Tim Blair: Prince Andrew makes a royal case
It doesn’t matter how bad the royals are, they are better than having a politician as our head of state because at least the royal family don’t actually do anything, writes Tim Blair.
Opinion
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Put aside the deaths, destruction, pain and grief, and disasters can be remarkably useful events. Through their sheer scale, major disasters are sometimes able to provide powerful clarity.
Such a clarifying moment occurred for British Guardian writer George Monbiot following the deadly 2011 Japanese tsunami and associated Fukushima nuclear meltdown.
To the dismay of his eco-nut followers, Monbiot declined to join the subsequent global anti-nuke pile-on.
Instead, an entirely natural disaster that killed nearly 20,000 people led Monbiot to a surprisingly bright conclusion.
“A crappy old plant with inadequate safety features was hit by a monster earthquake and a vast tsunami. The electricity supply failed, knocking out the cooling system,” Monbiot wrote.
“The reactors began to explode and melt down. The disaster exposed a familiar legacy of poor design and corner-cutting.
“Yet, as far as we know, no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation …
“Atomic energy has just been subjected to one of the harshest of possible tests, and the impact on people and the planet has been small. The crisis at Fukushima has converted me to the cause of nuclear power.”
Prince Andrew is now suffering a Fukushima-like meltdown of his own. A crappy old royal with inadequate safety features, Andrew has been hit by a monster Jeffrey Epstein friendship scandal and a vast public relations debacle following a terrible BBC interview.
He has been stood down from royal duties, whatever they are, and dumped by companies and institutions that previously enjoyed their connections to Prince-level prestige, including Huddersfield College, BT, KPMG, Cisco, Standard Chartered, AstraZeneca, the Outward Bound Trust and London Metropolitan University.
Australian commentators, understandably revolted by allegations against Andrew and his bizarrely evasive BBC chat, are now calling for Australia, in the manner of nations that turned against nuclear energy after Fukushima, to ditch the royals.
“The cursed lives of Epstein’s broken victims have become collateral damage to this latest royal scandal but, as Andrew demonstrated during his interview, these women are so irrelevant as to be beneath any mention or notice at all,” the Sydney Morning Herald’s Jacqueline Maley wrote on Saturday.
“It showed him for who he really is, and it revealed a glimpse of the snobbish, privileged and blindly cruel world he is a part of.
“How much longer will Australia want to be tied to these people?
“Once the Queen dies, and Prince Charles ascends to the throne of a Britain either ravaged by Brexit or still in the throes of it, how will even the staunchest of monarchists be able to argue the worth of the institution?”
My friend David Penberthy is of similar mind. “Our constitution tells us that we are incapable of finding anyone better or more talented in our home country to be our head of state than the likes of Prince Andrew,” The Daily Telegraph’s former editor lamented last week.
“We are insulting ourselves.
“It strikes me that almost no republican model could be less palatable than the one that throws this bloke into the mix to be our head of state.”
Yet even a minimalist republican model would necessarily involve a political dimension. An Australian republic could add further powers to those already held and routinely abused by our dire political class.
Right now, any authority held over us by the royal family is wholly symbolic. Under a republic, that authority could be activated.
We would be handing additional potential powers to the same geniuses who, for example, converted the cheapest energy sources on earth to the most expensive. A republic would be a reward for incompetence on such a scale that it costs us hundreds of millions of dollars.
I’d rather a certain quantity of power be left in the inert hands of a pervy prince and his weird aristocratic relatives than in the hands of a class whose decisions are reliably ruinous and which have inevitably negative material outcomes.
If that means tolerating the likes of creepy Andrew, tree-talking Charles, woke Meghan and overwhelmed Harry, then so be it. This doesn’t require any argument defending “the worth of the institution”.
The institution barely matters at all, beyond being a silo for the permanent storage of powers that under our current system can never be used.
As well, this is nothing to do with “finding anyone better or more talented in our home country to be our head of state”. It’s about maintaining a head of state who is completely uninvolved in matters of state.
Worth or talent don’t matter a damn.
You know, it wouldn’t make much difference if our official head of state is some lady in a castle 17,000km away or a tree frog or a turnip.
Just so long as it isn’t anyone or anything aiming or able to meddle in our lives.
That’s because, when Australia’s political class gets things wrong, we pay the penalty. When royals get it wrong, by comparison, they pay whatever penalty is decided by the court of public opinion.
Or, as may eventually be the case for Prince Andrew, whatever penalty is decided by an actual court.
Any sensible person might reasonably prefer to be left alone by foreign idiots than be bossed around by local idiots, even if those foreign idiots are inclined to brutish misbehaviour.
It’s a fine system. Resilient, too.
As Monbiot might put it, Australia’s constitutional monarchy has just been subjected to one of the harshest of possible tests. And the impact on Australia and Australians has been small.