Prince Harry does not exist and soon Meghan Markle will cease to exist too. None of the royal family exist. This truth, which has come to me rather late in life, has taught me how to stop worrying and love the monarchy.
Despite my boyhood admiration for King Sobhuza II of Swaziland, I was always a bit of a republican. Not a tumbrils and guillotine kind, nor even, really, a campaigner for abolition, because as the decades have rolled it has become impossible not to feel respect for the Queen’s hard work; and besides, as the Australians have learned, there’s not a lot of point in removing the monarchy unless you can agree on the alternative.
What alternatives suggest themselves? Tame presidencies in Germany and Italy have never seemed to gel as focuses for national identity; while the awkward amalgam of national symbol with political leader that France, the United States or South Africa attempt has always seemed a difficult mental feat. I’ve smiled to watch Americans at dinner attacking their president bitterly — until foreigners join in, whereupon the Americans become tense.
So for many years my proposition has been that if we British ever do away with kings and queens, we must not replace them with papier-mâché presidencies — I don’t know… Betty Boothroyd, Alan Johnson, David Attenborough or Michael Palin, cuddly people — but instead make the full leap from the personification to the abstraction of nationhood. Britain, I’ve argued (probably here) can be — indeed is — an idea. We can love and respect that idea. We don’t need a person in whom to invest our patriotism. It’s juvenile to crave icons and figureheads.
I still think this, but have concluded that abstracted patriotism isn’t going to happen.
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