Until just a few days ago, my attitude to the royal wedding could best be described as tolerant – or, perhaps more accurately, as bored rather than hostile. I tend to be gently contemptuous of those few who have managed to work up actual enthusiasm for the event, although I feel they are to be pitied rather than scorned. But if that means I’m not a monarchist, it definitely doesn’t make me a republican either. If we were talking religion rather than royalty, I would be called an agnostic rather than an atheist.
I even managed to summon up a little bit of sympathy for the Queen in her appalling travails over Princess Diana, who may have been charismatic but was also a very difficult woman. She simply didn’t appear to grasp that, if you marry the heir to the throne, very different rules of conduct apply than if you marry almost anyone else. She was, quite simply, the greatest threat to the monarchy since Oliver Cromwell.
Yes, I am aware that one of the left-wing arguments against the monarchy is that the Queen represents the tip of a pyramid of class privilege, and that her existence sustains a vast network of class discrimination lower down the pyramid. Without her, it is argued, the class system for which this country is notorious would simply wither away. But I say this is fanciful nonsense. The basis of the class system is wealth, and the private ownership of wealth, and the only way to end it is to dismantle private ownership and redistribute the wealth.
So, by and large, I am in no hurry to get rid of the monarchy – and certainly not by means of violence or revolutionary upheaval. There are masses of far more important things than abolishing the crown that need to be done to make this country a better place, and the list is growing exponentially with every month that the present Conservative-led Government remains in office. Nor do I fancy a referendum on the subject, which would make the nasty little row between Nick Clegg and David Cameron over the alternative vote seem like a teenage love spat. And what about electing a presidential successor? Boris Johnson? The Beckhams doing a job share? Ann Widdecombe? The mind boggles at the ghastly possibilities.
I was pleasantly surprised to discover earlier this week that these attitudes seem to put me squarely in the mainstream of the nation’s communal feelings about the monarchy. A poll in The Guardian suggested that a whopping two thirds of the electorate believe we would be worse off without the royals, compared to only a quarter who think we would be better off. Almost half saw them as a unifying influence, while only a third thought they were divisive. As for the wedding, 37 per cent said they were interested and excited by it, but 46 per cent said they weren’t.
So, other things being equal, all this would have enabled me to switch off my television and go off to the pub on Kate and William’s wedding day, just as I always do on a bank holiday, confident in the knowledge that I am at one with the nation’s general indifference to the event.
But, as it turned out, other things were not equal. Last weekend, The Sunday Telegraph made the astonishing revelation that neither Tony Blair nor Gordon Brown had been invited to the wedding, although John Major and Margaret Thatcher jolly well had. The newspaper quite rightly thought this big enough news to be its front-page splash, headlined “Royal wedding: no place for Blair and Brown.”
Needless to say, the Telegraph gave every appearance of being delighted with what it called this Labour snub – it isn’t called the Torygraph by Private Eye for nothing. And, no doubt, at Sunday breakfast tables across the affluent Home Counties, there were snorts of approval from true-blue Tory voters who like nothing better with their bacon and eggs than a good snubbing for the Labour Party. The reaction at my breakfast table, however, was rather different. I felt a sudden resurgence of republican spirit, such as I have not felt since my teens. All that benign tolerance on which I had been congratulating myself (see above) suddenly evaporated in a red mist of anti-royalist anger. How dare they snub the last two Labour prime ministers while honouring the last two Tories.
Nor were matters greatly helped by the curt “explanation” offered by St James’ Palace. Pressed by the Telegraph, a royal spokesman said simply that Blair and Brown had not been asked because neither of them were knights of the garter, whereas Thatcher and Major were. Ye gods, are all the other 1,000 or so guests paid up knights of the garter? Of course not. And why aren’t Blair and Brown knights of the garter? Has the palace failed to invite them to join that ludicrous institution, too?
True, the red mist has faded a little since then, so I will be off to the pub on Friday as intended, instead of staying at home to throw things at the telly. But my benign indifference to that absurd family and to their even more absurd hangers-on has given way to – well, plain, unqualified indifference. As the man said in the movie, I just don’t give a damn.
