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UNEASY LIES THE HEAD : ON LOSING THE ROYAL TOUCH  NOW AND THEN

May 4, 2023 by philco

Note: This is a revised and updated text of an article  originally published in Livingmaps Review  and posted online in 2021. It is due to appear  in a new collection of occasional piece Waypoints Volume 2 : Studies in the Grey Zone, to be published by eyeglass books in the Autumn of 2023.

How do you map a monarchy? Depict the location of its palaces and other places of residence? This may be quite an undertaking , given that the House of Windsor has so many mansions, not to mention castles, grace and favour apartments . A recent estimate of their land and property portfolio registered it at 21.5 billion  . A wealth map  then  would be an obvious starting point, although  members of the  Royal Family are understandably a bit touchy , not to say secretive about the exact extent of their personal  and collective wealth. The exact wealth of the Queen was unknown during her lifetime  , although guesstimates put it somewhere between 300 and 400 million sterling and she received an additional 30 million a year from the Civil list to help with her running costs. The royal  art collection  of old Masters has been valued at more than the whole of its other assets put together.

So far so predictable. But so what? Hands up anyone who  thinks the future of the British monarchy depends on its wealth, whether hidden or manifest?  Or that  its abolition will be triggered by  public outrage at the expenditure of so much tax payers money on supporting  the royal  life style during a cost of living crisis  when so many of their ‘subjects’ have to choose between eating or heating?   The current debate between Monarchists and Republicans does indeed pivot on the issue of whether the Royals give value for money  as ambassadors for UK PLC  or whether it is  an increasingly dysfunctional  and unaffordable relic of a bygone age, one  which  has no place in a modern democracy. Yet this is to presuppose that  the question can only be formulated  and resolved in terms of   cost benefit analysis.   The fact that such an economistic  perspective  is beside the point is illustrated by the fact  that  while  inherited inequalities of wealth and privilege   are condemned by over 80 per cent of the British adult population , and the Royal family are prime exemplars of this,   nearly 70 per cent  of the same people think that  the House of Windsor is  an institution worth preserving, even if they have misgivings about some aspects of its operation.

How to account for this exceptionalism ?   One reason is the way  the monarchy has absorbed the aura of celebrity culture.  This emerges clearly if you draw a network map showing   the social connections of the Windsors  with other royal families and members of the hereditary aristocracy , as well as with what used to be called High Society . This latter  has now expanded to include a the  super rich and the super stars of sport, entertainment , fashion and the creative industries.  Debutantes may no longer be presented to the Monarch at court ,  nowadays  it  is the glitterati  who give audiences and hold court, but the Season still continues  in all but name , with Royal Ascot, Wimbledon,  Henley Regatta, Oxbridge May Balls,  and the Queen’s Summer Garden parties its hotspots. A social network map would thus    show just how closely integrated the new and old aristocracies are , not only in terms of inter-marriage, but through shared  interests and life styles.

The  British Royal Family , or what is sometimes called ‘The Firm’ is a very peculiar kind of  business, exerting behind -the- scenes influence  on the political culture  while maintaining  scrupulous formal distance from  the operations of government. The fact that Britain is a constitutional monarchy but has no written constitution  has allowed   a  grey zone  to emerge in which an informal and largely invisible network of patronage and  preferment meshes in seamlessly with other hierarchies of public prestige, most evidently  in  the public honours  system. The ability of the establishment to absorb even the most apparent radical people  into its ranks is  one of the most open secrets of its historical success. One of my favourite photographs  of 2023  is of a black film maker and cultural activist  well known for his excoriating attacks on Britain’s colonial legacy   taking the knee as he is tapped on the shoulder with a sword by the new  King  in the ancient  ritual to consecrate his knighthood. The royal touch is still needed for this purpose  , and social  elevation   still demands a  prior act of submission. In this case an act of political protest inaugurated by Black Lives Matter finds itself travestied and its meaning reversed. All the more weird  then  to see the congratulations  pour in on social media from  the radical Glitterati  while  the subject himself  basks  in peer adulation  and   enthuses about  the quality of the Royal Art Collection. 

The transition to celebrity culture

If you are reading this , the chances are that, like me, you are not that  interested in following the detailed doings of this elite  and indeed  you may feel indifferent or even hostile  towards their existence. This antipathy is quite widely shared but is still a minority view. The gossip columns  are as alive as ever with the news of  the  Great and Not so Good , their comings and goings on  , with social media making it possible for everyone nowadays to be their own gossip   columnist. Royal watching is now part of a more general fascination with the Spectacle of wealth and power;  it   may be driven by voyeuristic identification or envy , a desire to emulate or to see the high and mighty taking a fall; whatever the motivation, this form of star gazing  shows no signs of decreasing  in popularity and seems quite compatible with holding political views which are diametrically opposed to the existence of self- perpetuating elites.

Scandal and rumour are grist to this particular mill. It could be argued that celebs are only getting what they  ask for, if not what they always deserve. After all these are people who live in and for the public gaze  and  who  often operate a carefully crafted public persona designed to excite  this attention. Although they may, at the same time,  go to great lengths to ensure that their private lives are safe from media scrutiny, this  inevitably becomes the focus of intense public  curiosity. This tension between  public face and private life is the fulcrum  around which the culture of celebrity  revolves; the secret of  its  attraction lies in  the secrets which the apparatus of  fame  both conceals and potentially reveals. Enchantment and disenchantment are  two complimentary sides to the frenzy of renown.  

The British Royals  are at once highly dependant on the media which sustains celebrity culture and continue toattempt to occupy a special position of inaccessibility in relation to it.. It is that contradiction which is tearing this monarchy apart , even and especially when it is denied or displaced;  when it is dramatically acted out , as it was in the case of Lady Di and  now with Harry and Meghan, the arranged  marriage between monarchical and celeb culture falls apart.

So to that interview.   After the long campaign of vilification in the Tory gutter press , Meghan and Harry  get their chance to dish the dirt on ‘the firm’ and the  media. Washing  dirty linen in public evokes a homely image of ordinary folk living cheek by growl in back to backs, in fear of the prying eyes of nosey neighbours. But applied to a family sequestered  in castles and stately homes, guarded from the madding crowd of paparazzi by an army of security guards , it takes on a hallucinatory quality: all those skeletons in the Royal family closet suddenly emerging blinking into the glare of the TV cameras.

 I did a straw poll  of close friends and colleagues, most of whom are very much on the Left politically  with  quite a few admitting to being republicans. They almost all watched  the  Oprah Winfrey interview , as did your correspondent.  Some claimed it was in the line of professional duty ,other admitted to ‘curiosity’. I asked them if their attitudes to the Monarchy had been changed as a result of watching  the  interview. A few said they now felt more sympathetic to Harry and especially Meghan, for  having to put up  with such an up -tight and  racist establishment . The majority said it confirmed their view that the Queen and other members of the Royal Family were simply out of touch with the modern world and ordinary people , and that  the institution itself was well past  its sell by date. Some thought it could be  modernised, although unclear how this might be done. Interestingly those who were most sceptical about the possibilities of reform, were also reluctant to propose abolition. The  historical association of republicanism with regicide still leaves a bad taste in many British mouths. Protector Cromwell’s democratic reputation has not exactly improved over the past three hundred and fifty years.

The Royal Touch

What struck me in these responses was the constant  refrain that that the ‘establishment’ of which the Royal  Family are still a conspicuous part, were seen to be ‘out of touch’ , not just  with the people, but with their own feelings. The stiff upper lip sense of public duty which the Queen is still seen to embody has come to represent not an ideal , but  a  socially distanced and emotionally remote stance on the part of a privileged elite. In contrast Lady Di, the ‘People’s Princess’,  was  seen  as someone who wore her heart on her sleeve , in a series of interviews  she made no secret of her emotional turmoil . She also  went in for a lot of  hugging , including  patients with AIDS. As a result she was widely seen as having  ‘the common touch’ even if she was a Sloane Ranger .

We are living in a period of touchy-feely identity politics, remember  David Cameron when prime minster  urging his fellow Tories  to ‘hug a hoody’ ? No doubt to console  these   young people for the fact that his government’s  policies had ensured that they had no jobs and no  youth centres to hang around in while waiting for one. In fact,  touching  is not a new instrument of the body politic. The royal touch and its supposed healing powers was  an intrinsic part of the monarchy’s equipment  from the middle ages onwards. In the age of   Feudal   absolutism , the laying   on of royal hands was a sign of possessing God’s gift to cure all classes of people  of particular diseases . The practice was thus  a means of claiming and legitimating –  we might even say performing-  a divine right to rule. English monarchs made use of  this device  right up until the  end of the17th century.

Although the application  of the  royal touch fell into abeyance, the notion that the monarch’s body possessed  special powers continued. This derived from the idea that the monarch had two bodies , a physical body that ages , gets ill and dies like any other human’s and a spiritual body that was immortal and transmitted  its hereditary powers from  generation to generation. This distinction  became the cornerstone of a  political theology of king and queenship whose traces can be found in the more modern distinction between the sacred and profane aspects of the monarchy as an institution. The two are brought together in the bio-political concept of breeding which is central to the aristocratic model of society. Within this frame ,as Hilary Mantel has reminded us, the Royals are essentially carriers of a bloodline and  as such a collection of organs. 

In the cult of Gloriana , for example , the virgin queen’s body, and especially her vagina , this ‘precious jewel’ as Shakespeare called it , had to be  protected from the laying on of foreign hands, so that the physical integrity of  this ‘earth of majesty ‘ would remain intact along  with the Queen’s  own thaumaturgical power. This fascination with Royal genitalia  and  theirs procreative capacities has remained albeit more out of prurient curiosity that as an agency of  statecraft. In a documentary made about Prince Harry’ s tour of duty with the British army in Afghanistan , he was asked by a group of young fellow officers what colour his  pubic hair was. Fast forward a decade and he finds himself interrogated by a member of his own family as to the  likely skin colour of his new baby.  

Nowadays the  therapeutic laying on of hands is  left to the Clergy, masseurs and  Reichian psycho-therapists, but the aura of royal presence  continues to exercise a metaphysical power.  The continued legitimacy of ‘regality ’   has increasingly  come to depend on maintaining this aura in the secular form of ‘pomp and circumstance’  via  elaborate public ceremonials – for example the trooping of the Colour on the Queen’s birthday . The royal handshake not longer claims any miraculous healing  power, but it does affirm a certain ritual contact between a ‘majestic presence’ and its subjects  which conjures up a  harmonious social order in which each has their appointed place.

 Indeed one possible reason for the continued public support for monarchy is a pervasive  desire for some version of social harmony  that transcends or at least magically suspends  bitter divisions based on structural inequalities of class, gender, generation and ethnicity.  Even though the  institutional existence of  the Royal Family embodies these very inequalities, its members, and especially the Monarch  are still often regarded as somehow being ‘above them’. However given the increasingly disunited state of the ‘United ‘ Kingdom, with the rise of determined  regional nationalisms in Scotland and Wales, and the  imminent advent of a demographic majority in Northern Ireland in favour of unification with the republic  in the South, it is likely that in the foreseeable future the Monarchy’s writ will be confined to what has always been its bastion  , namely England.

Re-Invented Traditions

There is clearly a danger that a monarchy still wrapping itself in the Union Jack  will be adopted as a symbol of a last ditch unionism  or even of a resurgent little Englander nationalism promoted by the populist and xenophobic Right with its dog whistle messages about white supremacy. In principle the Monarch as the titular head of the Commonwealth is officially committed to ‘multiculturalism’ but given the current move by many of these ex-colonies to secede and embrace republicanism as the final   stage of the  decolonisation process , it is looking more and more unlikely that King Charles III will be able to play this particular card.     

I well remember a 12 year old   boy  from an ex-dockers family and  an Irish background  with whom I worked as part of an anti-racist project in East London schools. He was vociferous in his fear that the   growing presence of BAME communities in this part of London would complete the destruction of its traditional working class culture which started with the closure of the docks.  At one point in the discussion he turned to me and said ‘Come off it sir, you can’t imagine Britain with a  black queen , can you’? I replied’ Well may be not, but you clearly can!’. We have just witnessed a situation in which the arrival of a Black baby  in the royal family was too much for the  TGP and called forth a wide range of negative reactions directed at its parents, and especially its mother .

History – and the tainted legacy of Empire – is at the epicentre of the culture war just now . Certainly we have moved on from the kind of  history I was taught at school , whose principles of periodisation were nothing if not regal ; we did the Plantagenets, then the Tudors and Stuarts and European history ended abruptly in 1789 with the Louis the Sixteenth’s head in the guillotine.  Yet we have not entirely abandoned the monarchy as an epochal structure: we still  talk of Regency furniture, Georgian  architecture and poetry, Victorian values , and the Teddy Boys who were working class kids dressed after the fashion of the Edwardian gentleman. 

 In this context it is perhaps worth remembering that the ‘Windsors’  are flying a flag of convenience. In 1917 during the First World War,  at the height of anti-German feeling  they anglicised  the family name from Battenberg  to Mountbatten ,  and  adopted their favourite castle as their patronym in order to lay claim to home- grown patriotic roots, and  to dissociate themselves from their German ancestry.  Perhaps what keeps the British monarchy alive, if not well, is that it is so conspicuously an invented tradition, a historical anachronism which is a reminder of a once upon a time when Britain felt itself Great. Nevertheless  exchanging a rather delicious marzipan cake ( a Battenberg)  for a  greasy brown Windsor soup seems in retrospect like the wrong choice of culinary traditions.

The monarchy may well lose its institutional  raison d’etre in a de-colonialised  Britain, especially if a devolved country has a new written constitution , even further marginalising its already limited power of social harmonics. But this does not  necessarily  means that its function  as a  natural symbol of traditional authority will vanish. To understand   why we have to grasp what  Majesty unconsciously represents and the terms and conditions of the Royal Family’s anchorage in popular culture and everyday life.

A  Right Royal Romance :the making of an aura

At this point I make no apology for the argument  turning  auto-biographical.  As a child I was told by my mother, an enthusiastic monarchist , that I was named after the Queen’s husband, Prince Philip.  In response my father who was  a staunch republican, informed me that in fact I was named after his father who was a an Russian Jewish  immigrant  and a follower of  the Russian anarchist, Prince Kropotkin. Family arguments , which mostly took place around the dinner table, thus frequently took the form of a replay of Royalists versus Roundheads in the English Civil War. I generally took the side of the Roundheads, ganging up with my dad. But in my  secret fantasy life it was a very different  story.

For my Freudian family romance I had a choice of two Princes , the romantic Russian revolutionary , or the  dashing young  Greek naval officer who was the  consort of the  Queen. Having transitioned  from the frilly frocks of early babyhood to the sailor suits of boyhood ,  I was given a model sailing boat as a  seventh birthday present.  In the early 1950’s  the regalia of maritime empire were still furnishing the identity props of middle class childhood .  So the  choice between Princes was a no brainer. Clearly my real dad was the Duke of Edinburgh ; as his illegitimate son I had been sent to this weird half -Jewish family to be brought up in order to avoid public embarrassment to the Royal family. As Prince Charles’ unofficial half brother  I awaited the call from the Palace to tell me that I had at last been recognised as having royal blood.

Sadly the  call never came, although as a precautionary measure my mother followed in the Queen’s footsteps and Invested in a  corgi thus at a stroke affirming her Welshness and her royalism. Alas for her ambitions and mine, the   dog in question routinely pissed on the carpet, mistaking it for grass, and took against humans, especially visitors. Our brief flirtation with canine royalty  ended when ‘Binky’ sank his  teeth into the calf of a prominent Tory MP who came to tea , much to my father’s delight. My mother subsequently  attributed   the foreclosure of her career as a Tory councillor to the late Binky’s actions, as well as to her son’s in occupying the Queen Mother’s old house at !44 Piccadilly in what became known as the HippyDilly Squat.          

It so happens that  my best friend at my prep school had a father who  was Lord Lieutenant of Sussex and as the Queen’s representative in the county lived in an appropriately  stately home, where I sometimes stayed  on holiday. Despite this  I eventually grew out of my royal family romance.  Nevertheless through my teenage years  I still had the occasional dream of visiting Buckingham Palace and getting lost in its corridors  in search of  some secret treasure, or. on hot Summer nights, Brigitte  Bardot. Then in my early twenties I had the opportunity to turn dream into reality.

I  attended a disco organised by the Gay Liberation Front and got chatted up by a burly  guy in his fifties who  had short hair, wore a blue blazer with   knife edge creases in his trousers. I felt  sorry for him as he  looked so  out of place amongst all the long haired willowy hippies   cavorting to the Grateful  Dead . It turned out he was a butler at the Palace . He told me that there were a lot of gay people employed as servants in the Royal household; they were preferred to heterosexuals  on the grounds that they were unlikely to get pregnant and have to take time off work. No ideological commitment to gay liberation then just good old fashioned heterosexist pragmatics!     

‘My’ butler let me know in quite explicit terms that he had a few other servants under him and that the position was always open to new recruits. All too  predictably he  had interpreted my friendly curiosity  as a sexual advance  but as he did not quite live up to my image of Prince Charming  I politely turned his invitation down-attractive though the prospect of getting laid in Buck House was to a budding anarchist.

This experience  did however alert me to the fact  that there is more than one way of being a  Queen. Contemporary gay culture  has entirely democratised the practice of queening around. Anyone who dresses the part can do it.  Coming out no longer means upper class girls learning how to curtsey. In fact the queering of monarchy , it’s promotion as a spectacle  of High Camp , might just possibly be its only saving grace. All that dressing up in gorgeous Ruritanian uniforms and parading about in leather boots with swords flashing ,spurs jingling and horse whip in hand, how very BDSM!   

There are in fact quite a few opportunities for dressing up fancy  currently on offer. Themed parties for both children and adults regularly feature a cast of Princes and Princesses , as well as popular  characters from   films, TV and sport. You can go as Lady Di or Darth Vader, play at Superman or Godzilla for a night. Prince Harry once notably attended a celeb party dressed as a Nazi – perhaps an oblique tribute to the fact that  one of his forebears, Edwards VII , like many members of the British Establishment in the 1930’s,   waved the Union Jack for Hitler.

 Between memesis and masquerade

 The purpose of this cautionary tale is to suggest that  if royalty did not exist we would probably have to invent some version of it .  The aura of  majestic presence is a quasi permanent feature of the contemporary media Spectacle, a chronic counterpoint to that disenchantment of the world which capitalism and its instrumental rationalities has achieved. Thus it enables  ‘commoners’ to  practice a form of royal baptismal naming  in claiming  entitlement to public recognition of their star quality. Cue Duke Ellington, Earl Hines, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, those   Queens of Swing and the Blues, not to mention the singer formerly  known as Prince (aka Rogers Nelson) . Here at least  the social imaginaries of celeb and monarchical culture go hand in glove.

More  significantly in the idiom of popular culture the association of regality with the capacity to regale others with richly entertaining stories about one’s accomplishments  speaks to a pervasive   desire to give a local habitation and a name to  yearnings for some other possible world than the mundane one we actually inhabit.  This  imaginative  world is  already heavily populated with characters from the fairy stories we grow up with , it is full of frogs turning into Princes at the first kiss, Cinderellas   meeting them or Paupers becoming them in rags- to-riches romances,  so many occasions in which a fixed social  order is magically  turned upside down and those at the top and bottom of  social hierarchy  people temporarily trade places. 

These make believe stories address  an  existential predicament intrinsic to our contemporary culture of competitive individualism; we are daily told we are the authors – and heroes -of our own life stories, and encouraged to become whatever we want to be , while at the same time  our actual lives  grow ever more uncertain and circumscribed . The result is to institutionalise  that Freud called the narcissism of minor difference.  From an early age we learn to big ourselves up by belittling the peers of whatever realm we happen to inhabit.  We first learn the tricks of this trade in the playground. I am the King (or Queen) of the Castle, You’re a dirty wee rascal. The same script is enacted in the factional struggles for power within our infantilised political class.  

 Under these conditions , the quest for some – any-form of transcendental identity can  become overwhelming. There are no shortage of fame academies, both official and unofficial, to fan the flames of personal ambition. Do -it-yourself  Royalty simply provides the vocabulary and syntax for these aspirations to become articulate . These narratives  are structured like day dreams but they are perhaps best cast in the form of an ongoing soap opera. One reason we have become so immersed in the  Harry and Meghan story is that each episode ends with the promise ‘to be continued ‘ and whatever our views of the monarchy we want to remain in touch with the story line  to find out what happens next..

The modern monarchy- that still fashionable oxymoron-  exists in a strange limbo between mimesis and masquerade. It projects itself as a model of democratic values whilst its very conditions of existence are their living negation. Its dynastic placeholders   are supposed to embody an ideal version of modern family values but  their actual family relations are as dysfunctional as they are patriarchal. So they are forced to pretend to be something they are not while  their ‘subjects’ are supposed to pretend that they are taken in by the performance of regality and in turn perform rituals of  deference in which they no longer believe.  This unwritten contract  is thus  a kind of folie a deux which we re-enact every time we sing the national anthem  imploring a God we do not believe it to save a Queen or now King we no longer wish to rule over us.   If we were not so busy dressing up in the cast -off trappings of  majesty,  to conceal what we have been told are our mundane ( and hence despised) realities,  we would indeed be able to see and to say that the King or Queen has no clothes other than those with which we invest them.   But the magic of  mimesis is that it so easily slides into masquerade, simulation into dissimulation and this process is greatly facilitated by  the  meme  culture that has grown up on digital media platforms like Twitter.

This was brought home to me while I was watching  Harry and Meghan in conversation with Oprah Winfrey, who it turned out is  now a close neighbour in Santa Barbara . Ostensibly a conversation between billionaires about  the impact of  emotional poverty and family abuse on their lives  , we were in fact witnessing  a carefully orchestrated transition from  majesty into commoner .  For a start Harry no longer  spoke the Queen’s English. Gone was the strangulated vowels and clipped consonants . that peculiar  mixture of languid drawl and beying which we associate with the entitled voice of the English upper class  . In its place there was a transatlantic version of Estuary, no doubt heavily influenced by Meghan. We were being treated to  the spectacle of a nice young suburban couple  talking openly about a nightmare they had lived through and just about survived.  Mr and Mrs Everyone, except, of course , for the  apparatus of wealth and celebrity just  out of shot which made the whole thing possible and to which the accolade of appearing on the Oprah Winfrey  show to hold court in front of millions  only added further kudos.   

Nevertheless there was  something in Harry’s heartfelt  anguish about his treatment by The Firm and by the Media  which went beyond the  special pleading rhetoric of the contemporary culture of complaint. I found parts of the interview  genuinely touching.  Harry has evidently been deeply traumatised by his  experience of seeing his mother hounded to death by the paparazzi , while members of his family, including his father ,stood by and did nothing , passively colluding in the unfolding tragedy  . The rawness of that moment, comes through vividly in his  skilfully ghosted  memoir. In  Spare. Harry’s words  culled from countless interviews , have  been translated into a highly wrought literary memoir  by the Pulitzer Prize winning  novelist J.R Moehringer whose own memoir  was a tour de force coming of age story.  It is his  hidden authorial hand  that gives Harry back  his own authentic voice , while turning  him into a kind of ventriloquists’ dummy .

What must it be like to grow up with a mother who is the light of your life, but who also features as a central figure  in the  national family romance  ,  the proverbial ‘People’s Princess’ who appears nightly in a thousand dreams , and in the waking fantasies of  countless more. Lady Di had the ‘common  touch’ that  the Windsor’s signally lacked, a touch that both excites and heals, as when Diana  embraced an AIDS patient during a hospital visit at a time when the LGTBQ community were being pilloried and ostracised as  carriers of a ‘gay plague’.     

Harry’s first response to his mum’s  death was to imagine that she had simply disappeared, gone on the run to escape  her hounding by  the Media and the Firm.    Perhaps she was in Paris or had found a hideway , a log cabin perhaps, in the French Alps?. He might run away and join her, start a new life away from the madding crowd of admirers, courtiers  and other hangers on .   The longing to escape the merciless  public gaze which your position attracts ,  to kill off the false persona of ‘fame’, and become your true self , that is a frequent day dream of self made famous men and women.  But for young Prince Harry this phantasy  involved  abdication from a position of regal  privilege which had always and already been denied him by virtue of his birth  rank.  As Charles’  younger son, he was never regarded as  a once and future king, at best an understudy to  his  older brother for the starring part. Perhaps he might have identified with his great grandfather , George VI, who stammered his way through a wartime reign he never expected or desired . But that  particular legacy of abdication was foreclosed by an altogether different kind of war – a war within the royal family itself , with even the most everyday  interactions    weaponised and  no hostages taken.

In Harry’s case what might in other family circumstances be  put down to a bad case of sibling rivalry, took on a much more viciously   Oedipalised  aspect.  Growing up, Harry  was infatuated with his assumed position  as his mother’s favourite , yet as an eight year old he was powerless to protect her from the slings and arrows of her outrageous fortune. And so she died.  Harry  took on the burden  of her  death and its representation in a way that none of the others did. He took her passing personally, as an attack on their relationship and the brilliant future  it might have afforded him.  Had she lived , his inferior status in  the  pecking order of regal succession     would have been compensated for by his special standing as the youngest child , the  princely apple of    his mother’s eye. With Diana gone he inevitably became   hyper- sensitised to all the real and imagined signs of his secondary  role, every mark of his brother’s official  preferment as king- in- waiting  felt as a  calculated slight.   Harry’s emotional abdication , his  repudiation of the tight arsed, stiff upper lipped codes of etiquette  which still obtained in the culture of the court, was another way to honour his mother’s memory.   

The Duke and  Queen are  Dead , Long Live  King Charles’ head! 

  The fact that  Royals  die just like everyone else , is perhaps their only possible claim to share a common humanity with their subjects, yet of course they do not die ordinary deaths . And not only because the ritual of royal mourning  take the form of a public ceremonial in which the nation is supposed to come together and transcend its internal divisions in the experience of  shared loss.  Royal deaths are sacrificial   in  a special sense. The death of a monarch and their consort is so that the institution of the monarchy can be born again in the accession to the throne of their heirs.  That cannot be accomplished without that peculiar  kind of official closure  we call ‘ a reign’.

 Each reign  deposits its own specific mythological event structure in the ‘grand narrative’ of the nation.  The  second  Elizabethan era is now  safely installed in a  fairy tale  periodicity ; It has become  a  once –upon- a- bedtime story of what makes Britain Great , one that  permits  a radical foreclosure of any   account of   what happened  during the royal  life time  that might connect  it to  the actual course of history. What we get instead is a pseudo –historicism , in which even the most disruptive moments – the Suez Canal Crisis,   The Miners strikes,  the Poll Tax riots, the black uprisings,  the 2008 financial crash , Grenfell Tower, Brexit, all are subsumed within the  continuity of ‘ the reign’.  HMS Britannia  might no longer  rule the waves, might even have to be mothballed, after its  last trip to hand over Hong Kong to the tender mercies of the Chinese government  but  Queen Elizabeth II  sailed on serenely , still at the helm of a ghost ship of state toward  a perfect storm called Lady Die. 

The real name of the ship is, of course, the Empire Windrush , the luxury cruise liner recommissioned  to carry a  rather different human cargo : Black Britons who never would be slaves to the island racism they encountered and who have not ceased to fight to build their own version of the New Jerusalem in England’s white unpleasant Land.  By  a somewhat similar rhetorical  device the internal storms and stresses undergone by the House of Windsor in the making of its  own family history is absorbed  , teleologically  enough, as so many tests to be passed, or obstacles to be overcome in  the progress made by  the British monarchy in adapting an essentially feudal institution to the modern world.   

One  key to this narrative’s appeal   is its successful merger   of an  aristocratic notion of ‘noblesse oblige’, the  duty of  those born to privilege  to  dispense  philanthropy  to  the plebeian multitude ,  with the more modern democratic  notion of public service as a  performance of civic bonds. But like all mergers  this one  was a take over bid; it  allowed  the conferment of royal patronage to become a recognition of  public service by and for others.

Another facet of this retro-modernisation is the way the narrative  has  conserved an archaic model of romance within a contemporary framework of  media gossip and scandalising about the sexual affairs of celebrity. We can  trace the  process at work in the long transition of  ‘courtship’ from the   expression of  a chivalric code of romantic love belonging to a  feudal aristocracy to the decidedly more plebean practice of ‘walking out’ , a euphemistic term for what was called ‘heavy petting ‘ , (which one of its practitioners , turned academic ,once described as ‘a form of pre-marital sexual apprenticeship widely practised before the pill ‘). Finally  we arrive at the  entirely  profane  contemporary usage in which to court    means to try to ‘win influence over someone through   flattery or   seductive attentiveness ’. Or what we would call grooming.

 In fact those who are being groomed for starring roles in the Royal Spectacle   find themselves   from an early age being    cocooned in  carefully managed scenes of social informality and family intimacy  staged for the benefit of the world’s media .  No sex please we are the  British Royal Family might still   be on  the official escutcheon but it doesn’t sell newspapers , so innuendo and gossip have to do the job until it t is time for the pomp and circumstance of a Royal wedding.    But then along came Prince Harry  who has bared almost all ( we not only  know that the colour of  his  pubic hair matches his beard but how he lost his virginity)   except that  what we really want to know is what  he cannot tell us  namely  how  the repressive character of his upbringing returns to shape his life’s ‘other scene’  as coded in his dreams  and  nightmares.             

The   retro- modernising strategy  went into overdrive in the carefully prepared obituaries  which were released for the recent royal deaths. So we saw the Duke of Edinburgh resurrected  with a new  posthumous  identity ,   a  thoroughly modern man of many parts, faithful consort , not a  roué with a penchant for pinching girls bottoms , a caring father not an overweening  patriarch ,  a pioneering environmentalist, rather than a  top gun on  the  grouse  moors ,  a  globe trotter (albeit one  who  thought all Orientals had  slitty eyes).  The Queen was also given a make over; she was to be remembered as a   standard bearer for  threatened values  of   public probity   and  for defending the one true Christian faith,    her work for charitable causes  went  hand in glove with  her devotion to horse racing and the human association of  good breeding  with good manners.( add endnote)        

The media coverage of the two funerals  was a masterpiece in the stage management of the Monarchy as Spectacle , where everything that appears is good and great  , and everyone  who is great and good  appears. Yet by special arrangement with the Crown  it was the Common People, not the Celebs who  were the stars of the show . Whether  patiently queuing in the rain to file past the coffins  or   lining  the route to pay their last respects Vox Populi  regained its  sovereignty for one day only  . Yes they wanted to belong to  something bigger than themselves , to be  part of history without having to make it ,  just by being there ;  like Their  Majesties,  these suddenly  loyal subjects   saw themselves rising above the mundane problems of everyday life.   In the context of a  profound and pervasive resentment  towards the political class , the  Monarchy as enacted in these ceremonies offered  a temporary  relief from all the back stabbing and mutual recriminations over Brexit that forms the  unravelling integument   of  our body politic. To put it more  positively , in this disenchanted island kingdom, undone by  its tempestuous rift with the rest of Europe,   the  funerals provided  the mise—en-scene for a  re-enchantment  with the public realm .

So what of King Charles’ head ?  It is futile to speculate  about  his actual state of mind  but  In the long wait to  assume his regal destiny  it must surely  have occurred to him that he would need to somehow step out from under his mother’s shadow and inaugurate a  form of regime change, if the institution itself  was to continue to enjoy  a modicum of popular support. Unfortunately he has already  been cast in the villain’s role, not once but twice : first the unfaithful husband  to Lady Di  and then the father who fails to intervene  to  resolve the bitterness  between his two warring sons.   At times he has been portrayed in the media as an arch manipulator,  attempting  to use his influence  behind the political scenes and meddle  in affairs of state which should be none of his business.. But  on the whole  he has cut a rather forlorn and eccentric figure, with his fulminations against modern architecture and his penchant for talking to plants , obsessions which have done little to endear him to a wider public. Already  the royal gossip mongers are suggesting he  might abdicate in favour of Prince William at an early opportunity.    Whether or not the British monarchy can afford the luxury of an inter-regnum ,however brief, is another question. Whatever happens, we are assured  that  the story will run and run. Or will it?    

Techno-feudalism Rules OK

Techno-feudalism Rules OK?

Maybe some day our  personal Prince -or Princess -will come if we  stay tuned to the right wavelength on social media.  In the meantime ,though, for those, like me, who are more sanguine about the prospect of  living happily ever after with or without a national anthem , we always have the alternative of watching  the Royle family saga unfold in endless  TV repeats. Like  Jim, Barb, Denise and Anthony we  too  can sit immobilised in  front  of our screens, turning slowly into couch potatoes while the world seems to pass us by, yet consoled in  the knowledge that, like any soap opera,  this is a story always to be continued , and  who knows,  the next episode may always bring surprises. Perhaps Jim ( played by ex trade union militant, Ricky Tomlinson), may get off his arse and join his erstwhile comrades on the picket lines. Perhaps Barb will get fed up  with being treated like a skivvy and  start a women’s group. Anthony may   have a strange encounter of another kind, come out as gay and be voted Queen of the May.   Dirty wee rascals may  tire of  all  the name calling games and demand the keys to those  castles in the air they have been counselled to build for others .  And The Fall of the House of Windsor, directed by Steve McQueen, may yet win the Oscar for best non fiction  horror film of 2050. We continue to live in such hopes.

And maybe after all these hopes are not so ill founded . In a recent survey  42% of people aged between 18 and 35 said that they were not going to watch King Charles’s coronation and a similar demographic  expressed the view that the monarchy were irrelevant to their lives and should perhaps be replaced by an elected head of state. Perhaps a younger generation  whose family romances feature  decidedly un-regal  influencers may simply turn their back on the whole business and vote with their feet when it comes to flag waving events and all  they represent .

I am writing this on Maundy Thursday when King Charles and Queen Camilla are handing out two purses of money to pensioners,   74 men and 74 women, to mark their service  to the Christian community . The purses contain specially minted  coins, a   white one adding up to 74 pence, the red containing a five pound and a fifty pence  piece commemorating Charles forthcoming 75th birthday and the  75th anniversary of the Windrush generation’s arrive  in the UK. The  ceremony  is emblematic of  the   absurdity  of the monarchic regime . An ancient feudal  ritual of alms giving to the poor of the parish and  originally serving  as a commemoration of the Last Supper , has been transubstantiated into a modern public relations exercise  which is its travesty. What we are offered is  a set of false equivalences  between acts of  charity undertaken by the immensely wealthy in the hope that they may yet squeeze   through the eye of a needle and enter the gates of Heaven, and the sacrifices imposed  on the   poor by virtue of their class and race.  [1]

One of the innovations in the Coronation ceremony  2023 has been  to include a moment in which  the whole population of the British Isles is invited to  make an oath of fealty to their new King and Queen, whether from the privacy of their own homes or in the pubs and other public spaces where they assemble  to watch the spectacle on TV .On previous occasions  the honour of  performatively stating one’s  subjection to their newly anointed majesties  has been confined to members of the aristocracy assembled at Westminster Abbey. The  extension of the  royal franchise  was no doubt   intended to signal the intent to democratise the ceremony , although , as has been pointed out,  to do this requires  their Majesties  to swear their allegiance to the British people , not the other way round! Apparently one idea was to allow  commoners to make their declaration of loyalty on line but this plan was abandoned  because  polls suggested that the uptake of the offer might be very patchy and anyway too close to the kind of plebiscite on the monarchy’s future that republicans have been demanding .  God forbid that the King and Queen should be voted out on the first day of  ritually assuming   office   or indeed that the Coronation should have to be cancelled due to lack of public interest.

Meanwhile as the plans for  Pomp and  Circumstance  unfolded,  the Tory government seized the time to introduce  even more draconian restrictions on the right to protest, including sending threatening letters to climate activists in case any of  them were  foolhardy enough to disrupt the proceedings by  suggesting  that Charles’ much touted  green credentials were indeed ‘fake news’. 

It could be argued that the   way   the Coronation has been marketed illustrates  the emergence of a new techno-feudal order in which the  customary forms of  capitalist exploitation  and profit have given way to  new platforms of accumulation  within the global digital economy owned and controlled by  a  monopolistic rentier class . Within the framework of this political economy ,  ‘The Firm’  will stay in business  by combining its inherited wealth with newly financialised assets to create a  global  franchise  platform, hiring out its exclusive services  to whoever can pay for them, for example as PR   ambassadors   for specific policies or  products, .  Whether or not the monarchy could survive in this  wholly secularised and commodified  form is a matter for speculation and debate. But this  may be its only realistic future.    The House of Windsor brand may end up being worth more than all its  palaces  put together.   


[1] Let us note in passing  that the symbolic value placed on the Kings anniversary is ten times that accorded  to  the Windrush generation , many of whom are still awaiting proper compensation for the injustices meted out to them , and who in any case are unlikely to receive any of the coins unless they happen  to be active member of the Christian communion.  Those pensioners who are lucky enough  to get hold of Maundy money can at least re-sell the coins  to collectors  at  approximately 500 times  their nominal value, which may help towards paying their energy bills, although also doing its bit for rising inflation.

.       

References

Marc Bloch  The Royal Touch Routledge 1973

Leo Braudy  The Frenzy of Renown :Fame and its history Yale 1997 

Phil Cohen  ‘The Perversions of Inheritance’ in H Bains and P Cohen (eds) Multi-racist Britain  Macmillan 2004

Cedric Durand ‘ Scouting Capitalism’s Frontiers’ New Left Review 136 2022

Guardian  The cost of the crown: series of reports  on the Royal Family April 6-13

 2023

Ernst Kantorowicz The King’s Two Bodies Princeton 1957

Hilary Mantel et al Royal Bodies   London Review of Books  revised efition 2023

J R Moehringer /Prince Harry  Spare Random House 2023

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