Writing in the New Statesman a few weeks ago, Quentin Letts suggested that Iain Duncan Smith was so fantastically unfashionable that he was close to doing one of those postmodern flips and becoming cool among ironic metropolitan youth. Is something similar happening to the Queen and other members of her family? Perhaps not exactly that, but the Queen's unashamedly upper-class accent and manner, her husband's bluff refusal to worry about dropping clangers and her eldest son's public wrestlings with conscience all contrast markedly with the contrived speech rhythms and stilted, risk-free soundbites of new Labour ministers. Besides, the Queen is old, and people are apt to like the old, who present no threat to anyone.
But the case for a British republic has never depended on the personal popularity or individual shortcomings of the current royals. Quite simply, it is time we grew up, and stopped - to quote Mervyn Jones, writing in the last NS anti-jubilee issue in June 1977 - presenting ourselves to the world as "a Ruritania for condescending delectation". It is easy to decry the celebrity culture that now dominates the press and many people's daily conversation. But it is preferable to the tittle-tattle about titled aristocrats and minor royalty that filled the gossip columns 50 years ago. However shallow and transient some of the people now lionised, they have at least achieved fame through their own efforts, which are often (not always) allied to considerable skill at, say, drama, music or football. If they are prepared to make the necessary compromises, and hire a good PR, there is no bar to serious novelists, classical musicians, artists, historians or scientists joining this culture and enjoying their share of the limelight. Indeed, one could reasonably say that Britain is now closer to a genuinely unified culture, where even what used to be thought highbrow has mass appeal (think opera, think Tate Modern, think Stephen Hawking, think Madonna in a David Williamson play), than at any time for a century.
In all this, the monarchy has absolutely no role to play. It is an hereditary institution left stranded in a meritocratic culture. Although we are expected to marvel that the Queen once cooked sausages or that her late sister played the piano, the royal family, these past 50 years, has failed to produce any notable achievers, except at arcane sports such as polo - itself a kind of achievement, given unlimited leisure and wealth. And to do much more than smile and wave - to achieve distinction in art, music or science, say - would be to undermine the idea of monarchy, which is that breeding is enough. The only achievement the monarchy represents is one now past, and mercifully so: the conquest and subjugation of a quarter of the globe under the Empire, which was well-represented at the Queen Mother's funeral by the Koh-i-Noor diamond, stolen from India.
This is what makes the British monarchy different from most of its surviving European counterparts. Like the Greek monarchy (which helped the colonels to power) and unlike the Spanish monarchy (associated with a return to democracy), it reminds us of something that we ought to forget, or at least put behind us. This is also what makes the monarchy unreformable. Sending the Queen on a world tour to apologise for imperial wrongs, using Crown land to ease the housing shortage or sending the royal children to state schools - all proposed by the think-tank Demos in a new pamphlet - are worthy ideas in their way. But they would simply make the British monarchy more acceptable. They do not address the fundamental objection: that in its most important role, the symbolic one, it represents values that we should decisively reject. And to that objection, there is only one answer.
Peacemaking begins at home
There is an international crisis, a mobilisation of armies, a deployment of nuclear weapons, a testing of missiles. Please remain calm: a British foreign secretary will be along in a minute. Like Robin Cook before him, Jack Straw traverses the globe, begging for peace and goodwill between men. Tony Blair demands that India and Pakistan "pause and reflect". One marvels at the politeness with which this is received, and wonders what reception would be given to an Indian minister who jetted into London and Dublin to "assist" with Ulster or to a Pakistani minister who told Mr Blair to "pause and reflect" before bombing Belgrade.
If British ministers fancy themselves as peacemakers, they should start in London, not in Delhi or Islamabad. In 2000 alone, they approved nearly 700 export licences to India and Pakistan, worth £64m. For several months, they have been hustling to complete a deal to sell 66 Hawk fighter-bombers to India at a cost of £1bn. Reports that, in view of the present crisis, the deal had been stopped proved to be premature.
We are told that if we do not sell arms other people will do so - an argument that if taken to its logical conclusion would lead ministers to sell their children into prostitution. Britain, after the US, is the world's second-largest arms supplier, and its customers include Sierra Leone, Indonesia, Angola, Zimbabwe, Turkey, China, Saudi Arabia, Israel and that well-known member of the axis of evil, Iran. There can be no guarantee that weapons sold elsewhere do not eventually find their way to Iraq. Nor can there be any guarantee that even the defensive arms we sell do not, in the weasel words of the EU code of conduct, "provoke or prolong armed conflict".
In the Middle East, Africa and Asia, western politicians wag fingers, call for calm and design peace plans. Virtuously, they strive to prevent war among savage peoples. They should recognise that the savagery - in the form of profits derived from lethal weapons - begins in the west.
