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King of Spain’s flood visit shows the power of monarchy

Futile gestures go further than we think. Credit: Getty

November 4, 2024 - 4:00pm

It was, in the fullest sense of the word, a medieval scene. Devastating floods had just killed hundreds of people in Spain. Assailed by an angry mob of survivors throwing mud at the visiting dignitaries, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez had fled the scene with his personal guard after being hit with a shovel.

Meanwhile, the King brushes away the protective umbrella brandied by a lackey, bends down — a ridiculously feudal touch, made necessary by the fact that he is almost a foot taller than everyone around him — to tell his entourage to back off, and plunges himself into a hostile crowd to hear their anger and comfort their sorrow. Later, the Prime Minister’s office would complain that the King should never have gone in the first place, much less drag his chief minister along.

That this tableau, which would have been intelligible to generations of our forebears, should have taken place in 2024 is entirely irrational. Spain is a constitutional democracy, in which King Felipe has no more power to direct the government’s rescue and recovery efforts than he has to govern by fiat and raise ship money. The Spanish monarchy has come under real criticism of late: back in June, 30,000 republicans marched in Madrid calling for its abolition. What’s more, Valencia, the former capital of the defeated republican government, is more hostile towards it than most of the country.

Perhaps there was also an element of public relations management from the Spanish royal household, which published a compilation of clips of the King speaking to and, in one instance, hugging two crying women, without accompanying commentary, as if it said everything that needed to be said. The complaints about royal security’s interference in rescue work was not mentioned.

But the instinct it revealed, though irrational in an age of constitutional government, is a deep-seated one. The instinct to run toward the personification of the state, to bitterly complain about the misdeeds of those who wield the actual power, has never vanished. In an age in which the actual mechanics of governance are as opaque as they have ever been, it tends to reassert itself in moments of crises.

Walter Bagehot, the vulgariser of the British constitution, saw it coming more than a century ago when he wrote that “[t]he best reason why Monarchy is a strong government is that it is an intelligible government.” Parliaments and party politics are “difficult to know and easy to mistake”; but when it comes to the basic principles of monarchy, “anybody can make them out, and no one can ever forget them.”

Bagehot was no defender of a politically powerful monarchy: he thought having a queen meant that those who were elected to govern could get on with it without public drama, a hope since dashed by the rise of quasi-presidential politicians whose private lives provide as much newspaper fodder as the doings of royals.

Yet the instinct to run to the dignified part of the constitution when the efficient part has failed persists. King Charles’s recent visit to Southport after the three murders there, where he was publicly cheered for no very apparent reason except that he was taking an interest in the lives of commoners, is but another example.

And whenever he or the late Queen Elizabeth have gone to places such as Canada and New Zealand, local indigenous leaders invariably ask to meet and to present their demands when it would be far more useful to lobby their MPs. The urge to complain to royals is so powerful in these countries that they have come to encompass governors-general, who are even more politically irrelevant than the monarchs they represent locally.

Indeed, the right to petition the king for redress — once considered so important the English Bill of Rights declared it illegal to make it a crime — still exists and is regularly exercised by desperate complainants, never mind that the invariable response is for such petitions to be referred to whichever department is concerned with it and to reply by way of a pro forma letter.

But petitions — which by law require no postage — keep coming in, even though almost the only official document acknowledging the existence of the right is a policy document of His Majesty’s Prison Service (only British prisoners have the constitutional right to petition the King, though foreign prisoners can do so as a matter of grace).

We sophisticates may well laugh at these futile gestures. We know that it is better to lobby our representatives, to write to newspapers, to post on social media than to waste the time of some royal correspondence officer. We may like to think of ourselves as rational, enlightened creatures, but there is an element of the pre-modern in all of us, which displays its full force when catastrophe hits.


Yuan Yi Zhu is an assistant professor at Leiden University and a research fellow of Harris Manchester College, Oxford.

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Arkadian Arkadian
Arkadian Arkadian
16 days ago

I had read about the king’s visit, but I knew none of the details – except the booing – like the hasty departure of the prime minister.

Milton Gibbon
Milton Gibbon
16 days ago

Bad policy is always the fault of the King’s evil ministers, not the King himself. Once you view constitutional monarchies this way then a lot of the “irrationality” makes sense.

David Lindsay
David Lindsay
16 days ago

British republicans can always be silenced for at least four years by the election of an American Republican as President, so any outpouring of such sentiment in response to Saturday’s Dispatches may be over by the end of this week. At any rate, that is true of the sort of republicans who make documentaries for Channel 4. The presence of Margaret Hodge made it obvious on what grounds the salonistes now felt that this subject could safely be broached. They may not know who would be President, but they know who no longer could be.

Or do they? The kind of Britons who warm to Donald Trump disagree with the present King about almost everything, so that Richard Tice repeatedly called for the then Queen to be succeeded by President Nigel Farage, Laurence Fox’s Reclaim Party was avowedly republican throughout its brief period of relative relevance, and things like The Light are vitriolically hostile both to the monarchy and to the Royal Family. The institution ties Britain to the Commonwealth, while the dynasty has both very deep and very recent roots on the Continent.

What passes in a Richard Rogers building on Horseferry Road is therefore the least of the worries of the Duke of Lancaster and of the Duke of Cornwall. Successive Governments have wanted to privatise Channel 4, but in Nixon and China fashion, it would probably take a right-wing Labour one to pull it off. The Duchy of Lancaster and the Duchy of Cornwall should buy the broadcaster of Dispatches. The House always wins, and the House in this case is that of Oldenburg, specifically of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg.

The Royal Duchies might make themselves useful across the board. Harland & Wolff used to be owned by the British State. It is poised to be bought by Navantia, which is the Spanish State. Britain will allow ownership by any state apart from our own. But if the Royal Duchies are private estates engaged in commerce, then what Thatcherite or Blairite could object to their purchase of, say, Thames Water? Thames Water’s bonds are now classified as junk. How much could it possibly cost to buy a company like that? And so on. Either these acquisitions would work, or the outcry would be so loud that the real solution, renationalisation, would become unstoppable.

The Attlee Government missed a trick in not branding the nationalised industries “Royal”, with crowns and royal cyphers all over them. It would have assumed that privatisation, a word that did not exist at the time, was inconceivable. In the end, not even the Crown and the Cypher saved the Royal Mail, but Margaret Thatcher had ruled out its privatisation, “because it’s Royal.” If so had everything else been, then on her own principles, she could not have privatised any of them. Better luck next time? Amend the next available piece of legislation to proclaim the Royal National Health Service.

Brett H
Brett H
16 days ago

I have nothing against monarchies but I can’t help feeling that the people who reach out to them are infantilised by the relationship. Monarchies obviously have no power in the modern world and yet people reach out to them for some comfort or righting of an injustice. It’s interesting that an emotion like that still exists today.

ernest turro
ernest turro
16 days ago

Son of Franco’s contemptible heir, this idiot and his fascistic entourage should stay the hell out of the Catalan Countries.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
15 days ago
Reply to  ernest turro

The “contemptible heir”, who saved Spanish democracy. Many great men have flawed personalities, or are prone to thinking they can get away with anything, that you must have discovered going through life.
David Eades

Geoff W
Geoff W
16 days ago

“And whenever he or the late Queen Elizabeth have gone to places such as Canada and New Zealand, local indigenous leaders invariably ask to meet and to present their demands when it would be far more useful to lobby their MPs.”
I live in Australia. This is rubbish. Indigenous leaders don’t have to “ask” to meet the monarch, they’re invited as a matter of practicality and/or courtesy, as other community leaders are. And the only “demand” I’m aware of recently was that by the indigenous senator Lidia Thorpe, who denounced Charles and Camilla as the heads of a colonialist empire, and said “f**k” while doing so. Not much magical in that.
Note also the false dichotomy between meeting the monarch and lobbying MPs; it’s possible to do both.
(No correspondence will be entered into on the merits of Senator Thorpe’s case; I’m only saying that her behaviour is part of the evidence that this writer is talking through their hat.)

Brett H
Brett H
15 days ago
Reply to  Geoff W

And whenever he or the late Queen Elizabeth have gone to places such as Canada and New Zealand, local indigenous leaders invariably ask to meet and to present their demands when it would be far more useful to lobby their MPs.”
In fact their petitions to the Monarch are symbolic only because those Commonwealth countries would not tolerate any interference by a Monarch. Which makes it all the more an emotional relationship that serves only one purpose, which is, as I said, to comfort the infantilism of the people.

Josef Švejk
Josef Švejk
15 days ago

This article is a load of rubbish. There are so many alternate arguments that they would fill fifty columns.

Josef Švejk
Josef Švejk
15 days ago
Reply to  Josef Švejk

Outsiders view many Europeans particularly those of Spain and Great Britain as besotted fools. It has always been thus, although force of arms has been replaced by Women’s magazines and the Daily Mail.
Royalty and Breakfast TV go hand in hand keeping the masses foolish and in line.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
15 days ago

No it doesn’t lol. Monarchy in 21st century is disgusting

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
15 days ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

Don’t you find republics a bit disgusting too? Nigeria, Pakistan, N Korea, Chad, Congo, Venezuela, Iran, Syria, Kazakhstan… The list is endless. The USA, France, Mexico, the Ukraine, Russia, Greece, Brazil, Argentina, Rumania, their politics leave nothing to be desired, their heads of state mired in either scandals, corruption, double dealings or hubris, or in some cases all of these things. Look at the 7 European kingdoms and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, and explain in what way these exemplary democracies are disgusting.
David Eades

Bobby Levit
Bobby Levit
15 days ago

What I got from this pitiful article is that “Republicans bad”

Michael Clarke
Michael Clarke
15 days ago

Maybe or maybe the people of Valencia think that King Felipe is a better man than the PM.