British Monarchy: Clouds over Windsor

LAST SUNDAY, MARCH 24, here in Blighty there was only one story on the front page of every major news­paper. It concerned the public confirmation that Kate, a 42-year-old mother of three from the Berkshire area, is undergoing treatment for cancer.

At its heart this is a sad story, which should be treated with sensitivity, and it is therefore only right to of­fer sympathy and support for the woman at the centre of what has become an ugly global media storm, now referred to as #kategate.

We know from long experience that anything touching upon the British royal family will be of intense interest all over the globe, and in an age of unrestricted social media speculation, much of what is written will be casually cruel, or deliberately sensational, as players within the attention economy compete to serve up the tastiest clickbait. In consequence, what should have remained a simple story of human misfortune has turned into a three-month orgy of wild speculation.

The conspiracy theories that have accompanied Princess Catherine’s extended absence from the public eye include that she was dead, she was in a coma, she was divorcing her husband for alleged infidelity, she had donated a kidney to her father-in-law, King Charles, and even that she was in Miami recovering from cosmetic surgery on her backside.

None of this was true, of course, but the voracious media appetite for information ensured that the reticence of Kensington Palace concerning Catherine’s condition and whereabouts allowed all kinds of nonsense to fill the vacuum. In reality, the timeline of events was simple and logical.

It all started when it was officially announced, on January 17, 2024, that Catherine, formerly Kate Middleton, who in polls is currently by far the most popular member of the royal family, would undergo a “planned abdominal surgery”. No further details were given, but it was informally confirmed that the issue was not cancer. Then there was complete silence, eventually broken by the single most unfortunate piece of royal media positioning since Shakespeare’s Richard the Third.

On March 10, being Mother’s Day, a photograph of the princess with her three children was released, reportedly taken by her hus­band, Prince William. It was an informal snap, which showed Catherine/Kate looking happy, though a little thinner than usual, and not wearing a wedding ring. Then multiple flaws were discovered in the pixelation of the photograph, and all hell, as they say, broke loose.

Reputable press agencies refused to use the picture, claiming it had been manipulated. Catherine then admitted as much, blaming her own amateurism. It was probably a composite, assembled in an attempt to get all the children smiling as nicely as they could all at once, which hadn’t happened on the day. And the lack of a ring might be explained by the fact that the underweight princess may have felt it unwise to wear her ring if her finger was too thin to hold it on reliably.

But logical explanations were of no use to anyone by this stage, and the rumour mill went into overdrive. Fakery! Dishon­esty! The princess was eventually driven to deliver a public state­ment to camera, sitting alone on a wooden bench. She explained that though her surgery had not been related to cancer, cancerous cells had been detected and she had subsequently been undergo­ing preventative treatment. Simple, consistent, and credible, except to imaginative trolls who immediately declared that the interview was obviously generated by artificial intelligence.

Despite the doubters, Catherine has now gone back in seclu­sion, and can reasonably expect to remain untroubled by the mainstream media. But the whole circus has left us asking what our royal family is for, and whatever it is, are they any good at it?

No one was asking these questions a few years ago, when the Firm still had wise heads and steady hands in the boardroom. But with the loss of Prince Philip in 2021 and Queen Elizabeth in 2022, the generational change has been enormous, and has proved much more debilitating than people realised at the time.

Though King Charles is acknowledged to be a good man with good intentions, losing 139 years of experience at the head of a small family organisation will undoubtedly have consequences.

King Charles is also currently in recuperation, having announced his own cancer treatment only three weeks before Catherine revealed hers. So with Prince Harry long gone to California, and Prince Andrew permanently in the dog­house, the senior royals currently available for work are Queen Camilla, Prince William and Anne, Princess Royal. This painfully exposes the truth that the family is at present either too old, too young, too dull or too ill, and looks set for a long-term struggle to keep up the standards of charismatic media presence set by the likes of Queen Elizabeth and Princess Diana.

Here we run into the basic problem with the hereditary principle: you get what you are given. King Charles was long rumoured to favour a ‘slimmed down royal family’, and rather unfortunately his wish has been granted. Humorous journal­ists are fond of pointing out that there are now more royal palaces than royals.

Hiding within this decline in numbers, there is a palpable decline in truly royal ‘quality’. Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip were unquestioned in their royal status, but their four children all married commoners, meaning people who are neither princes nor princesses by blood, nor peers of the realm. There are no longer enough royals in the world to sustain royalty in the genes. Diana Spencer, who, if circumstances had allowed, would be queen now, was the daughter of an earl and so was entitled, until she married, to nothing more than the prefix ‘Honourable’ before her name.

Charles and Diana’s children, William and Harry, then faced the same problem and also married commoners. Just to spell this out, Prince William, our future king, is no more than half royal, and his eldest child, George, who will himself become king in due course, is no more than one-quarter royal. This only matters because eventually people will ask: What is so special about these people? If the answer is that they are very nearly just like us, then the next question is: Why are we treating them as special?

The role of the monarch in the British constitution is fixed by statute and convention. This means that almost anybody could fulfil the role, if they have the patience to watch parades and the ability to read out speeches written for them by minis­ters, civil servants and courtiers.

But there are alarming hints that royalty is no longer a toler­able state for any modern person under-acquainted with the idea of duty, and over familiar with the idea of self-fulfilment.

So the question may no longer be ability, but willingness. When it comes to a career, Prince William’s children, George, Charlotte and Louis, have a range of examples to choose from. Their great-grandfather’s brother, briefly King Edward VIII, chose to quit the job for love. Their grandmother, Diana, chose to quit the job for lack of love. Where will this next generation find spouses, in a world where nobody in their right mind would marry a major royal? They have also seen their uncle Harry put aside his royal status when it didn’t give him quite what he wanted. So what will they do with their lives?

By design or circumstance, Charles and Diana let us know all about their problems, thus throwing off the cloak of mystique that royalty requires to sustain its special status. Harry then cut that cloak into little pieces as a form of revenge. Perhaps none of them realised that mystique is something that, once lost, cannot be restored. Queen Elizabeth seems to have known this, and protected her own ordinariness with punctili­ous attention to detail in the duties she felt God had ordained for her. She understood that monarchy is not a personal grant of special powers; it is a dignified office to be undertaken seri­ously, and without ego.

WE ARE LED TO believe that Prince William has no strong religious faith. We can only wonder whether his sense of loyalty to his ancestors can sustain him through the difficult, lifelong, public-facing role that awaits him. There is little star quality apparent in him, and there is a strong suspicion that much of the recent furore resulted from misjudgements attributable to him.

Finally, we can address the most uncomfortable point about the Windsors. They sit irremovably at the centre of British pub­lic and cultural life, and there is no conceivable way they can es­cape scrutiny, intrusion, and criticism, none of which amounts to what we might call accountability, because accountability requires expectations, and the way royalty is set up in this country, there are no specific expectations, except to sit irremovably at the centre of British public and cultural life.

No matter her reluctance, the current Princess of Wales is only the latest royal to be drawn into political controversy. This week, in one of Britain’s leading political periodicals, two columnists took opposite stances on her travails, using them as an excuse to attack longstanding enemies.

One, a long-time anti-monarchist, berated the spineless­ness and self-indulgence of British republicans for not getting on with the job of abolishing the royal family, because it’s basically too much like hard work. The other, an alt-right firebrand, chose to see nothing but the decline of our great country, dragged down by woke idiots, whose “epic hypocrisy” and “appalling double standards” lead them to be outraged by media intrusion into Meghan Markle’s life, at the same time as demanding to know all about Kate’s.

The moral of the story is that, in Britain, the royals can be used as an excuse to say anything you want about anybody you dislike, which robs them of any real power to manage their media pres­ence. What, if anything, can they do to get a grip on the situation? The current cast of characters seems ill-equipped for such a task.

Following the revelations contained in Prince Harry’s memoir Spare, the disastrous handling of the current crisis has dispelled what remained of the traditional royal aura in a way that seems permanent and irreversible. We have finally been allowed to see the royals as real people, very much like us, or worse, and we can’t unsee that.

Perhaps the late queen made one unintentional mistake, which was that she lived too long. Perhaps Prince Philip also made one unintentional mistake, by predeceasing her. Imagine, for a moment, that the late queen had died a decade ago, and King Charles had mounted the throne while his father was still available to be guide and counsellor, and remained energetic enough to control the wider family. Then, perhaps, with Philip in the palace, Prince Andrew would never have given his disastrous 2019 BBC interview about his connections to Jeffrey Epstein. Perhaps we would have been spared Spare. Perhaps, perhaps.

No matter what they do, and no matter whether they do it well or badly, clan Windsor cannot abandon their central position in British national life. They are doomed to remain all too visible while people shoot past them at their opponents. Inevitably, they will take on damage that they will never be in a position to repair. Nor can they expect to escape the attention of the world’s formal and informal media whenever there is the slightest hint of illness, or the faintest whiff of crisis or scandal. This is a terrible position for necessarily politically passive people to occupy. Their options are limited to combinations of smiling and waving.

Throughout #kategate, Catherine never explained or com­plained, exactly as royal tradition dictates a royal person should. But in the modern media environment, this is no longer a safe strategy. On the contrary, it has proved disastrous. What then should any of them do next time, and the time after that? The last vestiges of royal privacy may well have disappeared forever.

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