Image: Public domain
The one exception to the story of degeneration and loss of belief of the central, defining institutions of the United Kingdom is the monarchy. However galling for republicans, the monarchy played a long game helped by the Queen’s personal longevity, and saved itself. With the next three kings lined up, it is already projecting its claim into the twenty-second century. How it achieved this and at what price helps to demonstrate the larger argument. The traditional, constitutional settlement built around the absolute sovereignty of the core institutions of the Commons, the Cabinet, the Lords and the Crown, have lost their claim to a pre-modern form of allegiance. The monarchy went through its own equivalent of a Brexit shock with Princess Diana. It then found a way back, but only after discarding its precious freight of untouchability.
Three key moments were 1992, when Andrew Morton’s revealing book on the marriage of Diana and Charles was published and they separated; 1995, when Diana gave her Panorama interview setting out her claims directly; and 1997, when she died. The Queen publicly described 1992 as her Annus Horribilis – a horrible year. She had good reason to. As well as the open conflict between the heir to the throne and Diana, with lurid personal tapes of conversations between them and their lovers filling the tabloids, two of her other children ended their marriages and Windsor Castle caught fire. Her acknowledgement shared the crisis of the royal family with the public, an unheard-of breach in protocol. It was a permission to debate the nature and role of the monarchy and its future in a potentially influential fashion. It is hard to convey the force of the post-war taboo preventing such discussion. The monarch had been satirised from the sixties, and derided by the Sex Pistols on her Silver Jubilee in 1977. But the unwritten prohibition of serious discussion only began to erode in 1980s. After 1992, the Crown was still worshipped, but it became an institution that could be publicly criticised and debated without the critics being pilloried.
