Public Engagement

Unless you have experienced it, then you have no idea how much a criminal court is run by and for the Prosecution. Though obtained by the execution of an unlawful warrant, the evidence against Lord Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, as the son of a duke should be styled, will nevertheless be deemed admissible when the case came to trial. The Defence could never hope to get away with anything remotely comparable. But if the Prosecution can pull a stroke like that, and it pulls such strokes and worse every day that the courts sit, then there can be no complaint about ITV's methods in relation to Reform UK.

Now sitting as an Independent, Councillor Dean Miller of Bromley offers us the possibility of a treason trial. Anti-terrorism legislation covers most of the acts that might ever have been dealt with in that way, but in 2023, Jaswant Singh Chail was still given nine years, plus five on licence, after he had been apprehended on Christmas Day 2021 in the grounds of Windsor Castle, wearing a mask, carrying a loaded crossbow, and intent on murdering Queen Elizabeth II, who as always at Christmas was in any case more than 120 miles away in Sandringham. Treason was the only possible charge. And so to Councillor Miller and his call for the King to have his head cut off. How could that be prosecuted as anything other than treason?

Although every time that I go out for any purpose, I now claim to be performing a "public engagement" in the manner of the former Meghan Markle and her present husband, on balance I would not abolish the monarchy. You would not have hereditary surgeons or hereditary pilots, but nor would you elect them. The arguments for the monarchy are rubbish in their own terms, but so are the arguments for a republic, meaning that the case for change has not been made. Which republic is classless, and free of corruption? France? Germany? Italy? India? Ireland? The United States? Where? A Presidential Election would be a choice between the next Bullingdon Club member in line and someone who had casually given a trifling £50,000 to the most recently successful candidate for the Leadership of the Labour Party. No one else would even make it onto the ballot paper, and I would not want either of those as my Head of State.

Nor would I abolish the Royal Prerogative. Rather, I want it to be exercised by a Prime Minister who aspired to strengthen families and communities through economic equality and international peace. But the monarchy, and with it the exercise of the Royal Prerogative by persons who most certainly did not share those aspirations, does not depend on the support of people like me. It depends on the support of people who, as long as the monarchy were simply there, have been prepared to overlook the fact that hardly anything that they really wanted ever happened, while all sorts of things that they did not want did happen, no matter who was in government.

Yet the threat to the monarchy was always going to come from the Right, although I had always assumed that that would be because it was blindingly incompatible with Thatcherite meritocracy. As it is, though, note what those Raising the Colours, no beneficiaries of Thatcherism unless one reasonably counted lifelong and intergenerational benefit dependency, were saying online about the King, and note what they were not saying, for God to save him or for him to live long, either there or on the streets. Of course Queen Elizabeth II was a Remainer, just as of course the King is a Green at least in a nonpartisan sense; he and his asylum-seeking father practically invented it. Like Green Parties from the Bundestag to the House of Commons, the King is a supporter of the war in Ukraine. So much for the Battenberg line, through which he is a great-great-nephew of Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna.

Already revering Oliver Cromwell, Restore Britain has recruited Laurence Fox, whose Reclaim Party wanted the monarchy to die with the then Queen. Reform gave Fox a free run at Uxbridge and South Ruislip, in return for the same at Mid Bedfordshire. Richard Tice has repeatedly called for Nigel Farage to become Britain's elected Head of State. The political neutrality of the monarchy is like the impartiality of the BBC. When, exactly, has there ever been any such thing? The same may be said of the Police, about whom the clue is in the name. Like having a monarchy or having the BBC, having the Police is inherently political. If they no longer automatically express your prejudices, then your prejudices are no longer hegemonic. If they never have done, then they never were. Of those three examples, it is the monarchy that never has embodied the presuppositions of its strongest supporters. It still keeps sweet a lot of people who need to be kept sweet. But I am at a loss as to why it has that effect on them. Increasingly, it no longer does.