Mike Small: Platinum Jubilee is not about monarchy, it’s a festival of British nationalism

Reaching new levels of banality, a Royal Correspondent observes: “Prince Louis Wears Sailor Suit Reminiscent of William’s Trooping the Colour Outfit 37 Years Ago” – a reference we are supposed to recognise after decades of weird and tedious coverage of these weird and tedious people.

The Princess Royal (we’re told) will visit penguins at Edinburgh Zoo to celebrate the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee.

Tim Farron, the former LibDem leader who has returned to obscurity, explains the significance of the jubilee and why you have to be involved saying: “A reminder: the jubilee has nothing to do with your personal politics. It’s about celebrating Britishness, it’s about unity. You don’t need to think that everything about Britain is wonderful, just that being British is wonderful and that the Queen’s reign has been remarkable.”

It’s such a remarkably bad take you have to re-read it twice. It does however confirm two things. One, that the upper echelons of British political life have literally no clue what is going on beyond the Home Counties. And two, that this isn’t really about a nice old lady with a hat worth £3 billion, it’s a festival of British nationalism.

As the days roll on, this sense of obsequious trivia pervades the whole weekend as the commentators cover the series of staged events amid a blur of red, white and blue, and you realise the extent to which we are immersed in this family’s lives. This is a Truman Show we’re all in, whether we like it or not.

Watching all this unfold, it’s clear we’re asked to suspend disbelief and go along with a number of myths about the Queen and the royals.

First up we are asked to juggle two wildly contradictory worldviews. On the one hand, the media carefully cultivate the story that the Queen is the epitome of ordinary. She likes horses, tea and corgis. Her projected essence is “hard working”, dependable and steady. A commitment to “service” is regularly trotted out to describe her.

At the same time, we are supposed to believe that she was anointed by a divine creator who selected a single bloodline to intercede for, lead and represent millions of us; in other words, that the Queen serves at the command of God. I mean they don’t really talk about that bit but that’s what we are supposed to believe.

The second bit that we are supposed to believe is that this is all ceremonial and she and the rest of the monarchy are “above politics”. This is a surreal thing to believe given the gongs and the celebration of the British Empire – as Jason Hickel points out, “one of the most violent institutions in modern history, built on explicitly racist ideology and guilty of serial crimes against humanity. It is astonishing that OBEs and other honours are given, accepted and celebrated in its name”.

But aside from this and the obvious symbolism of extreme hierarchy and landed power, the Queen herself is explicitly political. As it was revealed last year, something called the “Queen’s consent” allows her to see legislation in advance and get opt-outs for anything that affects her. It turns out that at least 67 Scottish parliamentary bills have been vetted by the Queen over the past two decades, including legislation around planning laws, protections from tenants and property taxation.

She’s not above politics at all.

Beyond that, obviously she is vastly political for what she represents. As none other than Rosa Luxemburg put it: “We oppose the monarchy, even if it were to cost half as much as it does: we would not want it even if it were for free! We prefer the most expensive republic to the cheapest monarchy; this is not a matter of money: the monarchy is the most backward tool of class rule.”

BUT aside from the politics of it, the jubilee is just a very strange experience. Last week at ITV’s bizarre Platinum Jubilee programme, Alan Titchmarsh compared the Queen to Nelson Mandela. Post-Brexit Britain is an unhinged place where exceptionalism is the rule and baffling deference and deification is routine.

Writing in The New Statesman, Andrew Marr attempts to carve out a future for the monarchy. He writes: “How much can this family continue to unite the country? William, with his wife, Kate, is now seen as not just the heir but the saviour of the crown. The fervently monarchist British press agrees – Kate, sometimes with William, sometimes by herself, appears on almost as many front pages as Diana once did.”

Aside from the idea of the Windsors “uniting the country” (they don’t), he sidesteps the public problems between William and Kate.

He goes on: “This cannot cheer up her father-in-law very much. Prince Charles was thinking hard about how to refresh the monarchy during the early 2020s as he began to focus on his accession as King. He had long wanted a smaller family to be the essence of ‘the firm’. He had observed growing unease in public opinion about the sheer cost of financing so many people who required private aircraft, discreet and lavish accommodation and, not least, round-the-clock protection.

“The Prince of Wales and his advisers had sketched out a ground-plan for British Royalty 2.0. As King, he and Camilla would occupy relatively modest quarters in Buckingham Palace, with the public invited in even more regularly.

“William and Kate would stand alongside the new king. As he grew older, the young Prince George would be moved closer to the centre. Each core royal would concentrate on a major popular issue: the environment, mental health, support for women and children.

“But the rest of the family – Charles’s siblings Andrew, Anne and Edward, their children and spouses, and all the uncles, aunts and cousins – would effectively be asked to retire to private life.”

We’ve heard this a lot before but it never seems to come to anything.

THE idea of a “modernising king” is a trope that repeats itself as a defence for an ancient regime. Waiting for the monarchy to reform itself is such a British idea. It is a bit like Gordon Brown’s constitutional reforms – something we have been waiting for for ages.

Ancient royal power doesn’t reform itself. To think it would, or could, is to confuse the meaning of the institution.

Carved into Marr’s analysis is a funny idea. When he writes “each core royal would concentrate on a major popular issue: the environment, mental health, support for women and children”, does he imagine these are useful constitutional/social roles?

Rather than imagining the end of the monarchy, or radical reform, this commentator, in a supposedly left-wing magazine, is instead imagining them being hard-wired into a form of government.

In all of this we are subjects. To return to a well-used phrase, you can either be a British subject or a Scottish citizen. It’s time to choose. But it is not just about being a passive subject in the 21st century, it is about extreme privilege and the power of patronage.

As the late – and sore-missed – Tony Benn once said: “Above all, the existence of a hereditary monarchy helps to prop up all the privilege and patronage that corrupts our society; that is why the crown is seen as being of such importance to those who run the country – or enjoy the privileges it affords.”

Off with their heads.