The ugly will to rule
After William and Kate's grim tour of the Caribbean, the British press colludes in a palace PR offensive.
There is no honest way to justify the existence of royalty. Monarchy is impossible to ‘modernise’ because it has no place in modernity. The image of Prince William in his white dress uniform beside his wife in her white dress riding in the same open-top Land Rover that his grandparents used to lord over Jamaicans in 1962 was the most honest image of their Caribbean ‘tour’. It’s what the Royal Family is — an ongoing statement of particular white supremacy — and not what it now pretends to be: A charitable enterprise with thrones.
Splashed on the front pages of The Sun (an exclusive!), The Daily Mail (even more exclusive!) and The Daily Mirror (not kidding itself it had an exclusive!), the story of Prince William the moderniser is a perfect illustration of the royal lie. The man who cosplayed a 60-year-old colonial scene last week is now, in the words of The Sun, “ditch[ing] old-fashioned methods to show they are modern royals.” You’re expected to read this stuff with a straight face.
Inside the Mail — which claims to be “home of the world’s finest royal writers”1 — Jan Moir and Robert Hardman offer seemingly duelling commentary, she arguing that “William and Kate looked like dinosaurs from the Age of Deference” while he defends them (“…this tour was hugely popular”).
But dig beneath the bluster and they are, in fact, on the same side. Moir finds time to attack Meghan and Harry (“Unlike the Sussexes, [the Cambridges] stayed in post to do their duty with all the good and bad that it involves…”) while absolving the pair who actually engaged in the tour of responsibility (“I blame William and Kate for nothing”). Despite offering no justification for the whole enterprise, Moir still concludes that this is not even the “beginning of the end of the monarchy”.
English delivers a similar defence of the individuals:
[William’s] statement at the weekend was an absolute masterclass in diplomacy, showing both humility and acknowledging his critics without kowtowing to them… William benefits from his mother’s aura still, but Kate has created one all of her own.
It’s a level of arse-kissing for access that would make even a particularly brazen bulldog blush.
Meanwhile, in The Sun, its Royal Correspondent, Matt Wilkinson, manages to find an unnamed Jamaican to blame for the Land Rover stunt:
We can reveal Will and Kate were convinced by a general, proud that the vehicle had once carried the Queen and Prince Philip… the insider said: “The Land rover was forced upon William and Kate. Advisers knew it was going to be a problem but the general who ran the parade wanted to use it.”
Qwhite convenient, don’t you think? William can go from a man “[planning] a huge shake-up… [to prove] he is not a pampered prince” to cowed into swanning around in a bright white dress uniform in the space of a single article.
The Daily Mirror’s take — delivered by its Royal Editor, Russell Myers — is practically identical to the lines taken by the Sun and Mail. He concludes:
… after emerging from a series of PR nightmares and controversies, somehow, the Windsors’ future feels much brighter with William at the wheel when his time comes.
That ‘somehow’ is doing a lot of work. The future “feels brighter” because Myers has been told that it is by the prince’s PR people and it is in his interests to agree. Nothing has changed since last week but assured that it will change, royal reporters scurry to deliver the new ‘truth’ to their readers.
Over at The Times — The Sun with a bigger thesaurus — the royal ‘news’ is slotted into the top corner of page 19 (6 pages on from a report on how “defence companies [are] having a good war”). Unlike its tabloid sibling, The Times doesn’t tell its readers about the “reboot”, opting instead for sharing a royal source’s assurance that “William and Kate are in ‘reflection mode’.” For the real headrush of ideology, you need to head to the opinion pages.
Clare Foges, the most reliable source of bad takes since Ed Wood, writes the same column about a “slimmed down” monarchy that has been written approximately 500 times in the past 30 years. Putting aside the crassness of her name for this effort (“Operation Shock and Orb”), the headache-inducing moment comes when she writes:
This is not a recipe for a Scandinavian-style, “bicycling monarchy”. While that might suit our northern European friends, such a set-up would bore us. It is bred in the British bone to desire occasional orgies of flag-waving and fairy-tale carriages and that is what the royals must continue to deliver, while being attentive to the shifting and increasingly egalitarian public mood.
It’s a struggle not to come over all Inigo Motoya at that (“You keep using that word ‘egalitarian’, I do not think it means what you think it means.”) but most of all it is a crushingly depressing vision of a nation of forelock tuggers. It may be that there is a hardcore of people for whom the desire to deck themselves out in Union Flags and fall at the feet of their ‘betters’ feels like a biological imperative but most people have simply been told that this is what ‘we’ like over and over again.
Foges concludes her column by arguing that “if those leading the monarchy are bold, they can silence their critics for a generation”. They needn’t worry too much because the press and wider British media do that for them. There is no regular outlet for republican sentiment in the newspapers or on news broadcasts. The royal lie is still able to dominate the mainstream and while other nations will happily free themselves from it, the UK looks like it will be stuck with it for a lot longer.
It’s rather like a restaurant claiming to be home to the world’s most resilient cockroaches.