Time to Privatize the Royal Family
A couple of summers ago, I was sitting on a bench, admiring the planting and gravel pathways around Kensington Palace under a blue sky and warm sun, clusters of tourists gathering here and there, when unexpectedly my mind began to turn over restlessly upon the subject of the Royal Family. I was increasingly coming to the conclusion that I just wasn’t into it anymore. It may be that a brush with brief unemployment had kickstarted a politics of envy within. It may have been having ringside seats to the convulsions of Brexit—the tug of war between the ruling classes and the unelected masses—that had soured my overall ease with entrenched power. But I suspect, less grandly, it had been binge-watching The Crown that did the disservice.
The Crown’s main conceit is that the office of the monarch—‘The Crown’—is separate to the individual who wears or inhabits it. It is portrayed as a custodial sentence: bars of duty that lock out all personal preference and private relationships. The popular show documents the endless miseries this relationship inflicts upon everyone involved.
The idea is similar to that served up in The King’s Speech or anything by Julian Fellowes, such as Downton Abbey. In both, the class system is ordained: fixed categories of social order where those at the top must suffer wealth and privilege as a cog in the overall success of a functioning society. In the climax montage of The King’s Speech, when Colin Firth finally overcomes his stutter in order to fulfill his role, we see all the other aspects of Empire—government, troops, families—in a series of tableau, locked into playing their roles as effectively as the King; no-one really enjoying it.
In Fellowes’ Downton Abbey film, a sort of cheap chocolate box ITV version of The King’s Speech, or even his own television series, the King and Queen visit Downton. We are shown a monarch and his long-suffering wife trapped in an endless march about the English hinterlands, visiting aristocratic estates, imprisoned in protocol and dull dinner party conversation, all the while inflicting evermore misery upon the Downton household in the process.
A now larger, more prosperous and educated television viewing public can see that those that rule over us are really only there by dint of fluke: there is no difference of moral quality or value between any of us.
So while The Crown paints a portrait of fading deference throughout the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, the reality is that in contemporary Britain, if not the Western World at large, even the idea of maintaining privilege as a form of duty has all the appearance of a scam. The game, it seems, is well and truly up.
In the US and the UK, and perhaps the West more widely, the bigger questions of our times relate to the ease with which we consent to be governed. COVID and the overmighty display of the state to protect our greatest liberty (staying alive) has leant heavily on any understanding we have of what exactly we’ve consented to in order to be governed.
The issue of the UK head of state is nothing personal. We are experiencing an incoherence between the ruling class and the ruled. The participatory democracy stories we tell ourselves are coming undone and no longer ring true.
Across the West, amidst clamours for equity, serious questions are being asked about inherited inequality, even if dressed up in hopeless Marxist policy solutions. Questions over the veracity of votes in the US, conclave machinations in the EU that presented Ursula von der Leyen as one of its Presidents, moves for national separatism in Catalonia and Scotland, issues around mass migration: these are all symptomatic of a growing cognitive dissonance between the story we tell ourselves about the democracies we live in, and the ‘lived experience’ of them.
Atop all of this is the delicate awkwardness of the role of head of state. Particularly in parliamentary systems, where these are not elected but ceremonial and convention in function, there is an increasing sense of absurdity about their role.
Arguably, we see this most in Germany. While Angela Merkel’s long reign as Chancellor comes to an end, it is worth remembering that she isn’t the country’s head of state. Frank Walter-Steinmeier is the President of Germany— a politician, elected to the post of presidency by a small group of fellow politicians known as the Federal Convention. This virtually anonymous individual, Frank, has the use of two palaces as residences—one an eighteenth century palace in Berlin on a 20 hectare park, the other a nineteenth century mansion on the banks of the River Rhine. When Frank needs to travel about, he has the choice of a helicopter, four aeroplanes (designated with the code German Airforce One when Frank’s on board), and of course a black armored Mercedes Benz. A flag waves over whichever palace Frank is supposed to be in, whether Frank is there or not. Frank is paid about $270,000, with an expense account closer to $100,000, and Frank’s private office is allocated in excess of $23 million a year. Frank of course retires with a pension drawn from the wider federal budget, along with the handful of other former living ex-Presidents. There have been twelve Presidents since the creation of post war Germany.
The British head of state is a different beast altogether: an inherited position, a family from whom an heir is produced. This curious apparatus opens Parliament and hospitals, holds a weekly audience with the Prime Minister, signs legislative bills and greases the wheels of the conventions that make up Britain’s invisible Constitution.
If we want to fix the growing concern over the absurdity of The Crown—the duress of duty to perpetuate custom—why not simply privatize the Royal Family? I don’t mean to float it on the stock exchange, like British Gas. Instead, to create a clear distinction between the functional, ceremonial, and constitutional role of the Head of State and the Royal Family from whom the role is supplied.
Under a privatized system, like other aristocrats or celebrities, anyone who is not the Head of State can return to private life—alongside countless Dukes, Earls, Football Club Owners and Celebrity Chefs. An ecosystem of aristocracy does not need to be retained on the public purse, simply on account of their relational status to the head of state. Yes, you may be one heartbeat away from inheriting the role, but like any elected Head of State, you have a life before and after being Head of State.
This really ought to come as a significant relief to everybody. The Duke of Gloucester doesn’t have to interrupt his schedule for an appearance with a number of RAF Cadets. Harry and Meghan could live as minor celebrities in Santa Barbara, milking their connections, and no-one need bat an eyelid. With just one vacancy to be filled, sons, daughters, uncles, aunts, first cousins, are liberated to work freely as any other well-connected aristo.
Just imagine. Prince Charles could have developed his organic farm range and involved himself with environment and urban planning policy much more freely under this arrangement—only needing to curtail his own policy preferences once assuming office, in the same way Donald Trump needed to dump his private assets to avoid a conflict of interest.
Prince Andrew may have found himself with less leisure time on his hands. The public can be spared concern about whether Beatrice has enough coverage in OK Magazine. We wouldn’t have to feel quite so sorry for the Princess Royal turning up to inspect jams at some Mothers Institute in a county backwater.
With a fixed, clear Head of State role, even primogeniture can be more relaxed. Abdication doesn’t need to be an issue. A retirement age can be set for when it might be acceptable to leave office and return to private life. In a privatized family, the role could skip a generation and everyone would be relaxed about it.
As a private family, wealth would be their own—taxable like anyone else’s with a clearer distinction between that which is owned and maintained by the state and that which isn’t. There would be no more banging on about the Royal Family as benefit scroungers. The current hybrid model of blurred private and public funding is confusing. With a clear demarcation between the state-owned properties for the head of state, and the inherited assets of the family, with the public no longer responsible for the upkeep of private wealth, there’d be no more upset about spending $3m on refurbing a cottage in prime real estate in Windsor for newly wed grandchildren. Especially when they then abandon it for a $14m mansion they buy themselves.
A smaller, state-owned portfolio of two residences for the Head of State would mean Buckingham Palace could finally get the rewiring and new plumbing it so desperately needs. Sandringham, too.
All other assets are private.If the family cannot afford maintenance on all the palaces, cottages, castles, and grounds, they can be sold.
There are several other advantages to this situation. Not only is monarchy cut down to size in a leaner, fitter Brexit-Britain, it is more commensurate for a country with such a different territorial range than in 1952. Rather than to see this as the sad eventual demise in a long arc of ever reducing significance, the monarchy should see this as an opportunity. The entire enterprise renewed should come as a relief to the collection of families connected to the head of state.
The downside is that we may see huge chunks of central London and Scotland turned over to Russian oligarchs, Middle Eastern oil men, or unicorn billionaires from the US to China. But it seems a small price to pay if the Royal fabric, too costly for the public and private purse, is renewed.
An inherited head of state is as arbitrary as one elected by an in-group. If we are to have a lottery of chance in the selection of our heads of state, why not let it be an hereditary role? But we only pay for the monarch, not for his or her extended family.
