Talking about the royals reduces even intelligent people to twittering idiots

I always looked out for the valiant Admiral Cunningham of Hyndhope and the 28th Earl of Crawford and Balcarres, with his aristocratic nose held high in the air as if disdainfully noting the absence of incense centuries after the Reformation. The Knights of the Thistle were heroes as much as the Greek gods or Wagner's Walkures, and had nothing to do with the silly, jolly peers of Gilbert and Sullivan's Iolanthe. The Royal Company of Archers, with quivers crammed with arrows and high feathers in their caps, added to the stirring if largely illusory pageantry.

At school I was taught that ours was a constitutional monarchy which had worked well for more than 300 years. It meant in effect that the monarch had

little power, not that it was put so negatively. The implication, if not quite the reality, was that the monarch appointed the prime minister, particularly if it was Winston Churchill.

This, of course, is nonsense, although we still pay lip service to the concept. The parliamentary party elects and appoints its leader, and the electorate decides which party will form the majority and govern. The Queen, no doubt in private after appropriate or inappropriate consultation, will appoint the leader of the majority party as prime minister.

In other words, we knowingly collude with one another - with our fellow voters, MPs, life peers - that the monarch takes the decision, and presumably the monarch is satisfied with the decision taken. If not, tough luck. The Queen does not want to go the way of Louis XVI or of her Romanov relatives.

The prime minister goes to Buckingham Palace once a week to tell Her Majesty what he and his government, or rather Her government, are up to; and he'll go to see her on holiday when she's at Balmoral. Again, the implication is that the Queen condones and approves what even a democratically elected Labour government wants to do. And she is, in terms of the appointment of individuals to particular jobs, supposed to decide on life peers, knights, poet laureates (was she a secret reader of Ted Hughes before he was the recipient of an annual stipend, however modest, from the Civil List?), masters of the Queen's music, royal limners in Scotland (the post vacant since the death of David Donaldson: shouldn't it go to John Bellany?), not to mention endless sinecures to those with plummy voices which we're brought up to believe belong to the so-called upper classes? Certainly I'm in favour of kings

and queens, princes and princesses, and all attendant pomp and circumstance provided it works and no-one from within rocks the boat. This Christmas, though, my quiet belief in the monarchy has taken a battering.

The Queen has been persuaded by the Prime Minister, we read, not to celebrate the new millennium in Scotland as had been her intention and desire but instead to declare open the inheritance of Heseltine and Mandelson (what a comedy act), the dumbed-down dome. You'd think, if only as a substitute, the Duke of Edinburgh, named after our capital city, would celebrate here. Not so. The Prime Minister, in danger of losing Scotland as part of his fiefdom, has requested that the Duke accompanies his wife to Greenwich. The Prince of Wales will be, understandably, in the principality. The Princess Royal will be in Northern Ireland. Scotland evidently is a lucky bag. We'll see who we get and it won't be too much of a surprise.

On December 27 there was a risible documentary on BBC1, In Love with Elizabeth, about the long life and hard times of the Queen Mother, the programme being described in one national newspaper as ''a portrait which is charming or bland, according to taste''.

It is inconceivable that anyone, other than possibly one or two of those participating, could think it other than irretrievably bland. Based, apparently, on Grania Forbes's bestseller, My Darling Buffy, it came across as every programme about the Queen Mum does. Wonderful woman. Who else could have done what she did, particularly during the war? Helping her husband, George VI - who bizarrely had changed his name from Albert upon unexpectedly succeeding his brother Edward as King - with his stammer (don't wives always do that?). And dully on and on.

Why are these programmes, and the profiles in the press, in newspapers and magazines, the endless gush of books about the royals, almost invariably so uncritical? Presumably because there's nothing, no backbone or ballast, to criticise. And why do the same few people, all dressed alike and with identical braying voices, invariably utter the same platitudes? Because real people are kept away from the royals in case they upset them. In the Queen Mother documentary there was little to choose between Lady Longford, with marbles in her mouth and surprisingly the odd Estuary vowel at the end of a sentence, and Lord Deedes with golf balls in his mouth. Everyone gushed about the wonderful old lady as if she was as absorbent as blotting paper. Talking about the royals reduces even intelligent people to twittering idiots. In her own right Elizabeth Longford is no mean biographer who can wield the English

language in a way she didn't deign to do in this programme. Presumably even she couldn't find anything intelligent to say.

Myself, I went off the old lady in a big way less when the fishbones famously stuck in her throat (twice) than when Lord Woodrow Y-front's diaries revealed her as toasting Mrs Thatcher at the end of royal meals. The Baroness over the Thames, indeed. Funny that, the thought that the royals might be right wing. And the gaga (how dare you, sir!) Queen Mother having the chutzpah to do what, presumably, most of the others wanted to do.

Later the same evening was the first television outing of Mrs Brown with Dame Judi Dench (an unhonoured actress would hardly have done) as Queen Victoria horse-riding through the heather with Billy Connolly as John Brown. The film allowed the great ghillie to pay the queen the kind of sycophantic homage he was inclined to pay her until the Prime Minister, Disraeli (a decent novelist in his spare time), suggested to Brown that their queen should return to London and civilisation and face her public. The implication, in a careful film, was that Queen Victoria was the Petula Clark, Cilla Black, or a Spice Girl of her day. Or maybe Alan Bennett.

Poor old loyal Broon was put in his place by the PM but the tail-wagging Scotty (did John Brown really have a pigtail or was Mr Connolly's a sop to his vanity or his hairdresser's?) remained loyal until death, like a faithful gun dog. As we mostly, apparently, still are, to our present queen, and not least the readers, or voyeurs, of Hello! magazine.

I don't exclude myself. I write as one - and ''one'' is the pronoun one uses when talking or even thinking about the royals - who served a number of agreeable and instructive years as literary agent to the Prince of Wales, his brother, the sometime photographer Prince Andrew, and their father, the Duke of Edinburgh, an under-rated essayist. All three are extremely interesting, complex, and misunderstood.

The biggest shock, though, was taking the family to view the recently decommissioned royal yacht Britannia on Boxing Day. We'd set off to visit Deep Sea World at North Queensferry but it was closed. Maybe the piranha had a day off. We not only found Britannia nestling (if not nesting) at Leith (the sign-posting to it from Edinburgh is still utterly inadequate) but experienced no difficulty in acquiring tickets to board. A family ticket (two adults, two children) plus an extra adult, costs #24.50, if anyone's interested.

Dame Rumour had had it for months that the beached and decommissioned royal yacht was impossible to board and inspect unless you'd booked tickets months before. When I remarked on this, the courteous woman behind the till or computer said, with a somewhat enigmatic smile, that some days more than others it was easier to gain access to the ship. I understood that the yacht was probably not the surefire attraction it was meant to be, at least yet.

You are not shown the living quarters of the ordinary seamen, no doubt because they were hellish, getting on for 300 of them in the lower depths of the ship. You are shown the capacious quarters of the officers, and see their bar and the room where they played what sounds like a most infantile game each evening involving beating up a stuffed model wallaby which was frequently dispatched to the hospital quarters to be, literally, stitched up.

You are shown the admiral's quarters, most lavish (later the captain of the yacht was downgraded to commodore: was this for fear of the revolution?), and one of Nelson's silver buttons is framed on a wall. No sign of his missing eye or arm, though, which might have brought in more punters.

You're shown the queen's bedroom, and the Duke of Edinburgh's, and both members of the marriage had adjoining bathrooms. You are not shown those. You are shown, in another cabin, a double bed in which the Prince and Princess of Wales slept on their honeymoon, except when Princess Diana went walkabout to the sailors' area. Shock, horror!

There are three separate galleys for the preparation and cooking of food for the royals, the officers, and the men. Obviously egalitarianism didn't begin to enter into the equation when the royals were at sea in their yacht, mightily paid for by their loyal or not so loyal subjects.

Most hilarious, the portholes on the outer walls of the royal apartments are as high up as they are so that, in the crude language of my seven-year-old daughter, ordinary people can't peep in and see the royals snogging. As if they would.

By comparison, the state dining room and reception room are enormous. The grand piano in the latter - played, naturally, by Sir Noel Coward and Princess Margaret, who also honeymooned on the ship with Antony Armstrong-Jones, as he then was - is nailed to the floor, possibly so that no visiting and envious Commonwealth dignitary might steal it but more probably so that, when the ship was at sea and visiting the Queen's dominions, piano and pianist did not slide all over the place.

Britannia, now reluctantly bequeathed by Her Majesty to the British public - built on the Clyde; its interior designed by Sir Hugh Casson to make its denizens feel as if they were enjoying a country house weekend - is a quite shocking memorial to our class system at its most pernicious. It proves, moored there like some sore thumb in Leith, something of a metaphor for all that with easy hindsight may be seen as most repellent in Britain.

It is faded, a bit bashed in places, and the worse for wear. It has a vast engine room which looks as if it derives from another century or even another world, albeit (and in fairness) one which apparently functioned smoothly until the end, throbbing back fast to British waters after the handing over last year of Hong Kong to the Chinese.

Is it provocative, surreal, or challenging, a warning to anyone inclined to take note, that this expensive ship is moored in Scottish waters the year before we have our new Parliament? The Queen apparently regarded it as a floating palace - certainly not a gunboat - taking her to visit her people around the world, and they to visit her as hundreds of locals were invited on board wherever Britannia anchored. The grandest were invited to stay to dinner, where the place settings were measured with rulers.

As I've insisted, I am a monarchist, but I have problems at the end of the century with the insensitive and too often vulgar trappings of royalty. Oddly enough, the worn carpets sometimes with holes in them at Buckingham Palace make a kind of sense. They have a decent, hand-me-down dignity which this vainglorious, divisive ship does not.

Our political leaders, the political leaders of tomorrow's Scotland - Donald Dewar, Alex Salmond, Jim Wallace, David McLetchie - have to come to terms with the monarchy, and what it will mean to us in the years ahead. They really must stop hedging, or brushing the subject, like needles off the Christmas tree, under the carpet. It will not go away.

I do not want a General Pinochet presiding over Britain, or Scotland. I do not want a Lord Irvine of Lairg or any lawyer or accountant or even less an economist. I do not want a moronic sporting hero, or a film star - not even Sean or Billy baby. I do not want a superannuated politician on the way up and out, as Oxbridge colleagues are apparently content with.

I do not want the president of the Scottish National Party or any other political party. I do not want a religious leader because they're all male, fanatics, or

bigots. I do not want a writer or an artist because they'd cease to use their God-given inspiration: look at President Havel of Czechoslovakia, once one of the major playwrights of the world, now one of the lost leaders.

It's all very difficult, and rather important. My young children believe in princes and princesses, goodies and baddies, and there's nothing wrong with that. It is not escapism, not fantasy, more a means of understanding right and wrong, good and evil. They accept easily that there are bad kings and queens as well as good ones.

Some years ago Tom Nairn devastatingly and analytically put the boot into the hypocrisy of the relationship between the royal family and the people of these islands. That's fine, but it's too dreich or romantic (as opposed to charming or bland) to suggest that we can do without our icing on the cake, the royals, the pageantry and the rest (already we regret our lost Scottish regiments and the producer of the Edinburgh tattoo has his problems in mustering enough pipe bands these days).

We need, or should need, a bit of glamour, but it mustn't, like the relics of the present royal family, essentially un-Scottish as it is, be something we resent or even, as with the Queen Mother and other members of the family, mostly by marriage, come to despise.

n Giles Gordon is Scotland's leading literary agent, and an author in his own right.