I’m about to offer the future king of England some advice, and it’s very much his fault for being young enough for me not only to remember him being born but for me to have been just old enough when the momentous event took place to feel the first stirrings of pseudo-maternal pride in this publicly-owned baby. Naturally, I want to help. I’m just a good subject/proto-aunt that way.
So, he can come and sit by me on the sofa here, take one of these sherbet lemons and suck on it while we discuss his apparent desire to streamline the monarchy, strip it down to Danish levels of essentialism and make it fit for and sustainable in the modern age.
We have seen it in the “delightfully informal” family pictures released over the years by the Waleses, in the Princess’s commitment to beige flats wherever possible, and most recently and, we are told, conclusively in their choice of the £16m, eight-bedroomed Forest Lodge in Windsor Great Park (with no live-in staff) as their “forever home” instead of lining things up for a grand relocation in the fullness of time to Buckingham Palace. This is understandable, superficially sensible, and deeply stupid.
If you are going to retain something as essentially bonkers as a monarchy, something born of a belief in the Divine Right of Kings, of the belief that the head of one particular bloodline is God’s appointed flesh-rep on earth and ultimately exempt from any earthly constraint or judgment… well, you’ve got to be consistent. Otherwise you will start to look mad.
Context is everything. The contract that exists between a monarch and his people is: we’ll provide the tax money, you provide the entertainment – in the form of esoteric traditions, excesses and enigmatic signs and symbols – that we simply cannot get elsewhere.
Do you know what my favourite thing about the monarchy is? That Princess Margaret apparently owned a miniature diamond-encrusted saw for cutting up lemons to go in her drinks. The image of her pulling it out of her handbag and bending over a citrus fruit to hack at it with a special assemblage of jewels – or handing it over to a somber-faced footman to do likewise – pops into my head every time I imbibe a G&T myself, and never fails to induce a tiny but pure moment of joy. In a very real sense, this is what I pay my taxes for.
To think that modern royalty means a modest royalty is to misunderstand not just the nature of the contract but also the nature of human envy. William seems to think that by minimising extravagance he will pre-appease a potentially angry mob. The reality is that if you go big enough, no one cares what you do. No one can truly comprehend that way of living and so they dismiss it.
People envy most strongly and most dangerously those who have what seems only just but perennially out of their reach. And there are far more people who would consider themselves only a lottery win away from, say, living in a gorgeous house somewhere safe and leafy than there are those who consider themselves unfairly denied a life in literally palatial, fully-staffed splendour.
It belongs to the same class of psychological quirk that makes us happier to earn, say, £40,000 if it means we are little bit richer than our friends and neighbours that we would be if we earned £70,000 but lived among those taking home an easy six figures.
Which is to say – we are not rational beings, and what looks like a sensible move (literally and metaphorically on the Waleses’ part) could well have irrational outcomes. Watching people in a gilded cage can breed far less resentment than watching someone lead an ordinary life much better and more comfortably than you can ever dream of. William – I’d keep hold of all the diamond fruit saws you can, if I were you.