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‘The sexual and marital tomfoolery’ of what Barnes calls the Queen’s ‘whelps’ has
indeed been terrible PR for Windsor Inc., but it has not been the only cause of the
trouble. The social revolution which began in the late 1950s has ended the age of
deference. As a result, almost every major Western country including the United States
has suffered from what the former US Ambassador in London, Raymond Seitz, called
‘institutional melancholy’. The general public is increasingly cynical about the integrity
and wisdom of such established institutions as Parliament, the Church and the Law, and
the monarchy was bound to be affected. Margaret Thatcher’s reforming zeal undermined
the traditional aspects of just about every British establishment and her advocacy of the
free market ushered in the greed and excess of the 1980s, in which money, profit and
cost were the criteria by which everything was to be judged.
The cost of the monarchy has always been a sensitive point and the Thatcherite
requirements of cost-effectiveness and value for money are particularly difficult to apply
to the ‘magical’ and ceremonial organization which it represents. Could such an
expensive establishment – the total cost of the monarchy to the public is estimated at
£79.1 million a year – be justified in a Britain which was no longer a world power?
Financial arguments about the monarchy are complicated and tedious, but abolishing it
and replacing the Queen with a republican president as head of state would not
necessarily save a great deal. The head of state could no doubt make do with a far
smaller entourage than the monarch does at present and might, therefore, cost half the
present sum to maintain, but it has been estimated that presidential elections would cost
some £45 million a time every five years. A constitutional monarch is apolitical in a
way which no president can be. Every non-royal person has some political views or
connection, a situation which would inevitably create difficulties. He or she would be
very unlikely to possess the glamour or aura which the sovereign does as the symbol of
the nation.
Republican arguments against the monarchy are that it props up the class system and
stands in the way of true democracy and the modernization of Britain. Republicans
object to the way that the prerogative powers of the Queen are deployed by the
executive to implement objectives without consulting Parliament. The answer to most of
these points, as an eminent constitutional expert put it on a television programme on
the monarchy, is ‘Rubbish’. The real divide in British society is not between the titled
and the untitled but between the rich and the poor and the monarchy can hardly be held
responsible for that. Abolishing it would not make the executive less powerful or
undemocratic and might pave the way to political dictatorship. It is perfectly possible to
reform the constitution, exclude the hereditary element from the House of Lords, and do
the other things that reformers would like to see without abolishing the monarchy. It
really is up to Parliament to decide these things and deprive the executive of the
prerogative power if it wants to, but under present conditions when the Whips are allpowerful
and the Prime Minister has so many jobs in his gift, it seems extremely
unlikely that the House of Commons would do any such thing. Equally, it is hard to see
why ‘modernization’ cannot be achieved without getting rid of the Queen. As an