The King of England

In 1948, the embattled Egyptian King Farouk said that soon only five ruling royals would be left: the kings of hearts, clubs, diamonds, and spades, and the English monarch. It now looks as if he was off by one. The monarchy will not, however, drown in a wave of republican sentiment; nor will it be discarded because it fails. The crisis, when it comes, will be provoked by the unwillingness of the royal family to carry on with the job.

In theory, royals should symbolize collective national purpose — if and where such a thing exists — and embody common values. That was the role for which Queen Elizabeth II’s brood seemed perfectly suited when they were young. Courtiers, counsellors, and the media cast them as an ideal of bourgeois gentility. Then history took over. The royals turned out to be all too representative of their times — more like a sitcom household or a soap-opera dynasty than a model family: dim or daft, undisciplined, self-indulgent, driven by petty enmities, and animated only by infidelities.

Their pomp and glitter now look tawdry and overpriced — a gold tooth in a mouth full of decay. Charles, the prince of Wales, who has done so much for society and the environment, could have harnessed the goodwill of his people. Instead, he has turned his tragedy into farce. The latest of his bumbles was to book a shabby civil wedding, which can be represented as legal only by appealing, ludicrously, to the European Convention on Human Rights. We have thus discovered the world’s smallest and richest disadvantaged minority.

In short, the royals have done an abominable job in a role they chose for themselves. By any normal criteria of employment, they ought to be sacked. Lamely and risibly, however, they can still do the day job — which is to stay mum, sign legislation, and entertain top foreigners. The British, on the whole, are willing to let them continue, not out of lingering affection but for want of a viable alternative.

Soon, however, the royals themselves will lose the will to go on. Even the prince of Wales, who yearns to be king, no longer likes the country he is called to represent. From his point of view, the British have abandoned all their distinctive traditions — surrendering them to new, classless, politically correct values. Celebrity has replaced noblesse oblige as the nearest surviving thing to an aristocratic ideal. At the millennium celebrations, the queen had to link arms with the prime minister and mouth auld lang syne like a barmaid. If you’re a royal, what is the point of carrying on in such a distressingly unfamiliar world?

The next generation — the duo of Wills and Harry — has no appetite for the job. Both take after their mother. The shallow, meretricious egocentrism of Diana’s life and times represents the only future these postmodern princes can hope to enjoy. Deracination, anomie, and future-shock separate them from the traditions to which they are supposedly heirs. Neither of them is very clever — indeed, even with every advantage possible, Harry proved incapable of getting close to an average performance in national entrance exams.

Yet both princes surely have enough sense to realize that the job of king is now utterly unappealing. After what their parents have suffered from the public and the press — the obloquy, the derision, the intolerable intrusions into their private lives — they can only face their fate with dismay. As Charles grows old, the boys will long for the prospect of being pensioned playboys rather than dutiful royals. The problem for the monarchy will be of a kind well known in other kinds of theater: how to get bums on thrones.