Politics
You're no better than a stuffed badger, Ma'am
Published 07 August 2000
Long live the republic - Even her daughter calls her "the Problem". So why the fuss about this boozing old bore, asks Glen Newey
We are to celebrate the non-death of the royal Struldbrug, a woman whose wardrobe and social mores were fixed, along with her final interview, in around 1923. Nearly 80 years on, the Queen Mother calls to mind nothing so much as Damien Hirst's formaldehyde shark - going nowhere, preservative notwithstanding, with the bits slowly falling off. On 4 August, round at the matriarchal shack in Clarence House - now reduced to a skeleton staff of just 40 servants - the royal drawing-room will no doubt be awash with family packs of dental fixative and Beefeater. What is it about the public persona of the QM that encapsulates the enduring spirit of monarchy? It can't just be the addiction to booze and betting, winning as these may be; nor her millennium-bestriding colostomy.
Unlike the perpetually effete Struldbrugs, though, the QM still packs a punch. It is said that her compact with an American parvenue, Lady Fermoy (the "Lady of the Bedchamber"), sealed the Windsor-Spencer alliance. Until their bust-up, it was a commonplace of royal commentary that Di and the QM shared a mystical bond. Both were aristocratic bimbos on the make, the daughters of earls; as late as 1990 they were still sharing a coach at Ascot, though a few years later the QM was reportedly incensed when Diana showed up, after the split from Charles, at a royal bash. Nowadays in Clarence House they presumably toast the Paris underpass, much as the old Jacobites did the small "velvet-waistcoated gentleman" responsible for the demise of King Billy.
It's a matter for conjecture how far the Queen or "Lilibet" can discharge her role as mother to the nation, aged 74, while "Mummy" - or, as her daughter used to style her, "the Problem" - continues to grind out her interminable viduity. She remains a bechiffoned dominatrix to her family, and by extension the country as a whole, hissing reproach at her daughter for having invited Diana to the aforementioned bash. No doubt the partying, manipulation and joshing with fuddled courtiers like the late Woodrow Wyatt is a more worthwhile waste of public resources than sitting in Osborne and longing, the royal gusset moistening, over a hairy-arsed ghillie. But it spikes the myth of the royals as powerless and politically disinterested.
The royal apologist Frank Prochaska noted recently, in a Times op-ed piece, that there "is nothing paradoxical in the idea that a people can be free and self-governing under a monarchy". Maybe not. But we should not muff the sequitur, and conclude that, living under a monarchy, we are therefore free and self-governing.
Nor should we buy the fallacy that current "justifications" of monarchy escape the taint of natural aristocracy. In an article I wrote a couple of years ago about the post-Diana enuresis, I suggested, in all seriousness, that Her Majesty might be no more fit to discharge the reginal functions than would a stuffed badger. I will now suggest a more modest revision of the present constitutional arrangements.
Pro-throners often hold up the admittedly grim possibility that, under a republic, the sceptre and orbs might be grabbed by a President Branson. But if the badger doesn't poll enough votes, why not rely on a national lottery, the prize being (say) a five-year term as president? Something along these lines was practised by the ancient Athenians, and is, after all, deemed a fit procedure for jury empanelment.
It will be objected that a head of state, so chosen, might end up being any old tit-head. But any old tit-head - for example, the degenerate progeny of the Saxe-Coburg dynasty - is what we now have. It is at this point that we run into the weary "figurehead" argument: that since the present "constitutional monarchy" endows the sovereign with no political power, the privileges she enjoys are nugatory.
This premise is false, since Her Majesty and her proxies enjoy (for example) the right to hire and fire the head of the political executive - as witness the dismissal of the democratically elected Australian premier Gough Whitlam by the then governor-general. The following contradiction is seldom nailed: as head of state, the Queen is an insignificant cypher; on the other hand, it matters deeply which figure heads the state, and so it's better to have someone with blue blood and a few palaces than "commoners" - as only the royals have the in-bred savoir-faire to sete the Chinese top brass, hobnob with the late Sir Nicolae Ceausescu, and so on.
This contradiction is not altogether easy to negotiate. It has to pay lip-service to democracy, while also blagging on about the royals' elixir properties - in the QM's case, as a supernal apparition in blowsy organza. Hence her public image as an innocuous old bat who likes nothing better than a pint, a punt and a pot of jellied eels. The negotiation requires a lot of selective attention to screen out the ferrets-in-a-sack relationships with Diana and Wallis Simpson, the spurning of her children's nanny, "Crawfie", the decades-long memory- holing of Bowes-Lyon cousins in a mental asylum.
One of the incidental diversions afforded by the QM's PR industry is how little goes how long a way. The extreme paucity of new material means that media packagers are thrown back on to an apparently endless parade of clerics, including the top frock, George Carey, who recently trotted out (yet again) the QM's last-known utterance, when Hitler bombed the Palace, about looking the East End "in the face" - or, at least, in the eye. It seems to have struck nobody who regurgitates this bit of fatuity, least of all the prostrate Cantuar himself, that the remark can be taken in more ways than one - a rough paraphrase would be "now those bastards can stop moaning" - or that it might be crass to spout this stuff to people who had lost their homes or relatives in the bombing.
The subversion of democracy by old privilege can be seen all the way from the slush press to gutter politicians. One might have thought that the purveyors of loyal gush had been abashed by their performance during the Diana episode, but the torrent of tribute has resumed, in unstaunchable efflux.
It's not just the QM herself whose decrepitude offers a useful counter-poison to democracy. The Struldbrugs' asymptotic relation to death is re-enacted by the royal family as a whole, which bids fair to Zimmer-frame its way far into the 21st century: beneficiaries of the longevity that only the costliest medical care, and a life-style that makes sloths look like Stakhanovites, is likely to secure. If the present Queen pants on for as long as "Mummy", she's got another quarter- century at least, before a near-octogenarian Charles totters to the throne.
And this is the true meaning of the Queen Mother. In Germany, she is apparently known as "die Queen Mom", an apt blend of transatlantic gloop and tribal matriarchy. As the royals' answer to Barbara Cartland, the Mom of moms is a living fossil, embodying the "timeless" stasis of the British constitution. In truth, she is a hologram: a 3D figment, in which nobody believes, but in which we would like to believe that we believe. Not unlike the monarchy itself.
The author is a reader in politics at Strathclyde University
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by using the 'report this comment' facility or by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
