Year by year, almost week by week, the British monarchy becomes less credible. The Countess of Wessex is in itself an absurdly Ruritanian title and her meeting with a fake Arab sheikh sounds like something out of an 18th-century farce. Not that the News of the World's tapes of the meeting, published last Sunday, revealed anything remotely shocking: the Countess's views on royal affairs sounded like a rather dull lecture from Lord St John of Fawsley, and her views on the Blairs are common currency in the more traditional upper-middle-class circles. Any sensible person would regard all this as harmless entertainment. But it is a paradox of our society that, while everything is trivialised, everything is also treated as a matter of the utmost gravity. This must, therefore, be a crisis for the monarchy; Buckingham Palace must hold emergency meetings; the Queen must be in a "grim" mood, and no doubt ashen-faced with it.
British royalty is just another brand which happens, like Marks & Spencer or the Daily Express, now to look somewhat tarnished and outdated. But it still carries a certain lustre: a whole section of the population would never consider a Christmas Day without the Queen's Speech, just as another section (or, more likely, the same section) would never buy its knickers from anywhere but M&S. It carries even more lustre abroad, as do other near-extinct British institutions such as Baroness Thatcher. It surely defies logic to demand that the junior royals and their spouses earn their own living without occasionally exploiting the brand. (It equally defies logic to expect the royals to go out to work while confining their conversation to banalities about the weather. What is the countess supposed to talk about at the office if gossip about either politicians or her relatives are off limits?) Does anyone seriously think that Viscount Linley's furniture or the Earl of Wessex's productions or Lord Snowdon's photographs fail to benefit from their royal connections? If the Countess of Wessex's business partner, Murray Harkin, tells clients that "you're gonna ride off the back of it", he simply speaks the truth. Indeed, there is something refreshing about the idea of royalty being bought for straightforward money, rather than distributing its endorsements around established companies and charities according to old-boy networks and ancient customs. As Marx understood, capitalism is an improvement on feudalism.
But whenever British royalty takes a step towards modernity - taking part in television game shows, engaging professionals from British Airways to handle its public relations, offering opinions on education or the environment - it ends up looking sillier than ever. British royalty cannot be reformed, Scandinavian-style. It carries too much baggage. Its roots lie deep in national traditions of deference and hierarchy. It belongs to a culture where status counts for more than achievement, breeding for more than character. That culture has declined to an extent unimaginable even 20 years ago, yet it still exists to a far greater extent than in any other European country. The royals may be lampooned nightly on television; yet the Countess of Wessex still talks, without any apparent sense of irony, about how "we would like our children to be addressed as viscount", people still bow and curtsy, the media still discusses who should call themselves HRH and who not.
The House of Windsor, it is said, can slowly fade away into marginality and irrelevance without our going to the trouble of forming a republic. But monarchy, as its defenders often remark, is about symbols, about how the nation thinks of itself and how others perceive it. And British royalty stands for all the wrong things, sending the wrong messages both to ourselves and to others. It suggests that our past is a matter for greater pride than our present. It suggests that the values of meritocracy and inclusion, which new Labour claims to espouse, go only skin-deep. It suggests that, though we may value our democratic institutions, we love our pre-democratic ones more fervently. Even the monarchy's successes do little for our national image: what are people to think of a 21st-century country that can run gilded carriages down the Mall with flawless efficiency but cannot manage a functioning railway system? None of this applies to the Scandinavians who are so often quoted as models for constitutional monarchy; having no recent history of overseas empire, no false delusions of national grandeur, no serious internal threats to their social democratic culture, they can afford monarchies as inexpensive, harmless adornments - symbols, almost, of how egalitarian they really are. Nor does it apply to the Spaniards, who restored their monarchy as a symbol of their determination to renounce a fascist past.
Do not expect a republic any time soon. A prime minister too timid to abolish the hereditary element from the legislature is hardly likely to take on the monarchy. But support is slowly eroding; among 15- to 24-year-olds, according to the pollsters, it barely reaches a majority. Elizabeth II should be, and probably will be, the last English monarch.
Don't be too clever
How stupid do you have to be in order to be a Conservative? In the NS last week, John Lloyd suggested that the Conservatives, their think-tanks bereft of ideas, were returning to what John Stuart Mill called "the law of their existence" as "the stupidest party". This law rested on the Tories being the party of inherited, landed and often interbred wealth while their rivals, being in trade, needed brains to prosper. Tony Blair has restored this equation by putting himself on the side of clever clogs in business, particularly the hi-tech sector; the Tories are left to ally themselves with low-tech Sunderland greengrocers who can't cope with weighing bananas in kilos. But this matter of stupidity is trickier than it looks. Successful political leaders - Ronald Reagan, for example - often make a virtue of not being very bright because this, they think, allows them to empathise with the majority of voters, who aren't very bright either. Mr Blair should not allow William Hague to claim a monopoly of stupidity.
