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July 2 2025 - 10:00am
Until quite recently I was very confident that the monarchy would survive for the foreseeable future. Polling suggested that support for a republic was becalmed at around 20%, although always higher among younger age groups, and that this figure had barely shifted in decades. Big occasions like royal weddings and the old Queen’s Jubilees brought forth an enormous groundswell of goodwill. Protests by anti-monarchists felt mean-spirited and joyless.
Now? It’s anyone’s guess. It seems far from inconceivable that William V will be the last of his line and that Mr George Windsor will see out his years watching tourists eat their picnics on the lawn at Sandringham.
One of the principal reasons for my pessimism is that the royals themselves seem to have lost confidence in the monarchy as an ideal, and as a source of national self-confidence and patriotic brio. How else to explain the King’s decision to scrap the Royal Train, which has existed in one form or another for over 150 years?
Now, of course, defenders of the decision will say that the current rolling stock is coming to the end of its natural life and will be expensive to replace and modernize. They argue that this is a sensible decision, continuing the King’s stated desire for a less grandiose royal operation.
But ultimately, it signals a kind of pre-emptive cringing. As with the deliberately “slimmed-down” coronation, and the Palace’s pusillanimous reaction to the entirely manufactured controversy involving Ngozi Fulani and Lady Susan Hussey in 2022, the strong impression is of an institution that is no longer willing to take its own side in a quarrel, or to think broadly and strategically about what the monarchy ought to represent.
Maybe there are people who will applaud the idea of the King saving money by traveling in a shiny modern helicopter (although one might reasonably ask how his various attendants, bodyguards and advisers will be transported; you can fit a lot more people, more comfortably, on a train). But I suspect that those people are a minority — and that they are in any case more likely to disapprove of monarchy in principle. There is almost certainly a much larger percentage of the population who are charmed and cheered by the existence of the Royal Train, who take pleasure in its historical resonances and its inherent romance.
This is the great danger of the Caroline modernization program: that the Firm alienates, annoys and disappoints its natural supporters, while not in any way mollifying or appealing to the critics, the skeptics and those who have no instinctive cultural attachment to the monarchy.
Already there are mutterings in some Right-wing circles about the way in which the monarchy is throwing its weight behind the post-Blairite state dogmas around identity, religion and multiculturalism. The younger royals in particular are clearly very comfortable with this “soft politicization”, whereby they identify themselves with NHS cultism and the mental health industry, while ignoring more traditional concerns — William, for instance, is said to be totally uninterested in Christianity.
And the monarchy is losing support compared with 20 or 30 years ago, especially among the young. At the time of the Platinum Jubilee, only 62% of respondents were firmly monarchist — that fell to under a third of 18-24 year olds.
If the royals themselves lack any clear and distinctive vision for the monarchy beyond a kind of twee aesthetic background for The Current Thing, then they can hardly expect the rest of us to throw our weight behind them, especially if they refuse to address the concerns of their natural allies and supporters at a time of national crisis.
Death by a thousand self-inflicted cuts would be a terrible fate for a thousand-year-old monarchy — and is not nearly so unlikely as it once seemed.
