Down With the Royals (2 page)

Nevertheless, hordes of reporters had been camped for days outside the private wing of St Mary’s hospital, to the considerable inconvenience of sick people and their relatives, who found parking spaces suspended.
Most of the time there was nothing to report, forcing correspondents to fall back on the desperate standby of interviewing former royal ‘aides’ or each other. One of the most choice moments for me was hearing the Queen’s former press secretary, interviewed outside Buckingham Palace, talk about the ‘people’s pregnancy’. I don’t know if he really intended to implicate the entire male population over the age of puberty in the conception, but an even more imaginative species of paternity was implied by a man who joined the media scrum outside the hospital. Asked by a reporter about a rolled-up canvas he had brought with him to the vigil, he eagerly unrolled it to reveal a painting that appeared to show the Duchess of Cambridge as the Virgin Mary. The normal human response to this species of derangement is an instinctive recoil, but that’s a problem on live television; when the man launched into an explanation about the Duchess’s first child being the reincarnation of Jesus Christ, the flustered reporter cut him off in mid-flow.

There have been occasions, in recent years, when I almost convinced myself that sycophancy towards the royal family must have reached its nadir. I’m always
wrong, and the birth of Prince George revealed new levels of inanity across the print and broadcast media. Even
The Guardian
produced what it called ‘live royal baby coverage’, giving the infant’s weight and quoting this earth-shattering remark from Prince William: ‘We could not be happier.’
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On the day after the birth, when the couple were expected to appear outside the hospital for the infant’s first picture opportunity, some networks actually transmitted ‘live’ footage of a stubbornly unopened door. I don’t know how the door felt but the belated appearance of the Duke and Duchess prompted a frenzy of excitement among the assembled journalists, who shouted banal questions without evident embarrassment. In the press, Middleton’s appearance precipitated a minute exegesis of her hair, her dress and her swollen stomach – hardly unexpected in a woman who had so recently given birth. It was a small price to pay for the priceless positive spin generated by the event, explaining why royal aides sometimes claim that they don’t
need
to manipulate the media. The
claim may be disingenuous – I’m sure a huge amount of planning goes into every royal ‘event’ – but it is true that they are working in an unusually receptive environment.

One of the ‘justifications’ most frequently offered for keeping the royal family is that their milestones boost tourism to the UK. The assumption that royal events, and the mere existence of the family, bring foreign visitors pouring into the country is made so automatically that hardly anyone thinks to question it. In a period when royal celebrations have come thick and fast – Prince William’s wedding, the diamond jubilee, the birth of Prince George – it should not be hard to test this proposition. The results are revealing: there is actually no evidence to suggest that the British royal family makes the UK a uniquely popular holiday destination. On the contrary, any such notion is dispelled by the simple expedient at looking at tourist numbers and revenue worldwide.

But first I want to go back in time and look at the
effect on visitor numbers of two specific events, namely the weddings of the Queen’s elder sons, Prince Charles in 1981 and Prince Andrew in 1986. The first of these drew worldwide attention, so much so that still photographs from the day, such as Charles and Diana kissing before crowds on a balcony at Buckingham Palace, remain instantly recognisable. This type of public ceremony is often described as something the UK does better than any other country, making us the envy of other nations, so surely it drew tourists in their hundreds of thousands? The answer, when Republic made a request under the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act to the publicly funded national tourism agency, Visit-Britain, was instructive. According to the organisation’s head of research and forecasting:

The idea that foreigners who are planning holidays abroad sit down with a list of republics versus nations with hereditary heads of state has always struck me as implausible. If this proposition were true, you would expect to find the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Spain dominating the top ten destinations in the world, drawn up by the UN World Travel Organization.
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So which country has the highest number of international tourist arrivals? The answer is France, which has been a republic since Napoleon III went into exile (in England, of course) after being defeated in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. France easily beat every other country in the world in terms of foreign tourists in 2012, clocking up 83 million tourist arrivals; many more people visited France than actually live there (66 million). The US, which is also
a republic, was in second place with 66.7 million. And where was the UK in all this? At number eight, with only 29.3 million visitors. There was a monarchy, Spain, in the top five, but that almost certainly had more to do with beaches, landscape and stunning tourist attractions than the country’s deeply unpopular royal family. The
Daily Mail
reported these figures with an unintentionally revealing headline: ‘France
crowned
[my italics] most popular country in the world with record-breaking number of tourists (and UK lags in eighth place, beaten by Spain, Italy and even Germany)’.
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Even if we look at the economic impact of tourism, rather than the number of international tourist arrivals, there is no evidence that monarchy is a big draw. The US has the highest tourist receipts by far, amounting to $139.6 billion in 2013; in this top ten, Spain moves up a place to number two with $60.4 billion, but France ($56.1 billion) is close behind. The UK, sadly, drops a place in this table, coming in at number nine ($40.6 billion).

As France has discovered, one of the advantages of
becoming a republic is that the sumptuous palaces and huge land holdings which used to belong to the royal family can be thrown open to the public; the Palace of Versailles is the third biggest tourist attraction in the country, after the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower, with around five million visitors a year. According to the Labour MP Margaret Hodge, who chairs the House of Commons public accounts committee, Buckingham Palace is ‘only open seventy-eight days a year’ and ‘they only have about half a million visitors’.
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There is an option for an ‘exclusive guided tour’ of the state rooms during the winter months, but the cost – £75 per person, including a glass of champagne and a discount on purchases in the shop – is prohibitive for anyone who is on a low income.
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It isn’t even as though the royal family does a good job of looking after the many grand houses and palaces currently in its stewardship, as the public accounts committee discovered. I shall return to this point later, but let’s go back for a moment to the birth of Prince George, and the wildly over-optimistic predictions made about the impact of his arrival at home and abroad.

The idea of a universally joyful populace, splashing money on souvenirs and dutifully waving Union Jacks, was uncritically reported by most of the UK media. Yet there was evidence, if anyone had bothered to look, that this notion was nowhere near the truth. A You-Gov report
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based on polling in July 2013 suggested that slightly more British adults (53 per cent) were uninterested in the birth, compared to 46 per cent who did take an interest. Almost a quarter of the population (24 per cent) was ‘not at all interested’, while another 29 per cent was ‘not very interested’. In the circumstances, any headline (and there were many) attributing positive feelings to ‘everyone’ or ‘the country’ was bound to be wrong. That didn’t stop the national tourist board, VisitEngland, publishing a breathless press release which claimed that ‘England is all in a frenzy over the arrival of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s baby son’.
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According to the organisation’s chairman [
sic
], Lady Cobham, ‘the Royal Family has long been an asset to English tourism, but never more so than right now, with people across the world in a fever pitch of excitement around the arrival of the royal baby’. The press release babbled about ‘global excitement’, apparently unaware of how tasteless and Anglocentric this view was against the background of a savage civil war in Syria and a refugee crisis of massive proportions in neighbouring countries. Were any of these tragic fugitives really inclined to go on VisitEngland’s website and click on a link to ‘royal baby-inspired breaks and packages’? Did they hanker after the Hilton hotel’s ‘Tot-ter around Kensington’ package where ‘guests can enjoy a two-night shopping break, ideal for mother-and-daughter bonding and mums-to-be’? Baby talk is an apt name for much of the nonsense spoken and written in the UK about the royal family, as another offer highlighted by VisitEngland suggested: ‘Meanwhile, one of the luxury suites at the Grosvenor House hotel on Park Lane has been transformed into a five-star nursery for jet-setting babies. The hotel has … transformed a Premium
Park View Suite into a quintessential English nursery, designed and tailored with a royal baby in mind.’

In November 2014, Lady Cobham was awarded a CBE for services to tourism by the Prince of Wales, an occasion only slightly marred by an altercation between her partner, the former Conservative Cabinet minister David Mellor, and a London taxi driver.

Not long after the royal birth, the
Evening Standard
declared Kate Middleton’s child, by then aged all of two months, the ‘most influential person in London’ – quite a feat for someone who had yet to speak his first word. The paper gushed:

Inevitably, one of the reasons for this thoroughly undeserved accolade was the infant’s supposed impact on – you guessed it – tourism. The paper’s editor, Sarah Sands, who had previously been one of the Mayor’s biggest supporters, trilled:

How is a baby supposed to function as a tourist attraction? Are foreign visitors drawn to London merely in the hope of breathing the same air as this unusually gifted infant? Or are they supposed to think that London is a small, informal city where a royal baby might be encountered in shops or public spaces? If so, they might be in for a shock: the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are no more keen than any other parent to find their infant son the focus of unsolicited attention from strangers. In 2014, lawyers for the couple warned a photographer
called Niraj Tanna to ‘cease harassing’ Prince George and his nanny after he was spotted by royal protection officers in Battersea Park. A statement from Kensington Palace accused Tanna of ‘placing Prince George under surveillance’ and suggested his behaviour amounted to stalking.
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The photographer denied harassment and insisted that he was entitled to take pictures in a public park.

In fact, there has been a sea change in attitudes towards children’s privacy in recent years, and photographing them without their parents’ consent is regarded as beyond the pale by most editors. When adults die in tragic circumstances, family photographs are often published with children’s faces obscured, a practice which was unknown in newspapers three decades ago. There is also much greater sensitivity than there used to be about the need to avoid sexualising babies and young children. None of this seems to have registered with the editorial team at
Vanity Fair
magazine when they decided to produce an issue marking the first birthday of Prince George in 2014. The cover
was given over to an informal photograph of William and Kate, the latter grinning and holding their son. The strapline read: ‘Happy Birthday, Prince George! Raising the World’s Most Eligible Infant’.
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Eligible for
what
? Inside, the magazine devoted nine-and-a-half pages to drivel about the Prince’s christening, revealing the make of pram chosen by the couple – ‘navy blue, top-of-the-line Silver Cross’ – and describing the baby blue monogrammed sweater given to him as a Christmas gift by his grandfather, the Prince of Wales. The magazine went on to claim that the baby had ‘united the royals with commoners’, a choice of language which was telling in itself. It suggested that the magazine is living in a fantasy version of the UK where cheerful working-class people doff their caps to the royals as they pass and food banks are unknown.

It was left to the YouGov poll I’ve already mentioned to
pour a welcome bucket of cold water on such extravagant claims, while a breakdown of the results contained a warning for the future of the monarchy. The poll showed that Conservative voters were much more likely to be interested in the birth than Labour supporters, which is unsurprising; many left-of-centre politicians are instinctive republicans, even if they are reluctant to admit it publicly. But the gender difference was striking: many more women than men were following the event, and female commentators showed a marked preference for a female baby. If the scenes following Diana’s death had revealed a previously unremarked tendency among women to identify with female members of the royal family, it became apparent that a generation of women who had grown up in the meantime was now hoping for a new Princess. They were to be disappointed, and that is why the birth of a male third in line to the throne was and is bad news for the monarchy. The UK had a female head of state for almost half of the twentieth century and the Queen is still carrying out royal ‘duties’ – if looking tired and grumpy on occasion – in the first decade-and-a-half of the twenty-first. But the arrival of
Prince George means that all the monarchy has to offer for the remainder of the century is an unbroken line of three kings: the Queen’s pantomimic eldest son,
his
eldest son and
his
eldest son. Even if they adopt different names on succeeding to the throne, as the Queen’s uncle David (Edward VIII) did, it is now written in stone that the UK’s next three heads of state will be Charles, William and George Windsor. Barring accidents, at least two of them are unlikely to ascend the throne before their sixties or seventies; age on its own is not a reason for ruling someone out of a job, but a royal family with genes for longevity, and access to state-of-the-art health care, is a recipe for what is effectively a gerontocracy. That is one of the reasons why younger members of the family have had to be deployed so extensively on ceremonial occasions, not just to lift some of the burden from the Queen but to obscure the fact that the country’s ceremonial head is approaching ninety. As I write, and assuming that Elizabeth Windsor remains in good health, that birthday is only a year away. No doubt the public celebrations are already being planned and cost will not be a consideration, however weak the state of the economy.