by Joan Smith
It’s that word again: ‘feisty’ is always used about women who stand up for themselves, and rarely, if ever, about men. But an accurate critique of Portillo’s behaviour wouldn’t focus on his manners, appalling though they were. Republicans are entitled to free speech, just like anyone else, and I had been invited onto the programme to explain my reasons for opposing the monarchy as an institution. Portillo’s reaction to my presence in the studio felt like an attempt, conscious or otherwise, to exclude the argument for an elected head of state from the mainstream media.
Even something as reasonable as putting the current royals in a historical context is liable to be grotesquely misrepresented. In February 2013, the novelist Hilary Mantel gave a lecture at the British Museum, published a couple of weeks later in the London Review of Books,22 about the anachronistic status of the royal family in modern life. Mantel, who had previously achieved near ‘national treasure’ status for her Booker prize-winning novels set in the reign of Henry VIII, looked at the royals almost as zoological specimens, comparing them at one point to pandas (‘pandas and royal persons alike are expensive to conserve and ill-adapted to any modern environment’). She compared Princess Diana to Marie Antoinette, and suggested that Kate Middleton ‘appeared to have been designed and built by craftsmen’.
The lecture was clearly a reflection on the unchanging nature of royalty, not a personal attack, so Mantel must have been astonished to find herself pilloried in the Daily Mail.23 Under the headline ‘Bring Up The Bodies author Hilary Mantel’s venomous attack on Kate Middleton’, the paper pulled no punches: ‘A best-selling author who has based her literary career on writing about the Royal Family has launched a bitter attack on the Duchess of Cambridge. Hilary Mantel used her position among the novel-writing elite to make an astonishing and venomous critique of Kate.’
Other papers quickly piled in. The Sun described Mantel as a ‘snooty writer’ and said she had ‘insultingly dismissed’ the Duchess;24 the Daily Express detected a ‘backlash’ against Mantel as ‘a host of politicians and celebrities … rallied to defend the honour of the future Queen’.25 There was such a storm that the Prime Minister decided to get involved, despite the fact that he was on an official visit to India and might be assumed to have more important things to talk about; Cameron condemned Mantel’s observations about the Duchess as ‘completely misguided and completely wrong’. Even the leader of the Labour Party, Ed Miliband, felt he had to say something, describing Mantel’s remarks as ‘pretty offensive’ and saying that ‘Kate Middleton is doing a brilliant job in a difficult role’.26
A few months later, my book The Public Woman was published. One of the chapters, which picked up themes I had written about in my earlier book Misogynies, used Middleton as an exemplar of the remarkably limited role of women in the royal family. The rest of the book looked at the continuing failure across the world to grant women full human rights, ranging across subjects such as FGM and trafficking for labour and sexual exploitation. But it was my remarks about the Duchess that were picked up and misrepresented, just like Mantel’s, as a personal attack. The Daily Mail returned to the fray, describing my observations as a ‘blistering attack’.27 The paper’s columnist, Richard Kay, wrote:
After the furore over Hilary Mantel’s venomous attack on the Duchess of Cambridge, whom she described as a ‘shop-window mannequin’ with a ‘plastic smile’, you might have thought writers would think twice about putting pen to paper on the subject.
Not a bit of it.
For just three months after the Booker Prize-winner faced a furious backlash for her comments – which even earned a reprimand from the Prime Minister – human rights activist Joan Smith dismisses the former Kate Middleton as ‘unambitious and bland’ and Britain’s ‘Queen Wag’.28
Kay barely bothered to conceal his wish that critics of the royals would just keep quiet. But the refusal of the media to give a fair hearing to rational analysis of the royal family reached its reductio ad absurdum when an American showbiz blogger, Perez Hilton, came swinging into the ring. Why on earth would I express reservations about Middleton or Princess Diana? Hilton had no doubts: ‘Wow,’ he exclaimed. ‘Talk about harsh!! It might be time to retract the claws, Joan!’29 It was an unintentionally pertinent observation, exposing the journalistic impulse to turn each and every critique of the UK royals into a cat fight.
In an atmosphere so inflamed on the subject of monarchy, any perceived ‘insult’ to a member of the family runs the risk of prompting irrational and disproportionate reactions. I thoroughly dislike the kind of childish prank played by two Australian radio DJs, Mel Greig and Michael Christian, during the Duchess of Cambridge’s first pregnancy, but not because it involved one of the royals; it would have been indefensible no matter who the target was. In December 2012, Greig and Christian called the London hospital where the Duchess was being treated for extreme morning sickness, pretending to be the Queen and Prince Charles; I don’t suppose they expected to get very far, but an Indian-born nurse, Jacintha Saldanha, was taken in. She put them through to a colleague, who disclosed details of the Duchess’s condition and treatment; it was a distasteful breach of privacy but no lasting harm was done to any member of the royal family. The radio station went ahead and broadcast the stunt in Australia, where listeners mocked the DJs’ dreadful attempt at upper-class British accents, and it was subsequently reported around the world. The whole thing was a storm in a tea cup but the impact on Ms Saldanha was catastrophic. A couple of days later, she hanged herself.
To anyone who is not invested in the ‘specialness’ of the royal family, it is hard to comprehend that someone would take so much responsibility on themselves as a consequence of accidental involvement in a stupid hoax. In September 2014, a nurse at the same hospital told an inquest that Ms Saldanha felt responsible for the release of private information about the Duchess, while another colleague said she received an email in which Ms Saldanha talked about feeling ‘ashamed’.30 Even so the coroner, Dr Fiona Wilcox, did not criticise the DJs and made the important point that Ms Saldanha’s death ‘was not reasonably foreseeable’.31 Yet, in the days immediately after her suicide, some users of social networking sites moved swiftly from shock to rage and began to make the absurd claim that the DJs had ‘wanted’ this outcome all along. Greig apologised to Ms Saldanha’s family at the inquest but she also told the BBC’s Newsnight programme about the death threats she received: ‘I was in lockdown for months. There were bullets with our names on it sent to police stations.’32 She said that the threats to herself and her family continued for eighteen months.
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 id
entify 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.
1 The Guardian, rolling news blog, 3 June 2012.
2 Mail Online, 3 June 2012.
3 Leo McKinstry, Daily Express, 6 June 2012.
4 Daily Telegraph, 1 January 2011.
5 Centre of Retail Research: Queen’s Diamond Jubilee: Retail impact of £508.94 million.
6 The Guardian, 27 March 2012.
7 Recent YouGov Polling on the Monarchy and the Jubilee – Media Briefing.
8 Financial Times, 17 May 2013.
9 The Guardian, rolling news blog, 23 July 2013.
10 The Guardian, 19 July 2013.
11 UNTWO Tourism Highlights, 2014 edition, p. 6.
12 Mail Online, 13 August 2014.
13 BBC News Politics, 28 January 2014.
14 Royal Collection Trust website.
15 ‘Who’s interested in the Royal baby?’ YouGov, 23 July 2013.
16 VisitEngland Statement: Impact of Royal Baby on Tourism.
17 Evening Standard, 20 September 2013.
18 BBC News, 2 October 2014.
19 Vanity Fair, August 2014.
20 Jubilee Debate: The Queen & The Monarchy, Latest findings on British public opinion, Ipsos MORI, 19 November 2012.
21 Radio 4 and 4 Extra Blog, Feedback: The Moral Maze, 17 February 2012.
22 London Review of Books, Vol. 35, No. 4, 21 February 2013.
23 Daily Mail, 19 February 2013.
24 The Sun, 20 February 2013.
25 Daily Express, 20 February 2013.
26 Daily Express, 20 February 2013.
27 Daily Mail, 22 May 2013.
28 Daily Mail, 21 May 2013.
29 Perezhilton.com, May 2013.
30 Daily Mirror, 12 September 2014.
31 Digital Spy, 12 September 2014.
32 The Independent, 13 October 2014.
Part II
Down with the royals
IF 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’.33 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’.34 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.’35 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 Republic36 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.37 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.38 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.