Some 15 years ago I wrote a piece in The Mail about Princess Michael of Kent. She had a public, not to say demonstrative, affair with a young Russian mafioso, which was amply documented by panting paparazzi.
Her lover was subsequently riddled with bullets somewhere near Moscow, which gave rise to all sorts of ugly if unsubstantiated rumours about Princess Michael and her husband. I wrote that, if our royals wished to get rid of the monarchy, that was exactly the way to behave.
The Palace issued a protest, and the paper couldn’t get rid of me fast enough. I was quite angry at the time, but later I saw justice in that reaction. In addition to the constitution, history and constitutional history, our royals derive their legitimacy from an aura of love, theirs for their people, their people’s for them.
Attacks on the royals, even marginal ones like the Kents (Prince Michael was 53rd in the line of succession), risk punching holes in that aura, especially if the attacks are valid and factual. That’s why the press used to wear kid gloves when getting its hands on any royal scandals.
That didn’t mean the royals were off limits. They weren’t, as anyone who has ever seen those brilliant 18th century cartoons by Gillray, Hogarth and Rowlandson will testify. But it did mean that the press treated the subject responsibly, realising that some lines just couldn’t be crossed.
The implicit understanding was in line with Burke’s maxim: “For us to love our country, our country must be lovely.” This adage rings even truer if ‘country’ is replaced with ‘monarchy’.
Not all British kings could be readily confused with choirboys. Bertie, the future King Edward VII, kept some Parisian brothels in business almost single-handedly. And his grandson, Edward VIII, had to abdicate over the unlovable woman he loved.
The nation giggled about Bertie’s indiscretions and gasped about his grandson’s. Still, the throne remained sturdy even if it had tottered a bit. The quiet heroism of King George VI, who refused to be evacuated during the Blitz and did perhaps as much to boost the nation’s morale as Churchill did, reminded the people why they loved their royal family.
The press continued to treat the royals with tact. Even though gossip circulated about the amorous exploits of Prince Phillip, no scandal ever made the papers, not even during the Christine Keeler affair. Both the Queen and her husband were loved, in a quiet, understated English way.
But then their two elder sons married quite awful women, and scandals began to pile up. The venerable institution tying up the past, present and future into an irreplaceable national continuum desperately tried to shield itself from the shovelfuls of muck thrown at it by tabloids. That didn’t always work – some dirt stuck.
Each particle of it took some mystique away from the royals, and a monarchy demystified is a monarchy in trouble. Monarchy and church have that in common: even a whiff of vulgarity may turn into a hurricane sweeping the edifice away.
Both institutions depend on their flock’s love of something higher than themselves, and in Britain especially the link between monarchy and church is emphasised by the quasi-sacrament of anointment. God’s kingdom is in heaven, a monarch’s kingdom is in earth, but the two realms are inextricably linked.
When photographs of royals in flagrante delicto with American visitors are splashed all over the tabloids, when the heir to the throne writes letters to his mistress expressing his urge to become her female hygiene product, while his wife cuts a wide swathe through the male population of the British Isles and beyond – each such incident by itself and especially all of them collectively drag the monarchy from its exalted perch down into the gutter.
I haven’t seen any statistics, but I’m willing to bet that, even if many Englishmen retain their respect for the monarchy as an institution, few actually love any of the royals personally, certainly not the way the late Queen was loved.
When she died, one could see genuine grief in many people’s eyes (including, I’m sure, mine). They mourned the passage of a monarch whose impeccable life of honour and dignity made her lovely, in the Burkean sense of the word.
King Charles III has turned out better than I feared. His bizarre attachment to certain woke fads apart, he and his new Queen have done much to preserve the aura of dignified mystique around the monarchy. His Majesty’s courage in continuing to serve his realm in spite of suffering from cancer has much to do with that, as I understand only too well.
But the outrageous scandal involving Andrew and his hideous ex-wife may prove the undoing of the monarchy yet.
Andrew, Fergie, the late Diana and her second son are more in tune with the zeitgeist than Charles is, certainly more than his late parents were. They were driven by the old-fashioned duty of service, while the riffraff end of the royal family worship at the altar of self-service.
When Diana screamed “I want to be me!”, she was issuing the manifesto of all-conquering modernity. That was the modern counterpart of the prayer with which the late Queen ended every day, a statement not of love but of amour-propre.
Andrew is covered with Epstein’s muck from head to toe, but even though he has lost all his titles, he is still eighth in the line of succession to the throne. For all of Charles’s efforts to protect that piece of furniture, some of that filth is bound to stain it.
Each blotch doubles as a hole punched through the aura from which the monarchy derives its real legitimacy. This is how most people probably feel about it – the fine constitutional points, while perfectly valid intellectually, fall flat emotionally. And love isn’t mainly, and never merely, rational. It’s an intuitive feeling, not a rational construct.
Polls show that about a third of Britons support replacing the monarchy with an elected head of state, which proportion almost doubles for the 16- to 34-year-olds.
When those youngsters grow up, they may or may not realise that such a development would spell a constitutional disaster tantamount to the dissolution of Britain’s sovereignty. We might as well become America’s 51st state.
Yet even if their minds develop sufficiently for them to understand such matters, it’s clear that they feel little emotional attachment to the royal family. And it increasingly looks as if this is the family’s fault.