Following the death of Elizabeth II, power is performing its truths, transforming princes into kings and dukes and children into princes. But as the British state becomes less legitimate, these processes are losing their potency. The late Queen is revered across the world but the monarchy itself has lost its magic. Charles is King, but the monarchy will not be what it was.
Monarchy was never above politics. It rested on it and on the Conservative party in particular. This was the party of the monarchy, the union, the constitution, the established churches and the empire. In 1936, it disposed of a king emperor who offended its bourgeois sensibilities, thus redirecting the royal line of succession down to King Charles III. It was a Conservative government of the 1950s that redefined the monarchy as a national rather than imperial one. A then-imperialist Enoch Powell, in his tilting at the royal titles bill, was appalled, but to no effect. In time, he would become an ardent nationalist, dismissive of empire as a passing phase and the Commonwealth as a racial danger to the nation.
Today’s Conservative party is radically different from that of the 1950s. It has taken up Powellite free marketism and nationalism rather than imperialism. It now cares little for church or constitution. Of course it celebrates the person of the late Queen, but monarchy is a subtly different matter.
For most of the Conservative party, Brexit was far more important than royal propriety. What to them would once have been an incendiary charge that, as prime minister, Boris Johnson “lied to the Queen” to get a politically convenient prorogation of parliament made little impact, despite being true. In fact, it was a weaker accusation than it might seem, for it was that the prime minister had told fibs to the particular cherished royal person rather than to the sovereign.
Another telling sign was given by our new prime minister. Having just kissed the hands of the dying monarch, she eulogised her wrongly. Speaking from outside Downing Street, Liz Truss said the late Queen “was the very spirit of Great Britain”. Clearly, no one in Downing Street knew to advise the notionally unionist Truss that her late Majesty was Queen of the whole undivided United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
That is telling. While it is a common error in the country at large, and in the media, it is an extraordinary one to be made by a Conservative prime minister on such a solemn national occasion and in the context of the politics of the Northern Ireland protocol. She and her advisers clearly did not know or care.
In a celebrated book, The Enchanted Glass, Tom Nairn, one of the great interpreters of British history, challenged the notion that the antique British monarchy was mere archaic mumbo-jumbo. Monarchy mattered. It embodied, and sustained, a backward antique state, one that made it impossible for a proper modern democratic British nation to emerge. It kept the nation, its politicians and its intellectuals infantilised. It also helped keep it stuck in an Edwardian time warp, incapable of transforming itself economically and industrially.
That thesis is not quite right. The problem of the monarchy is not its backwardness, but its particular modernity. Although not keen on bicycles, it was the very model of a modern monarchy. As author and historian David Cannadine revealed in the 1980s, the great royal rituals are inventions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, created alongside the great royal processional way that is the Mall.
The monarchy spoke through radio long before most people had receivers. In 1953, the coronation was broadcast on television, to a nation of wireless listeners. The new Prince Consort started egging on the nation’s engineers in an era of heroic test pilots, sleek new jets and atomic power stations. That Dan Dare world is as long gone as the promise of the new Elizabethan age, but it had its moment.
This is not to say the monarchy was not surrounded by puerile propaganda or that it endures or doesn’t matter. On royal matters, the House of Commons, especially “at its best”, and the BBC cringeingly debase themselves. This is important in that it hides the power, not of the monarch, but of a monarchical state and the cravenness of the political class in front of it.
But something fundamental has changed. The invented traditions that sustained the performance of monarchical presence have their outward pomp but have lost much inner meaning. The voice of the monarchical state is, post-Iraq and Brexit, assumed to be dissembling or mendacious. The once wholly cringeing media now often report to greater powers who are less inclined to respect the official royal version. They have bigger lies to tell.
It is also the case that the prestige of the British monarchy depended on that of the British empire and then the British nation and the British state. That too has eroded. Recent prime ministers have been neither efficient nor dignified. Strikingly, the Conservative party has proved incapable of preparing for or managing the Brexit it so badly wanted. It is now hard to instinctively believe there is a particular British diplomatic or military genius.
The civil service hasn’t covered itself in glory either, partying in Downing Street while the rest of us obeyed the rules and, like the ministers it serves, staying on holiday in the midst of crisis and collaborating to cover up scandal. Lords temporal or spiritual do not command the respect they once did. In parallel, excepting the late Queen, the royal family is associated with inappropriate friendships and rejecting transfusions of energy from charismatic women, Diana, Princess of Wales, and Meghan.
Crucially, the Conservative party has changed. It has left behind its roots as the royal party, as the party of national capitalism and of a genuine union. Although it has increased its share of the vote in every general election since 1997, it is now an English party shackled to a dying electorate, a failing Brexit and powerful radical right, but not to monarchist impulses. It exercises its own power monarchically, satisfying the special interests of its own privy councils.
Meanwhile, the great silenced majority of the younger generation is neither monarchist nor Conservative. It is savvy about the mendacities of power and is rightly resentful at having its future being blighted by the fantasies of old people and all that is associated with them. Its monarchy will be very different. Indeed, they may well, like presidents from around the world, have warm words for the late Queen, but prefer a more modest, more modern, more democratic, more dignified republican constitution.
David Edgerton is the author of The Rise and Fall of the British Nation and professor of modern British history at King’s College London
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