Non-Britons may not have noticed, but Prince Charles, the heir to the British throne, recently celebrated his 60th birthday. This gave rise to an enormous number of profiles and other stories in most parts of the British press, several remarking on the fact that, though now entitled to a senior citizen’s rail card, he’s still waiting for his real job to start.
Frequent comment was made on the Prince’s habit of pronouncing on the big issues of the day, from fox-hunting to architecture, and occasionally putting his Duchy’s money where his mouth is. Here, for example, is Bruce Anderson in the Independent:
This is a man who tries to put his ideas into practice. But he also stretches for the bigger context, the wider horizon. … He wants to make sense of the human condition; to promote dialogues between town and country, science and religion, Christianity and Islam. The Prince believes in hard thinking. As those who work for him will testify, he is never satisfied with the easy answers. “Public intellectual” is a modern way of saying Renaissance man. Charles fits that description. He paints more than competent watercolours. He is a cellist (no easy instrument). Even though outclassed by his sister, Anne, he is an accomplished horseman and an outstanding devotee of the noblest of sports: deer-stalking. He is a man of insatiable intellectual curiosity who is incapable of intellectual complacency. He is entitled to make a claim which the rest of us lesser beings should envy: nil humanum a me alienum.
That we should all receive such praise! Artist, sportsman, intellectual, even a musician on a particularly tricky instrument – is there anything the man can’t do? It makes one regret that he’s the future King. If only he were an ordinary citizen, what more he might have achieved!
The darker side of Anderson’s grovelling eulogy is revealed a few paragraphs on. It turns out that Charles’s munificence extends to passing on the benefit of his views to lowly democratically elected representatives of the people. This is the sort of thing of which Anderson wholeheartedly approves:
A couple of years ago, some malcontented political adviser tried to make trouble for the Prince of Wales, by revealing that he often wrote long letters to government ministers. Courtesy demanded a detailed reply, Some ministers, still tainted by adolescent republicanism, resented this demand on their time. The rest of us should welcome it. Anything which forces politicians to look beyond the briefing clichés and make their unused brain cells do some thinking can only improve the quality of government. Nor is there any evidence of political bias, for it is impossible [sic] to classify Charles’s political views.
Yes, who needs politicians with their silly “democratic mandates” and their facile “years of experience hearing and channelling the views of voters”? If you really want to know how things are, you need to ask a man who was brought up surrounded by servants in a world of nearly unimaginable luxury.
It’s a strange fallacy, the idea that a hereditary monarch is going to be better at understanding the people than their elected politicians. There’s something disquietingly blood and iron about it – the idea that if only these footling politicians got out of the way, the true spirit of the nation would be revealed.
I was pleased, the other day, to come across a technical term that described this thought-free faith in the benign wisdom of monarchy: royal liberalism. It was used in an Economist article on the anti-government protests in Thailand, which are being led by the inaccurately-named “People’s Alliance for Democracy”. An article (pdf) in the Journal of Contemporary Asia gives more background.
British royal liberalism consists in the belief that the Queen (or King, when Charles gets there) agrees with you and, left to do things on her own, would do what you think should be done. Russian peasants took a similar position. Even reactionary fringe players like Christian Voice believe that the Queen is right behind them on the issue of homosexuality. This is harmless enough in itself, perhaps, but the great strength of the present Queen is that no-one actually does know what her views are, and so people like Christian Voice are left to fill in the gaps themselves.
Even if Charles, by some mighty effort of will, shuts up when he becomes King, all his existing views will be out there from his days as Prince of Wales. It shouldn’t matter – it really shouldn’t matter – but for some people it does. I worry that the current alienation from democracy might make royal liberalism (or some variant fixating on someone else) a more serious challenge to representative democracy than a few servile news articles. The UK isn’t interwar Germany, much less Thailand, but there are dislocating economic times ahead and the hollowing-out of democracy cannot go on for ever without bad consequences.
So happy birthday, Prince Charles. I hope you enjoyed the day, but with all due respect, I prefer democracy.
