The older and more frightened I get, the more tolerant I am of monarchy. As the political space becomes more polarised and violent, I see the benefits of letting a disinterested figurehead too rich to be bribed be at the centre of that space: to prevent something more malevolent occupying it. It isn’t dynamic, of course, and it calcifies the class system. It doesn’t have to, it just has. It comforts a declining country which might do better arresting that decline than sinking into the imagined landscape of a commemorative tea towel. But there are worse things than a responsible sovereign. Donald Trump, who I can’t even look at, shows us that.
But what about them? In Robert Hardman’s new biography, Charles III: New King. New Court. The Inside Story, he quotes the Princess Royal on the death of her mother. She felt, she said, “rather weirdly… a sense of relief — that somehow it’s finished”. That’s an odd thing to say about the death of a queen, I thought: unless you really know what you are talking about. I never considered Elizabeth II until I watched the silly Diamond Jubilee flotilla in 2012 when the late Queen, then 86, stood for hours in the rain. Her husband, who stood with her, was later hospitalised. Until then she had been an image to me: a coin, a stamp.
