This split, he believes, is “a threat to a cohesive and successful Australia as it tries to adapt to the globalised economy.”

Wait, apologies, I jumbled my notes. That was Kelly after the 1999 vote on the republic, a cause he was very much in favour of.

This time round his columns have run passionately against the proposed Voice, and his tea-leaf reading of very similar voting patterns — the Yes vote fading the further from CBDs — sits on a much more ideological plane.

Once again the big No vote points to a “divided nation,” but now the goodies and baddies are very clear. That “confident, educated, city-based middle class” cohort has become something malignant, purveyors of “progressive sophistry” and “progressive values” and “experiments… tampering with the once accepted but now eroding universal norms that defined the Australian nation.”

The fourteenth of October, to underline the point, was a “repudiation of elite morality and assumed moral superiority.” On and on Kelly goes, for more than 2300 words; quoting various “experts” to categorise this as our Trump/Brexit moment, the revenge of everyday, ordinary citizens tired of being scolded and looked down on.

The Professor has been castigating “elites” (with all the unacknowledged irony this encompasses from a person of his means and position) since at least the late Howard years, but whereas the group once largely consisted of inner-urban Labor and Greens supporters working in academia and the arts, big business — with its public pronouncements in favour of marriage equality and tackling climate change — seems also to now stand in Paul’s naughty corner. “Elite(s)” appears no less than seventeen times in last month’s tirade, along with thirteen mentions of “progressive(s).”

That pattern of higher support in the inner city ebbing lower as you approach the bush can actually be observed in every referendum this side of Robert Menzies’s attempt to ban communism in 1951. It was more pronounced in the 1999 vote (both for the republic and for a new constitutional preamble) and more pronounced again in 2023.

A Labor–Coalition city–rural split has also been growing at general elections, reaching its apogee in May last year. There is change afoot in the electoral arena, and it is also seen dramatically in the ever-plummeting support for major parties.

Kelly’s bitter deep dive is worth citing because it conveniently contains most elements of the gloating-dressed-as-analysis that has emerged from the No-supporting commentariat. Even more than most political journalists, he seems to be a hostage to the present, inhaling the current zeitgeist and reciting it with deep meaning and drama — and often at great length.

So what does the 40–60 Voice outcome tell us about the country? That Australia is racist? Or colour-blind? Or doesn’t like elites?

I don’t think this result should change or even reinforce anyone’s opinion about the nature of this country. Instead it verifies that Australians can be relied on to bury Labor government midterm referendums, regardless of the topic. Set your watch by it: early opinion polling shows overwhelming support; Liberal leader eventually opposes (because to do otherwise would be professionally fatal); the government, encouraged by the polling, still presses ahead. Then it all becomes an orgy of scarifying tales about the danger of messing with the Constitution — the blueprint of this country, the envy of the world. Former judges are exhumed to warn of the risk. Why are the government and its mates so desperate to do this? They’re spending how many millions on it? Such self-indulgence, such arrogance, who can resist reminding them who’s boss?

With counting over, the Voice slots in fourth out of Labor’s eleven midterm attempts to change the Constitution since federation. That’s not particularly bad.

What does set this vote apart is its makeup. Last century, decent statistical correlations could be observed between Labor two-party-preferred support at the previous election and Yes votes. Traditional high-income Liberal electorates reliably took their party’s cue and joined outer-suburban and regional Coalition supporters to deliver, overwhelmingly, above-average Nos.

This time around, that high-income territory is mostly in teal hands (but the locals still vote Liberal over Labor in two-party-preferred terms), and those electorates voted a higher-than-average Yes. It was much like the republic vote, when they could still be loyal Liberals by siding with treasurer Peter Costello rather than prime minister John Howard.

This change in behaviour in the former Liberal heartland was a major driver — perhaps the major driver — of the record city–bush divide.

That might have been because, as Kelly writes, the Voice was seen as a “moral” issue. How might a referendum on something mundane, like recognising local government, have gone? As a Labor midtermer it would have been thrashed, but would it have exhibited those heightened geographic differences or settled back to something more predictably partisan?

Kelly was just as strongly against marriage equality, and that 2017 survey also exhibited the city-to-bush pattern (overlaid by outsized No votes in some suburban electorates with high numbers of people from non-English-speaking backgrounds), but the overall outcome, a big win for Yes, precluded triumphalism. On that occasion, the elites were apparently vindicated.

There is one other tendency in the recent analysis, and not just on the No side. Some people see the referendum as an electoral test failed by the Albanese government. It was so out of touch on this issue, can it recover?

The vote has certainly brought Anthony Albanese, who evidently believed his special skill set would bring this home, thuddingly down to earth. It’s damaged him in the eyes of the political class — they will no longer marvel at his prowess — but does that matter in the long run? Probably not; he had to get real sometime. It was something people were forced to vote on, a tenth-order issue for the overwhelming majority, and won’t feature at all in the next campaign. There’s nothing in the historical record to suggest referendum losses portend the same at subsequent elections.

Kelly was at it again last week, presenting a strategy for Peter Dutton’s path to the Lodge — courtesy of the Voice vote. Acknowledging that it “is easy to exaggerate the meaning of the referendum,” he proceeded to do just that, finding in it a “strategic pathway” for the opposition and piling on advice for the Liberal leader’s “approach post-Voice.”

The old pro-business warrior now sounds decidedly blue Labo(u)r (or should that be “populist”?): companies get a serve for “defending their economic bottom line while doubling down on their promotion of social and environmental values.”

That tedious old chestnut, Menzies’s “forgotten people,” gets an awfully long workout in the context of an imaginary two-term strategy for Dutton, à la (without mentioning him by name) Tony Abbott. Back on terra firma, Dutton will be lucky to survive for just one term as opposition leader, let alone two. •

The post Getting the referendum wrong appeared first on Inside Story.

We find ourselves in the former group. We were deeply moved by the Netflix series, directed by the critically acclaimed American documentary film-maker Liz Garbus, and were absorbed by the book. It isn’t simply the human drama that gripped us, or our sympathy for Harry and Meghan. We also see significant implications for Australia in the way the debate over their actions has played out.

Any account of these recent events must begin with Princess Diana, for it is increasingly apparent that her rebelliousness lives on strongly in Prince Harry and is evident in Meghan’s attitudes and behaviour. When Diana was alive, many people saw her as the best thing going for a stodgy and rapidly fading royal family. What’s often forgotten is that before her death in August 1997 she had become a prominent social activist.

We were particularly struck by footage in the BBC documentary, Heart of the Matter, showing her walking in protective clothing through a recently cleared minefield in Angola earlier in 1997. “I’d read the statistics that Angola has the highest percentage of amputees anywhere in the world,” she explained to the camera. “That one person in every 333 had lost a limb, most of them through landmine explosions. But that hadn’t prepared me for the reality.”

We were also struck by another TV image: Diana sitting by the bedside of an HIV/AIDS sufferer in a hospital. During a visit to Cape Town to see her brother, Earl Spencer, in 1997 Diana had met with Nelson Mandela, who praised her dedication to helping those infected with HIV/AIDS. “We saw her sitting on the beds of AIDS patients and shaking hands with them, and that changed perceptions dramatically with regards to AIDS,” Mandela recalled. He also expressed his appreciation for Diana’s visit to children in Angola crippled by landmines, observing that she had helped inspire the campaign to destroy South African landmines.

An important feature of Diana’s social activism was its internationalism. As well as AIDS awareness and prevention, she supported charities and organisations committed to battling poverty and homelessness, visited charities in Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Nepal, India and other countries fighting leprosy, and opposed the stigma surrounding mental illness.

In the last year of her life, Diana began dating Dodi Fayed, an Egyptian producer whose well-known films included Chariots of Fire. Perhaps her attraction to an Egyptian man partly reflected a desire to extend her consciousness beyond England with an act of love that was also a rebellious act. After all, Egypt had been the scene of perfidies and infamies characteristic of the British Empire, especially the crushing (with the help of Australian soldiers) of the gathering movement for Egyptian independence in 1919.

The open grief of the British public after Diana’s death led us to believe that the tabloids had learned their lesson and would no longer harass, intrude on and exploit the royal family. We are astonished by our naivety.

Despite his decade-long career in the British army, Harry undoubtedly carries on his mother’s tradition of rebelliousness and internationalism. He is patron of a leading landmine-clearance charity, the Halo Trust, and has called for the world to become free of those weapons by 2025. Twenty-two years after Diana, he retraced his mother’s footsteps in Angola.

After walking along the suburban street that was once filled with explosives, he said it was “quite emotional” to retrace Diana’s steps “and to see the transformation that has taken place, from an unsafe and desolate place into a vibrant community of local businesses and colleges… I’m incredibly proud of what she’s been able to do and meet these kids here who were born on this street.”

A news agency photo shows Harry sitting beneath the Diana Tree, which marks the spot where Diana was pictured in the minefield. “Landmines,” he said, “are an unhealed scar of war.” In 2014 he had established the Invictus Games to support soldiers permanently injured in combat.

Harry and Meghan have also taken a leading role in drawing attention to the needs of people with mental illness. In an interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2021, Harry revealed his own difficulties with mental distress while Meghan discussed her depression, experience of a suicidal state and the shocking refusal of the Palace to offer mental health support when she asked for it during her time in England. Under royal protocol, Meghan was compelled to give up her keys, passport and driver’s licence and only got them back when she returned to the United States.

In the same year, 2021, Harry and Oprah made a series of educational programs entitled The Me You Can’t See exploring mental illness and suggesting ways of alleviating it. In Spare, Harry provides considerably more detail about his struggle with mental illness over several years and how, in therapy, he finally came to terms with his mother’s death.

Throughout these years, the tabloid scrutiny of the couple was intense. In his interview with Oprah, Harry compared his relationship with Meghan to the hounding of his mother “while she was in a relationship with someone who wasn’t white.” He feared that history would repeat itself, that like Diana they would be “followed, photographed, chased, harassed” relentlessly. This fear, and the extent of the persecution of Meghan, is described in much more depth in both Harry and Meghan and, especially, Spare.

Among the key points to emerge in the Netflix series is the relationship between the tabloid press and “the Firm.” Harry’s explanation of how the London tabloids work with the royal family’s media staff to produce stories for the front page is dynamite; in his view it was the Firm as much as the tabloids who sought to destroy the Duchess of Sussex. The underlying racism of the tabloids and the royal family are laid bare.

Spare follows up with a great deal more detail on the toxic interdependence of the Firm and the tabloid media. We learn how the relationship between Meghan and William and Kate seemed to start well enough (William and Kate had loved Meghan in Suits) but soon deteriorated, going from one small conflict to the next.

For Harry, the problem of the British media and the royal family goes back a long way, to his mother’s death and the events preceding it. He is horrified that the paparazzi who chased her until her car crashed stood around photographing her, rather than trying to help, as she lay dying. He is shocked that no attempt was made to arrest the paparazzi involved, a failure he believes has only encouraged the tabloids to intrude into his own and his family’s private life.

Spare is, in fact, a great autobiography, a j’accuse that accumulates damning details to intensifying, almost unbearable effect until Harry and Meghan escape.

As historians, we were surprised by Harry and Meghan, which we hadn’t expected to be so thoroughly informed by recent historical scholarship. But the two people chosen as key commentators give a clue to its quality. David Olusoga, a professor of public history at the University of Manchester, has written, produced, directed or appeared in a string of TV documentaries, including Black and British: A Forgotten History and, most recently, Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners. Afua Hirsch is a journalist with the Guardian and author of Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging. Between them, supplemented by archival footage and narrative commentary, they bring the British and world historical context to life.

In episode three of the series, Olusoga comments that “this little island off the coast of Europe was at the centre of the biggest empire the world has ever seen” and goes on to ask at whose cost, pointing towards Britain’s history of slavery. Hirsch comments that “Britain had a ‘deep south’ that was just as brutal, that actually enslaved more Africans than the United States of America did.” Britain’s deep south was the Caribbean, overseas, far away, “out of sight and out of mind.”

After an unseen narrator points out that slavery fuelled the early British Empire in North America, Hirsch says that the first-ever “commercial slave voyage conducted by Britain was personally financed by Queen Elizabeth I. And it continued to be financed by kings and queens, right up until its abolition.” Even in its abolition in the 1830s, Britain sided with the slave owners, many of whom were also members of the British parliament, by compensating them at huge cost.

Olusoga and Hirsch are drawing here on the scholarship of the Legacies of Slavery Project, based at University College London and led by historians Catherine Hall, Nicholas Draper and Keith McClelland. The project’s extensive research has helped change British public awareness and understanding, and stimulated among historians a greater interest in the consequences of the end of slavery in the British Empire. Jane Lydon, Zoë Laidlaw, Emma Christopher and others have been tracing how, after abolition, people, ideas, and finance were transferred from the Caribbean to Britain’s settler colonies.  Australia was obviously among them, as recent research by Christopher and Lydon highlights.

Harry and Meghan also considers the more recent historical context. Olusoga draws attention to the migration of many Black and Brown people to Britain from the mid twentieth century — so much so that London “began to look, for the only time in its history, like it actually was the centre of an empire that was mainly made up of non-white people.” When Harry and Meghan became engaged, he says, the royal family seemed at last to have begun catching up with modern British society.

We see Harry and Meghan at a memorial service to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Stephen Lawrence, the eighteen-year-old boy killed by white racists. Only two of his attackers were ever brought to justice. Hirsch says that Harry and Meghan’s attendance was highly significant, speaking to “the pain that many people still feel as a result of the murder of Stephen Lawrence.”

Olusoga and Hirsch reappear in episode five to argue that the failure of the Palace to defend Meghan from press persecution was a huge disaster for the future of the monarchy. “Here was a woman,” says Olusoga, “who just looked like most of the people in the Commonwealth, and they somehow, for some reason, couldn’t find the capacity to protect her, to represent her, to stand by her, to take on vested power in her name, to fight for her.” For Hirsch, the departure of Harry and Meghan “felt like the death of a dream” that a truly inclusive Britain could form and flourish.

In Australia, coverage of the series and the memoir gradually shifted from a kind of can’t-watch-it, won’t-read-it scorn to a very mixed but more earnest consideration of the issues the series and the book raise. One of those issues is the future of the monarchy in Australia.

In Spare, Harry reveals a continuing interest in the Commonwealth, and especially the countries that still regard the British monarch as also their own. He writes about the outstanding success of his and Meghan’s royal tour of South Africa in September 2019, the first since that country returned to the Commonwealth in 1994. They were welcomed there as representing a new direction for the royal family and for the Commonwealth, and they both felt that in this shift they had an important role to play.

Yet the role of the monarchy in the Commonwealth has come into increasing question. The final episode of Harry and Meghan shows the monarchy in trouble in the Caribbean, as member nations continue to reject a past shaped by slavery within the British Empire. With reparations increasingly on the agenda, and aware of the royal family’s historical role in the system of slavery, some Commonwealth nations no longer want the British monarch as their head of state. Barbados declared itself a republic in November last year and Jamaica has declared its intention to become a republic by 2025.

What about Australia? What should our future relationship be with this dysfunctional British family? Does the Harry and Meghan story have any implications for us?

While the Australian republican movement has so far said little about the couple, commentary on their significance for an Australian republic has been growing. We agree with Jenny Hocking when she writes, “This now openly feuding family provides our head of state, imposed on us and fourteen other Commonwealth nations by dynastic succession and inherited title alone, in which we have no say and no relevance. It inevitably reignites questions about why Australia is still a constitutional monarchy.”

Apart from the difficulty in imagining a popular and workable alternative, one of the main obstacles to the move to a republic in Australia has been the popularity of the royal family. We grew up in that environment. John Docker remembers his English mother listening to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II on radio. Ann Curthoys recalls keeping a scrapbook in 1953 of the coronation, as most schoolchildren did, and being one of the 50,000 schoolchildren marshalled in the Newcastle Showground to spell out Welcome (she was in the W) when the Queen and Prince Philip visited Australia the following year.

Lyndall Ryan remembers that the biggest event in her life until she started high school in 1955 was the Queen’s first visit to Australia in 1954. The Australian Women’s Weekly then kept her up to date on the royal family, and in particular their tours to other parts of the Commonwealth. She didn’t seriously consider becoming a republican until after the Whitlam government was dismissed by the governor-general on 11 November 1975, and until Jenny Hocking published The Palace Letters in 2021 she was convinced that the governor-general’s action had nothing to do with the Queen.

But republicanism has had a chequered history in Australia. It gathered increased support after Whitlam’s dismissal, reached a peak during the 1990s and subsided after the defeat of a referendum on the question in 1999. It has been undergoing something of a revival in recent years, especially as Queen Elizabeth’s reign was drawing to a close. Our prime minister is in fact a republican, though he is insisting right now that the matter of the Voice to Parliament, and indeed the Uluru Statement from the Heart generally, must take priority.

Alongside the essential debates over the Voice and a Treaty, it is time to step up public debate about Australia’s becoming a republic. Indeed, the question of the republic is not entirely separate from those debates: they are all part of a necessary reshaping of modern Australia. While Indigenous commentators have focused on the Uluru statement and its proposals, support has been evident for an Australian republic that truly recognises Indigenous sovereignty.

Harry and Meghan and Spare demonstrate with great clarity how the monarchy continues to be shaped by British history, British concerns and British symbolism, and not at all by Australian or indeed Commonwealth ones. The evolution of the monarchy as an institution is clearly outside our control and always will be. The tabloid British media have deeply compromised the monarchy and the royal family, and sections of the Australian media, especially those that are Murdoch-controlled, have too often joined in. With several Caribbean nations forging new republican paths for themselves, surely it is time for Australia to do the same. •

The post Harry, Meghan and the republic  appeared first on Inside Story.

Of course, talk of presidents naturally brings to mind the United States’ powerful chief executive. But that’s a false comparison: a dramatic shift from a parliamentary to a presidential model of government is not on the cards for Australia. Better to look at parliamentary systems that already have presidential systems. What they have in common is that their presidents tend to be symbolic figureheads more akin to a constitutional monarch than an American-style president.

Proponents of the republican cause in Australia might therefore like to look more closely at the Irish experience of presidentialism. Ireland was once part of the British Commonwealth, as Australia still is, but it adopted a directly elected presidency eleven years before formally leaving the Commonwealth in 1949. Like Australia, it has a parliamentary system of government with a strong prime minister, but it has managed to weave a president into its political fabric without too many hiccups.

What could Australia hope to learn from the Irish presidency? The first is that the president, by necessity, is more a symbolic than a political figure. When the presidency was created in 1937, some people feared it was part of a ploy by the then prime minister, Éamon de Valera, to create an elected dictatorship, but that anxiety primarily reflected the tense political atmosphere of late 1930s Europe.

Any concerns were quickly allayed by the election of the non-partisan Douglas Hyde, a retired professor of modern Irish and a leading cultural revivalist, as the office’s first occupant. Hyde was supported by all political parties and sought to stay out of the limelight for the duration of his seven-year term, adopting a minimalist interpretation of his role. Had a more political figure sought and won the office, and gone on to challenge the government’s authority, a different type of presidency might have evolved. The message for Australia is that, regardless of how the institution is designed, the tone is very much set by early incumbents.

For this reason, some thought needs to be given to the electoral rules for a president, beginning with candidate eligibility. Would anyone be allowed to run for a hypothetical presidency, or would eligibility be restricted, for example, to citizens aged thirty-five or older (as is the case in Ireland and the United States)?

To run for the Irish presidency requires either the signatures of twenty of parliament’s 220 members or the support of four local councils, all of which are party-controlled. The one exception is that current or former presidents can nominate themselves. That clause hasn’t caused problems to date but could easily do so if a disgruntled former president (inspired by a recent counterpart across the Atlantic, perhaps) wanted to disrupt the process. The nomination process is specified in the constitution and can only be altered by referendum.

Ireland’s major parties have kept a firm grip on the process, especially up to the 1990s, even colluding on a number of occasions to ensure no election was necessary when they agreed on a candidate. The level of parliamentary support required for a nomination means that only Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael, historically the two largest parties, could field candidates. No Fine Gael candidate has ever been elected to the presidency, so when the party decided not to oppose Fianna Fáil, there was no contest.

That’s why presidential elections were the exception rather than the norm. Ireland’s directly elected model looks quite different from processes in other European countries, where parliaments rather than the people select the president, but has always been closer to that model in practice.

In recent decades, though, Ireland’s political parties have relinquished some control over the process by allowing their own local councillors to nominate independent candidates. The consequence of a more open system has been greater competition, with as many as eight independents securing nominations at the past two presidential elections and winning a combined total of almost 40 per cent support on both occasions.

The only attempt to change the nomination process more fundamentally was a referendum to extend candidate eligibility to citizens aged twenty-one and over. It was held on the same day as a marriage-equality referendum in 2015, but the overwhelming level of support to end relationship discrimination didn’t carry over to the presidential question, which was easily defeated by a three-to-one majority.

Aspirant presidential candidates in countries such as Bulgaria, Finland, Iceland and Poland can circumvent parties by securing a particular number of voters’ signatures to run for the presidency, but that option isn’t available in Ireland. Political parties have an open and stated fear of celebrities or media personalities using this avenue to get on the ballot, potentially undermining the presidency if elected — or worse, putting it into direct conflict with the government.

That’s not to say that the president has many powers to challenge the government. But some, including the power to send a parliamentary bill to the Supreme Court to test its constitutionality, create a potential clashing point. That particular power has been exercised on fifteen occasions by different presidents, and the Supreme Court has struck down the proposed legislation seven times. One of those referrals drew criticism from a government minister, and the then president, Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh, ultimately resigned in 1976 when the minister was not rebuked.

With all bills requiring the consent of the president to become law, it’s no mystery why the parties are unlikely to open up the nomination process anytime soon.

What about the election itself? This process should be a bit more familiar to Australians, since Ireland is one of the few countries that uses preferential voting to elect its president. While most European countries use a two-round ballot, the Irish system — like Australia’s — is what is known as the single transferable vote. On only one occasion, when Mary Robinson beat Fianna Fáil’s Brian Lenihan in 1990, has a candidate with the largest number of first-preference votes been beaten.

Such an outcome might lead to the reasonable conclusion that parties in government usually get their candidate elected, but this has not proven to be the case in recent years. Voters have treated the presidential contest as a classic second-order, midterm election — in other words, as a means of expressing their opinion on the government of the day rather than the candidates running for office. This can give presidential elections an additional political dimension that opposition parties can exploit as a means of attacking the government.

In terms of who gets to vote in presidential elections, the franchise in Ireland is restricted to Irish citizens resident in the country. Unusually, Irish citizens living overseas are not allowed to vote in elections. Given the size of the Irish diaspora — estimated at several multiples of the resident population — successive governments have been reluctant to embrace overseas voting.

Earlier this year, however, it was announced that the government will hold a referendum before 2024 on allowing Irish-born people living abroad the right to vote at presidential elections. If this significant change were passed, the devil would be in the detail. Would all votes be counted equally, for example, or would overseas citizens have their votes weighted? If the former, then it could be possible for a president to be elected without majority support among the resident population.

These issues and more demonstrate that Australia faces complex questions if it decides to go down the republican route and adopt a presidency. Despite the controversy and confusion when it was introduced, Ireland’s presidency has endured, with recent incumbents among the more popular politicians in the country. Such popularity would be especially important for the first incumbents of a hypothetical Australian presidency. As the Irish experience shows, careful consideration needs to be given to the design of such an institution lest it tarnish the republican cause. •

The post The Queen is dead! Long live the president? appeared first on Inside Story.

What does all of this mean for Australia? Possibly not much. Nothing seriously resembling national grief has prevailed, whatever the politicians and media are telling us. The passing of a woman who has simply been there throughout the lives of most of us has a certain poignancy, and she commands respect for being good at her job and being willing to do it to the best of her ability to the very end — which quite reasonably translates into “devotion to duty” in the seemingly endless tributes.

Media companies have been on the lookout for anyone who has ever found themselves in the general vicinity of Her Majesty so I might as well share my experience. I did but see her passing by just once. It was the centenary of the office of Australian high commissioner to the United Kingdom in 2010 — what could very loosely if not quite accurately have been called the centenary of British–Australian diplomatic relations — and I was at a function in Australia House in the Strand, which was also the occasion for the launch of a book I had helped edit.

The royal couple sat on the stage of the grand Exhibition Hall during the formalities and then made their way around the room, the Queen politely formal in the usual way, Prince Philip more chatty. Their progress complete, they took their leave — I suppose they were there an hour — and it was hard not to admire two elderly people who had performed duties of such formidable dullness for much of their lives. And here they were still at it long after most people were enjoying their retirement.

They lived lives of great privilege, of course, and it is right — in an age when the descendants of those oppressed by the British Empire draw attention to that legacy — that her reign should be seen as entangled in a messy, difficult and often brutal imperial history. Elizabeth II’s life began when that empire was at its greatest extent, and the early part of her reign coincided with some of its most appalling violence. It would be a remarkable act of erasure — and a highly political one — to pretend that the only thing that matters in her career is that she was the kind of woman willing to dance with Ghana’s leader Kwame Nkrumah at a ball in 1961. (But that matters in judgements of her role, too. In the United States of the time, African-American men were still occasionally being lynched for forwardness with white women.)

Older Australians will have memories of royal visits and of Australian Women’s Weekly covers from a time when the Queen herself and the monarchy as an institution did express something important about the country’s national identity. Many — perhaps most — Australians were proud to be British, proud to belong to the Empire and then, when that disappeared, grateful to belong to the Commonwealth, even if only because it gave the country’s athletes a decent show of a solid medal haul.

That pride gradually declined as Britain turned to Europe in the 1960s and 1970s and Australia turned to the United States and Asia. The monarchy itself has come to matter a great deal less to most of us than it did back then. One of the most striking features of the Palace Letters — the correspondence from 1974–77 mainly between Sir John Kerr and Sir Martin Charteris, the Queen’s private secretary, released in 2020 after Jenny Hocking’s High Court victory against the National Archives of Australia — was that they evoked a world in which the monarchy still seemed to matter.

Kerr took seriously the idea that the monarch’s place in Australian life could be protected and even strengthened; it helps explain his outrageous behaviour. Charteris also clearly believed that this battle was still one worth fighting, which might help explain why he so foolishly engaged in discussion with Kerr about the nature of the governor-general’s reserve powers.

It was much more common in my youth to see pictures of the Queen on the walls of public buildings than it is today, and in some subtle way she still seemed to be one of us — not like, say, Olivia Newton-John and Paul Hogan, but not quite a foreigner either. Yet it is still startling to watch footage of old Olympic ceremonies of the late 1960s and early 1970s — in full colour — with Australia’s rare gold medal victories accompanied by “God Save the Queen.”

Royal visits evoked greater excitement in the 1970s — and in the 1980s, too, with the arrival of the young and glamorous Princess Diana — than they did ever after. Writing to the Palace in early 1984, Sir Ninian Stephen, the governor-general of the day, said of republicanism that “even its most optimistic supporters see it as a far-off beacon rather than as any at all immediate goal. It counts for little in practical affairs but is always good material for articles in Sunday papers or for questions in opinion polls.”

Most Australians, if they bothered thinking about such matters at all, continued to see the monarchy as worthy of retaining in their Constitution, even as public opinion shifted toward a sense of its unimportance to them — at least that is what political scientist Luke Mansillo’s research on polling tells us of the 1980s. I can’t recall the last time I was invited to toast the Queen at an event in Australia; was it the evening, at our end-of-school dinner in 1986, when we also toasted Pope John Paul II?

Things did change in the 1990s, with the rise of republicanism in the Keating era. While the nation debated that issue we also, from 1994, ceased to expect new migrants to pledge allegiance to the monarch. The monarchy, especially in light of the family problems of the Windsors, suddenly seemed less relevant to a confident, multicultural, Asian-facing Australian society. Ninian Stephen had distinguished nationalism from republicanism in 1984; by the early 1990s, though, republicanism had become an expression of nationalism for many more Australians. Cultural and political identities were coming into alignment.

The Queen’s death will inevitably make the question of Australia’s becoming a republic more pressing. Some republicans — Malcolm Turnbull has been the most prominent — urged Australians simply to put off the matter until the Queen’s passing. But Turnbull’s attitude to this question belongs to a much longer tradition whereby politicians proclaim the republic inevitable while always finding reasons to put it off until the week after never. Anthony Albanese’s position, at least superficially, looks a bit more promising for republicans. Labor’s priority is constitutional recognition for Indigenous people and the Voice to Parliament. The republic will come after that. Or so we’re told.

My own feeling is that the aftermath of the Queen’s death will provide republicans with little comfort. It is true that the often embarrassing media coverage — which seems rather like I imagine it would be to swim in a pool filled with molasses — will place in the spotlight some of the absurdities of the system, especially for a country such as Australia that likes to imagine itself as independent.

Yet, while monarchy means little to Australians in practical terms, it is still meaningful as celebrity and spectacle. The pageantry around the monarchy will be in full flight in the time ahead. Leaving aside the Queen’s funeral, which will be a grand, solemn and sombre ritual, the coronation of Charles III will follow, presumably in the new year. I doubt that the parlous state of a post-Brexit United Kingdom will do anything to encourage economy or restraint. It is more likely to have the opposite effect, for a cynical and failed British elite has every reason to promote fantasy and escape when the prison of reality is so cold (quite literally for many in the coming winter) and discomforting.

Presumably, an investiture of William as Prince of Wales will also follow before too long — the last was of his father, in 1969. And we’ll no doubt get our own royal visit from the new king in due course, and it will be different — carrying the gravitas of a serving head of state — from those he made as a mere prince and Geelong Grammar old boy. The Prince of Wales and Princess of Wales will also need to tour as the Prince of Wales and Princess of Wales. So it goes.

These occasions will be a joy to many journalists and perhaps to many other Australians, too. For a time they will relish the novelty of a new king with all of the changes that will bring to everything from the heads on our coins to the names of lawsuits. Yet even after this novelty wears off, the old problems for republicans will remain. What will the republic look like? How do we elect its president? They were the rocks on which the ship was wrecked last time, in 1999, and they still loom treacherously.

Almost a quarter of a century on, we trust our politicians even less than we did back then. Overcoming such obstacles will be no less formidable in the post-Elizabethan age. •

The post Swimming in molasses appeared first on Inside Story.

In both cases, three federal electorates topped the Yes vote: Melbourne (71 per cent and 84 per cent), Sydney (68 and 84) and Melbourne Ports (now called Macnamara, 66 and 82). At each outing, Victoria was the most enthusiastic state.

And the strongest support for change came from high-income urban electorates, Liberal and Labor voting. In 1999, for instance, prime minister John Howard’s seat of Bennelong voted 55 per cent in favour, treasurer Peter Costello’s Higgins 64, and Joe Hockey’s North Sydney electorate 61. (Labor leader Kim Beazley’s electorate of Brand, by contrast, gave a resounding 66 per cent No.) In both cases, Australians in the capital cities were more in favour than their country cousins.

But there were differences. Two decades ago, low-income electorates (by city standards) with large migrant populations from non-English-speaking backgrounds, or NESBs, tended to be enthusiastic republicans. In 2017, they were among the strongest opponents of same-sex marriage. Of the western Sydney electorates, for example, migrant-heavy Watson and Fowler voted for a republic — 54 and 52 per cent respectively — but only small minorities — 30 and 36 per cent — wanted same-sex marriage.

At the other end, Lindsay and Macarthur, the middle-income low-NESB seats were against the republic, with 41.1 and 40.2 per cent Yes, but in favour of marriage equality to the tune of 56.2 and 52.1 per cent. (Another way of looking at it is that Lindsay and Macarthur voted similarly on both occasions relative to overall national support.)

State-wise, 1999 saw a continuation of a longstanding pattern of relatively low support for change in the outlier states prone to being suspicious of Canberra: Queensland, Western Australia and Tasmania. In 2017, though, New South Wales was the least supportive of gay marriage.

The 1999 pro-republic vote of 45 per cent could have been worse. Of the forty-four constitutional referendums since Federation, fourteen got less support and twenty-nine received more. At the time, one narrative had it that the evil genius John Howard had rigged the vote by forcing Australians to vote on a particular model rather than on the general concept of a republic. But that wasn’t Howard’s doing, it was the constitution’s.

A majority of Australians wanted to cut ties with the monarchy, but that group was split between a majority who wanted a directly elected president and a minority who favoured the minimalist, appointed model. Simple maths tells us that most of the direct electionists eventually opted for a bird in the hand, but enough of them were peeled into the No camp.

Or maybe that’s applying too much of a rational behaviour template. Maybe for some people the urge to inflict humiliation on “elites,” bankers and urban trendies overrode other considerations. That can happen in popular votes when people don’t care too much about the outcome. (By-elections tend to be like that too, which is why it’s unwise to take much away from their results.)

Our constitution is very difficult to change, partly because the exact wording of the amendment must be decided before it is voted on. New Zealand, without a written constitution, could move to a republic on a vote in parliament. They would probably hold a referendum first — “Shall we become a republic, yes or no?” — but it would be like Brexit, indicative only, with the details worked out later.

(The terminology can be confusing. In Australia we tend to call a constitutional referendum a “referendum” and a non-constitutional, non-binding referendum a “plebiscite.” In the rest of the world, including Britain, the two terms are interchangeable. For Australians, Brexit was a “plebiscite.”)

Our first federal referendums, in the first decade of last century, were held with general elections. That’s the sensible, low-cost way to do it. But along with the aggressively oppositional two-party system that developed around 1910 came the expensive habit of putting them up midterm. Dragging people to the ballot box to give a tick to some arcane wording change, which we’ve all managed quite well without so far? Little wonder the temptation to punish the perpetrator of this inconvenience has so often proven so strong.

Ideally, referendums concurrent with elections would again be the norm. What’s stopping that from happening is our politicians’ insistence that it can’t be done, that bipartisanship on a single issue is not possible during an election campaign.

If another republic vote is held, it’ll probably be on the direct election model. The president’s powers would need to be whittled down and codified, which would mean lots of mooted changes to the constitution, a boon for the No case. Alternatively we could simply transfer the governor-general’s reserve powers to the new position, so we’d have a president who, being directly elected, is able to claim a mandate superior to the prime minister’s, has the ability to dissolve parliament unilaterally, and is commander-in-chief of the armed forces to boot.

Put either of those plans to the electorate and the 45 per cent Yes vote in 1999 will start to look like the high-water mark.

One day, not soon, New Zealand — and Canada for that matter (where the founding document can be changed with super-majorities in federal and state parliaments) — will cast off the British monarchy. Even the Brits will likely do it before we do, in which case we’d have a non-existent monarchy in our constitution.

With former monarchists then forced to pick a side, a minimalist model would be the likely outcome — something similar to the plan rejected two decades ago. •

Update: Professor Jeremy Gans of Melbourne Law School suggests a two-stage referendum process to “avoid the inevitable ‘appointment vs direct election’ debacle”.  From this blog post:

The constitutional amendment should provide for the pollies’ preferred model of bipartisan parliamentary appointment, but with a built-in follow-up referendum – mid-way through the second Presidency? – that puts the direct election model to the people. If the pollies are right, then that the second referendum will be defeated. If not, then that’s fine too, as the appointment model clearly wasn’t cutting the mustard. But, crucially, both sides of that pro-republic movement will have a stake in voting yes in the first referendum, unless of course they hate the other side’s model more than the present constitutional monarchy.

The post The long road to a republic appeared first on Inside Story.

When we have this kind of vote, cost is almost always a key part of the No campaign. Why are we wasting money and time on this; wouldn’t it be better spent on schools and hospitals? So this development isn’t a great omen for the republic’s chances.

The “two step” strategy — a non-binding referendum on the general idea followed by a constitutional vote on the model — has long been part of Labor’s republic push. Kim Beazley’s plan before the 2001 election was for a plebiscite concurrent with the subsequent election.

As a rule, holding referendums with general elections is preferable, not only because it costs a lot less and is less disruptive to people’s lives. It’s also likely to be drowned out by the political campaign. People are more likely to tick Yes if they don’t overthink it.

But let’s assume the plebiscite is held and the Yes vote prevails, which is no certainty. What then?

One of the narrative strands that emerged from the unsuccessful 1999 referendum on the republic depicts that diabolical genius, John Howard, rigging the outcome by forcing Australians to decide on a particular model. But that was the Constitution’s doing, not the then prime minister’s. Any move to a republic must eventually clear that hurdle.

The logic behind the plebiscite is that voters will feel they have ownership of the process and would be more likely to approve the final constitutional referendum. That seems to envisage sixteen million electors as one big convention, and is quite a leap of faith. Which is not to say it shouldn’t be attempted.

Most surveys indicate that a majority of Australians want us to have our own head of state. A large majority of that majority would prefer the president to be directly elected. But for a republic referendum to pass it must have the support of more than that portion of the voting population. Basic arithmetic tells us that the 45 per cent who voted for the minimalist model in 1999 included some direct electionists opting for a bird in the hand.

The argument that most republicans want an elected president and therefore that option would be more likely to win a referendum is simplistic. It’s rather like concluding that because voters invariably name health as their number one priority, the political party with the most popular health policy will always win the election. (If this were so, we’d almost always have Labor governments.)

There are problems with any direct-election model. The Constitution gives the governor-general enormous powers, which convention, along with the possibility of prime ministerial and royal intervention, restrains occupants from exercising. The advantage of a minimalist model like 1999’s was that such restraining powers could be left in place; if a president went bonkers and announced we would invade New Zealand (the governor-general is commander of the armed forces) a two-thirds vote of parliament could remove him or her.

But an elected president with those powers, and one who felt he or she enjoyed a special mandate as the only politician elected by all Australians, could be quite another thing.

It is almost impossible to imagine any government or parliament allowing such a dangerous plan to go to a referendum, let alone it passing.

The powers would need to be codified first. That’s hardly insurmountable, but such a vast rewriting would provide plenty of ammunition for republic opponents.

Hybrid models involving parliamentary oversight without changing the current powers, as suggested here and here for example, would still allow a president who suspected he or she was going to be removed to dissolve parliament first. (In theory, this is also possible with the minimalist model, but the incumbent would at least not have “people power” onside.)

And writing into the Constitution parliamentarians’ ability to veto candidates and remove elected presidents? That No campaign writes itself.

In June, academic lawyer Megan Davis argued persuasively in the Monthly that the campaign for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament should be linked with the republic. Others have made similar arguments.

The obvious rejoinder is that lumping them together aggregates the difficulties — that it risks alienating monarchists who are sympathetic to the Voice, and republicans who aren’t. But voting behaviour doesn’t always adhere to these linear formulations.

Under the right political conditions — in 1988, say, with the Hawke government in its third-term doldrums, voters inclined to give it a bloody nose, annoyance at being dragged to the ballot box, and Coalition opposition — you can get a 62.4 per cent No vote on a proposition to “provide for fair and democratic parliamentary elections throughout Australia.” Yet, also under the right conditions — including bipartisan support — large majorities have voted for rather arcane changes.

Davis has a point when she says that the old assumptions about “bipartisanship” don’t necessarily still apply, given the low esteem in which the political class is held (and as measured by the low primary votes of the major parties).

I don’t share Davis’s and others’ optimism about the likelihood of Australians supporting the Voice. Then again, I don’t like the republic’s chances much either, under any model. In fact, given the current condition of our politics, it’s difficult to envisage any constitutional referendum on anything being passed again — ever.

And Australians enjoy saying No to “elites.” It makes them feel good.

But what have we got to lose? Since Federation we’ve had thirty-six defeated referendums, and after none of them has the sky fallen. Governments of the day are left red-faced, but there is no evidence it impedes their longevity.

Why should we be scared to make it thirty-seven, or thirty-eight or forty? There’s an argument that a failed Voice referendum would be a setback for the cause, but why?

Without the Voice, there seems no particular reason for Indigenous Australians to feel excited about the prospect of this final separation from Britain. On the contrary: in the 1800s, London sometimes had a moderating influence on colonial infliction of atrocities on Aboriginal people. From around that time the racist and influential Bulletin magazine — slogan “Australia for the White Man” — was campaigning for a republic. So the two causes of the Voice and the republic might not seem a natural fit. But in the twenty-first century they could prove complementary and compelling.

The Voice could rescue the republic from its current status as dreary 1990s kitsch. The republic could help provide an alluring context for the Voice. It would be a distinctly Australian aspiration.

Perhaps the sum can be greater than the parts. •

The post Rescuing the republic appeared first on Inside Story.

“Luck is a synonym for ruthless adaptation.” When the Polish philosopher Stanislaw Brzozowski (1878–1911) wrote these words, Europe’s clutter of imperial houses commanded the fate of peoples not only across the continent but also in much of the world beyond. Most of those monarchs would fall in the cataclysms of war and revolution to come, though a handful of small-state northern variants (Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Netherlands, Belgium) survived by remaining on the right side of their compatriots through the century’s traumas.

Britain’s monarchy alone appears to have performed another trick in the face of recurrent social and political convulsion: finding in it material from which to carve new roles and rationales (including even a name), while continuing to live and breathe in the grand manner of old – and retaining along the way, even through its worst of times, broad public support.

So at least runs a plausible summation of the fair outlook Queen Elizabeth II might observe as she waves from the Buckingham Palace balcony to the crowds assembled in The Mall during the centrepiece weekend of her “diamond jubilee” in early June 2012. By strange alchemy or divine grace (and the Queen is a believer as well as “Supreme Governor of the Church of England”) – and backed in any case by more than a touch of steel – the celebrations of her sixty years on the throne find the House of Windsor in as favoured a condition as could reasonably be wished.

All is becalmed. The long crisis of the 1990s – the agreement, under pressure, to pay income tax, the Windsor Castle fire, media disasters, marital troubles, and above all Princess Diana – is a receding memory. A once-in-an-aeon constellation has appeared: promising marriages (notably that in 2011 of handsome Prince William, second in line to the throne, to the comely Catherine Middleton), youthful replenishment, quiet modernisation of the “royal household,” skilful PR, an indulgent media, unthreatening political circumstances (including inert republicanism), and welcome freedom from scandal. Each of these would be encouraging in isolation, but their coincidence – and blessed reinforcement in the warm public sentiments that cluster around a major anniversary – make 2012 close to the best of times for the institution.

Yet if this is indeed the view from the balcony, an astute monarch with a strong sense of family history will also be aware of how much “The Firm” has had to change to secure this position – and how rare and fragile such moments of grace can prove to be.

AFTER all, the early years of the Queen’s reign were bathed in a similar hue. Princess Elizabeth, heir to the throne by virtue of the “abdication crisis” of 1936–37, had become sovereign at the age of twenty-five on her father’s death in February 1952 and was crowned in an elaborate ceremony in Westminster Abbey in June 1953. The atmosphere of the coronation spoke of the profound determination of the high Anglican and royal establishments to reassert their legitimacy and power after the unsettling post-war years of austerity, a reformist Labour government (1945–51) and the modernist aspirations embodied in the Festival of Britain (1951). But if the heavy armoury of “invented tradition” was deployed in the cause of conservative reassertion, the event entered popular awareness thanks to a modern vehicle: television.

The crowding of families and groups of neighbours around the communal set, many bought specially for the occasion, made the 1953 coronation Britain’s first “shared national experience” through the medium. Thus, in the terms of David Cannadine’s pioneering analysis, television became entwined with royal ceremonial and sprouted another invented tradition. What lodged in the collective memory was less the cod-medieval rituals than the glittering procession, “the dress,” the exotic colonial guests defying the London downpour. The framing of a new kind of pact between royalty and people, mediated by ever more powerful broadcasters, began at that moment.

The spectacle of a young, female monarch at the head of an old, imperial state invited talk of a “new Elizabethan age.” The phrase may never have caught on, though it did express an implicit longing for social regeneration that other indicators of the early 1950s – the end of food and fuel rationing, slum clearance, a consumer economy – seemed to herald. But Britain was also a “great power,” carrying the heavy burden of wartime debt, colonial responsibility and Cold War military expenditure, and this increasingly constrained its capacity to remake itself. The exercise of royal diplomacy as British statecraft acquired its modern form in this period, notably in the Queen’s epic tour in 1954 of the Empire-becoming-Commonwealth. The enormous crowds in Australia in particular made the tour “by far the biggest event ever in Australian history,” according to the scholar turned broadcaster Jane Connors, who saw it as a test case of “popular monarchism.”

There were already faint shadows on the crown in these early, golden years. Many in Scotland beyond the ranks of historians and nationalists were angered that the routine use of “Elizabeth II” elided the fact that the realm of the sixteenth-century Elizabeth had been England alone (and, by the way, that the “virgin queen” had chopped off the head of Mary, Queen of Scots). Some red pillar-boxes with the offending crest were blown up to make the point that, north of the border, the young queen was “Elizabeth I.” The shadows lengthened in November 1956 with the exposure of Britain’s deceitful collusion with France and Israel to attack Nasser’s Egypt and seize the Suez, precipitating a shameful retreat and a convulsive political scandal (as well as giving the Red Army a free hand to pulverise Hungary’s revolution).

The “Suez crisis” was a generation-forming moment. In dividing the country and shocking millions out of an unquestioning belief in the integrity of Britain’s institutions and the men who ran them, it seeded much of the creative dissent that was to emerge in cultural and intellectual life over the ensuing decades. When it first touched the monarchy in September 1957, though, the initial spasm of criticism took a somewhat baroque form: a peeved anatomy of the Queen’s personal failings (including her voice) and the stuffiness of her court in the conservative National and English Review by its proprietor-editor Lord Altrincham (who later renounced his peerage to become again plain John Grigg). This was followed two months later by an article for the New York Observer in which the pontifical journalist Malcolm Muggeridge presented a similar case.

It was mild stuff by later standards, but a taboo had been broken and the reaction was fierce. (Grigg was assaulted by a choleric member of the League of Empire Loyalists, an incident caught on live television.) It took many years for a later cohort of royal advisers to admit that Grigg was right to lambast the Queen’s men. But how far did his scorn reach at the time? Richard Hoggart’s innovatory book The Uses of Literacy, a richly textured reconstruction-memoir of the working-class settlement of Hunslet, in the Yorkshire city of Leeds, was also published in 1957. Hoggart observed that “as an institution, [monarchy] is scarcely thought of by the working-classes; they are not royalists by principle. Nor do most harbour resentments against it…”; and that mature working-class women especially “think of the members of the Royal Family as individuals, caught up in a big machine manipulated by ‘Them,’” and thus feel “well-disposed” towards these unfortunates.

The monarchy was in the background of people’s lives, if always there. It was a source of public news (the “Queen’s speech” opening a new session of parliament, a state visit by an overseas dignitary), familial announcements (Princess Elizabeth’s marriage to her Greek royal suitor Philip in 1947, the birth of their children) and occasionally sensation (the pressure in 1955 on Margaret, the Queen’s sister, not to marry a divorcee). There was little academic interest, with Edward Shils and Michael Young’s sociological essay on the coronation in 1953 a rare exception. (“About this most august institution there is no serious discussion at all,” it began.) A few surveys by constitutional historians (Ernest Barker, Robert Blake, Harold Nicolson) and journalists (Anthony Sampson’s path-breaking Anatomy of Britain) filled the unperceived gap. The young denizens of the early 1960s “satire boom” preferred to ridicule the privileged-steeped manner of Conservative grandees such as Harold Macmillan and Alec Douglas-Home (prime ministers in the second half of the Tory hegemony of 1951–64), though the fortnightly Private Eye was later to extend its clubbable savagery to mocking “Brenda” and her brood.

The hopes of a cathartic modernisation that fuelled Labour’s return to power under Harold Wilson in 1964 barely encompassed the palace, though the award of MBEs (“Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire”) to the Beatles betrayed a certain awareness of the need to show willing. The six years of Labour rule were characterised by occasional spats (an attempt by the postmaster-general Anthony Wedgwood Benn to remove the Queen’s image from stamps was thwarted) and cabinet complaints (those of Richard Crossman, like Benn a prolific diarist, survive), though Wilson himself fitted a broad pattern whereby Labour leaders have seemed to enjoy a more congenial working relationship with the sovereign than have Conservative. At a deeper level, a decade of transformation in which social barriers (of class, especially) were being questioned made some sympathisers and insiders question the monarchy’s public profile. Was society leaving the monarchy behind?

The result, in 1969, was another television hit: Royal Family, a documentary series that would portray the leading members in their everyday roles but also aimed to reveal the ordinariness behind the mystique. Such spectacles as a family barbecue, however stilted the accompanying conversation and controlled the format, were riveting to a national audience many of whom had “grown up” with the Queen (a ten-year-old who had watched the coronation in 1953 was but twenty-six). It was another stage in the evolution of that mediated pact, which in principle carried great potential rewards (familiarity breeding more popularity and loyalty) but also brought risks (familiarity breeding questioning and a corrosion of “allegiance”).

“THE monarchy’s mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic,” wrote Walter Bagehot in The English Constitution (1867), still the fons et origo of almost all political discussion of the subject. There was little immediate sign in the 1970s that the monarchy had been harmed by ignoring his advice, and much at that stage to suggest that the crown would suffer more by following it. Britain had other things to preoccupy it during that troubled decade: inflation, strikes, a faltering economic model, Scottish nationalism, the Northern Ireland war. A Conservative prime minister, Edward Heath (1970–74), had taken the country into the European Economic Community, but his government swayed then sank under trade-union pressure; his Labour successors, Harold Wilson (again) and James Callaghan, faced the same problems with shrinking resources.

In the midst of it all, the Queen’s “silver jubilee” of 1977 was marked by a hot summer of street parties and big crowds, with the punk-rock explosion providing the court-jester chorus. Her address to both houses of parliament in May contained a rare, explicit statement of position, on the Scottish debate: “I cannot forget that I was crowned Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Perhaps this Jubilee is a time to remind ourselves of the benefits which union has conferred, at home and in our international dealings, on the inhabitants of all parts of this United Kingdom.” In the event, the abortive referendum of March 1979 and the election of Margaret Thatcher two months later would scotch for a generation the threat of Britain’s “break-up,” as well as inaugurating a decade in which Thatcher’s combination of “free economy and strong state” would change the terms of political debate.

This turbulent process, to which a fervently partisan (and in the spirit of the age, decreasingly deferential) media was fundamental, dominated the 1980s. It would at times bring elements of the monarchy closer to the real political heat: notably over Prince Charles’s environmentalism (which briefly made him a hero among parts of the left) and the Queen’s commitment to the Commonwealth (an institution near-openly scorned by her prime minister). The ensuing controversies caused brief embarrassment, then deflated and left little trace. They were eclipsed by the greater story of the 1980s, the Charles–Diana marriage, in which the effort at media projection begun in 1969 was revived only to escape from the control of its putative managers. The wedding in July 1981 of the thirty-two-year-old heir to the throne and the nineteen-year-old ingénue Diana Spencer was to fulfil its chief function of securing the next generation, but the marriage’s dysfunction and protracted breakdown – played out in semi-public between increasingly embittered camps, recycled by a voracious (and now global) media, consumed by an audience ever less inclined to grant automatic assent to “the royals” – caused strategic paralysis in the institution.

The cycle that began with an orchestrated “fairytale” (in which millions wanted to believe) and ended with the princess’s death in a car accident in 1997 also spanned the eighteen years of Conservative rule under Thatcher and (after her resignation in 1990) John Major. Two, and then three, election defeats from 1979 shook Labour from the dream of a return to a pre-Thatcher idyll and forced much of the intellectual left to engage with the roots of the misgovernance exemplified by single-party hegemony. The search for a new constitutional settlement (as opposed to a mere change of government) as the route to a revived democracy was to take diverse forms from the later 1980s, among them the pressure-group Charter 88 and a lively sub-culture of pamphlets and reports from think-tanks such as Demos and the Fabian Society; in Scotland and Wales, there was a parallel mobilisation of energies behind campaigns for a national parliament or assembly. It was inevitable that this new phase of thinking about the way Britain governed itself “as a whole” would address the question of the royal system, and as it did so the background of discord and institutional infirmity propelled both the reformers’ sense of urgency and their self-confidence.

Indeed, the growing attention to the monarchy in this period suggests that a wider intellectual and even psychological unlocking was taking place. An influential contribution was Tom Nairn’s The Enchanted Glass (1988). Nairn’s argument – in a bravura if also complex read – is that the crown’s appeal, rooted in the “glamour of backwardness,” extends to the political order of which it is the apex, itself a consequence of England’s early state-nationalism and postponed political modernity. In analysing the royal system as the work of history and ideology, and thus paying it the rare respect of taking it seriously while sustaining a majestic scorn, Nairn’s book remains radical and its ideas fertile. While a new edition in 2012 highlights its force, the vigorous contrarianism of others of the period, such as Christopher Hitchens’s “Counterblast” booklet The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain’s Favourite Fetish (1990), has aged far less well.

Edgar Wilson’s rationalist study, The Myth of British Monarchy (1989), examines the subject from first principles and every angle to discredit its intellectual basis, though its occasional note of exasperation with the populace’s stubborn reluctance to embrace the anti-royalist case hints at the spectre of “false consciousness” that overhangs many such arguments. The proportion of British people favouring a republic fell from 16 to 10 per cent in the Queen’s first decade on the throne, rose towards twenty per cent by 1971, receded by the time of the 1977 jubilee, and would remain near-constant at around a fifth of the population over the next two decades. (The historic variations are explored in Antony Taylor’s valuable Down with the Crown: British Anti-Monarchism and Debates about Royalty Since 1790.) Any modest accretion was welcomed by hopeful advocates of a new domestic commonwealth – though such moments also tended to expose both the separate agendas of doctrinal anti-monarchists and less reliable media-populist antagonists (as well as the dependence, to a degree, of the former on the latter), and the way that core sentiment seemed impervious to arguments and events alike.

Nonetheless, if the later 1950s had inaugurated a period of criticism and institutional introspection, mainly among the elite, the later 1980s were to open another and more broad-based one. In both cases the process unfolded in the context of larger changes in society and politics to which the monarchy itself was only rarely seen as central by much of the population. This singular combination of elements had the effect of provoking an awareness within the royal household of the need to adapt and also giving this little-scrutinised body – effectively a department of government – space to do so.

In both cases, the difficult times were to have approximately the same lifespan. Richard Weight, in his fine study Patriots: National Identity in Britain, 1940–2000 (2002) describes 1992–97 as “the crisis years” for the monarchy. In retrospect it is clear that they lasted a further half-decade and that his book was published at their end-point. The encroaching wave, signalled by several low points of scandal or embarrassment (such as a mock-medieval TV game show in 1987 featuring younger royals), broke over the palace in 1992. John Major’s unexpected election victory in April, the Conservatives’ fourth in a row, had quickly turned sour with a series of humiliating policy reversals and incipient recession. The palace then wandered into the line of fire over the festering issue of the Queen’s non-payment of income tax, an inferno at Windsor Castle (and an eruption of popular fury at the expectation that we, the people should pay for the repair), and the confirmation that the fairytale marriage was over.

In a speech to the City of London in November 1992 marking the fortieth anniversary of her succession, the Queen (through a stinking cold, which somehow accentuated the point) referred to an “annus horribilis” and struck a rare vulnerable note: “There can be no doubt, of course, that criticism is good for people and institutions that are part of public life. No institution – City, monarchy, whatever – should expect to be free from the scrutiny of those who give it their loyalty and support, not to mention those who don’t… Forty years is quite a long time. I am glad to have had the chance to witness, and to take part in, many dramatic changes in life in this country. [But there is] one unchanging factor which I value above all – the loyalty given to me and to my family by so many people in this country, and the Commonwealth, throughout my reign.”

THERE were more low points to come in the mid 1990s. The continuing dramas of marital disintegration (two of the Queen’s sons divorced in 1996), the raw material of millions of news reports as well as of a burgeoning celebrity gossip-and-rumour industry, tarnished The Firm’s brand in ways that had few modern precedents. The existence of competing factions and agendas fuelled the bewildering media carousel and locked the palace into a defensive and reactive stance. In politics, the infirmity of Major’s government and (from 1994) the invention of New Labour under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown – self-consciously modern and impatient, if also anxious to reassure – gave inchoate expression to the sense that an enfeebled, anachronistic establishment was in the way of necessary renewal.

Some, at least, of New Labour’s leading figures, before and after the movement’s landslide election victory in May 1997, regarded its “modernisation” mantra as bearing too on royalty’s composition, expense and formal prerogative powers. In the event, Diana’s sudden death four months later altered the horizon by binding the “efficient” and “dignified” parts of the state (in Bagehot’s formulation) into a temporary partnership where the uncertain authority of the new was entrenched by being seen to buttress the suddenly threatened legitimacy of the old.

The anti-royal impulse, which had seemed to peak in 1992, took unimagined new directions in the ensuing “Diana week.” A vast, potent sigh of collective mourning drew people across the country to congregate, lay flowers and leave messages in impromptu public memorials (notably outside her home, Kensington Palace). Amplified by a press seeking its own anchorage in a confusing situation, this reaction soon morphed into impatient criticism that the Queen was ensconced in Balmoral Castle in northeast Scotland and showing no inclination to return to London (“Where is the Queen when her country needs her?” screamed the Sun’s front page).

The instinctive affirmation of popular subjecthood against the crown was instantly subject to competing interpretation, as variously an incipient expression of a republican imaginary and a reaction whose reverent appeal and emotional investiture was deeply royalist in spirit. The broader context of New Labour’s promises of a new constitutional settlement fuelled reformist optimism that this was – or could become – a perilous crisis for the House of Windsor. But over the crucial days, Blair and his coterie – building on the prime minister’s surefooted tribute to Diana as “the people’s princess” on the morrow of her death – offered artful PR advice to an uncertain palace on how to defuse the charged atmosphere. The Queen travelled south and, for only the second time in her reign (the annual Christmas homily apart), addressed the nation. (“We have all been trying in our different ways to cope… there are lessons to be drawn from [Diana’s] life and from the extraordinary and moving reaction to her death.”) Behind the scenes, a concordat between old and new establishments was in overdrive, working to restore the pact between monarchy and people.

The result of the accommodation was on display the next day as the Queen led her family out to witness, and bow to, the passing of Diana’s hearse past Buckingham Palace, followed by a see-it-to-believe-it funeral service at Westminster Abbey where pop culture fused with high tradition. The ceremony was broadcast live to enormous crowds gathered in London’s parks, and their spontaneous applause at the electrifying tribute to Diana by her brother, Charles Spencer, rippled across the city and into the very nave. The event, the climax of an epic week, left emotions frazzled, wounds staunched, an institution relieved – and was followed by a poll measuring support for a republic unchanged at 18 per cent.

Britain, it was widely said, had become a different country: people’s new emotional openness (or incontinence, according to the many critics of the “carnival of grief”) was the harbinger of a search for public authenticity (or evidence of populist derangement, muttered the self-styled “dissidents”), perhaps even a longing for a changed relationship with power (or the perilous flooding of the public realm by celebrity-worship, insisted the contrarians). In the following weeks, the Scots and (by a hair’s breadth) the Welsh voted “yes” in referendums on self-government. The “Diana moment” had suspended campaigning, though the comparable lack of fervour in the two nations during the mourning reinforced the notion that the ghost of a sublimated English nationalism was abroad. In the event, it would take far more to turn Britain from a nation of subjects to one of citizens.

But the crisis, whatever it connoted, left the crown feeling and looking fragile (“the very nadir of our stock market,” said Lord Airlie, then the influential City-trained head of the palace administration). And the unsettlement would continue. The momentum of reform under Labour in the post-1997 years, which included incorporation of the European human-rights convention into domestic law and changes in the composition of the House of Lords, carried in its train the long-term progressive aspiration that the monarchy too would at last be – what? – streamlined, rationalised, reduced, trimmed (“scaled down” was the most frequent jargon-term).

A bicycling, Scandinavian model of the monarchy was much touted. There was opinion-poll encouragement of the option, but any real movement in its direction faced problems both generic (an ambitious new government’s many competing political priorities, and fortified trenches of constitutional conservatism) and particular (the difficulty of disentangling the entire monarchical system – its sovereign possessions, its social depth, its legal foundations, its parallel deep state – from its “royal family” carapace). To take but one example, the perennially floated alteration to the laws of succession to allow direct female inheritance or a Catholic monarch would require a change in the law in all sixteen countries where Queen Elizabeth is the sovereign, and in the case of Australia and Canada all the state or provincial legislatures as well as the federal one. A legal nightmare would inevitably become a political one.

As New Labour’s radical impulses faltered or were diverted into banning fox-hunting, into the Rubik’s cube of upper-chamber reform, into Afghanistan and Iraq, the palace found space to breathe. A key signal of a changing mood was the aftermath of the Queen Mother’s death at the age of 101 in March 2002, when initial scepticism at the (long-planned) announcement of ten days of official mourning was confounded by the large numbers prepared to visit, waiting for hours if necessary, her lying-in-state at Westminster Hall. This was not “Diana-mania”; but what was it?

A COMPELLING new book by the journalist and royal “insider” Robert Hardman offers some ingredients of the answer. The title, Our Queen, may promise the kind of blancmange-and-fairy-floss confection from “royal experts” that fills bookshops and airwaves in an anniversary year, but its detailed account of how the monarchy has rethought its core purpose over the past two decades makes it a study of the political intelligence of the powerful that should be on the reading list of every republican.

The process began, it seems, in the depths of 1992, was accelerating under the relentless pressures of the mid-decade, and began to see daylight after 1997. The impact of the various shocks was to impress an awareness that in an increasingly democratic and restless age, the old assurances – heredity, deference, spectacle, tradition – were no longer automatic guarantors of legitimacy. Nor was the monarchy able merely to fall back on Bagehot’s pithy formulation of the sovereign’s powers vis-à-vis the government: “the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, and the right to warn.” The institution must find other ways to secure its future. A vital foundation had already occurred in the reform of the “civil list,” the government subvention that had funded the royal household’s official functions since 1760. This was first cleverly renegotiated in 1990 to extend over a decade rather than each year (thus evading political and media controversy), then in 2011 was replaced by a new “sovereign grant” based on the revenues generated by the crown estate, the royals’ property portfolio.

Of equal importance was a comprehensive review process initiated under the auspices of an internal research unit, which began to look strategically at the entire operation and shift the dynamic from reactive to proactive (getting “ahead of the media,” in the words of the Queen’s then press secretary). The recommendations of the “change agenda” went to senior members of the family and their top officials, the “way ahead group.” A mantra of the palace hierarchy, then and later, was a phrase from Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard beloved by all aristocrats feeling the chill of progress: “If things are going to stay the same, then things are going to have to change.”

The combination of think-tank and cabinet was informed by a surprising source, the script (later book) of the 1992 documentary film Elizabeth R, co-written by Antony Jay (who had scripted Royal Family in 1969, though is more renowned as co-author of the classic television comedy series Yes, Prime Minister). With clarity and economy, Jay provided a job description for the Queen in a way that took account of changes in society and people’s expectations since the 1950s. He distinguished between her formal constitutional roles, informal functions and required qualities, and concluded – taking a step beyond Bagehot – that a modern queen had to be not just head of state but “head of the nation,” a role in which her personal contribution is crucial.

The palace jumped on the argument and made it its own. (“It was the mid-nineties and we were constantly questioning ourselves about everything. This made sense. We had just never thought of the monarch like that,” Hardman quotes “a very senior official” whose identity may be inferred from his text.) Jay’s concise summation of what the Queen existed to do – including the new title he had invented for her – was “quietly annexed” by her advisers, and now has prominent place on her official website. (“The Sovereign acts as a focus for national identity, unity and pride; gives a sense of stability and continuity; officially recognises success and excellence; and supports the ideal of voluntary service.”)

The turning-point took a long time to reach, though out of the traumas of 1997 the clear target of the “golden jubilee” of 2002 emerged. In the latter year, when under-promise (“A lot of effort went in to making it look unplanned” said a royal aide) gave way to over-performance (enthusiastic crowds attended the set-piece visits and events) the change-makers knew that they had closed a dark chapter. “Up until then, it felt like a reign of two halves. Act One: good, Act Two: bad,” Hardman quotes an official. “Then, suddenly, we were into Act Three.”

A DECADE on, the monarchy – and everyone wrapped, willingly or reluctantly, in its embrace – is still living through that third act (though there have, as suggested here, been even more sub-plots in the sixty-year drama). The restorative landmarks of these years included the BBC/RDF documentary series The Royal Family At Work (2007), which brought the calculated intimacy of its 1969 precedent to a far more subtle level. In the early stages of the 2012 jubilee, which reaches its high point in June, the long trough that began in the mid-to-late 1980s looks ever more contingent and less existential than it did for much of that time. From royal tours (notably the Queen’s historic trip to Ireland in 2011, with its moving symbolism and palpable emotional shift among the hosts) to a sophisticated intergenerational policy, from financial security to effective internal management, from a complaisant media filled with courtiers galore to subdued critics with no strategy beyond waiting for something to turn up – the brand is thriving.

It can’t last. For an institution whose real presence (pace Antony Jay) is so personalised and whose public obligations are inexorable, periodic reversal is inevitable. What it would take to precipitate a structural crisis, however, is less clear. Some will look to the emerging politics of austerity to provide an answer (though the depression years of the 1930s or 1980s offer little encouragement here); others to the succession, though this may yet be over a decade (and an unprecedented “platinum jubilee” in 2022) away. After all, few look at the prospect of King Charles III (and a Queen Camilla) with enthusiasm, even if the heir reportedly plans to outflank reformers by halving the number of royals paid from the civil list/sovereign grant from its present sixteen, and not many more would wish on William (via the much-discussed “jump-a-generation” scenario) a curtailment of what remains of his youth and freedom by seeing him enthroned.

Yet in any political scenario, the combination of the people’s confident assumption of involvement in, even ownership of, the institution – alongside their immense, healthy indifference most of the time – and the monarchy’s awareness of this must be taken into account in gauging likely consequences. The modern monarchy seems to have internalised the lesson that it cannot rely on practising mere “equipoise” (a felicitous usage of the historian Charles Townshend in his vital study of public order in Britain); rather, it must work continuously to sustain its part of a contract with the people that entails permanent exposure to an unspoken plebiscite whose informal rules and obligations are shaped as well as understood by both sides.

Here, Kevin Sharpe’s rich study of earlier image-projection, Selling the Tudor Monarchy: Authority and Image in Sixteenth-Century England (2009) has a contemporary resonance. Sharpe highlights “the gradual enthralment of the monarchy to its subjects” in a way that “underlines, rather than counters, the argument for the centrality of the people in politics.” While “the ideal of the commonweal and developing national sentiment were promoted to enhance royal authority,” he writes, “in so far as they also emphasised the people and the nation (and the monarch’s responsibility to both), they had implications that were, some might say, democratic and republican.”

There are further resonances in arguments for a “welfare monarchy” (Frank Prochaska) with roots in the Victorian era (1837–1901) and for a “democratic royalism” (William M. Kuhn) of ceremony and spectacle in the decades before 1914, and in the trenchant critique by Steve Poole (in The Politics of Regicide in England, 1760–1850) of the framing of republicanism through the lens of “meritocratic liberalism” that misses how much anti-monarchist expression involved “popular belief in contractual accountability.” To a degree, all question (Kevin Sharpe again) “any simple choice between elite history or history from below,” and taken together suggest that the most recent phase of monarchy’s history – with its elements of globalised and touristic appeal, of the accommodation between royalty and celebrity, of the extension of royal patronage to new constituencies, of the emphasis on “service” and “voluntarism” as key to the brand, and of careful reattuning (including in personnel and institutional ethos) to the society beyond the gates – can usefully be viewed through an expanded lens.

The modern story of Britain’s monarchy is one of the end of teleology. At the high tide of 2012, it can seem that those in the inner sanctum have more quickly grasped this, been more adept in keeping pace with complex change, and even – in understanding the importance of building legitimacy through a coherent mix of ideas, alliances, and strategy – been more astute students of Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, than their opponents. For a dynastic institution whose internal governing motto is “keep doing the same thing – differently” and which now (according to Robert Hardman) craves a public image as “dutiful, worthy, unshowy,” the political achievement is formidable.

If, in face of this, democratic republicans with all their own distinguished historical precedents are to make any headway, they will need a clearer idea of what kind of change is needed, of what they want and how to persuade people to support it, and of what is achievable and how to get there. A good place to start would be with some ruthless adaptation of their own. •

The post A long reign and a lost republic appeared first on Inside Story.