IN the late 1980s, the application process for the BBC’s journalists’ training scheme asked candidates to rank the order in which about a dozen news stories might be presented on the evening bulletin. This was an improbably good hypothetical news day, with things like “America invades China”, “Deutschemark collapses”, “Home Secretary resigns”, “IRA bomb destroys Wembley stadium”, “SDP wins Shettleston by-election” and other similar zingers. One of them was “Prince Edward announces engagement” – something he didn’t do until about a decade later.

Obviously, I put that one last and was grilled (by Brian Taylor, if I remember correctly) on why I didn’t think it should be further up the list. I’ve no idea now what I said, but I may have mentioned The Independent, which had recently launched and become very successful. One of its distinguishing features as a paper, initially, was that it didn’t cover royal stories at all.

It’s a commonplace to say that the Royal Family is like a soap opera, but in at least one respect it is – or like The X Factor, or football, or the proceedings of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. Some people are incredibly interested in the subject, and for others it hardly registers at all.

But if you think about it, that this can be the case is a remarkable aspect of modern constitutional monarchy. On the one hand, the monarch remains nominally all-powerful – we are subjects of the Queen, every law is passed only with her approval, the armed forces owe their allegiance to her and not the government, and so on. On the other, it’s perfectly easy to think that nothing that the monarch, or any other member of the Royal Family, does matters all that much.

It is, however, no small achievement by our current monarch that that should be the situation. The fact that the Queen doesn’t feature in news stories that seem particularly controversial (“Opens Chelsea Flower Show”; “Wears blue coat to meet President of France”; “Keeps cereal in Tupperware containers”) is in itself extraordinary. The same could not be said of most of her predecessors, and – given the way in which the Prince of Wales has made his opinions on a number of subjects plain – it may not be true in the future.

Even monarchs, such as Queen Victoria, who are remembered as highly successful did not always manage things as smoothly as the current Queen. There was a surge of republican opinion in the late 1860s and 70s; in the last century, while the Queen’s father gets generally favourable notices, her uncle was a catastrophic King. The fact that very few people, even those that are convinced republicans, can find much to object to in Queen Elizabeth II is a testament to how well she has fulfilled her role. Especially since, as the popularity of the television series The Crown demonstrates, her reign has been far from uneventful.

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Public sentiment, however, does not remain static. The brouhaha which came in the aftermath of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, was one of the few moments when the Queen was thought by many to have fallen out of step with her subjects. And some have chosen to see in Princes William and Harry a greater commitment to the kinds of issues which concerned their mother – what might be considered greater social engagement, or dangerously political, depending on whether you approve or not.

This is tricky ground. Some saw the visit of the Duke of Cambridge (or the Earl of Strathearn, to us) to slum properties in Blackpool this week as an overtly political stance, reminiscent of Edward VIII’s declaration that “something should be done” about unemployment when visiting an abandoned colliery in 1936. The judgment on whether it is overtly political could be made quite independently, of course, of whether you wholeheartedly approve of it, or think it evidence of outrageously Leftie sympathies.

The majority, I imagine, would conclude that this sort of thing falls on the right side of being a political statement, while the Prince of Wales’s comments on environmental matters, religion or modern architecture may be rather too close to the kind of politics which the Royal Family is expected to transcend, or at least not weigh in on. But that’s no more than a hunch.

The oddity here is that an institution which is, historically speaking, entirely to do with taking political positions and the exercise of power is nowadays expected to avoid that sort of thing like the plague. Yet the social responsibilities of the Royal Family – their patronage of charities and good causes, links with the armed forces, the churches, government and so on – necessarily have a political aspect. Some people were at the time critical, for example, of the causes Diana, Princess of Wales, took up, and yet her opposition to landmines and support for people suffering from Aids were exactly what endeared her to many, and now seem to the vast majority to be utterly uncontroversial, indeed highly praiseworthy.

The success of the monarchy depends on the ability to tread this line carefully, and to evolve in step with public opinion. The current Queen has been very successful at doing so, but that’s no guarantee of the monarchy’s long-term survival. Like the House of Lords, which springs from the same sort of source, no one would dream of creating such an institution if you were starting from first principles. But the Lords works reasonably well, and all the suggested reforms of it run into the difficulty that the replacement wouldn’t be as effective.

The republican argument that there is no logical justification for the wealth, privilege and position of the Royal Family is impossible to refute with logical arguments, such as the fact that an elected president would probably be as expensive, or that the Royal Family bring in a lot of tourist revenue.

Those may be true, but the only real case for the monarchy is its quasi-mystical role; that it is expected somehow to represent the country, provide an ideal, and transcend petty political issues while embodying general national sentiments. A thankless task, when the public constantly argues about what the role ought to be. Perhaps there’s a lot to be said for staying out of the news, especially since they’d probably rather.

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