Ten days of mourning for the death of Queen Elizabeth II reached their climax at Westminster Abbey today, with a tear in the eye of the nation and hundreds of world leaders in attendance. They came to honour not power or achievement but a ceremony of nationhood in one person. They have witnessed an extraordinary week of recent British history, a week in which nothing else was allowed to happen.
Modern monarchy has always been based on the orchestration of emotion. The stage-management of the Queen’s funeral has barely broken step. The fusion of a family’s grief with the passing of a national figurehead has been elevated by ritual, yet diluted with informality. The media management has seemed effortless. Royals in uniform have never been offstage, always against the backdrop of a sombre, smiling, adoring crowd. The scene has been underscored, hour after hour, by a never-ending queue; the nation as Greek chorus to the events. The queue to Westminster Hall, with its relentless vox pops, could have been almost rehearsed. And even as “the reign” comes to an end, continuity is rammed home with cries of “long live the King”.
Tomorrow the opera will be over and we shall find ourselves back with monarchy as before. The challenge will then be TS Eliot’s “to know the place for the first time”. Of the Queen’s popularity there is no doubt. She ended her reign with 81% support, as high as ever, while King Charles III commences his on an impressive 70%, up from 54% only months ago.
The Queen’s global appeal was peculiar to her longevity and elemental appeal as “mother of a nation”. She sustained with panache the fiction of a powerless sovereign shrouded in ceremony. But it was above all her personality that appealed. Her office was supported overwhelmingly only by the older half of the population. Less than a third of under-30s favour monarchy. Some, possibly a silent many, will have found the past week uncomfortable, an extravagant last throw of UK plc, an antiquated royal soap staggering to a close.
Charles’s is a more problematic challenge. The royal family is dysfunctional, the royal estate indefensible, its obsession with soldiering outdated. Much stress has been made in the past week on Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and with good reason. The UK is virtually the only nation in Europe with a still unstable union – a result of the failure of London’s political class to tolerate a federal autonomy. It lost Ireland under the Queen’s grandfather and may yet lose Scotland under her son. This may not be the fault of the house of Windsor, but it makes monarchy a dubious custodian of unity.
Separating the headship of state from elected office has, on the whole, proved a sound constitutional principle. Failure to do so is currently tearing the US apart. Separation distinguishes the mystical embodiment of the nation from the turmoil of democratic division and argument. But how to institutionalise that embodiment remains elusive. The greatest powers on Earth have elective presidencies, but few could be considered secure democracies. Meanwhile, most of Europe’s more progressive states, in Scandinavia and the Low Countries, are contented with their monarchs. They use the absurdity of heredity as a guarantor both of continuity and of political impotence. For them it appears to work.
If Britain is to retain a monarch chosen by birth it must be by overwhelming public will. That requires the office to be updated by a democratic consensus and not to rely on decisions by the new king himself. He takes office after what has been an undoubted triumph of public relations. Such triumphs are tenuous, if blind to the need for reform.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
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