Even before Princess Anne’s head injury, with a king and princess both on long-term sick leave, royal family experts were arguing that its professional component, having previously been too big, is now dangerously small. If there ever was an intervening just right, nobody spotted it at the time.
Mercifully, given the family’s impressive birth rate, there is no suggestion it will have to resort, as in the past, to importing foreign workers who may not even speak the language. But if the labour shortfall is not yet acute or even noticeable, royal authorities allude to struggles that have perhaps been under-reported: vacant patronages, event planners who can’t lay their hands on a duke. The royal biographer, Hugo Vickers, wrote months ago that “the King’s cancer diagnosis is a reminder of what a foolish idea a slimmed-down monarchy is”.
Now Anne’s accident serves, according to fellow specialist Richard Kay, “as the most compelling warning of the dangers of a slimmed-down monarchy”. That the slimmed-down idea is actually an exclusively royal reform, adopted by Charles as the answer to his family’s periods of deep, self-inflicted unpopularity, only underlines the courage of royal commentators willing to address his alleged folly. Many of the remaining 11 working royals, they point out, are old. We have to consider a time when there will no longer be a Princess Anne, for all the humbler events, or enough duchesses to cover Wimbledon. To conceive of the cultural desert when Camilla’s book group, the Queen’s Reading Room, is just a memory.
Do we want the British royals – since this is presumably the alternative – to abandon their exceptionalist history of groaning palace balconies, stuffed with mad hats and chestfuls of inexplicable medals, and follow lounge-suited European versions down the route of mass redundancies? Well yes, we do, obviously, but this seems to have no impact on the urgings of royalty specialists, even with the ongoing counter-argument of ex-working royal, Prince Andrew, still sharing a 30-room palace with his soft toys.
The routinely proposed solution – recruitment of younger royals, starting with princesses Beatrice and Eugenie – signals, if it’s not covert anarchism, a perverse indifference to waning support for the royal family. The arrival of these princesses would not just represent a rehabilitation opportunity for Andrew, who has shown he will leap at any; there is little reason to think they would dissuade the 40% of 18–24 year olds (and 30% of those between 25 and 49) from preferring an elected head of state. In fact, unless I completely underestimate the wider public’s respect for luxury property, their prominence risks achieving the opposite: a surge of interest in everything from reduced to entirely invisible royal families.
Mr Princess Beatrice and Mr Princess Eugenie are, respectively, a developer and a promoter of luxury homes. The former, Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi, recently told the Times about a £42m house in Chelsea he’d done up for Qatari developers: “I say to my friends, if you’re going to live somewhere full time in London, it’s Chelsea, Belgravia, Notting Hill or Holland Park” (he and Beatrice have gone for a grace and favour royal apartment in St James’s Palace).
Eugenie’s husband, Jack Brooksbank, reportedly works with the Discovery Land Company (which builds private luxury golf developments in “exquisite and untouched sanctuaries”) on a development in Portugal
that will “enhance the natural beauty of the southern coastline”. US buyers learn that this “private European escape” is just 6.5 hours from New York. A Discovery Land Company project in Scotland has recently been described as “a luxury playground for the mega rich”.
Since star royals have all, at least before the recent health problems, been criticised for any perceived gap between their public commitment to the environment, wildlife and alleviating poverty, and their personal habits in, say, travel, hunting and palace collecting, the risk of newer recruits being considered, at best, non-inspirational, should arguably be set against the bonus of extra help with local visits. To add to her essential appearances at Ascot and in the Garter procession, Camilla, for instance, has called at schools, a market and, following her relaunch as a literary figure, a book festival also featuring a number of actual authors. “Books and gardens,” her majesty said, “are faithful friends to whom we can always turn to”.
Much like the distribution to public premises of free King Charles portraits, some of these activities can give the impression as much of demonstrating a demand for royal patronage, as of fulfilling one. The free portrait scheme (an arguably over-literal interpretation of the last queen’s “I have to be seen to be believed”) has been extended to include universities, hospitals and, really, job centres.
No disrespect to the busiest royal, Princess Anne, but her view, last year, on royal slimming down, “it doesn’t sound like a good idea”, perhaps didn’t factor in the recruitment difficulties afflicting her family as much, if not more, as other sectors. That neither qualifications nor references are required for professional royals may make it harder to predict which are most likely to, say, monetise their status, insult the public, quit, hang out with a paedophile, or produce an accusatory memoir. Similarly primogeniture, to judge by Harry’s text, is less help than employment law with fights over, for instance, Africa. William: “Rhinos, elephants, that’s mine!”
A recruitment drive now could leave the family looking bloated when geopolitical and generational changes seriously challenge the assumption that a royal invariably adds value. How many working royals does a country need? No doubt Tom Nairn was right, in The Enchanted Glass, to say “one might as well demand a lowering of the British annual rainfall as ask for ‘the abolition of the monarchy’ ”. But the way the kingdom has sailed through the recent absences suggests it might still be possible to get by with – what? – four?
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
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