Are the English royal family the greatest scam ever played?

Wha?

Personally, I think monarchy is a ridiculous concept in 2023.

However the late Queen was a bit of an unusual monarch and I doubt that Charles will be able to fill those boots, because it’s impossible.

She arrived into the job very much just as Britain was moving into post-War recovery and reconfiguring itself as the modern UK with the empire being wound down.

She was introduced as this very glamorous, fairy princess type character who never really said anything controversial and stood in completely contrast to her predecessors in the sense that she was absolutely polished and TV-ready.

She was a sort of wholesome and picture perfect character that just seemed to be a figment of imagination as much as a reality.

She also coincided almost exactly with the dawn of mass market television in the UK and her coronation was the first serious TV event there.

Throughout her career she never really said anything and never put a foot wrong or had a hair out of place. So she entered that national treasure category that is very hard to define.

Most of the rest of her family were continuously mired in tabloid scandals, very public marital breakdowns etc etc but she just continued to troop the colour and walk the corgis.

She’s was more of a projection than a person and basically had performed the role of totally non-controversial symbolic figurehead who said almost nothing and had a court of followers desperately trying to interpret her hats and handbags for some kind of political meaning.

As she aged she just became more grandmotherly and that role bedded in even further and she was elevated to untouchable levels of national treasure and even national grandmother.

Charles on the overhand is an opinionated, often controversial, occasionally publicly cantankerous figure who isn’t going to have the same vibe at all and Camilla is certainly not going to have the Disney princess vibe either and there’s the whole Diana legacy…

The publicly funded, well resourced national fairytale ended last year.

The next chapters will be a lot more gritty and real. I think that’s where you’ll see the British monarchy shrinking to something that drops into the background like many of the remaining monarchies in Europe.

You will also likely see more countries who have the British monarch as head of state drop it. It’s already happened but I think the nostalgia (possibly with a tinge of Stockholm Syndrome) and warmth towards the late Queen just isn’t going to be replicated. So for a lot of places there’ll be debates about calling it a day.

That's one that's trotted out quite a bit and tends to use selective examples of republics and monarchies and assumes that the fact they're constitutional monarchies is the primary driver of their stability, without providing any evidence at all.

The reality is that the countries they're looking at are in post-WWII Europe and whether they're republics or constitutional monarchies, tend to all share in a common vision of rights based democracy. The monarchy bit in the countries that retained it is usually not at all relevant to the structures of government or their politics.

You don't have to go back very far to find constitutional and other forms of monarchies in Europe involved in massive conflicts, including being most of the protagonists in WWI. If you want pick some nice examples, Imperial Japan was a constitutional monarchy... I suppose you could argue it was stable, but it was one of the most hostile forces in modern history and did huge damage to many of its neighbours.

if you take France, Ireland, Finland, Iceland, Switzerland and even post-WWII Germany, etc you can't really call any of those in any way unstable - many of them (including Ireland) are in the top ten most democratic countries in the world, and if you go to the older example of a large modern Republic, the United States, it's got whacky politics form time to time and plenty of flaws, but it's been ticking away since the late 1770s ...

I'm also unconvinced by the tourism argument. I mean, do people really go to the UK to see the royals or to see the palaces and sites and check out all the history and culture and so on that the UK has to offer? It's not like the 85+ million who visit France every year are put off by the fact there's no royal family either...

And I mean if you visit Spain does anyone (including the Spanish) even realise there's a king?!

I've also seen the arguments made from the perspective of NZ republicans about the fact that the Queen (or the new King) is a very remote character. They are technically the head of state for NZ, yet the reality of it is they're an ambassador and symbol of the United Kingdom. They occasionally visit, and it's pretty much like any visiting foreign dignitary, yet they're supposed to be the country's head of state? So they miss out on the opportunity to have a equivalent of a president who can act as their chief ambassador... I think it's probably even a looser connection when you get into some of the smaller states that people don't even realise the UK monarch is head of state in. Aussie and Canada are a bit more royalist I think, but I wonder will that fizzle a lot in the years ahead.

I mean, if you think of the Queen or Charles, you don't immediately go "oh yeah they represent Canada.." even though they're emblazoned on their coins and so on most people just see it as a technicality.

Churchills opining tended to be that of someone who saw the world through very deeply imperial pink glasses and who saw empire and monarchy as altruistic and benevolent somehow. His views on class and race were genuinely appalling, even if they may have been very much of their time and his background.

He said a few things during WWII that will be remembered, and turned into an impressive speechmaker during that period, but his views on a lot of things were just a snapshot of the views of the upper echelons of the British imperial establishment of that era and they liked their status quo, which probably meant keeping the oligarch of cousins i.e. the European royals in position.

It doesn't really add up. If you look at France, people walk through lavish former royal palaces like the Louvre, Versailles, Fountainebleau etc etc etc..

They're visited as pieces of archaeology almost - a look back at a bygone era. The fact there's no kings and queens in them isn't really relevant. If anything, it has made them far more accessible than their British counterparts.

On a much much smaller scale here in Ireland, we can wander Dublin Castle or Áras an Uachtaráin without any need for a viceroy being still in existence. The history's and the architecture is still there.