NOTE: As a new feature here on Substack, authors can record their commentaries. I have done that for this piece. If you wish to listen rather than read— although, cards on the table, you’ll hear me stumble a couple of times— please scroll to the bottom. But then, once you’ve got the recording playing back, maybe you’ll want to scroll back to the top to match what you hear to the pictures you see in the story.
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It seems only fitting on this Independence Day weekend— not to mention a welcome if brief relief from politics and pandemic and war— to think of the Queen. I mean Queen Elizabeth— formally known as Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her Other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith. The Queen from whose forebearers our forefathers tore away.
It’s fitting, because 1) she doesn’t tax us like they did, and 2) she’s a lot more forgiving than they were. Like, we get a new president, she’s the first to invite him for tea.
So I celebrated with the Queen’s subjects exactly a month ago when they commemorated her 70 years on the throne. It was her Platinum Jubilee. And quite a jubilee it was, a splendid spectacle of pomp and circumstance. For that alone, no one else on earth can match the British.
Not that they got it quite right. Elizabeth was formally coronated in June of 1952, 70 years ago, but she has sat on the throne since the day her father died that prior February. So arguably for the jubilee she was four months past. Maybe they opted for good weather over good math.
But still, they celebrated, and if public opinion polls are to be believed, “they” means most Brits. Queen Elizabeth has approval ratings at 90%, an apex any politician would covet. Especially her own politically teetering Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who’s sitting right now at minus 15%, whatever “minus” means in a public opinion poll, but it can’t be good.
There is that other 10% of course, some of whom would abolish the monarchy tomorrow. Many are from the three countries in the United Kingdom that aren’t England— Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland— where many see subservience to England’s ritualistic royalty as a drain on their own ancient cultures. If you saw the television series The Crown, you might remember that until he reached adulthood, Charles, the Prince of Wales, didn’t even speak Welsh.
There are Brits who find their monarchy either crazy costly or appallingly anachronistic. Mind you, this is not just a new current of the 21st Century. I heard their voices, and those same arguments, when I lived in Britain more than 40 years ago.
The cost of the crown is up for debate. The latest calculations say that the government— translation, the taxpayers— supports the monarchy to the tune of $110-million per year.
Castles and palaces, let alone the more than 1,100 employees who serve the royals, not to mention salaries for what are known as the “working royals,” don’t come cheap— a payroll pared but only barely palliated by the withdrawal of the queen’s scandal-plagued son Prince Andrew and her fame-plagued grandson Prince Harry.
On the other hand, while it’s an imprecise calculation, the monarchy’s advocates argue that what the royals bring in from tourism pays the bills with money left over.
I’ve believed that’s true ever since being part of ABC’s live coverage of the nuptials of Charles and Diana on a sunny London day in the summer of 1981. For weeks before the wedding, tourists from around the world crowded the city just to get a whiff of the wonder to come, and to buy every form of trinket, from thimbles to trivets, sold in most every store.
On the wedding day itself, in a career where I’ve seen more than my share of colossal crowds, I’d never seen one as large as this, and haven’t since. The point is, tourists spend money. Millions enough, royalists maintain, to support the monarchy.
And the argument about the anachronism? No question, that’s what this monarchy is. But it’s also Britain’s rock, the continuity that connects Britain’s ancient history to the modern nation, the foundation that frames British life. We have our Constitution which is, although sometimes exasperating, our rock. But for the Brits, who have no formal constitution— basically governance derives from English common law and that’s whatever Britain’s Supreme Court says it is— the monarchy is their continuity, the Queen is their constitution.
I remember thinking about that when I was covering Watergate almost 50 years ago. Our government was in shambles but our Constitution was intact and thanks to that, so was our nation. In the U.S. and Britain both, governments come and go. The American constitution and the British monarchy outlast them all.
To be sure, Queen Elizabeth has fouled up a few times, most notably with her appearance of apathy toward the beloved Princess Diana, both before Diana died and after.
But while that frosty facade was a road bump in her reign, the Queen is back, about as popular as she’s ever been.
But she’s 96 now, and it only seems realistic to say that Charles is bound to replace her. Which might pose problems for the royals. Whether measured by those opinion polls or just intuition, Charles is barely half as popular as his mother is (although as an aside, I once was part of a small London luncheon with the prince, and he was both personable and articulate). But it takes tenure to grow in the hard-won esteem of the British people, and Elizabeth has had 70 years to nurture that growth. 73-year-old Charles— unless he lives to the age of at least 143— will not get anything close to that much time.
On the other hand, if Elizabeth dies and Charles succeeds her, you can bet that there won’t be riotous insurrectionists breaking into Buckingham Palace to forestall the transfer of the crown. Not because he will be so uncommonly admired but because, unlike the architects of political discord in America, he will not be widely abhorred.
And perhaps because, after all is said and done, the people of the United Kingdom appreciate the special place they still have in the world. They appreciate it because they know how their global influence has shrunk. The once redoubtable British Empire, which at its peak enveloped nearly a quarter of the world’s population and a quarter of its land on which they proudly proclaimed the sun never set, today is a tiny fragment of its former self where the sun sets every day of the year. That’s on those days, of course, when the sun shows up at all. But they know what their nation might look like if the monarchy went away. George Orwell in The Road To Wigan Pier summed it up: “The alternative is to throw the Empire overboard and reduce England to a cold and unimportant little island where we should all have to work very hard and live mainly on herrings and potatoes.”
Neither this monarch nor any monarch before her was perfect. In some cases, far, far from it. But there are certain sentiments that the monarchy bestows on its subjects that we don’t have. I wouldn’t want royalty for my country— our forefathers fought hard to get rid of it. But there are a few of its features— the pride, the pageantry, the noble parts of a sometimes troubled history— that I would gladly embrace.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.