by Andrew Marr
The British audience on mainstream television peaked at 24.5 million, mostly watching the BBC, while around the country 5,500 roads had been closed for street parties, by now a firm tradition. The great British composer Arnold Bax once told his countrymen they should try everything once, ‘except incest and folk-dancing’. Ignoring half of his warning, many streets were filled with Morris dancers and inebriated English people introducing themselves to their neighbours and trying Scottish reels. The day could be summed up as one of grand pageantry, but pageantry with a knowing smile. In the crowds many people wore a T-shirt reading ‘Thanks for the Day Off’. Even the Guardian cleared most of its news pages for lavish coverage.
This was without doubt a very good day for the Windsors, which showed that the British reacted as enthusiastically as ever to a happy ending and the prospect of a successfully self-regenerating dynasty. Perhaps the only sour note was that neither of the last two Labour prime ministers, Tony Blair or Gordon Brown, had been invited, though all living Conservative ones had been. The excuse, which was that they were not members of the Order of the Garter, seemed thin and some muttered that it was quiet revenge by Clarence House for Labour’s banning of foxhunting and the failure to order a new Royal Yacht. It probably was, instead, a genuine slip-up by Buckingham Palace. At any rate, some found it churlish, given Blair’s help after Diana’s death.
More generally, Charles and Diana’s story had been such a roller-coaster for the monarchy, starting so spectacularly and ending so badly, that one of the questions had been how this wedding would avoid too many obvious echoes of theirs. The real difference, it turned out, was not in the choice of one location over another, but in the demeanour of the stars of the show themselves. Prince William was smiling sheepishly but clearly enjoying himself; Kate Middleton was poised and self-assured; they chatted quietly at key moments about how lucky they were. As they left the Abbey the newly created Duke of Cambridge told his Duchess, ‘It was amazing, amazing. I am so proud you’re my wife.’ Around them Prince Harry grinned and muttered encouragement. These were people at ease in their skins, the same age, who had met at what they would call ‘Uni’ and who had lived together – in what used to be called Sin but is now known as North Wales. They had split up and made up. At twenty-nine, Kate Middleton was old for a royal bride – nearly a decade older than Diana had been – and she would face the inevitable demands to produce an heir quickly. But that extra experience of life is a golden treasure, and she seems already to have the toughness, savoir-vivre and staying power that Diana Spencer had struggled to find.
In retrospect, the earlier wedding seemed like a naïve explosion of frenetic patriotism at what had been, admittedly, a very tough time for Britain. The journalist Ian Jack reminded Guardian readers that in 1981 ‘British pits still employed a quarter of a million miners, ships still went down the slipways of several dozen British shipyards, the Rolls-Royces that purred to the front doors of St Paul’s still had British engines’ and yet, at the same time, ‘Imprisoned IRA men were dying on hunger strike, urban rioting had erupted in several English cities, 2.5 million people (and rising) were on the dole.’ The Falklands war, the revival of the economy and the boom years of Thatcherism were still ahead. ‘Di-mania’ had come like sunshine in midwinter and, as now seems clear (but was less obvious then), far too great a burden of promise and hope was loaded onto frail shoulders. Then, the political divisions in Britain were more bitter and there was an angrier anti-royalwedding, republican reaction, with left-wingers taking boats to France to avoid the coverage and more media mockery.
By 2011, Britain still faced plenty of problems. In some respects, they had got worse. With the spending cuts to pay off a too-large national debt hanging over many people, and the complicated war in Afghanistan dragging on, nobody could say these were easy times. But a different Conservative prime minister, David Cameron, was at a peak of his authority. Republican hostility to the spectacle of the wedding was so muted as to be almost invisible. We should not assume any easy division between royalist and conservative on one side, and left-wing and republican on the other. The crowds in London were much more than the hard-core of royalist sightseers. Overall, they seemed relatively young, and from every background. With different banners, many could have been at a summer rock festival or even on a march of trade unionists against the coalition cuts. Many expressed pleasure that a middle-class woman had been welcomed into the Windsor embrace and noted the Queen’s expressions of delight as she returned to Buckingham Palace. In an unscientific survey by the author, asked whether one day an Asian or black member of the royal family was possible, most in the crowd replied with a puzzled shrug and a ‘Why not?’ or ‘Of course’.
Kate Middleton was not, as we have seen, the first commoner in modern times to join the core monarchy. Lady Elizabeth Bowes Lyon and Lady Diana Spencer had been, strictly speaking, commoners, since they did not have royal blood. But they were not what most Britons would call commoners. Kate and her parents were genuinely middle-class. They had gone through a long period of testing and apprenticeship in the odd world of royalty, managing to say or do nothing embarrassing despite teasing from twits and snobs. The Middletons were millionaires, but self-made ones who had built up a mail-order business for children’s parties. Kate’s father had been a flight despatcher and her mother, the daughter of a shop assistant, had been an air hostess. Her mother’s family was traced back to coalminers who had worked in pits owned by the Bowes Lyons, the Queen Mother’s family. Though Kate had been educated at a private boarding school, Marlborough, and was doughtily learning to shoot, stalk and watch polo matches, her world was that of the aspirational, successful middle, not of landowners. She and mother were the kind of women millions of other British women could identify with. Girls in the crowd waving signs reading ‘Harry’s mine’ were (mostly) joking but could go home afterwards and feel the joke was not absurd.
The 2011 wedding was only one part of a story, which has much longer to run. But it contained messages and dilemmas, which Prince William will need to think about during what will presumably be a long apprenticeship before he becomes King. The British are now less class-conscious than ever before and far less formal. Negotiating the right balance between the reserve that royal mystique depends on and the openness that people (not just the media) expect has been difficult for his grandmother and it will be difficult for him. What jokes are acceptable? How does he dress? Which television programmes, if any, does he agree to appear on? Should he give interviews to newspapers? Can he go on holiday anywhere other than secure royal estates or remote islands? After he finishes his career as an RAF helicopter search-and-rescue pilot, where will he make his home and how much royal work will he take on in the early years, when with luck he will have a young family to take care of? These are old questions but they never go away, and the answers slowly and subtly change, generation by generation.
Prince William’s education at Eton and St Andrews University may have been in some respects more ‘normal’ than his father’s or grandfather’s. With his younger brother, he has been a regular at elite London nightclubs and has had a circle of well-off friends that gives him security and support beyond ‘the Firm’. It still puts him inside an elite group. At his wedding many of the guests, including the prime minister and the London mayor, had been at his old school; so had some of the commentators describing the event. The future king’s wife went to Marlborough school; so did the prime minister’s wife. None of this need mean very much at all, so long as care is taken to avoid the impression of a closed ruling class, with morning coats, identical accents and similar views. That would undo the Queen’s hard work to ensure she is seen as everybody’s monarch – certainly not classless but certainly not politically tilted either.
The good news is that Prince William has so far showed a sure touch and is married to a woman who, having faced a long ordeal by newspaper columnist, starting with the ‘Waity Katy’ jibes earlier in the relationship, is tougher and m
ore street-wise than her predecessors. Some who know him have said that below the surface of smiling normality, Prince William remains coldly angry about the role played in his mother’s death by the media. If so, who can fail to sympathize? There are no other obvious scapegoats for what happened. His father looked after him and his brother warmly and well after her death. Charles and his sons now seem to have a good, mutually micky-taking relationship and Prince William seems to be genuinely pleased that his father found warmth and support from Camilla. So far as the press is concerned, in the past it has been William calming his father down, rather than the reverse. At the ski resort of Klosters in 2005, unaware of the proximity of microphones, Prince Charles had conducted the traditional photo-call with a murmured commentary: ‘I hate doing this . . . I hate these people . . .’ and, observing Nicholas Witchell, the BBC royal correspondent: ‘These bloody people. I can’t bear that man. I mean, he’s so awful, he really is.’ It was his son who urged him to keep smiling and attempted to lighten the mood.
The Duke of Edinburgh was a more open, optimistic man before feeling himself mauled and misunderstood by journalists and closing off. The Prince of Wales is said by friends to have been a funny, loving, open character before hitting a wall of media hostility, and again closing off. The question is, can the same pattern be avoided a third time? Given the appalling blow of his mother’s death, at such a vulnerable stage in Prince William’s life and in the eye-scorching glare of global publicity, he seems to have emerged as an astonishingly balanced man. Yet part of the reason for that must be the love and care of a grandfather and father, both of whom have been demonized by sections of the press and public. So ‘balanced’ and ‘happy about the media’ are likely to be two very different things.
In 2005 Prince William and Prince Harry had had their mobile phone inboxes hacked into by a private investigator working for Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World. They were hardly alone: the story of the illegal hacking of phones covered hundreds, perhaps thousands, of targets, including a thirteen-year-old murdered girl, Milly Dowler, the bereaved relatives of victims of the London bombings of 7 July 2005, as well as numerous politicians and celebrities. It pushed Murdoch into closing his 168-year-old Sunday newspaper, which for much of its life had been the biggest-selling paper in Britain. As public revulsion exploded, the scandal rocked the entire Murdoch empire, embracing some of the journalists and titles which had over the years most infuriated the Royals. The fear of being eavesdropped, entrapped or betrayed runs deep in the Windsor family and most of its senior members have been conned or caught out at some time. Greedy or credulous junior Royals had been humiliated publicly and secrets spilled from the highest levels. Even police protection officers upon whom the Windsors depend so heavily have been drawn into the web of suspicion.
Since any senior member of the British monarchy has to live part of his or her life in the public eye, this is not a problem that can be shrugged off. But it is not a problem, either, for Prince William alone. What happened to the Duke of Edinburgh and Prince Charles – the spite and jeering, rather than the reporting – not only did them damage but damaged the monarchy. It made them, and thus the monarchy as an institution, less optimistic and more inflexible. If the British value the monarchy, as they do, then the media grandees who set the tone of some of the coverage at least (Twitter and the blogosphere have democratized much of it) must ask themselves whether they are making the country a better or worse place by hounding a future king. ‘Hounding?’ the reader might ask, ‘Who is hounding Prince William? Are not he and Kate the most popular Royals of all?’ Yes, they are. But if the twentieth-century history of the British monarchy is any guide at all, the mood will change sometime, and harder times will follow. Public fury about the behaviour of some journalists and newspaper executives in 2011 may bring to an end the free-for-for-all behaviour of the past few decades. After the monarchy, the City and Parliament, newspapers themselves have become the latest target of pitiless and unforgiving scrutiny. Painful as it is, this may simply be what democracy feels like in our times. Deference, and a belief in the virtues of privacy and reticence, will not return to make life easier for future kings and queens. And if Prince William has not been warned about that already by his father and grandfather, it would be a great surprise.
The Good Life
It has been a good life. The Queen has moved among beautiful places and interesting people and always known that she was here for a purpose. Almost every year, season by season, almost exactly the same things must be done, said and performed – Garter days, Maundy services, ambassadors retiring, prime ministers and civil servants to be seen, hospital wings to be opened and Commonwealth visits to be retraced. It is a public life of huge predictability and minimal spontaneity. Alongside, it has been a private life with a lot of fun and warmth as well as the odd disaster. She has been an outdoor woman who has bred racehorses, gossiped with close friends, walked, shot and ridden, and been amused, as well as alarmed, by her family.
In her eighties she still rides, still stoutly refusing to wear a helmet: her daughter points out that for this to happen, someone would have to be brave enough to suggest to the Queen that she rides unsafely enough to need to. As the Princess Royal puts it, ‘That’s a difficult one to get past.’ For the Queen, horses have been a refuge because they don’t know she is the Queen. They are no respecter of rank, only of ability. The Queen and her sister were brought up to tack their horses and untack them, and brush them and pick stones from their hoofs. The Queen’s oldest friends remember horse games from the start of her life. One, Margaret Rhodes, has written: ‘We cavorted endlessly as horses, which was her idea. We galloped round and round. We were horses of every kind: carthorses, racehorses and circus horses. We spent a lot of time as circus horses and it was obligatory to neigh.’13 As a girl, her rooms were full of toy horses.
None of that now, of course. But she keeps in her head detailed information about the bloodlines of racehorses that even professional trainers need to check in books. Sadly because of a lost horseshoe, Carlton House, her much fancied runner in the 2011 Epsom Derby (the only Classic she has never won), finished third; but life always has to offer further challenges. Her husband at ninety still drives four-in-hand carriages with verve, which would be a dangerous sport even for a much younger man. She no longer stalks or shoots, but she takes a great interest in that too, padding by evening into the pantries at Balmoral or Sandringham to check what has been killed.
She stays on top of her papers. Is that fun? Hardly; but the Queen still expresses a great interest in the latest scandals and gossip from Westminster. Former civil servants talk when they retire of the pain of ‘information withdrawal’. With ‘dine and sleeps’ at the palaces, and the constant comings and goings of well-informed people, never mind those secret papers, the Queen has never experienced that. She has been looking down from the top of the mast at the whole ship of state. Yes, in obvious ways she has been out of touch with daily realities, swaddled by the routine of court life, the constitutional job and the scale of the buildings she lives in. Yet by touring and talking endlessly to a wider cross-section of people than most politicians or journalists ever meet, she is remarkably well informed. And she has done her share of sneaking out, sometimes it is said in an elderly, anonymous-looking brown car, chauffeured by that slightly wild driver, her husband. She may not carry the money with her head on it, but she keeps a close personal eye on royal budgets, the salaries and daily running costs of the monarchy. She has seen the effects of family breakup at close quarters – rage, abuse, sorrow, regret. So she isn’t swaddled, really. In private she can be spontaneously warm, but she never forgets her destiny and when she needs it she has a terrifyingly expressionless stare that could halt a tank at twenty paces.
Long ago, John Selden, one of the leaders of the other side during the great Crown-versus-Parliament confrontation of the seventeenth century, observed that a monarch was a thing people made ‘for quietness sake’. Politicall
y, the Queen has shown there is truth there. Despite economic turmoil, overseas war and terrorist violence, her reign has seen no dramatic breakdown of the political order: switches from left to right, from radical to consensual, have happened with almost boring simplicity.
Critics of monarchy might say that this is precisely the problem. During the Queen’s reign, Britain’s power in the world, her ability to make things, her productive energy, have declined. Maybe a less stable system would have allowed sharper turns. Perhaps the British needed a bigger shock than they got in the second half of the twentieth century. And perhaps as a buffer, a reassurance-institution, the monarchy contributed to British complacency. This is a plausible criticism. The trouble is that it cannot be proved or disproved. Some countries with monarchies – such as Spain, or Japan – have undergone far bigger shocks than most republics. On the other side, it can hardly be said that key republics such as the United States have been somehow less stable. (The closest rival to Britain, France, has chosen to have the form of a republic hiding the reality of something close to intermittent but absolute monarchy. And if anyone thinks republicanism is a cheap option, they should scan the chateaux, holiday homes, guards of honour, aircraft, wine cellars and army of truculent chefs required to keep the President of the Republic in his comfortable splendour.)