Family drama
The British royals may have weathered centuries of scandal, but their dynasty keeps on rolling along
In thinking about the royal family, therefore, we must always keep firmly in mind that it is perhaps the only remaining institution for which no special qualification is required. There is no reason to assume that Parker Bowles will be less good at her job than anyone else in the family, and indeed she could hardly be as graceless and grumpy about it as the Princess Royal.
Those who hold the view that the royal family is an unnecessary--and often ludicrous--extravagance can take comfort from the fact that this was being said at least as far back as the 17th century. Calls for the abolition of the monarchy have been common enough since then, but there are many reasons it is unlikely to take place--chief of which is that Britain would have to invent a whole new form of government and institutions to replace it. This is not a simple matter. First of all, because of the bicameral parliamentary system of government, the prime minister is not, and cannot be, the head of state--he or she is simply the party leader who can put together a majority in the House of Commons. As in Germany and France, Britain would need to elect a president of the republic to serve as head of state as well. In France, the president de la republique plays approximately the same role as a king: He lives in the Elysee Palace; he names, after a convoluted political process that can only be understood, if at all, by the French, a prime minister ( president du conseil ), who can command a majority in the Assemble Nationale; he serves as the de facto commander in chief of the armed forces and greets other heads of state when they arrive in France. With all due respect to President Jacques Chirac, nobody can plausibly argue that he plays this role as well as the queen does in England. As for Germany, its past political history is such that nobody would look to it as an example to be followed.
Might we then look to the United States as an example and elect a president of the United Kingdom to serve for four years who would be both head of state and head of the government? But would this mean imposing some equivalent of the Electoral College on Britain, or turning our counties into states, or making Britain truly a federal state (England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, plus the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man)? Would we need to turn the House of Lords into the Senate? Would we need a Supreme Court? These are weighty problems, but no sensible person would want to throw overboard a system of government that has worked for many centuries for one that is fairly recent and has problems of its own.
Then, too, let it be said that a major attraction of royalty lies in the simple fact that the sovereign is not a politician. The sovereign is not scheming to get re-elected while serving simultaneously as head of a political party and as head of state--he or she is merely the citizenry writ large, an observer of the political process, not a participant. He or she stands in for the people of the United Kingdom in the sense that it is the sovereign's job to listen, advise, and warn, as well as to play the all-important role of emphasizing the decent, common-sense, long-term view of things, as opposed to what politicians may be attempting to impose or conceal to further their own agendas or their careers. Nobody who has listened to President Bush ranting about cutting Social Security benefits or lowering taxes for the rich can doubt that it would do him no harm if he had to listen at regular intervals over a cup of tea to a gentle, firm, sensible lecture about social responsibility from somebody like the queen, who, for all her faults, is very conscious that the poor and the humble are as much her subjects as is the Duke of Devonshire. Prime ministers as powerful as Gladstone, Disraeli, and the Marquess of Salisbury complained that their palms grew sweaty and their knees trembled before their regular "chats" with Queen Victoria, whose stern common sense and careful moral judgment made her a formidable interlocutor. Those who know Queen Elizabeth II say that she is every bit as sharp and formidable as her great-great-grandmother. Indeed, recent photographs of the queen not only show a certain resemblance to Victoria--the frown, the turned-down corners of the mouth, the beady eyes, the expression of barely concealed impatience ("We are not amused")--but make it clear how unnerving it would be to explain to her a policy with which she disagreed.
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