by Joan Smith
Keeping up the illusion
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.68 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.69 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.
Daring to be modern
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.70 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.71
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’.72 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.
This episode is a reminder that the Windsors associate with tyrants by choice, a fact demonstrated by how often Charles visits absolute monarchies with terrible human rights records; he doesn’t even seem to mind that the Saudis bear a heavy responsibility for exporting Wahabbism, a particularly unpleasant form of Islam which imposes barbaric punishments under sharia law. The cost of these jaunts to taxpayers is stupendous: in 2011, a visit by Prince Charles and Camilla to the Middle East and Africa cost £460,387 after they chartered a private plane for the entire trip.73 Nothing is too undignified for the UK’s future head of state: in February 2014, Charles took part in a ceremony in a stadium in Riyadh hosted by the former head of Saudi intelligence, Prince Muqrin bin Abdulaziz, where he joined in a sword dance.74 In Saudi Arabia, swords are generally used for a more sinister purpose: a few months after Charles’s visit, Amnesty International documented twenty-three executions, most of them beheadings, in just three weeks; they included two sets of brothers on 18 August, all of whom claimed to have been tortured during interrogation.75 On the same trip, Charles visited Qatar, which has been described together with the Saudi kingdom as ‘major culprits in the exploitation and ill-treatment of migrant workers’, who are often subjected to financial exploitation, b
eatings, torture, rape and execution.76 No matter: Charles’s connections with the Emir of Qatar came in useful when he took a dislike to a £3 billion scheme by a London-based architect, Christian Candy, working with a Qatari company to redevelop the Chelsea Barracks site in London. The scheme was dropped at the last minute and Candy sued the Qatari company in the High Court, where it was alleged that Charles had lobbied the royal family to get the scheme withdrawn.77 A letter Charles sent to the Qatari Prime Minister in March 2009 was revealed in court, showing the Prince complaining about ‘brutalist’ architecture in the city and pushing the merits of an alternative neo-classical scheme by his favourite architect, Quinlan Terry.78 Two months later, Charles met the Emir for tea at Clarence House and the court heard that the ruler subsequently ‘went mental’ with the head of the Qatari company, echoing Charles’s view of ‘how awful the scheme was’.79 Not only did Candy win his case, but the judge condemned Charles’s intervention as ‘unexpected and unwelcome’. The Royal Institute of British Architects, whose members have suffered interference from Charles on many occasions, said that the case highlighted ‘inappropriate behind-the-scenes methods used by the Prince of Wales’ to stop the Chelsea Barracks scheme.80 Its architect, Lord Rogers, later claimed that the Prince effectively has a veto over planning applications in London, accusing him of ‘unconstitutional behaviour’ and an ‘abuse of power’.81
It is not just the Queen’s eldest son who enjoys connections with unsavoury regimes. His younger brother, the Duke of York, is such an avid traveller that he has earned the nickname ‘Air Miles Andy’. As well as the usual clutch of princes from Gulf states, he is on friendly terms with politicians and oligarchs from Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan, former Soviet republics with poor human rights records. During the Prince’s ten-year stint as a UK trade envoy, most of his trips were paid for by taxpayers, with the cost amounting to £358,763 in 2010 alone;82 he stepped down from the role in the middle of the following year, but his publicly funded travel bill rose by £20,000, including £81,000 for a single trip via a chartered flight to Saudi Arabia.83 (The Prince once chartered an aircraft for a two-day trip to Teesside and Belfast, at a cost of £10,470.) This is despite the fact that Andrew’s role as trade envoy was marred by a series of bad decisions, usually involving close relatives of despotic leaders; early in 2011, the Labour MP Chris Bryant called for the Prince to be sacked from his job promoting trade, claiming in Parliament that he was a ‘very close friend’ of Colonel Gaddafi’s second son, Saif al-Islam, who was later charged with two counts of crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court.84 Andrew also held a lunch at Buckingham Palace for Sakher el-Materi, son-in-law of the Tunisian dictator Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, just three months before the regime was overthrown in the revolution that kicked off the Arab Spring in 2011;85 some people, it seems, just can’t help being on the wrong side of history.
But the connection that cast greatest doubt on Andrew’s judgement – and finally caused him to stand down as trade envoy – was his friendship with the American multi-millionaire and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The financier owned a mansion in Palm Beach, Florida, and in 2005 a woman complained to police that he had assaulted her fourteen-year-old daughter at his home. The FBI began an investigation and up to forty young women, some of them aged between fourteen and sixteen at the time, claimed they had been procured for sex at the mansion. In 2008, Epstein entered a plea bargain, pleading guilty to soliciting prostitution with an under-age girl; he was sentenced to eighteen months in prison and served thirteen months. On Epstein’s release, Andrew continued to see him and he was even photographed walking with the financier – now a registered sex offender – in New York’s Central Park. Newspaper reports suggest that the Prince eventually broke the connection but the damage was done, landing the British royal family with the worst set of headlines it has endured in decades: ‘Andrew denies sex slave claims: Prince is named in US lawsuit’ (Daily Express) and ‘I was Andy’s sex slave: Palace’s fury at shock court claims in States’ (The Sun). The accusations emerged in early January 2015 after a woman filed a motion in a Florida court claiming that Epstein had ‘loaned’ her for sex with wealthy and well-connected friends, including Prince Andrew, when she was seventeen (and thus a minor under Florida law). Buckingham Palace initially refused to comment but later changed its mind and issued no fewer than four categorical denials of ‘any suggestion of impropriety with under-age minors’ on the Prince’s part.86
An elected head of state who behaved like the Queen’s two elder sons, using public funds on a profligate scale to visit regimes accused of flagrant human rights abuses, would risk being ejected by voters at the next election; someone who covertly used his or her connections to destroy a commercial deal might even end up being impeached. That is how the democratic process works, maintaining checks and balances so that no individual becomes too powerful. But the Windsors are immovable under present constitutional arrangements and their position at the top of the social structure plays a key role in maintaining the UK’s class system. This is another unappealing feature of ‘modern’ Britain which would look very different under a republic, reducing at a stroke the huge number of people directly employed by or dependent on the royal family for patronage of one sort or another; royalty institutionalises deference, the notion that some people deserve respect solely on account of who they are – their birthright, in other words – and hence condescension and snobbery are built into the system. There are few better places to see this in action than a Buckingham Palace garden party, when thousands of people from all over the country are invited to drink tea on the palace lawn and mingle, at a safe distance, with the royals. There isn’t even a pretence of equality as the masses are guided towards a huge marquee, kept well away from the more favoured guests who make for the smaller and more exclusive diplomatic and royal tents. One July afternoon, when the event was wrecked by a sudden downpour of monsoon proportions, I heard an announcement that the royal family was being ‘evacuated’ into the palace, while the rest of us were left to huddle, as best we could, in the inadequate shelter of the big marquee. Few complained, because the key to this system is everyone knowing their place and being thankful for the tiny advantages – in this case, being in the palace garden at all – that come with it.
The popularity of TV dramas such as Upstairs, Downstairs and Downton Abbey is often attributed to nostalgia, suggesting that viewers enjoy watching a social hierarchy that now seems quaint and outmoded. But the army of volunteers who show visitors around National Trust properties confirms the persistence of an opposing and profoundly undemocratic narrative; uncritically affirming the social status of previous owners, they send a message that birth and wealth matter as much as they ever did in the UK. This is a paradox in a country where millions of voters regularly turn out to support parties whose manifestos claim a commitment to equality and social justice – though not, as we have seen, an elected head of state – and so is the fact that the Queen enjoys immense powers of nepotism. She exercises these first and foremost to the benefit of her immediate relatives, showering them with titles in lieu of (or in addition to) the usual birthday and wedding gifts. In 1987, she decided that Princess Anne would in future be known as the Princess Royal, a title restricted to the monarch’s eldest daughter; in 2011, she celebrated her grandson William’s wedding by conferring the title of Duke and Duchess of Cambridge on him and his bride. (The couple even have a spare title, Earl and Countess of Strathearn, for use when they cross the border into Scotland.) Prince Andrew got a royal dukedom when he married Sarah Ferguson, although the Duchess of York has complained of being frozen out of the family since her divorce. The Dukedom of Windsor is vacant and seems likely to remain so, given its unfortunate history, but the Queen has plenty of other baubles to dangle down the chain. Honours come in minute gradations, bewildering to foreigners but clearly understood by those who hope to receive them; a CBE is worth more than an OBE, for instance, and that
in turn is better than an MBE. So significant are these distinctions that I once heard about a former British ambassador who was distraught to receive a common-or-garden knighthood when he had expected a KCMG; both entitle the holder to be addressed as ‘Sir’ but a ‘Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George’ (satirically known as ‘Kindly Call Me God’) is much posher.