ONCE upon a time there was a Queen. She was dearly loved by her people. Many years ago her son the Prince married a beautiful princess. Slowly the people began to love this Princess far far more than the Queen or even the Prince. She became the "people's princess".
After many more years had passed the Princess and the Prince parted ways. So the angry Queen took away the royal title of the Princess. Suddenly one day the Princess died. The people of the land were sad but also angry. More than half said they didn't want the Queen. The Kingdom was not united about its Queen any more. And then? Nobody knows how this story will continue or, maybe, end. But the head that wears the crown in the United Kingdom has never been so uneasy, and the authority with which it is worn never so uncertain.
Britain is today in the midst of a polite little revolution against the style of its royalty. It did not need newspaper surveys to tell anyone that this Queen had lost the favour of her subjects. But the rush of surveys on the monarchy that came soon after Diana's death—too soon, some say—anchored the anger in numbers difficult to ignore.
The Queen had recognised this in her people-led flight from her Scottish retreat to the streets of London. "There are lessons to be drawn from her life and from the extraordinary and moving reaction to her death," she said in her live broadcast, the nearest thing Britain has seen to a royal confession for some time. Prime minister Tony Blair urgently broadcast an assurance that the monarchy would be reformed.
The surveys were not just trapping sentiment in statistics. A passing disappointment, they were suggesting, has become a settled disillusionment. "These surveys have done a lot of damage to the monarchy," Harold Brooks-Baker of Burke's Peerage, the prime monitor of British royalty, told Outlook. Diana and what people saw as her expulsion from the House of Windsors was at the heart of this turning away. "Unfortunately the majority of people believe that Prince Charles treated his late wife badly," says Brooks-Baker. "They hold him responsible for what happened to their marriage. The contrast with the late Princess of Wales was an obvious one. She was accessible, easy to approach, she was interested a lot in charities. The Prince of Wales does a great deal for charities, and is more accessible than the mother, but does come across as quite formal."
And so Britain confronts a change in the ways of its royalty along the most painful lines imaginable. Royalists abhor Europe, now the royalty must become more like European royalty in its ways. The air from Brussels is beginning to blow through Buckingham Palace. "I think the problem is that unlike the royalty on the Continent—close cousins of the House of Windsor—the House of Windsor has been unable or unwilling to modernise itself, people think they are very distant," says Brooks-Baker.
EUROPEAN examples beckon. Juan Carlos, the King of Spain, Brooks-Baker notes, "is seen more often, going shopping, going to the cinema. He leads an ordinary life, the life of a very rich man, of course, but he is very approachable. The way the Continent's royal families have divested themselves of political problems and ceremony puts them in a different category." The Labour government has also begun to speak of a "people's monarchy" that is "accessible". The Palace will now begin to monitor public opinion. Indications about the future of the royalty could come from computers at Gallup, not royal wishes. At only the threshold of royal change, Britain also ponders ways in which greater accessibility can be reconciled with greater privacy.
European royalty points to ways that can be more significant than style. They have done the sort of thing that most people in Britain now seem to want: that Prince William should succeed to the throne, not Prince Charles. King Juan Carlos of Spain was chosen to succeed to the throne by Franco in place of his father. The father of King Albert of Belgium was forced to step aside to make way for his son. To the royals these are not European models, they are others in the family. They are so closely inter-related that it is possible to speak loosely of "the" royal family of all of Europe. When The Sun is angry with the Queen, it calls her a German.
It could be European to bypass Prince Charles. Surveys underlining his unpopularity have proved seriously embarrassing for him. Established royalty is impatient with suggestions about breaking the line of succession. "Prince Charles is heir and will become King, after him will come Prince William," a Buckingham Palace spokesman said. Columnists have written in his defence. "He is the heir to the throne and deserves the support of the nation," wrote the Mirror. Otherwise, it said, he "could find himself a Never-Was without being a Has-Been".
The Gallups of the day are not gospel. But surveys conducted in recent days by The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Sun and others suggest that disillusionment with royalty in its present form is greater than the Palace must have feared. A survey of 1,073 people for The Sunday Times showed that 72 per cent of the people think the Queen is out of touch with the people, and that 42 per cent want her to step down right now and another 30 per cent by the time she turns 75 in the year 2001.
Twice as many (60 per cent) want Prince William to be king next, not Prince Charles. Fifty-eight per cent say they do not see royalty continuing in its present form 30 years down the line. Fifty-four per cent say it was wrong to have stripped Diana of her title. Thirty per cent say support for monarchy itself has declined. A survey by The Sun showed that 73 per cent of people still support royalty, but 39 per cent say they see the royal household less favourably since Diana died. But only one in eight wanted outright abolition of royalty. Strangely, if royalty has found some support recently, it is through the book The Royals by notorious American biographer Kitty Kelley. The book has not been published in Britain for fear of libel action. In these immediately post-paparazzi times, natural curiosity has become evil, to not know something a virtue. It helps that the attack has come from an American. The British support their institutions most eagerly when outsiders attack them.
But the damage to this institution has been extensive lately and in time the damaging revelations from this book could seep in to shake the institution further.
Three years back when Windsor Palace burned, the Queen called it her "annus horribilis". (The Sun mis-spelt the Latin, as it would.) The Queen has never had an annus more horribilis than this one. She had spoken of looking forward to her visit to India and Pakistan. India is a far better place for Her Majesty these days than Britain. But the questions over her reign will not go away when she returns. And then?
