Showbiz glitz dethrones Britain's sense of majesty - Column

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Nov 28, 1994 | by Richard Grenier

How about Goldie Hawn for Queen of England? I can see her now, taking the salute, the Guards regiments passing in review at slow step, with Queen Goldie, the embodiment of royal majesty and tradition, giggling just a little to liven things up.

Or perhaps Queen Jane of the royal house of Fonda? She has lineage, of a sort.

And the only reason I'm not suggesting Queen Barbra of Streisand is because the darn woman has such an exalted view of herself that she might actually think it plausible.

After all, the members of Britain's royal family for some time have been behaving themselves very much like Hollywood royalty: running about, committing ostentatious adultery, dumping their private lives (including their sex lives) out before the public and playing the modern game of victim. It's far from certain, of course, that Britons want their royal family to behave like movie stars. Only a decade ago, 90 percent of the British population favored retention of the monarchy. Today, this has dropped to three-quarters or less. Most interestingly, one opinion poll found that only 35 percent thought the monarchy would exist 50 years from now. The future arrives fast these days.

British constitutional scholar Walter Bagehot (a former editor of the Economist) wrote famously in the 19th century that "we must not let daylight in upon magic." For Bagehot, the. monarchy was a thoroughly irrational institution, surrounded by a sense of tradition and the magic of ceremony, to which ordinary Britons who understood nothing of politics could nonetheless give their allegiance. A monarchy wouldn't be necessary for a "cultivated population capable of abstract ideas," he wrote, but it was best to give the unlettered masses a hollow but ornamental monarchy to embody their national identity.

Few Britons, and almost no Americans, realize the recent vintage of almost all the "ancient" British traditions, most of them invented in the late 19th or early 20th century, as if following Bagehot's instructions. Prince Charles, the cause of so much of the present royal turmoil because of his marital separation and the authorized biographies (and counter-biographies) of himself and Princess Diana, was invested as Prince of Wales in accordance with a medieval practice revived (if you can call it that) in 1911.

A number of talking pinheads on American television (mostly women alas) have gushed most embarrassingly about Britain's monarchy as if it were a tourist theme park and its royal family dolls they used to play with as little girls. But for a nation to preserve its form of government for the benefit of tourists, the Economist writes, is "odd," to say the least. In addition to which, the tourists would come anyway, as they still come to Versailles many years after the last French king.

The British system contains no real checks and balances, and the monarchy, all but impotent, offers no serious opposition to a democratically elected Parliament. Leaving aside the suitability of Prince Charles to be king, a strong argument against abolishing the monarchy, in the Economist's view, is that the effort to do so would be more trouble than it's worth.

But an even more powerful argument against abolishing the royal house, even in its fallen, showbiz state, is that the British people might simply like the idea of a monarchy. In which case, I repeat my offer of Queen Goldie of Hawn, but will not be offended if Britain turns me down.