarin, who was accused of fraud, falsifying documents and embezzlement.
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Five months later, Cristina failed in an attempt to have the charges dropped; at the time of writing, the couple are awaiting trial. An opinion poll published less than a week after the King’s abdication suggested that the gesture was not enough; two-thirds of the Spanish population demanded a referendum on the future of the monarchy, a choice they have so far been denied.
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The Spanish experience is a warning to royalists that support for monarchy can evaporate virtually overnight,
especially in difficult financial times such as those that followed the 2008 financial crisis. The
Washington Post,
reflecting on the Spanish abdication, posed what might have seemed an unthinkable question even two decades earlier, asking whether Europe’s remaining monarchies – ‘mostly fusty, toothless institutions’ – should go.
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This verdict from the other side of the Atlantic underestimates their remaining power and influence, as we have already seen. But it is a reminder of how archaic Europe’s monarchies seem to nations which have been republics for decades and in some cases centuries.

In the UK, where a sophisticated PR effort goes into normalising the continued existence of a royal dynasty, this is not so apparent; on the contrary, one of the curious side effects of the Windsors’ longevity has been to turn London into a favoured hang-out for deposed monarchs, many of them related to the British royal family. The Duke of Edinburgh’s cousin, King Constantine II of Greece, ended up in Hampstead after being overthrown in a right-wing coup in 1967; six years later, the
junta declared Greece a presidential republic, a decision endorsed in a referendum when democratic government returned the following year. But some people never give up: ‘King Constantine and Queen Anne-Marie of the Hellenes’ appeared on the guest list for Prince William’s wedding in 2011; so, by the way, did a couple called ‘Crown Prince Alexander and Crown Princess Katherine of Yugoslavia’, a country which was torn apart by civil war in the 1990s and no longer exists.
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Another royal dynasty, the Pahlavis, set up camp in a hotel in Kensington after the Shah of Iran was overthrown in a coup in 1979; they lived within walking distance of Kensington Palace, where the divorced Princess Diana – also experiencing a species of exile – would one day plot and seethe against her former in-laws.

The violent overthrow of so many royal dynasties is a potent argument for the democratic process, which offers a peaceful and dignified exit for people whose privileges are long past their sell-by date. The map of Europe might look very different if they accepted this
option: European monarchies have not fared well on the rare occasions when ordinary people have actually been allowed a vote on the matter; the Italian monarchy was ended by a referendum in 1946, long before the Greeks confirmed their desire to be a republic. On the other side of the world, Australia is usually cited as an example of the popularity of the British royal family, following the 55 per cent vote in 1999 in favour of keeping the Queen as head of state. But that referendum can hardly be counted as a true test of republican sentiment, given that it failed to offer a democratic alternative; the option on offer was not a republic with an elected head of state but the unpopular alternative of a President appointed by Parliament.

From a modern perspective, it is clear that monarchy is a pre-modern form of government. The constitutional model adopted by the UK supposedly addresses some of the criticisms, yet the Windsors have steadfastly resisted even the modest reforms associated with the Dutch and Scandinavian royal families – the so-called ‘bicycling’ monarchies. Even in those countries, the changes have been cosmetic, a matter of personal style rather than
constitutional significance, but the notion of the Queen (even in her younger days) or Princes Charles getting on their bikes is unthinkable. The result is a bewildering gap between the UK’s commitment to modernity, expressed in domestic law and international treaties, and a constitutional arrangement which gives so much status and influence to a single family. The UK was one of the countries that drew up the UN Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the UN general assembly almost six decades ago and is still widely regarded as the pre-eminent statement of the rights of human beings. The very first article declares that ‘all human beings are born equal in dignity and rights’, a proposition which is simply impossible to square with the institution of monarchy.

It takes a bit of imagination to get beyond the idea of the UK as a top-down society with the same family always at the summit. An Asian friend once told me that there are villages in India where girls who haven’t been able
to find husbands are married to a tree; it is better to be married to a non-human object, so the argument runs, than not to be married at all. There is an analogy here: the British royal family is
our
tree, something people lean on because they haven’t given any thought to what life might be like without it. The answer is less scary than they might think; I’m tempted to adapt the old feminist slogan and suggest that a modern democracy needs a queen like a fish needs a bicycle. The benefits of becoming a republic far outweigh any nostalgic attachment to the late Princess Diana or rose-tinted memories of royal weddings.

So how would an elected President differ from the current arrangement? The first thing to go would be the hideous
cronyism
that is such a blot on the record of the British royal family. It is highly unlikely that a head of state, elected by popular vote and with the option of standing for a second term, would keep the kind of unsavoury company favoured by the Windsors. As well as a fair number of deluded ex-monarchs, vainly dreaming of being welcomed home by cheering crowds, the guest list for the 2011 royal wedding was
notable for the number of indefensible regimes that were represented. One of them was Lesotho, a small country in south-east Africa which has been accused of a catalogue of human rights abuses: torture, deaths in police custody, corruption, trafficking, discrimination against people with HIV/Aids, and child labour.
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But the invitation that caused most outrage was to the Gulf state of Bahrain, whose Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa was on the list, even while his father the King remained at home suppressing an uprising with brutal force. ‘How does the Queen justify her invitation to an unelected tyrant with fresh blood on his hands?’ the
New Statesman
demanded.
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On the day before the wedding, I joined the human rights activist Peter Tatchell for a demonstration at the gates of Buckingham Palace, where we unfurled a banner protesting about Prince Salman’s inclusion on the guest list. Supporters of the monarchy squirmed and claimed that the royal family had no choice but to invite heads
of state, but the excuse was blasted out of the water by the Foreign Office: a spokesman categorically denied that the wedding was a state occasion, arguing that it was ‘a private wedding so invitations are down to Clarence House’.
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Faced with a torrent of bad publicity so close to the wedding, Prince Salman made a last-minute announcement that he would not attend. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who had recently sent troops to support the Khalifa family’s crackdown in Bahrain, had no such qualms, sending Prince Mohammed bin Nawaf bin Abdul Aziz to represent him. But then members of the Saudi royal family are known to be particular friends of the groom’s father, Prince Charles.