Long Live the King? By Matt Tait — Read time: 9 minutes

Long Live the King? By Matt Tait — Read time: 9 minutes

Long Live the King?

What's the point of the British Monarchy anyway?

King George III, as played by Rory O'Malley in “Hamilton” the Musical on Broadway. (Photo by Joan Marcus)

King George III, as played by Rory O'Malley in “Hamilton” the Musical on Broadway. (Photo by Joan Marcus)

Let’s be honest. The British Monarchy is a very weird institution. And I’m saying that as a Brit.

I grew up in the UK. Not in London, of course. God no. London might as well have been foreign; a place full of bankers and lawyers and politicians. People you’d see on television, but who would never visit unless it was election season and they wanted a photo wearing a high-vis jacket in front of some heavy machinery to collect votes.

No, I grew up in a little town famous—if such a word can even be used for it—for being a short drive from the nearby car assembly plant and an oil refinery that drove the local economy after a few centuries of industries coming and going, each making it briefly livable and then collapsing back into obsolescence. A town where the locals knew you had to work hard to live, but also knew that others who didn’t would be the ones setting the rules from a distance.

And sure enough, today there is a new ruler: an elderly man who has never worked a day in his life, and, thanks to his (literally) crowning achievement of being born to the right family and managing to outlive his own mother, now gets a national parade and to subjugate everyone in the entire United Kingdom.

His face will literally be on the money.

So when my international friends have asked me this week if I’m excited for the coronation, “no” is very much an understatement. I am not especially anti-monarchist, but the whole thing has me Googling pictures of guillotines and quietly thinking that most treasonous of all British thoughts: that perhaps the French had a point.

Much of my dislike for the event comes not so much from the event itself, but from the truly awful coverage and takes about it from the UK and around the world. The obsession by media and major British institutions in trying to make the coronation a Big Thing(TM) is—for want of a better description—extremely gross and cringe. The coronation is simply not a profound, important, or patriotic thing to normal working people, no matter how many supposedly serious commentators declare it to be so. It’s obnoxious and insulting enough when that lie comes from the British government as a distraction from other, actually important things. When it comes from the British media, it’s pathetic and frankly disturbing.

At the same time, the reactionary anti-monarchy takes, especially in Europe and the U.S., are somehow often just as bad, usually rooted in the observation that Kings are not democratically elected, or noticing that the royal family is comprised of genuinely awful people.

Thanks. I assure you, we know.

Not all takes are terrible though. My favorite comments have come from my Ukrainian friends, which roughly sum up as “we absolutely do not understand why Brits are doing this, but it seems to make you all happy, so we’re happy for you”. It’s fabulously sincere and genuine both in its bafflement at the absurdity of it, and its genuine happiness for Brits that the little dour island gets to have a fancy-dress party, like a grumpy Eeyore wearing a party hat.

The problem with the both the pro- and anti-monarchy takes, though, other than their shallowness and fake performativity in both directions, is that most people—including most of the institutions inside the UK itself—seem to have forgotten what purpose the Monarchy actually serves as an institution to modern Britain, or what exactly it’s for. And it’s not tourism, or opportunities to wave flags. The real value in the British Monarchy is that it keeps the pomp of state as far away from the Prime Minister as possible, so that they never get carried away and forget that they are not—and never will be—the King.

Let me explain.

The executive branch of every country has to juggle operating in two rather different domains at the same time: domestic and international. For democratic countries, leaders are explicitly decoupled from the State itself, at least domestically. They may have a bully pulpit, but their power is not absolute, and they are required to drive their domestic agenda by persuasion and navigation of elite and public interest groups. Only then can they pass a law that is enforced by the coercive police power of the State. It is a difficult process on purpose; it is not automatic.

The international domain is quite different. Here, leaders—including democratic ones—greet each other not just as some politically well-connected foreign individual, but rather as the embodiment of the foreign state itself. When the U.S. President lands in London for a state visit, he is greeted by the British ceremonies of state not because Britain has some particular respect for the man Joe Biden, but because, for the duration of his visit, he is America.

Perverse as it might sound to say, but the ceremony is not for him. It’s for you.

Authoritarian countries do not bother as much with switching modes for the two domains. When a dictator speaks for his country on the international stage, he speaks for his country. No difference there. But when he speaks domestically he also speaks as the state, and his word is law. On the international stage, at least, the roomful of near-equals might still choose to ignore his words. But the danger of authoritarianism is that when the authoritarian speaks his will into domestic law, those words are enforced coercively by the state without the need for prior discussion, navigation, or even recognition of the private interests of the citizenry.

For democratic countries, this duality causes a really odd—and very non-obvious—mental drift for democratically-elected leaders that, if not actively guarded against, insidiously pushes them towards authoritarian and anti-democratic thinking as they last longer and longer in office: they lose the mental distinction between themselves and the state.

Newly elected democratic leaders tend to navigate the domestic front rather well. After all, it’s basically a prerequisite for the job. By contrast, they usually find themselves out-of-place on the international stage—it has no analogy in normal public life. After a while in office this reverses. The international stage becomes second nature, and the domestic one starts to feel uncomfortable.

This basically comes down to ego: as a leader on the international stage, you are treated with enormous dignity, respect, and deference, and your authority to speak on behalf of your country is implicit and unquestioned. You get fine food; visit fancy palaces; meet famous people. When you land in their country they throw literal parades in your honor!

The adjustment when you fly back home is palpable. You are greeted on return by your nation full of ungrateful yobs who do not see you as the forever-president like your fancy new friends do, and these dirty plebs instead insist that you degrade yourself by doing nasty petty things like “defending your record”, facing media accountability, or articulating a plan for the future, even though that means implicitly criticizing yourself for having not already done it yet.

It is perhaps no surprise, then, that democratic leaders start slowly disengaging from the ugly world of domestic democratic process, and instead start longing to be something, well, kinglier.

The worst part of this insidious shift is that it always occurs alongside a parallel drift in the body-politic when a leader stays in power too long: If a person has been leader for just one term or two, it is relatively easy to see how another person may replace him, and to simply vote him out. But when a leader has been in office too long, it starts to become hard to see anyone else fitting the great leaders’ shoes. After all, there are two candidates: One is the God-Prince and Father of the Nation, unquestionably fit for office, and whose statesmanlike knowledge in all matters of state are second nature. His opponent is just some guy—No, worse: a politician.

I don’t know why, but the terminal limit for this effect seems to be just over a decade or so. Leaders, and in some cases, entire parties, that have been in power too long lose interest in negotiated improvements to domestic life, and start instead to become obsessed with power for its own sake, often with horrendous effects both at home and abroad. Some people certainly fall prey to this impulse much earlier, and some hold out longer, for sure. But there is no shortage of examples of individuals who were once celebrated by the public on their first election to office and who stayed in power long enough to become a villain to their own public and neighboring states.

America’s solution to this problem, for what it’s worth, is the 22nd Amendment: no president may be elected more than twice. No matter how popular you are, as the clock strikes Twelve O’Clock eight years after you take office, the trappings of power instantly evaporate and the Constitution transforms you back into your ordinary pumpkin self.

Britain has no 22nd Amendment. It has a different solution: someone else wears the crown.

In the United Kingdom, anyone can be Prime Minister. But you will never wear that crown. No matter how powerful or popular you are, your colleagues will have sworn allegiance to someone else. The British Armed Forces; her Police Forces; her Intelligence Agencies have allegiance not to you, but to them as embodiment of the State itself, and never to you personally. If you win your election you will have a nice (but not elaborate) house and office. And once a week you go meet the King in his palace for the sole purpose of reminding you that—no matter what—you inhabit the world of mere mortals, and will never get to live in the lofty realm of kings.

The coronation’s job, then, is rather strange in what it attempts to do: it is the gate between the king as man and the king as state. Its functional job, if you draw back the curtain a bit, is to throw so much pomp and ceremony at the little man in the chair that everyone is dazzled and simply forgets that he’s just an unremarkable man with no particular achievements, and set him up to authoritatively represent the nation in all matters of state going forward.

To be clear: I’d rather it be someone else. Honestly, pick someone out of a phone book. I’m no fan of nepo-babies having generational fame and wealth air-dropped on them for no reason other than birth. I’d certainly prefer not also giving them constitutional status.

But his job is, ultimately, just to wear the crown so Rishi Sunak—and others like him—can’t. The Monarchy is the British constitutional mechanism of perpetually reminding the Prime Minister that, no matter how many votes they get, nor how rich, or how famous, they will always be a little man too; forever smaller than they want to be, and to save the nation from what it would become if it reverted back to the age of real kings.

Other countries solve this problem in other ways. No other country has a person whose job is to remind the political leader of the nation once a week, to their face, that, despite everything, and no matter what, they’ll always be, well, a little bit shit. No other country would tolerate it. Modern Britain has it as its constitutional bedrock.

And there’s just nothing that could be more British than that.

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