God save Her Majesty, the Queen of irrelevance
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here is no sillier location in the Venn diagram than the intersection of “people who are royalists” with “people who think the crown should miss out Prince Charles and go straight to Prince William”. How in the name of porphyria-by-proxy can they be both? The British monarchy is a hereditary gig as governed by the Bill of Rights and the Act of Settlement. You can’t just skip a round because you don’t like whoever the random figurehead generator has thrown up.
That’s the entire point: even if he or she is gibbering, has a chin that meets their nose, and wets the throne aged 59, they are the monarch. If you don’t like it call for a republic, where you really do get to choose. Otherwise what you’re suggesting is a popularity contest for head of state between three or fewer members of a family who couldn’t charisma their way on to a parish council in a blind judging test. I know we’re a self-loathing people, but that would seem to be going too far even for us. Wherever you stand on the main monarchy debate – which is to say, whether we should have one at all – I hope we can all agree the idea of effectively picking and choosing belongs in the domain of ghastly things like “meritocracy” and “democracy”.
Yet perhaps the only thing that should be more anathemic to the crown than this is the idea of “relevance”. Popular wisdom declares no one knows the second verse of the national anthem, but I feel sure it contains nothing about “relevance”. It can’t be a rhyming issue – John Bull or whoever composed it could have done something perfectly serviceable with “elephants”. Alas, on the occasion of the Queen’s 90th birthday this week you could hardly move for discussions about relevance. How had she managed to stay relevant? Was she relevant any more? How could she stay relevant in the future? Would the crown remain relevant after her death?
Dear me. What would she want with relevance? A few minutes’ research debunks my grandmother’s claim that royals are “two a penny on the continent”. Even so, modern royal relevance feels very continental, and consequently something that should be shunned for the moral health of our nation, like bidets or enjoying sex. If the Danes or the Norwegians wish to be relevant that is, of course, a matter for them. But it’s not something ours should be involved with.
I can’t remember who wrote it, but someone once distilled the appeal of the early-era Spice Girls perfectly, saying that they came across as people who you could swap makeup with before heading out together to Topshop. This was their cheery relevance, and very well it served them. Relevance is most desirable in our early Spice Girls, but not in Buckingham Palace. Relevance feels something that Prince Charles might place his faith in, much as he has done with homeopathy, only with potentially even more devastating results.
Fortunately, most of this week’s ceremonial relevanting was people projecting relevance on to Her Majesty, as opposed to her getting sidetracked by it. The Queen was so modern, panted one “royal watcher” (as we have to call the professional wing of the Franklin Mint completists), that the official monarchy Twitter account was tweeting all her birthday engagements. Rising to the challenge of relevance, every single member of the cabinet weirdly tweeted happy birthday wishes to the Queen, 90, even though the royal motto is actually Honi soit qui @ me.
Elizabeth II has occupied the throne for over six decades and, for my money, she has done so rather majestically (if you’ll excuse the tautology). But an inherent part of her occupation of the office, whether or not sentimentalists can bear to face it, is epitomised by that faintly heartbreaking photo of her returning home from a six-month foreign tour, and greeting the six-year-old Prince Charles with a formal shake of the hand. Like the past, the royal family is another country. They do things differently there.
And it has worked. Though I’m not really a monarchist, I can’t help feeling she has known best. Far from being “relatable”, any royal family wishing to stick around should surely be something of an enigma to their subjects. Not for the health of their family dynamics – those frequently seem to be collateral damage, but are none of our beeswax except as matters of gossip. No, the monarch must remain remote and other for the preservation of the crown. They are not the same as us, or we’d be them. Their survival depends on their otherness. The lesson of the celebrity era, with its endless oversharing and stars’ insistence that they’re “just like us” is that over-familiarity breeds raging contempt. By far the most dangerous threat to the monarchy in all of Elizabeth’s reign thus far came from the world of celebrity, in the form of the megastarry Diana. The more people could relate to Diana, the more the institution in which she had shot to fame looked vulnerable.
Her death saw the famous outpouring of emotion, and a demand that the Queen behave uncharacteristically. Having awoken from that late summer night’s dream, and subsequently enjoyed various Helen Mirren dramas, many people have now rewritten their own history of the period, and maintain that they always admired the Queen’s obvious bafflement at it all, until she was helped to realise that the display of a very small amount of public emotion was a matter of obligation. Obligation was something she understood. Consequently, she discharged it promptly and faultlessly, though clearly in the hope that it would not be necessary to make a further exception to the rule for another four decades: one per reign is quite sufficient. But other than that, the Queen has remained in character for over 60 years. Take that, Daniel Day-Lewis.
It is the performance of a lifetime – or rather, the lifetime has been the performance. Its only nod to dynamism has been her glacial ageing and the clockwork turn of her daily engagements. That, all told, looks to have been something far more permanent than mere relevance, which Her Majesty wisely appears to have regarded as royal kryptonite.
