The British Monarchy is entering a vulnerable phase akin to the early 1990s. Ipsos polling from the start of the year shows that only 37% of British people now think we would be worse off if we abolished the monarchy, numbers we last saw in the mid 1990s (in 1992 it fell to 37%). By comparison in 2012 in the lead-up to the Diamond Jubilee this figure was 67%.
This fall has been driven as it was in the 1990s by exposure of the Royal family’s venal degeneracy. In the 2020s this has been caused by Andrew’s hanky panky and his mother’s decision to cover for him. In the early 1990s it was Royal philandering. 1992, the annus horribilis, was the year that Diana published a book discussing Charles’s with Camilla Parker-Boles. Andrew was separated from his Wife after the tabloids published photographs of her having an affair. To top it all off Windsor Castle itself suffered a fire which destroyed 115 rooms and burned the Queen’s private chapel.
During the 1990s it was received wisdom amongst most columnists and politicians was that the Monarchy would not survive the death of the Queen, that institution would die with her. A month before the 1997 election the Marxist writer Tom Nairn (of the Nairn-Anderson thesis) called Elizabeth ‘little more than an accusing spectre’ and said that ‘the game really is over’. In 2002 YouGov found that only one in two people believed that the Monarchy would survive until 2022. A Guardian leader from 2000 read:
We declare our hand: we hope that in time we will move - by democratic consensus - to become a republic. We are gradualists: we accept that it will not happen tomorrow. Let the Queen remain Queen for as long as she lives, or she wishes, or she remains able. But in the meantime there should be a long, vigorous and grown-up debate - both inside and outside parliament - as to who, or what, should succeed her.
1992 was also the year that the BBC filmed and produced To Play The King, the second part of the House of Cards trilogy, releasing it a year later. The show, adapted from the Michael Dobbs book series, shows a staunchly right-wing Conservative Prime Minister, Francis Urquhart clashing with a thinly-veiled Charles, who has become King after the death of his mother in middle age. Charles wants to reverse Thatcherism and in particular cuts to welfare and makes public interventions attacking Urquhart’s ‘hard-right’ policies’, despite a broad consensus that the policies are working to make the country wealthier.
Charles covertly works with opposition leaders to frustrate the government. He is helped by the House of Lords and significant sections of the media, and makes a series of Burnham-esque speeches about Hope and the need for the nation to come together. He is shown to be thick and insolent, relying on the direction of a West Indian lady advisor who he later has an affair with. She says that she enjoys her position because it gives her an opportunity to expand the rights and entitlements of commonwealth citizens.
After several Royal provocations Urquhart concludes that he must call an election. The series has a happy ending. Though Charles scores some early victories Urquhart uses leaks and other skulduggery to destroy him. After winning there is a delicious final confrontation where Urquhart tells Charles that he is a stupid person whose opinions will be of no interest to anybody once he is no longer Monarch. Charles is forced to abdicate and so the crown goes to William, creating a malleable boy-king.
There is much that we as Republicans can learn from this show before a sympathetic government is installed. Urquhart reaches out to Diana once it is clear that an election must be called, could Kate, who has been treated dreadfully by William, be similarly co-opted? Urquhart weaponises the sexual degeneracy of the Royal Family behind closed doors to weaken Charles. If the rumours about the rubbery pipes and bottoms are true what could be done with this? How much capital be yielded from giving oxygen to claims about the family which are aired in the American press and never reported on in Britain? What could be achieved by holding an inquiry into the connections between Mountbatten and Kincora boy’s home?
