Royal prerogative to mess with their heads

AUSTRALIAN republicans might have enjoyed more success had they heeded the lessons of Ben Pimlott.

The Queen

AUSTRALIAN republicans might have enjoyed more success in the 1999 referendum had they heeded the lessons of Ben Pimlott's biography The Queen.

Exposing the absurdity of a hereditary monarch in the modern age is the easy part; explaining why this particular monarch continues to capture the popular imagination is a task for a heavy-duty intellect.

Pimlott's biography, therefore, is as much about "the Queen in people's heads" as the one in Buckingham Palace. By the time of the Queen's coronation in 1953, it was clear that, to all intents and purposes, the monarch reigned by democratic consent in Britain as in Australia. As Pimlott's engaging narrative unfolds, the tyranny of popular opinion is the dominant theme.

In a story rich in unexpected detail, Queen Elizabeth II intuitively steers a path for the evolving British monarchy between reform and continuity. She recognises that, beyond the ceremonial, the monarchy's political power has effectively been removed, and she takes the path of least resistance when confronted with hard decisions. Having resisted pressure to persuade an infirm Winston Churchill to step down as prime minister early in her career, distancing herself from the dismissal of Gough Whitlam in 1975 is second nature.

From Elizabeth's birth in 1926, "the manufacture of a publicly known personality for the princess" was a surprisingly sophisticated exercise. She was presented as "an innocent, unsophisticated child who, but for her royal status, might be anybody's daughter".

She did not accompany her parents on their 1927 tour of Australia, but it was estimated that three tonnes of toys were presented to her in absentia. Pimlott introduces the paradox within the iconography, never satisfactorily resolved": how could the object of so many admiring glances and the recipient of such largesse deliver a convincing performance as a member of a typical family? The narrative builds to its gripping climax; the crisis that almost crushed the monarchy with the death of Princess Diana.

Pimlott paints the 1950s as a long honeymoon; the young Queen embodies the optimism of post-war Britain and emerges as a symbol of Commonwealth stability abroad. He challenges the myth that the attachment to royalty in the Menzies era was merely romantic hankering for the lost days of empire. On the contrary, Pimlott finds the Queen and Prince Philip reflected a progressive instinct and a new-found maturity in a Commonwealth of equals.

By the end of the 50s, the narrative of the archetypal young family, "the kind of brisk and open-shirted nuclear unit that breakfasted on cornflakes", was in trouble, challenged notably by Princess Margaret's affair with divorcee Peter Townsend. Decorum prevailed and their engagement did not occur, but there were signs of tension between changing attitudes and a conservative institution, highlighted by a less deferential press.

Public perception of royalty begins to change with Prince Charles's engagement to Diana Spencer and escalates in the mid and late 80s. First comes criticism of the frivolity of the younger royals, followed by claims that the royal family was overpaid and under-taxed. Finally the central myth of royalty -- as "a model of domestic virtue and private happiness" -- collapses. "Bit by bit, the jigsaw of the Waleses' failed relationship was pieced together," writes Pimlott. "Separate breakfasts, separate timetables, separate friends." The royal family was, "in the modern jargon, dysfunctional".

The firm's crisis of identity spread beyond the tabloid press. The Sunday Times noted a glaring contradiction: the royal family's place in a class structure that was losing its relevance. The modern monarchy could not longer sit at "an apex of hierarchical, aristocratic society; it should be set apart from all classes, something distinctive and unique that exists because the British people want it to exist". It must avoid at all costs becoming "the hereditary branch of the showbusiness industry".

Pimlott wrote his original draft against the background of the gathering crisis that culminated with the divorce of the heir to the throne and the death of his ex-wife in 1997. In the chapters added before his death in 2004, Pimlott considers the Australian referendum, the result of which was a greater relief to the Queen than was publicly confessed. It was, after all, the first time the monarchy had been subject to the popular vote. Endorsement by a clear majority in a far corner of the Commonwealth boosted morale in Buckingham Palace when the family was close to its lowest ebb.

The obstacles for the republican movement are as much psychological as political, says Pimlott. It was a mistake to consider royalty merely as "Europe's greatest living fossil", as the essayist Tom Nairn once called it, "the enchanted glass of an early modernity which has otherwise vanished from the globe". Pimlott, echoing Nairn, concludes that to dismiss popular royalism as the mindless product of media manipulation is a miscalculation. On the contrary, royalty contains "an apparently inexhaustible electrical charge".

This edition, posthumously updated for the diamond jubilee, includes an informative afterword by Pimlott's wife, historian Jean Seaton, who reports a turn in fortunes that might have surprised her husband: "As popular trust in other elites -- politicians, bankers, the press -- declined, so that of the monarchy rose." For the British, the Queen had become "part of their mental furniture", palace reforms had been well-received and the troublesome family had been slimmed down "as various outlying royals have been dropped from the central cast".

Seaton's insight into the disdain Pimlott received for writing the book is informative: "Perfectly well-brought-up women would go out of their way to be rude to him for even contemplating writing about the Queen, great historians warned him of the irreversible damage to his reputation for doing so, while political scientists snickered."

The astuteness of Pimlott's analysis more than a decade and a half after its publication is vindication. His understanding of the pre-eminence of culture over politics in shaping human events sets him apart from most of his contemporaries. He did not succumb to the fashionable contempt for popular emotion, relying as much on the archives of The News of the World as he did on The Times.

With the closure last year of that remarkable journal of cultural record, one wonders where future historians will turn for an understanding of the vernacular imagination.

E-BOOK REVIEW
The Queen
By Ben Pimlott