The British public isn’t ready to give up on the monarchy. The proportion of Brits that want a republic is minor, and has barely changed since Andrew’s 2019 Newsnight interview.
Recent Ipsos polling does show a sharp hit to the favourability of the royals across the board. But chart it over the years and the decline looks similar that of a usual bad month. The share of the public that feels favourable towards King Charles is down somewhat, but it’s not below anything he, his heir or most of the rest of his family haven’t seen before.
In 2019, 21 per cent of the public wanted to move on from the monarchy – today it’s 23 per cent. This compares to the 64 per cent who want the monarchy to stay, down only two points on 2019. In other words, the nation is trending towards a republic by a net of one million Britons every decade – so, just a few more centuries to go.
At the time of her death, many claims were made about Elizabeth II being “Lizzie the Last”, but the institution carries on. While there has been a clear public opinion drift against the monarchy, the institution stands without serious challenge.
Charles’s personal ratings, while not quite recovered from where they were before 1997, are still positive. At his coronation the King had some 70 per cent favourability among the public. Today it’s at 60 per cent. However, from 2017 to 2021 his favourability hovered around the high forties and mid fifties.
To put it bluntly, Andrew was a two-bit player in this royal family. I’ve trawled what polls I can find over the past few decades that survey attitudes to members of the royal family. On the extended list of names, there’s always Camilla and Princess Anne, but rarely Prince Edward. And never Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. The truth is that Andrew was too insignificant a figure in the royals to come to define them.
[Further reading: Gordon Brown sends new Epstein dossier to police]
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Subscribe here to commentThank you as always for injecting some hard data into the breathless coverage of what keeps being described as “the biggest crisis for the monarchy in more than 350 years.” Considering that puts it ahead of the Test Act, Monmouth’s Rebellion, the Glorious Revolution, the Jacobite Risings, and the multiple scandals involving the children of George III, including accusations of both incest and murder, it seemed like there might be a chance the headlines didn’t accurately reflect the actual state of play.