For the past week and a half, the British press has been having a lot of fun. They’re finally ripping into the Prince and Princess of Wales, something they used to do with some regularity a decade ago. They know how to do it, they’ve done it before, but about seven years or so, the British media decided that they needed to do all-in on William and Waity, and build them up in the sad hope that W&K would eventually rise to the occasion. The hope was that after QEII died and they had the Wales titles, then magically they would take on more work and be seen out regularly and give the press a lot to write about. It has not worked out that way at all. Will & Kate’s move to Forest Lodge, their “forever home,” seems to be the last straw. It’s the centerpiece of a larger conversation about William and Kate’s laziness, ineptitude and stupidity. Speaking of, the i Newspaper had a hilarious editorial by Lucy Mangan, all about the Forest Lodge move and how it’s the dumbest thing she’s ever heard. An excerpt:
[We need to discuss Prince William’s] apparent desire to streamline the monarchy, strip it down to Danish levels of essentialism and make it fit for and sustainable in the modern age.
We have seen it in the “delightfully informal” family pictures released over the years by the Waleses, in the Princess’s commitment to beige flats wherever possible, and most recently and, we are told, conclusively in their choice of the £16m, eight-bedroomed Forest Lodge in Windsor Great Park (with no live-in staff) as their “forever home” instead of lining things up for a grand relocation in the fullness of time to Buckingham Palace. This is understandable, superficially sensible, and deeply stupid.
If you are going to retain something as essentially bonkers as a monarchy, something born of a belief in the Divine Right of Kings, of the belief that the head of one particular bloodline is God’s appointed flesh-rep on earth and ultimately exempt from any earthly constraint or judgment… well, you’ve got to be consistent. Otherwise you will start to look mad. Context is everything. The contract that exists between a monarch and his people is: we’ll provide the tax money, you provide the entertainment – in the form of esoteric traditions, excesses and enigmatic signs and symbols – that we simply cannot get elsewhere.
Do you know what my favourite thing about the monarchy is? That Princess Margaret apparently owned a miniature diamond-encrusted saw for cutting up lemons to go in her drinks. The image of her pulling it out of her handbag and bending over a citrus fruit to hack at it with a special assemblage of jewels – or handing it over to a somber-faced footman to do likewise – pops into my head every time I imbibe a G&T myself, and never fails to induce a tiny but pure moment of joy. In a very real sense, this is what I pay my taxes for.
To think that modern royalty means a modest royalty is to misunderstand not just the nature of the contract but also the nature of human envy. William seems to think that by minimising extravagance he will pre-appease a potentially angry mob. The reality is that if you go big enough, no one cares what you do. No one can truly comprehend that way of living and so they dismiss it.
Which is to say – we are not rational beings, and what looks like a sensible move (literally and metaphorically on the Waleses’ part) could well have irrational outcomes. Watching people in a gilded cage can breed far less resentment than watching someone lead an ordinary life much better and more comfortably than you can ever dream of. William – I’d keep hold of all the diamond fruit saws you can, if I were you.
This reminded me of the larger conversation about “stripping” the Sussexes of their titles too – either everyone in the family has special magic royal blood, or no one does. Either royal titles are bestowed on the magic-blood-havers, or else the whole thing falls apart when you make royal styles and titles about who is and is not in favor with a wrathful and lazy king. That’s a microcosm of what Mangan is saying too – the British people apparently want the “magic” of the monarchy and a living connection to that history. What they don’t want is a work-from-home king living in a lodge and banging on and on about how he does the school run.
This piece also reminds me of something else I’ve been considering for a while… none of this would have blown up in the way that it has if William and Kate had been keeping up their end of the “invisible contract” for the past three years. If they were more visible and if they worked more, I think the Forest Lodge move would have landed differently. Instead, the Waleses lie endlessly, flake out constantly and feel empowered to shrug off the invisible contract whenever they feel like it. How much of the past ten days has been about the press tugging at William’s leash in particular?
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Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Cover Images.
