While such animus is out of step with mainstream opinion, it’s clear that the coronation has lost its romance and even its meaning among much of the wider public. Two-thirds of respondents tell YouGov pollsters that they either don’t care very much or don’t care at all about the ceremony. Only 9% of Britons said they care “a great deal”, and that cohort tends elderly.

Modern Britons may well ask: why do we find ourselves locked into a ritual — a religious ritual, to be precise — inherited from the ancient past? Even if some share the Christian faith that underpins rituals like the coronation, can’t they practise that faith privately, without the need for a solemn, state-sanctioned ceremony involving bishops, priests, crowns, sceptres, and holy oils? Why do we need public ritual at all?

All this is a tragedy, because old rituals like the coronation can play a deeply salutary — and even progressive — role in societies otherwise wracked by modern capitalism’s cruel, arbitrary hierarchies. We human beings do all sorts of things that have no functional value in themselves but that help us communicate symbolically. We shake hands. We exchange rings. We are wired, it seems, for ritual: a pattern of words and actions characterised by formality, rigidity, and repetition. The closest analogous human behaviour, according to many anthropologists, is children’s games.

In the middle of the last century, a husband-and-wife team of British anthropologists travelled to Africa in an attempt to scientifically understand the ritual process. Specifically, they sought the meaning of religious rites among traditional tribes; ultimately, it awakened them to the indispensability of ritual for decent societies.

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Victor Witter Turner was born in 1920 in Glasgow. As a teenager, under the tutelage of an Anglican priest, he was drawn to mystical traditions. But by the time “Vic” entered university and married, he had become a card-carrying Communist. His wife, “Edie”, had also embraced Marxism early on, because it was a worldview “wrung clean of religion”.

In the late Forties, the couple discovered Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa in a public library. It inspired Vic to study anthropology: he was thrilled by the thought of living hand-to-mouth in remote places, and drawn, too, to the “neat social systems among indigenous islanders” that seemed to exist “like an organism with its own social structural laws”. He worked under Max Gluckman, the legendary leader of the structural anthropology movement based at the University of Manchester, who dispatched Vic to central Africa to study “chieftainship politics”.

Ritual, of course, was central to defining the individual’s roles within the “neat social systems” in which he was interested. For example, many tribal peoples mark the passage from childhood to adulthood with highly elaborate rites, whereas in the modern West, childhood often merges imperceptibly with adulthood, leaving it to each individual to figure out what it means to “come of age”.

Many anthropologists then dismissed tribal ritual as the unintelligible mumbo-jumbo of a “simpler” people. But in 1951, Gluckman sent Vic a telegram urging him to switch to researching the religious practises of the Ndembu people of south central Africa. Edie came along. The Turners’ time among the Ndembu convinced them that such supercilious attitudes were false. “In matters of ritual as of art,” Vic would write years later in his seminal 1969 text, The Ritual Process, “there are no ‘simpler’ peoples, only peoples with simpler technologies than our own. Man’s imaginative and emotional life is always and everywhere rich and complex.”

Zambia, where the Turners encountered the people, was then a British colony known as Northern Rhodesia. Nevertheless, the Ndembu welcomed the foreign couple’s attempts to understand their rituals, even inviting them to participate. The Turners studied the Isoma, a rite that treated women suffering from infertility. The central action of the ritual involved the afflicted woman and her husband walking in the nude several times between two holes, one identified as “cold” and the other “hot”, representing both the grave and the birth canal. In this way, the ritual reconciled the once-warring communities of the living and the dead.

The Dutch-German anthropologist Arnold van Gennep, whose ideas the Turners borrowed, taught that every rite involves three stages. First, a separation, when the subjects are removed from the social structure. Next, the liminal stage, when the subjects become indeterminate, ambiguous, outcast even: during the core action of the Isoma, the afflicted couple no longer occupy their symbolic roles as husband and wife; their nakedness signifies that they are more like new-borns, or the dead. Finally, there is a reaggregation, when the subjects return to the social structure, either in a new condition — a boy emerges as a man after the extreme trials of the coming-of-age ritual — or merely restored to their prior condition — the afflicted couple now “healed” by Isoma.

The Turners focused their analysis on the middle stage. As Vic explained, liminal beings “are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial”. To become liminal is to assume a transcendent vulnerability; it is the condition of Christ on the Cross. The humiliation of the liminal subject, for the Turners, fostered communitas, a state apart from the structured hierarchies we inhabit most of our lives. Communitas, a primordial state beyond rank and class, reminds us that the high and mighty have their status only in relation to the low, and “he who is high must experience what it is like to be low”.

Before he assumed power, a Ndembu chieftain had to undergo ritual humiliation at the hands of a mythic figure known as the Kafwana; coded female, she was associated with the land and the people who tilled it, those who weren’t politically or militarily strong but who nevertheless possessed a sacral power. Among other things, the chieftain-to-be had to absorb a barrage of insults and criticisms from other villagers; once installed, he didn’t dare hold it against the people. In this way, the religious ritual taught the chieftain that he was first and foremost a servant.

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By humbling himself, and dispensing with his normal privileges, the one undergoing the ritual must recognises what Vic called “humankindness”: “a generic bond between men.” Without it, the hierarchical community has no qualms about excluding and even destroying the weak. Far from locking people into the past, then, ritual allows them to confront present and future challenges. Ritual, in this telling, humanises societies.

On the surface, the coronation of King Charles and Queen Camilla is about as distant as can be from the chieftainship ritual of the Ndembu people. But the rite’s underlying structures are are shockingly similar. The Anglican ceremonial adds several layers of Christian symbolism, not to mention genteel ornamentation — all of which softens the liminal humiliation of the king-to-be and his bride — but the fundamental process is the same.

First, there is the separation of the ritual subjects — Charles and Camilla — from humdrum British reality. This is marked by their carriage ride to Westminster Abbey. Next comes the liminal stage, where Charles’s face is literally covered by Anglican churchmen, using a canopy of golden cloth, known as the anointing screen. The covering shields the most sacred element of the ritual from prying eyes, but it also means that Charles is erased as an individual.

The core action of the liminal stage is the anointing of king’s hands, breast, and head with oil. In the Bible, such oils are the mark of the self-sacrificing King of Kings: Jesus is anointed before he is to undergo his passion, death, and burial. Once the screen is removed, the anointed king will kneel at the high altar while the archbishop recalls how “Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God … was anointed with the Oil of gladness above his fellows.” Thus Charles, as a Christian statesman, is united with the sacrifice of Christ. He is giving up something, trading his personality for that of the sovereign, dutybound to serve the commonweal.

Finally, there is Charles’s reaggregation: he re-enters society with elevated status, symbolised by the crown and sceptre. But again, this occurs only after he has ritually identified himself with society’s victims — indeed, with the anointed Victim. All this marks him out as the servant-ruler of the British people, rather than merely a king.

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Today’s economic hierarchies tell the winners that they owe their status to no one and nothing but their own “meritocratic” efforts. This isn’t, in fact, true: study after study demonstrates that social mobility has stalled, especially in the Anglosphere. But it makes for particularly obnoxious elites: if they owe their status to no one, then they also have no obligations to society’s losers. Against such a backdrop, Britain’s traditional monarchic rituals, not least the coronation, are a very different, and much-needed, account of what the high owes the low.

When we glimpse the communitas lying beyond everyday structures — when we leave behind profane everyday reality to play the solemn, cosmic game of ritual — we are possessed by a vision of what society could or should look like. Here, the mighty chieftain submits to the lowly Kafwana. Here, the omnipotent Son of God consents to be humiliated. And His Majesty the King consents to follow the mortified god-man, even into the tomb.

It wasn’t the mercurial, ADHD-fuelled writing style, which somehow still manages to tease a bright narrative line out of the chaos. It wasn’t the harrowing details of the two years the author spent in the notorious Nineties CEDU boarding school system for troubled teens. It’s that the book is trend-buckingly unapologetic. There is no privilege-acknowledging. There is no self-flagellating liberal guilt. There is one trigger warning, but in context it functions more like a titillating anticipatory pause than a chance to avoid upsetting content. After all, what reader of Paris: The Memoir is going to set the book aside just when she’s getting to the juiciest part of her traumatic origin story?

It’s hard to overstate how unusual this is. It’s got to the point when writers insert privilege disclaimers reflexively, including in contexts where they don’t make sense and aren’t even necessarily true. (“My house burned down and somebody murdered my cat — but as a cis, straight, able-bodied white woman, I’ll never know what it means to really suffer.”) I understand why people do this, of course; if you don’t call out your own privilege, you run the risk of someone far more unhinged and vindictive doing it for you. I just didn’t realise how refreshing it would be for a writer to just… not.

In the few places in the book where the word does appear, it tends to have a very different meaning. In the CEDU facilities where Paris was confined for two years in her teens, it was a “privilege” to contact your family, to wear shoes, to sleep on a bed instead of a bare mattress in the hallway. Said privileges would be revoked for violations of the facility’s rules, which were both so numerous and so intentionally self-contradictory that it was impossible not to break them. In short, the abuse that occurred at these places, which multiple lawsuits have alleged functioned more like private prisons than schools, is nothing short of horrific — residents were forcibly medicated, ritualistically humiliated in group struggle sessions, beaten and sexually assaulted, stripped naked and left in solitary confinement for up to 20 hours at a time. And the teens destined for them were the last to know what was happening: standard intake protocol was for members of the CEDU security team to snatch them out of bed in the middle of the night.

Since 2020, when she first shared this story in the documentary This Is Paris, Hilton has been part of a survivors’ movement that calls for CEDU facilities to be shut down. The sections of her memoir detailing her treatment there read like equal parts exposé and survival thriller. But here, too, the book takes an unexpected turn. Paris Hilton isn’t sorry for her privilege, but she isn’t sorry for herself, either. In a world where so much cultural currency resides in narratives of victimisation and oppression, she chooses again to just… not.

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This is striking, juxtaposed with another recent memoir by a certain individual born into breathtaking wealth and status. Consider Paris’s tone when reflecting on how her time at Provo, Utah’s CEDU facility, left her not only traumatised, but completely lacking the education of a normal person her age:

This whole shit storm had stolen two years from me, and that’s like—what is that? Like 10 percent of my life at the time? No! More like 20 percent, isn’t it? Because, like, two years would be a fifth of your life if you’re twenty, and I was only eighteen, so—ugh. Forget it. I can’t do math. Math got robbed from me, along with geography, algebra, socialisation, healthy flirtation, how to conduct my body and value my soul.

Now compare it with Prince Harry, bewailing that he’d been cut off financially by his father at the tender age of 34:

Cutting me off therefore meant firing me, without redundancy pay, and casting me into the void after a lifetime of service. More, after a lifetime of rendering me otherwise unemployable. I felt fatted for the slaughter. Suckled like a veal calf.

Both passages embody a peculiar type of celebrity: fame was guaranteed long before they did anything attention-worthy in their own right. Both were notoriously troubled teens who responded to the pressures of a privileged upbringing by rebelling, often as publicly and messily as possible, secure in the knowledge that they were too well-protected to be left with nothing. Both, too, experienced genuine trauma in their lives, the pain of which no amount of money could soften.

And yet, if someone had said 10 years ago that only one of these people would ultimately build a multimillion-dollar brand on the foundation of his or her victimhood — and make a spectacle of renouncing his or her famous family while continuing to capitalise on it at every turn — who’d have guessed it would be the Prince?

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Perhaps we might disagree on who has the greater claim to family grievance: the motherless royal who chose to renounce his role in the family, and wound up renounced by them in return; or the heiress whose complicated relationship with the parents who sent her away doesn’t stop her from citing the family name among her list of assets. (It is worth noting here that Harry, though he has made headlines by acknowledging his white male privilege, always somehow seems to avoid mentioning the part where being born royal and astronomically wealthy was surely a greater advantage. He also has the word “PRINCE” emblazoned on its cover in an exceptionally large font.) But the difference is one of degree, not of kind.

The difference in their attitudes, meanwhile, is vast. After returning to her parents’ home from the lockdown facility, a 19-year-old Paris stays up at night, unable to sleep in the room from which she was abducted at the age of 16, listing “ways to make money and leverage the assets no one could take from me: my face, my name, my legs, modelling contacts, and experience on the runway — none of which would mean anything if I wasn’t willing to work hard”. Harry, a married father in his thirties, also stays up at night — raging at the injustice of having to navigate the adult world, for which he is woefully unprepared in a way that neither the press nor his family seem to appreciate. He laments having been cruelly robbed, by his royal upbringing, of formative experiences such as carrying cash, riding the subway, or (yes, really) receiving boxes from Amazon: “After decades of being rigorously and systematically infantilised, I was now abruptly abandoned, and mocked for being immature?”

The two approaches make for a study in what each author evidently perceives as his or her most winning public relations strategy. Harry’s brand is a sob story, wrapped in a privilege acknowledgment, stuffed into Oprah’s mailbox. He is undiscerning in the details he shares. Paris’s is a more carefully choreographed airing of dirty laundry, offering front-row seats for the press. Unlike Harry, Paris is under no illusions as to the symbiotic nature of the relationship between herself and the media. They exploit her, but she exploits them, too, often beating them at their own game. As harrowing as the boarding school stories are, the more radical — and revealing — part of this memoir is the frankness with which she describes a lifetime of living in front of the cameras, for better and for worse.

Her humanity, the real person behind the public figure, comes through in unexpected flashes, as when she describes putting her own body between a mini-dress-wearing Britney Spears and the hovering paparazzi as the pop star climbed into a car, shielding her in the vulnerable moment when a photographer might have captured an upskirt shot. But what also comes through is how savvy Hilton has always been about how much she controls the narrative when it comes to her family’s public face — how much she is its public face.

When her parents come to visit her at the Provo boarding school just a few weeks shy of her 18th birthday, she hisses a promise in her father’s ear: if he makes her stay at the facility until she’s reached legal adulthood, her first stop after they let her out will be the offices of the Wall Street Journal, where she’ll tell the press exactly what they’ve been doing to her — what her parents paid them to do. After years of refusing to believe their daughter when she said she was being abused at Provo, what does it say about the Hiltons that this was the one utterance they took seriously? (Paris was released shortly thereafter.) And what does it say about Paris that, despite her threat — and despite the obvious cachet of having been so sensationally mistreated — it took decades before she made this story public?

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I came of age at the same time as Paris Hilton — she is almost exactly one year older than me — and it’s tempting, having read this memoir, to indulge in a little self-flagellation of my own. I remember laughing along with everyone else when Sarah Silverman, at the 2007 MTV Movie Awards, joked with gleeful malice about Hilton’s upcoming stint in jail. I remember rolling my eyes at The Simple Life, the reality TV show that featured Paris and Nicole Richie struggling their way through menial, low-paying jobs as janitors, farmhands, camp counsellors. Of course, there was no way of knowing at the time how much of The Simple Life was pure performance (apart from the strip searches and struggle sessions, Provo’s preferred method of character-building was to make the residents haul rocks), or that Paris’s widely-mocked breakdown over being sentenced to jail stemmed from genuine PTSD. But the mix of sneering contempt and total incuriosity with which she was treated: that was a choice.

It seems incredible that the media hasn’t jumped at the chance to recontextualise what they did to Paris Hilton in the same way that they’ve done with Britney Spears — which is to say, to shamelessly march out all their most exploitative coverage for a documentary re-airing, under the nearly transparent pretence of repenting for their sins. And yet, the response to Paris’s latest offering has been, at best, only marginally less sneering than usual.

Maybe it’s because there never was a meltdown, or a breakdown, or a tearful sit down with Oprah that made Paris seem like a person it was possible to feel sorry for. Or maybe it’s just the same old cynicism: who is to say that this isn’t just another example of Hilton’s uncanny capacity for controlling the narrative, even as she appears to be making herself vulnerable? If a person is both incredibly calculating and also incredibly honest about it, does that make her more trustworthy, or less? When she forgives her parents for sending her away, is it because she really forgives them? Or has she simply concluded — as Prince Harry must have when he decided to christen his daughter a Princess — that her family is a greater asset to her than renouncing all its privileges could ever be?

Christopher Hitchens, that unthinking man’s iconoclast, once called her “an averagely-volatile woman from a disadvantaged family”. He was almost being nice, but like so many others, he only really used her as an excuse to tell hideous anecdotes. Craig Brown published a whole book that pasted together the worst stories that people recorded about her in their diaries. It was a sure and sorry way to ensure your letters were published after you were gone: put in an anecdote about Princess Margaret being difficult or looking, as Nancy Mitford had it, “excessively common”.

Remember, these are not tabloid reports. This isn’t the rough and tumble of a free press. We are quoting public intellectuals. Despite Margaret being awful, as they saw it — trashy and appalling, rude and condescending, and, frankly, low brow — the elites found her irresistible. Few of us are too classy for gossip, too clever to mock an appearance instead of imagining what lies beneath it. Margaret’s punishment for projecting upper-class indifference, privileged selfishness, is to be seen as more of a soap-opera character than a woman. Perhaps that says more about us than her.

Her husband, horrible bully that he was, once set her dress on fire. “Good thing too, I hate that material,” he said. To which Margaret replied: “Material is a word we do not use. We call it stuff.” This sort of thing gets held up as inexhaustible snobbishness. Really, it’s a stiff upper lip, splendid resilience in the face of abuse. And anyway, can’t we live with a little high handedness in our princesses? Consider her nephew’s current reputation and Margaret’s blue-blooded insistence on calling scrambled eggs buttered eggs starts to look rather appealing. It’s a small price to pay for a stable and enduring monarchy: that a king’s daughter’s might occasionally be too royal.

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But living off the public purse makes you fair game for voyeuristic bitching: there is an assumed public ownership of Royal lives. The story of Margaret and the Queen, along with the Queen Mother, getting the giggles when T. S. Eliot read The Waste Land at Buckingham Palace is often reference to show what a bunch of philistines the Royal Family is — as if Modernist poetry has anything to do with constitutional monarchy. (And as if most of the rest of us wouldn’t have done the same. Eliot was a terrible reader.) When people enjoy that story, I am reminded of the painter Francis Bacon, who once booed Margaret off stage at a party because her singing wasn’t very good; the poor woman ran out in tears. Somehow when you are born into the Royal cage, many intelligent people think it is acceptable, maybe even clever, to treat you like you’re an animal.

People like Christopher Hitchens did this because they had a bigger target: the institution of monarchy. He could happily paint the Windsors as emotionless bastards without caring very much about their so-called victims. But the old saw about Margaret being the lamb sacrificed for the good of The Firm needs investigating. It fits the narrative of heartless Hanovarians to say that the Princess wasn’t allowed to marry Peter Townsend out of cruelty or myopic traditionalism or whatever. It’s a simplification, though, to see it as a case of the establishment crushing young love for the sake of expediency.

Sarah Bradford reports a friend saying “Princess Margaret was very religious, much more than you would think”. Yes, her desire to marry a divorcé was a moral and constitutional dilemma: the Queen was the head of a church that didn’t allow such things. But in the story about the institutional thwarting the individual, Margaret and her feelings have been ignored. As Bradford says: “Asked whether, as the general public perceived it, she had been sacrificed on the altar of the monarchy, the queen’s private secretary replied simply, ‘She sacrificed herself’.”

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Margaret defies the stereotype, then, of a selfish, useless celebrity. Jonathan Freedland once said of her: “Five decades before Paris Hilton, there was the current Queen’s sister, Princess Margaret — an object of glamour and gossip, permanently on vacation, internationally famous yet achieving nothing at all.” (If only she had written book reviews for the New York Review of Books!) If you are more interested in bourgeois tattle-rags than humdrum duties, it’s easy to share his view that she did nothing at all. But in reality, Margaret was a great charity worker. She was a patron of the London Lighthouse, an AIDs charity more famous for its association with Princess Diana, and she used to visit patients there and make them laugh. (She did her work without any media attention and before Princess Diana was involved.)

Margaret’s friend Lady Glenconner had a son with AIDs at the height of the epidemic; Margaret turned up and gave the boy a big hug as if nothing had changed. But while Diana was hugely — rightly — praised for shaking AIDs patients’ hands, Margaret remained in the shadows. Of course, Margaret didn’t want attention for her good works, but that doesn’t mean we should dismiss them.

In the stories told about Margaret, style so often comes before substance. It’s easy to use anecdotes to make someone look bad, but there are plenty of stories that make Margaret seem not just nice but remarkably normal — the opposite of the character drawn by gossipy republicans. Gore Vidal reported how he and she once saved a number of bees from drawing in a swimming pool at Windsor. “Go forth and make honey,” the charming and humorous Princess said, in what Vidal called “a powerful Hanoverian voice”. When she visited Lady Glenconner, she would do her friend’s hair and lay fires in the grates. On these visits, she showered out of a bucket, ate tinned food, and went scrambling up mountains. Away from people who were desperate to say something shocking and scathing about her, Margaret appears to have been quite ordinary. Likeable, even.

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One of the few people who seems to really understand Margaret is the biographer Selina Hastings, who said that the Princess,

“looked at the world outside between the bars of her extremely comfortable cage. She was inquisitive and she was courageous, and sometimes she ventured halfway out. But the moment it looked as though there may be difficulties, back she flew into her cage, slamming the door behind her.”

Margaret was forced into public life, and when she was expected to accept people’s offensive intrusions into her life, she sometimes refused. She wasn’t perfect; but she was goaded and cornered. As Ferdinand Mount said, “being ghastly is so much expected of her that it becomes her party piece”.

Craig Brown called her life “Cinderella in reverse”, in a classic example of our inability to see Margaret as anything but a character out of a story. “Nothing is as thrilling as they said it would be; no one is as amusing, as clever, as attractive or as interesting,” he wrote. He could have been talking about all the journalists, biographers, diarists, and so on, who used her to fill their pages.

Margaret, unlike Cinderella, was never destined to be a queen; she was first and foremost a sister. There was a constant, silent presence in her public life — a gold standard of decorum — against which she was judged. Elizabeth and Margaret are, like Kate and Meghan, presented as stereotyped female opposites: the good wife and the wayward celebrity, the modest Queen and the flagrant Princess. Such reductions make for a lonely life.

For Margaret, this perpetual isolation began at her sister’s coronation. According to Sarah Bradford, Margaret had “very mixed feelings because I adored my father and he was dead and yet I felt I had to be pleased for Lillibet being crowned Queen though I knew that in a way I’d lost her.” She was only 23 when that happened.

And that’s why people worry about Prince Charles. Our future king threatens to be a politically active monarch. “I simply can’t see what I see and do nothing about it. I could not live with myself,” he told his biographer, Jonathan Dimbleby. The Black Spider Memos were the most worrying of his interventions to date; they revealed him successfully pestering ministers for changes in policy and spending. It is impossible to imagine the Queen sending 27 notes to ministers in just over a year asking for, among other things, specific items of defence expenditure. Perhaps Dimbleby is right to say, “a quiet constitutional revolution is afoot.”

And maybe that’s no bad thing. The last monarch to have a major influence over modern politics staged a few vital interventions. As Jane Ridley, author of a new biography of George V, told me: “George’s role was not to change things politically, but to react to events and crises, which he did with aplomb. He enabled the appointment of prime ministers at times when, through war or through political realignment, the party system was not functioning to produce agreed candidates.”

The political system has matured and stabilised since then. But it’s certainly showing its age now. It’s not unreasonable to imagine that, in the coming years, it will become so dysfunctional that a monarch must stick his nose in. And if he is obliged to be a more political monarch than his mother — long may she live — Charles ought to read Ridley’s account of his great-grandfather’s life, which provides a blueprint for how a monarch might effectively and acceptably involve himself in politics.

But it could also help Charles learn from his great-grandfather’s mistakes. For one thing, he needs to keep his voice down. George was notorious for blurting out his country-squire opinions. (“Of course you said it, George,” his wife, Queen Mary, admonishes him at one point, “we all heard you.”) Neutrality did not come naturally. He was so obviously a Tory. Just after he became king, when the Liberal Party was in power, he told the Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, “I don’t know how you can go on serving that damned fellow Lloyd George.” These ministers weren’t exactly thrilled to be working with a rude, reactionary king who they thought was “a dunderhead”. Especially because the nation was in the middle of a constitutional crisis.

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The House of Lords had voted down a budget for the first time in centuries, and the Liberal government was threatening to neuter their lordships with the Parliament Bill, which would abolish the Lords’ veto of legislation. The Liberals prevailed — by manipulating the naïve new king. The PM, Asquith, bounced George V into a promise to create hundreds of new peers to vote through the Parliament Bill, if it didn’t get through the first time, by threatening a “King and Peers vs The People election”. George’s private secretary, Knollys, advised the king to make the promise — having not told him that if the Liberals resigned, the Tories would take over, avoiding the threatened election. (Knollys was rightly sacked for this low-grade duplicity.)

When the bill went to the Lords, it looked like Tory peers would defeat it. George couldn’t let that happen. If the Tory peers voted the Bill down, he would have to make good on his promise. And a supposedly neutral constitutional monarch would be in terrible trouble if he created hundreds of peers to favour one party over another. Talk about interfering.

His other private secretary, Lord Stamfordham, sprang to action. Ridley has been much praised for rescuing George from his reputation as a dullard. She ought to be celebrated, too, as a political historian: she has discovered that Stamfordham asked the Archbishop of Canterbury to get the bishops in the Lords to vote for the bill. A former Viceroy of India was summoned from Scotland to do the same. Lord St Aldwyn was “encouraged” to vote the right way, while Lord Rosebery was outright asked to do so. He did — and took 20 others into the lobby with him. The bill passed by 17 votes. There we have it: the palace’s interventions were decisive in a parliamentary vote.

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This is, supposedly, unthinkable. So strict is the non-interference principle, the monarch isn’t even allowed to go into the House of Commons, let alone have their flunkies tip the balance in a legislative vote. Imagine the uproar if it was revealed that Charles had persuaded enough of his aristocratic friends to squeeze a bill through Parliament. But George was dragged into politics by Asquith, and if the palace hadn’t interfered in the vote, he’d have ended up doing something even worse: making a load of new lords. Charles’s second lesson, then, is to keep out of things unless strictly necessary.

This was sharp work, especially from Stamfordham, one of the many supporting characters expertly handled by Ridley, who makes the page fizz, bristle, and shuffle with figures like the fantastically waspish Lady Geraldine Somerset, the heart-breaking Prince John, and the blinking but quietly effective Royal Librarian, Owen Morshead (you can practically hear him cough politely). Stamfordham is the best of them though: the king’s loyal retainer, darting around London, corralling politicians and producing clear, effective memos that kept the king better informed than his ministers. Like Jeeves, he always appears at the right moment with a solution to George’s woes.

Stamfordham’s advice kept George on the right side of the constitution. During the Irish Home Rule crisis, George drafted a crude letter threatening to veto a bill unless it was put to the electorate — something no monarch has done since 1708. The accepted wisdom is that the royal veto no longer exists. But Vernon Bogdanor, the constitutional expert, has said that the use of the veto in similar situations remains an open question. Imagine Parliament sent Charles III a bill to abolish civil liberties. We might well prefer him to copy his great-grandfather’s threatened intervention than his mother’s scrupulous impartiality.

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It was the very real threat of civil war in Ireland — a threat the complacent Asquith met with endless rounds of champagne and bridge — that drove George to meddle. Sounding a lot like Charles in conversation with Dimbleby, he wrote to Asquith in 1914, “I cannot help feeling that the government is drifting and taking me with it.” And without George, Ulster might have been bloodier: he organised a non-partisan conference, for instance, and told Bonar Law, the Tory leader, to restrain his practically seditious rhetoric — which is more than we expect of the Queen, but less than we might get from Charles.

Although he liked to flex his fading prerogative — like when he outrageously tried to refuse Lloyd George an election in 1918 — George turned his role into an enabling one. When he was asked to open the new Parliament in Belfast, he insisted on giving a speech in favour of peace. The speech opened the way for talks, proposed by that quiet hero Lord Stamfordham, leading to the Anglo-Irish treaty. The palace were arbitrators, not partisans.

It took the same role when Bonar Law resigned as prime minister in 1923, he was too ill to nominate a successor. Commotion ensued. The choice was between the unknown Stanley Baldwin and the experienced Lord Curzon. Curzon was the obvious choice to almost everyone, especially himself. But he was a peer. And it was increasingly obvious that having a lord for PM was unacceptable in the new age of democracy. The Conservative party chairman was inundated with letters for Baldwin, but it took a royal intervention to sort out the kerfuffle. George, in consultation with the party’s biggest actors — including Balfour and Salisbury — picked Stanley.

Nowadays, the Queen waits for the party to appoint a leader, taking a purely ceremonial role (imagine if she’d weighed in on the choice between Boris and Hunt). But the systems we use for selecting leaders will be challenged on day. Charles might have to do what George did and make a neutral intervention to keep the system running. We might be grateful.

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But Charles will have to learn to moderate himself. Ridley’s portrait is a of a deeply Tory, reactionary man, who learned from experience to rise above politics and intervene without prejudice. The same king who bellowed at a footman who dropped a tray, “That’s right, break up the bloody palace!”, sharply admonished a coal rich aristocrat who was bad mouthing the unions to “try living on their wages before judging the strikes.” When the government wanted to stop banks paying Russian money to unions during the General Strike, George intervened, furious at this attempt to “touch the pockets” of strikers. He had come a long way since the 1911 railway strike, when he wrote to Asquith proposing legislation to stop strikes spreading. At that point, he and Mary were worried about “encouraging socialism… and pandering to the Labour party”. Like our Queen, he moved with the times.

Unlike previous biographers, Ridley takes no superior pleasure in painting George as a philistine. She combines a historian’s rigour with even-handed admiration for George’s gruff and prickly character. He wasn’t cultured or metropolitan, but he well understood the way the country was changing and how politics needed to follow, despite the fact that he didn’t appreciate Cezanne.

It’s not uncommon for people to mock Charles, either. He’s no philistine, but he is a crank. There may be more acceptance of his views, but like George he seems to belong to another world. While the Queen is timeless, Charles is old-fashioned. Where she is restrained, he is amateurishly enthusiastic, passionately gathering causes. He isn’t known for his temper (George was almost constantly in a foul mood), but he has the air of being high maintenance. Let’s hope he finds himself a courtier as good Lord Stamfordham.

What might be more important, though, is Camilla. George’s Queen, the redoubtable Mary, has, until now, been undervalued as an effective consort; but Ridley shows her at George’s side, an essential part of the process. “George always used to tell me everything first”, Mary said as a dowager. If Charles has to be a politically active monarch, his success may well rely on his famously enduring bond with Camilla.

This man was Alan “Tommy” Lascelles, former Private Secretary to George VI and Queen Elizabeth II, and the Assistant Private Secretary to Edward VIII when he was Prince of Wales. He had lived, grace-and-favour, at the Old Stables at Kensington Palace (he thought it was one of the nicest houses in England) since he retired in 1953. Having been a courtier, on and off, from 1920-1953, he gives a fascinating insight into how to preserve a monarchy in a democracy.

Lascelles gets caricatured as a stiff-arsed, hard-bristled, curmudgeonly enforcer of horrible rules in The Crown, forever thwarting true love’s course. As well as playing a role in Edward VIII’s abdication, Lascelles is seen as one of the Establishment men who decided Princess Margaret couldn’t marry Peter Townsend. But despite this crucial role in modern Royal history, the real Lascelles remains slightly out of sight to us. There is no biography. His archives in Churchill College, Cambridge are largely closed — especially material relating to the monarchy. Edward Owens, who recently wrote a book about the royal family and the mass media, was denied access to them. His diaries, although excellent, were selectively edited by his friend Rupert Hart-Davis; they reveal a much more emotional, sensible, likeable man than the popular image.

There is no consensus, then, on Lascelles’s true character. To Edward VIII, living in exile as the Duke of Windsor, Lascelles was always “that snake”. The feeling was mutual. When Harold Nicolson had lunch with Lascelles three days after the Abdication, the courtier said the former King was “like a child in the fairy stories who had been given every gift except a soul”. He was also spitting with rage about the fact that Edward VIII was not patriotic enough: “He never cared about England or the English.” Ferdinand Mount remembers Lascelles visiting his school, where Mount “was startled by his explosion of venom against the Duke of Windsor … He was memorably unpleasant.”

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But Lascelles wasn’t just a stickler for arcane and snobbish standards, nor did he take a cruel pleasure in enforcing them. He stood for fair play and pragmatism. When Noël Coward was recommended for a knighthood, Lascelles advised George VI against. The King was constantly approving courts-martial against young RAF officers who had written dud cheques, and Coward had recently been fined for cheating his Income Tax. It would have been wrong for those young men to be punished while Coward was honoured.

Essentially honourable, then, despite being memorably unpleasant. Lascelles understood that although monarchy must be staged, that doesn’t mean it can be fake. The public spectacle has to be a true enough expression of the values it upholds. That is why the knighthood had to be refused, and why Wallis Simpson couldn’t be Queen. (In one of his more venomous moments, Lascelles wrote that the King’s subjects would not tolerate “a shop-spoiled American, with two living husbands and a voice like a rusty saw”.) That is why, after the abdication, Lascelles went to some lengths to keep Edward out of the country, to try and eradicate the whole affair from the public mind. It is also why, irrespective of the way it happened, Lascelles came to believe the abdication was inevitable. Edward, he said, was “habitually ready to sacrifice truth to his personal likes or dislikes”; Edward’s celebrity wasn’t enough to maintain the monarchy.

Lascelles believed in the institution but said, “I have never idealised any member of the House of Windsor”. When Harold Nicolson was commissioned to write George V’s biography, Lascelles told him it would be the biography of an institution, and that there would be no need to “descend into personalities”. This isn’t just bluster. The night the abdication was announced, Lascelles walked round and round St James’s Park, thinking about James II. The stability of the monarchy mattered to him. He described the abdication as “a real tragedy in my life”.

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And yet for someone with such strong principles, Lascelles lacked a sense of direction. As a young graduate, he was rather louche. Although he was skittling around London dining with what Bertie Wooster would call some of the better elements, his diary never comes alive like it does when he shoots his first stag, or when he’s riding a horse. (He gives thanks that he inherited the “long, flat Lascelles thighs.”) His main interest as a young man — just like Edward VIII’s — was to be active. A series of possible careers — Foreign Office, stockbroker, journalist — were tried, hated, failed or simply never started. Without the war, he would have been edging towards becoming a drifter. Instead, despite a somewhat inactive war, he was awarded the Military Cross.

After the Armistice, he worked for his brother-in-law, the Governor of Bombay. Writing to his uncle Adolphus Liddell (another slightly lost soul) he said: “there is much in all the flummery and ceremonial which, even after a long course of military discipline, irritates me profoundly.” We might be surprised at this lack of admiration for imperial flummery. This is, after all, Alan Lascelles: reactionary, establishment stalwart, slayer of marriages, arch defender of the old order. But it was precisely this slightly detached view that made him such a good courtier.

Lascelles believed in the substance of royalty, not just the display. The day after George V died, nearly 20 years after that complaint about imperial flummery, the King’s body was taken to a little church at the end of the garden at Sandringham for a small private ceremony ahead of the large, public spectacle:

“The guardsmen, with scarcely a sound, slung the coffin on their shoulders and laid it before the altar; and there, after a very brief service, we left it, to be watched for thirty-six hours by the men of the Sandringham Estate. I daresay when all the tumult and shouting dies, that little ceremony will remain in my mind as the most impressive of all.”

Lascelles was not the sort of Royalist who was in it for the memorial plates and days out at the park. He was a genuine believer. He could talk of the King as a Deity with little exaggeration. He was burying the head of his tribe. This is why there was such a kerfuffle with the new King. Edward VIII wanted to run a very different sort of tribe.

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Lascelles’s history with Edward VIII is essential to understanding later events. When he returned from India in 1920, his friend Letty Elcho brought him a letter offering a job with Edward VIII, then Prince of Wales. Lascelles was attracted to the job partly because St. James’s Palace was half a mile from his house and a quarter of a mile from his club, but mostly because “I have got a very deep admiration for the Prince, and I am convinced that the future of England is as much in his hands as in any individual”. Remarkably, had this job not come along, he would have signed on as an apprentice to a printing firm.

This deep admiration would not last, and Lascelles’s ability to see the ridiculous in the Royal was important to his role as a courtier. After nine years of watching the Prince drink, gamble, womanise, neglect his duties, be rude to members of the British establishment, and — shockingly for the feudal Alan — show very little interest when there was a scare that George V might die, he stormed out in 1929, in the sort of resignation so many of us have dreamed of making:

When he asked me why I wanted to leave him, I paced his room for the best part of an hour, telling him, as I might have told a younger brother, exactly what I thought of him and his whole scheme of life, and foretelling, with an accuracy that might have surprised me at the time, that he would lose the throne of England.

Most of us, after such an exit, would never go back. And Lascelles had only drifted into the role. Quitting it, he called himself “an inverted Falstaff” (because he was thin, just as thin in middle age as when he was young), leaving Prince Hal to “work out his own damnation”. But, after two years of reading and gardening with his family in the country, and a stint working for the Governor General in Canada, he was asked to re-join the Royal staff.

At first, he refused. The job was with George V, who he once described as “the godhead” — but Lascelles had said in his resignation letter: “Very few men can go on being private secretaries all their lives, and I am not one of them.” And besides, he pointed out, when the king died, he would be in a very difficult position, to put it mildly, having told the next-in-line exactly what he thought of him. Clive Wigram, George V’s Private Secretary — who was hiring Lascelles to be his assistant — told him not to worry. The King was in splendid health and had years left in him. Lascelles wrote to his wife Joan saying he was going to take the job: “It is no use going about the world singing ‘God Save the King’ if one isn’t prepared to assist the Deity when called upon.”

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And so, in January 1936, he travelled to Norfolk to start his new job. He had found a first-class carriage reserved for him at Liverpool Street. Once the journey was underway, “a young man appeared in the doorway of my carriage. I was about to tell him to go away when I recognised him as the Duke of York.” It was a good thing he recognised him. The young man would accede as George VI within 12 months, and Lascelles would become his Private Secretary in 1943. The Duke of York said to him halfway through the journey, “What’s all this about the King not being well?” George V died within four days. The soulless Edward was king.

And so, from a combination of lassitude, duty, and blue-blooded patriotism, Lascelles ended up as Assistant Private Secretary to a man he was morally repulsed by. Gentlemen do not just drop out of Royal service because they dislike the new King. It is perhaps surprising that Edward kept Lascelles on. But it seems obvious from this distance — as it seemed to Lascelles then — that Edward had never planned to make it that far and wasn’t going to stay long.

The royal family is meant to bring spectacle to our lives by displaying theirs: a glittering pageant of Births, Deaths, and Marriages. As the monarchy lost power through the nineteenth century, they replaced it with performance. Public engagement became Queen Victoria’s way of maintaining her relevance. And this new mode of royal existence is part of what made Edward VIII such a star as Prince of Wales: his tours of America, Canada, and South Africa were massive successes. But by the end of George V’s reign, British royalty had consolidated a new covenant with the people: “private probity, public spectacle.”

Lascelles was the high priest of the Georgian model and had seen first-hand that Edward was all public spectacle and no private probity. A courtier out of duty (and because he found nothing else to do), he realised that unless the royal family stuck to its principles — to the principles forced on it by a changing world — it would suffer. To the extent that he was a propagandist, an enemy of Edward VIII, a reactionary, and everything else he is claimed to be, it was because he realised the royal family had very little choice. Much of what Lascelles is said to have brought about may well have been inevitable as monarchy adjusted to democracy.

He had always been a slightly unwilling courtier. (He told his daughter long after he retired that, if he could have his life again, he would breed horses. “Racehorses, or cart-horses: any sort of horses.”) He was good at it, though. It remains to be seen whether he will eventually be remembered as the last of the old school who helped the monarchy transition to its modern function — or as a crusty old reactionary who needlessly destroyed a clutch of happy lives. But when his archives are eventually dusted off, I doubt we will find any dark secrets in there. We already know the fundamentals. He was a man who believed in royal morals underpinning royal spectacles.

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What would he make of the modern monarchy? In his 1990 review of Philip Ziegler’s Edward VIII, Christopher Hitchens observed that “the magic of the throne is now inextricable from Charles and the Annenbergs, Diana and Donald Trump — the extension of Edward’s international white-trash habit into modern showbiz and celeb culture.” This line might stand as a eulogy for the Lascelles’s school: that there is little point in having a Royal Family unless they adhere to certain difficult and sometimes out-of-date principles. For Lascelles, as for the public at that time, those principles were about marriage. One of the last things he did was sit in the garden of Kensington Palace to watch the firework celebrations of Charles and Diana’s wedding. The next day, he asked for news about the event every few minutes, anxious it should all be going well. He died two weeks later.

Undoubtedly, the sort of revelations we have heard about the Royal Family since would have been anathema to his sense of decorum. But Tommy didn’t speculate. A young man from the BBC once tried to persuade him to appear in what Lascelles called “a television orgy on The Future of the British Monarchy”. Lascelles gave a forthright reply: “I told him I would as soon walk stark naked down Piccadilly.” We might find it easy to dismiss him as an old fogey. But how confidently can we say that we are beyond his concerns about private probity? Are we above worrying about what makes an acceptable royal spouse?

To circumvent this, they projected all that patriotic feeling, all that flag-waving and ceremony and ritual, onto one family — who weren’t even British originally. So instead of days commemorating national independence, or great military victories against rivals, which would all feel a bit foreign and vulgar, they celebrated the birthdays, weddings and funerals of this one family, who they both venerated and sort of tormented (their loutish media even hounded a princess to her death). What a strange country.

It’s testimony to the British monarchy’s continual survival and relative strength that the decision of an Oxford College common room to take down the portrait of the Queen feels significant.

While it’s sad on the one hand, it also seems strange and archaic that they even had a picture of the Queen in the first place. It would be like finding out that real-life prison crime lords had pictures of Her Majesty in their cells, like Noel Coward in The Italian Job. Or that they were still playing the national anthem before gigs, as in the Beatles’ day. A cultural revolution has swept the country, and the monarchy remains the last vestige of the old order.

Despite our common disagreements over life at the top of Maslow’s pyramid, the monarchy has so far largely avoided entanglement in our culture wars, possessing a fairly impeccable record on race and espousing a more general British Niceness that covers most ranges of opinion. (It’s telling that the Queen’s removal was spearheaded by an American student, unironically protesting “colonialism”.) Yet that will start to change, and as we live through the final chapter of the second Elizabethan era, more trouble lies ahead for the Royals.

The monarchy’s great skill is to build a narrative, in particular to preserve the fiction that the nation is an extended family, with the Windsors as its representatives. Their life cycle is celebrated as the nation’s, their joy is our joy, their sorrow is the same as the blows and hardships we endure.

Royal weddings become a symbol of the nation’s hope and optimism, and the family’s most recent high point was the marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton. Even I was rather surprised by how much I enjoyed the day, watching with four generations of in-laws; because modern life so unnaturally starves us of the endorphins produced by group activity, it can feel exhilarating when things are done together.

It even got me ruminating on the meaning of monarchy and its role within a hyper-social species such as ours, as well as the importance of ritual. Although in fairness, I had started drinking at 11am on a Friday, which might have had something to do with it.

Even in my area, one of those pleasant London inner suburbs where luxury beliefs are the norm, there was a pile of unsold Guardians the next day while all the copies of the Mail and Express had gone. (The only other time I’d seen that in Haringey was after the riots that summer, reflecting the most basic of human instincts – venerate the chief and protect the tribe from violence.)

More recently, we shared in the family’s sorrow at the funeral of Prince Philip, who would have turned 100 today. As well as his work with charities and the Duke of Edinburgh scheme, much of the funeral television coverage featured married couples who, like the Queen and Duke, had enjoyed or endured decades of marriage together, and so the royal union came to represent their own. The Royal Family’s suffering was theirs, just as their joy was, which is why Britain’s small band of eccentric republicans always have such a hard time not appearing mean-spirited.

Yet the royals are not ordinary people; indeed, in some strange way they are throwbacks to the pre-Christian world where the separation between divine and mortal was ambiguous. It’s well known that Prince Philip was worshipped as a god on one island, but as a reader on The Rest is History podcast pointed out, Philip was the closest modern equivalent to a hero from legend. Like Aeneas he had to flee his homeland following a war in the land of Ilium, and came to wander the sea like Odysseus; he fought heroically in war, was a great chariot racer (he was even a pilot) and married a foreign queen before achieving divine status.

This is Britain, though, and unlike the ancients we don’t like boasting about great deeds of war and renown. So he just became known as Phil the Greek who liked insulting foreigners.

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The thing is, we aren’t at all like these people — which is why the system works. Meritocracy is, to mangle Churchill’s famous quote, the worst system except all the others. It’s better we reward people for gaming the Oxbridge system or making a pile in finance rather than for their ancestor’s ability to swing a sword on horseback. Yet it also creates numerous problems of its own, some of which are eased by monarchy.

Chiefly, there is the quite serious problem of runaway status-anxiety, which manifests itself in all sorts of problems, ranging from mental health to over-spending to political radicalisation.

Royalty takes the pressure off. Prince William is roughly my age, but I am never going to compare myself to him, nor feel like a failure in comparison. In contrast, I might compare myself with that pillock from school or university who goes on to become far more successful than me.

Meritocracy also wears down the sense of noblesse oblige, the idea that elites have a duty to care for those less fortunate, and to feel humble and grateful. There are now almost no mechanisms for suppressing the ego and narcissism of the ruling class, and so the Royal Family are almost a freakish exception in this regard.

The rituals associated with monarchy may seem arcane and even absurd, but they provide a function in drawing prestige and splendour away from the powerful. The unchanging nature of ceremony removes the individual ego, and where people in power innovate, they also reflect their own glory. Tradition is about sublimating narcissism, why is why non-traditional ceremonies — secularised weddings or “naming ceremonies” — make everything about the individual.

The Blairite love of abandoning tradition was a symptom of an extreme lack of humility. When the boss changes the ancient dress-code he may be being nominally progressive, but he’s also asserting his dominance; the new rituals reflect the new lord’s worldview.

The Royal Family remain far more liked and respected than the people who would replace them, but that is the nature of modern democracy, a degrading popularity contest which inevitably leads us to feel contempt for those in charge, often quite rightly. It’s why more democracy is not always a good idea.

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There has, in recent years, been quite a bit of research showing the benefits of monarchy in raising social trust and even increasing economic growth. It partly explains why monarchies are associated with political stability, and account for seven of the 10 least corrupt nations on earth. If you were going to live in any country on earth and all you knew about this mystery place was whether it was a republic or monarchy, you’d obviously go for the latter. The worst outcome would be Saudi Arabia; in contrast the depredations possible under a president are limitless – Syria, Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan… the list goes on. If you were to expand that test to the last 200 years, then the contrast only becomes more extreme.

Yet all these arguments are essentially utilitarian; that the monarchy has proved its “historical utilitarianism” just as with Chesterton’s Fence. Yet fences may still rot, and all ancient institutions, whether of monarchy, Church or nation itself, depend on some myth-making and targeted amnesia. Like Tinkerbell’s fairies, they only exist so long as people believe in them. If people still think the Church plays a useful role in social capital but don’t believe in the Resurrection, the Church will still die; likewise, with the monarchy.

Few people believe the coronation represents God’s choosing of the monarch, and not that many even care about the national church she leads, but more importantly, few really buy into the myth of their being the nation’s guardians, or that their sovereignty and higher status is somehow natural or justified. Perhaps more seriously still, the 2019 proroguing controversy removed any doubt that the monarch is utterly powerless. The idea that Her Majesty was a check on overmighty politicians may have been a myth, but it was one we all pretended to believe in.

Without that shared belief, the monarchy lacks the moral support it needs to face some rough years ahead, not just with the scandal of Prince Andrew, the fall-out with Meghan and Harry, and the damage to the next king from The Crown. It is quite seriously unpopular with younger people, an age divide that, like many things, is relatively recent.

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Despite all this, the Royal Family is in ways well-suited to 21^st century politics, in particular the recent fact of multiculturalism. Monarchies are historically more tolerant, and Daniel Finkelstein’s grandmother’s saying, “While the Queen is safe in Buckingham Palace, we are safe in Hendon Central”, reflects a real historical truth.

The polarisation problem, too, favours our Queen. The monarchist argument used to be that without her, we’d get President Blair, but more likely Britain would have a presidential figurehead – like in other former monarchies such as Germany, Austria and Ireland – and it would be someone like David Attenborough.

Yet whether even Attenborough qualifies anymore for that role, modern societies don’t produce “national darlings” anymore, neutral figures beloved by the collective nation. Almost no public figure is apolitical today, just as few areas of life are apolitical, because we are going through something akin to a reformation.

That is bad news for the royals, since monarchies have usually found great religious divides difficult because, from the time of the Emperor Justinian onwards, they have sought to be neutral yet often ended up antagonising everyone. At some point the House of Windsor will need to decide on which side of this cultural divide it stands, because a more general British Niceness won’t do anymore. Their predecessors the Stuarts faced the same question – and they chose the losing side.

Even two years in I was determined to pour scorn on the harmless young couple: “Prissy… simpering… clothes horse… will only ever be remembered as one of the House of Windsor’s plus-ones… Diana Lite,” I snarked in the Daily Mail of all places.

To be fair, I have always admitted to being just about the worst judge of character in Christendom; put me in a room with three saints and a sociopath and we all know who I’d be blood brothers with by sunrise. True to form, just a few years after laying into the Duchess of Cambridge, I was bigging up a certain American actress thus: “Meghan Markle has never waited soppily for some prince to rescue her. In fact, it seems far likelier that it is she who will rescue the prince.”

What happened to make me transfer my allegiance from Sussex to Cambridge? Two things: hypocrisy and the pandemic.

The first can largely be blamed on the House of Sussex. There is, after all, something grating about lecturing hoi polloi about carbon footprints when your Louboutins are click-clacking up the steps of Elton John’s private jet for the nth time. Later, while their subjects were being told not to leave their houses, there was something farcical about the speed with which the Sussexes struck out for what one feels was their destination all along: a gated community in La La Land; slipping over the Canadian border like draft-dodgers in reverse.

How different from the home life of our own dear future queen. Kate has had a good pandemic, upbeat and modest, sharing photographs of the children and her thoughts on home-schooling; visiting businesses affected by lockdown and just getting on with it. Her appearance at the Sarah Everard vigil was unexpected and beautifully judged; she looked like a thoughtful, sad student performing a silent and simple act of sisterhood.

I couldn’t help but compare it to Meghan’s scenery-eating style of feminism, which at its worst saw her writing “inspirational messages” for sex workers on bananas. We all know a Meghan. Sitting on her throne of sorrows, she is the moist-eyed paragon of passive-aggressiveness, soldiering bravely on in the hope that someone will find the heart to ask: “Are you ok?” As for those not brave enough to break free from the Firm, especially that stuck-up sister-in-law with her stiff upper lip — well, she’s just trapped and bottling it all up. Far better to let it all hang out and hold a pity party on prime-time TV.

How unlike Kate. She seems refreshingly liberated from the modern notion that mithering on about one’s troubles will in some way solve them; the Markle-isation of mental health, whereby the super-privileged signal that they too are in pain, so please don’t envy them all this lovely stuff. The Heads Together initiative — led by the Cambridges and Harry — may tick the fashionable boxes, but it appears to have far more to do with service than with therapy: supporting young people, veterans and homeless charities.

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Meanwhile, the pandemic has made us impatient with the rich and famous lamenting their lives from luxury fortresses, something which led to the all-time low audience for the Oscars on Sunday. In Kate, we see the difference between righteousness and self-righteousness, between stoicism and splattering one’s problems all over the shop.

Everything she did which I judged so ungenerously a decade ago reflects well on her now. “Waity Katie” passed the test which far more aristocratic young women have failed: the ability to stare straight back into a spotlight with perfect self-possession.

Though the likes of me gushed over Meghan for bringing “diversity” to the House of Windsor, we failed to register that the descendant of coal-miners and trolley dollies was equally as ground-breaking, and certainly more mocked by her prince’s inner circle (“Doors to manual!”) than Meghan ever was for her mixed-race heritage. Kate even has an embarrassing relation of her own; frisky Uncle Gary, proud owner of the Ibiza shag-pad known as La Maison de Bang Bang, who was welcomed whole-heartedly to the wedding.

She always gives the impression of having known what she wanted, and to be happy with what she has — an attractive quality in a world where screwing up and then griping about it passes for being “authentic” and where those who wear their troubles lightly are accused of being “in denial”. Much as I adored Diana, and found her expressions of emotion affecting and fresh, such travails are now the norm; everyone has an eating disorder, everyone doesn’t get on with their in-laws.

Similarly, I suspect she knows that another bout of over-privileged marital combat played out at peak viewing time is not something the public wants or needs. No one knows what goes on in any marriage and though the Cambridge’s relationship was subject to the usual tittle-tattle about William’s “affair” and her “rural rival” a few years back, they appear to have come through the rumours even stronger.

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Most of all, I like Kate for what she doesn’t do as much as for what she does. She will never throw herself down a flight of stairs, have her toes sucked by an ugly American or travel on a plane called the Lolita Express. Not yet forty, she is maturing from a coltish girl to a grande dame; at the funeral of Prince Philip, perfectly coiffed and clothed and masked, I thought she had a look of the actress Claire Bloom, in the way a young Queen Elizabeth did too.

And so the soft spot that even a hardened republican like me has for Queen Elizabeth II appears to be transferring to her granddaughter-in-law, the perfect queen-in-waiting. It’s telling that the only members of the family not to see an upswing in popularity after Prince Philip’s funeral were Harry and Meghan, reflecting as it did a life of service so profound that it was the only time I recall the deceased giving express instructions that they should not be given a eulogy. The fashion for publicly foisting one’s emotions which marked this century’s Troubled Teens is hopefully on the way out, helped along by this young woman of humble origins who appears to believe that “Never complain, never explain” is a pretty good rule to live by.

The Royals traditionally function as ciphers: representations in human form of entire world views that are otherwise hard to talk about. As Henry VIII represented the break from Rome, and Victoria represented Empire, they put a face on the big ideas of the age, and people line up behind them. In this clash, things are no different.

Today, we are told, in a drawing room at Sandringham, a showdown is taking place between Meghan, the unhappy American princess dialling in from Canada, and the 93-year-old Queen — mediated by their various princes. It would be hard to find two more suitable representatives than these two women of the clashing philosophies that, in different ways, have dominated British and European politics for the past decade. Tradition versus progress, duty versus self-actualisation, community versus commerce, nation versus globalisation.

There are hints of this in the opinion polling splashed all over the weekend papers. No matter which version you look at (YouGov, JL Partners, Deltapoll have all had a go), each ‘Megxit’ survey reveals the same central tension in public attitudes. A majority of people support the decision of Harry and Meghan to go their own way and overwhelmingly think they should be allowed to do it; but at the same time there is a noticeable harshness in the punitive sanctions which the public think they should receive. The couple should be stripped of their titles, their home, their military honours, barred from receiving financial support even from Prince Charles, and left even without police protection.

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Is Prince Harry the new Edward VIII?

By Tanya Gold

There’s a degree of sympathy for them, but also the audible bolting of the door behind them.

On one level, the British public have become liberals with amazing completeness in just over a generation. From the ‘Red Wall’ in the North to affluent London, from young to old, we have accepted and grown fond of a world of individual rights, self-realisation and freedom from judgment. By the logic of this world-view, there can be no doubt: of course the Sussexes must be free to do as they please and shake off the constraints of their elders. Who would stand in the way of a young family’s search for happiness?

But on another level, there is a growing fear that this same logic, in its relentless ratchet towards ‘progress’, will inadvertently destroy the things we hold most dear. It’s an uneven conflict because where the liberal world view is coherent, defensible and ostensibly virtuous, many of the things it threatens are hard to defend in the same terms. This mismatch makes people defensive and angry, as the Sussexes are now discovering.

In this competition of world views, the monarchy is highly vulnerable. In yesterday’s poll, even millennials are still clearly in favour of keeping the monarchy, and boomers even more resoundingly so. But there can be no logical liberal argument either for raising up an arbitrary family through birth, or for denying their individual rights once they’re there (denying them a political vote is already a breach of their human rights). If the monarchy has to justify itself in this way of thinking, it will eventually fall.

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Harry and Meghan's embarrassing predicament

By Douglas Murray

Meghan was initially welcomed with open arms by the British public, and her Hollywood backstory and mixed-race background brought something new to an institution people like to see gradually evolve. But she has recently come to represent precisely the combination of woke politics and global corporate power that a majority of British voters are trying to find ways to resist — instead of modernising a beloved old elite, she now seems to be dragging her husband into the hated new elite, and it feels dangerous.

Her slick new website, the trademarking of ‘Sussex Royal’, like a golf course, complete with corporate monogram and merchandise rights, is upsetting to people, not only because it is naff, but because it looks horribly convincing as a business proposition. As one commentator wrote (in a piece defending the couple entitled ‘Harry and Meghan will outgrow the Queen’) “no celebrity couple on earth better embodies the zeitgeist of our age… they will be billionaires before the 2030s”.

The Sussexes are already drawing up their battle lines. Via their surrogate Tom Bradby, they are threatening a “full, no holds barred” interview that would “tarnish the royal family’s international standing” by accusing the Palace of being racist and sexist. If there is to be a showdown between big business and hyper-liberal politics on one side and a creaky, beloved but illogical, centuries-old national institution on the other, Meghan and Harry will start with the advantage.

But just as the monarchy becomes the new battleground, there’s an absence of any cogent defence of it. The voices critical of Meghan and Harry, such as Piers Morgan’s, have framed the whole thing in personal terms: Meghan and Harry are selfish freeloaders and have been personally offensive to the Queen. Spoilt brats being rude to grandma, is the critique.

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Meghan and Harry are playing a dangerous game

By Douglas Murray

But accepting that we should choose sides based on their behaviour as individuals already surrenders too much ground. Monarchy can’t be defended in these terms — no matter how impeccably behaved, the merits of individual Royals can never be fairly deserving, and so eventually that argument will lose.

If there is to be any hope for, if we must, Team Queen over Team Meghan, it must start by flat-out rejecting the relevance of liberal individualism in this context. The royals are not interesting as individuals, they are not there on merit, they must not mistake themselves for celebrities. The monarchy is there to symbolise the continuity of the nation within a family. The less we know about them as individuals the better.

The institution, meanwhile, cannot be judged on its internal logic but on the success of the constitution it makes possible. By effectively relegating politicians to second-tier managers and reminding us that the country is much more than its government, it ultimately gives people reassurance that tomorrow will be recognisably like today. It has given Britain an atmosphere of gentle progress and freedom, almost uniquely in Europe, for hundreds of years; it has saved us from the excesses of American-style politics while acting as a necessary drag on the intellectual fashions of the day.

This is as practically valuable to the UK in 2020 as it ever was, even as it flies against liberal logic. If the monarchy is a key component of our national atmosphere of stability, and that stability literally makes people across the world want to live here and businesses want to be based here, what is happening today at Sandringham matters. It’s a battle of philosophies, and Her Maj needs better back up than this.

Back then, it was still relatively straightforward: survey a group of people, usually between 1,000 and 2,000, ‘weight’ the answers to make them more representative of the whole UK population, and interpret the results. The methodological arguments that raged back then among the pointy-heads —  telephone polls vs online polls; how to deal with past vote recall and turnout — have either now been settled or are at best secondary issues.

Polling companies were still, only half a decade ago, headed by larger-than-life public figures, more likely to have had a journalistic background than a statistical one, who regularly went on TV to “read the runes” for a grateful nation. For them, polling, like politics, was an art not a science.

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The royalty loyalty of the working classes

By Paul Embery

Today, the question everyone asks during an election is still the same one — who is going to win? — but the world of opinion polling looks very different. We have, of course, all been burned by a succession of difficult elections with unexpected results that various polling companies failed to predict and as a result the media and public are rightly much more circumspect. We want to know more, before believing anyone’s predictions.

‘Data scientists’ are gradually replacing those grand ‘pollsters’ who used to offer confident insights with a neat turn of phrase. These new number nerds are likely to be under 30 and might well know nothing about politics. Instead of simple surveys and uniform national swings, they are using complex statistical models. For people whose bread and butter relies on being seen as a savvy political ‘expert’, all this amounts to an existential threat.

The most powerful data modelling technique in politics at the moment, is something called MRP. It stands for “multilevel regression with post-stratification” —  not exactly catchy — and the number of people who fully understand it in the UK can be counted on two hands.

But, roughly speaking, you conduct a huge survey, normally 10,000 or more so that you have sufficient numbers to look at small subsets of people, and you then analyse what the most predictive characteristics are behind the question you’re interested in, for example whether race, education or income is more predictive of how people are going to vote (that’s the ‘multilevel regression’ part).

Then, once you have identified the most predictive characteristics, you use what you know about the people in each constituency, and in combination with any local effects you observe in your sample, you can estimate the outcome in every constituency in the land (that’s the ‘post stratification’).

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Call yourself a Monarchist?

By James Kanagasooriam

With this method, instead of crude national swings, you create something close to a simulated version of the whole electorate, in miniature, in all its complex glory.

The defining moment for MRP arrived during the general election of 2017. The conventional opinion polls had showed a dramatic narrowing, with most still showing Theresa May’s Conservatives significantly ahead on election day. The Westminster bubble was expecting her to build on, not lose, David Cameron’s majority.

But as well as their conventional poll, YouGov had also run an MRP model, and, instead of a majority this one pointed to something very different: a hung parliament, with the Tories losing ‘safe’ seats such as Kensington, Canterbury and Ipswich. Two weeks before polling day they gave it to the Times, who put it on the front page with the headline: Shock Poll Predicts Tory Losses.

Almost nobody believed it, but it turned out to be astonishingly accurate.

In the polling world, the pattern of the turbulent past few elections has been one of repeatedly trying to correct for the mistakes of the previous election  (and sometimes overcorrecting in the process). Because YouGov’s model turned out to be so accurate, right down to Canterbury and Kensington, this time everybody is waiting for the YouGov MRP to drop. It is expected next week, and if it shows a large Tory majority, I would expect the pound to surge against the dollar within seconds.

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Does Scotland resent the Royals?

By Euan McColm

At UnHerd, though, we’re interested in the things everyone else is ignoring, and so we’ll leave to YouGov the unenviable task of forecasting the main result.

Instead, we’re doing something slightly different. We’ve teamed up with an impressive startup called Focaldata that specialises in MRP — and we’re doing what we believe is a first. Using the same technique that predicted the result last time, we’re mapping how the 632 constituencies of Britain differ on six big issues of the moment that aren’t being much talked about in the election campaign: attitudes to the Royal Family, gender, immigration, religion, free speech and tax. We’ve called it UnHerd Britain.

The first set of results, out today, reveal how different parts of the country feel about the Royal Family. The results are striking. Prince Andrew may be all over the news, and the new season of The Crown may be keeping people busy across the country, but nobody gets to vote on the Royal Family.

For the first time, today, we can see what would happen if they did — down to individual constituencies. For Buckingham Palace, it’s a mixed bag of news. Overall, their position is still secure: only 2 of 632 constituencies have more people disagreeing than agreeing with the phrase, “I am a strong supporter of the continued reign of the Royal Family.”

But all is not rosy. Scotland, while still tilting towards support of the royals in all 59 seats, is dramatically less in favour than the rest of the UK; the large cities, including London, are similarly much less enthusiastic. The groups that are growing fastest in our society — university graduates and ethnic minorities — are the groups least excited about the Royals.

It may sometimes feel like Brexit is the cause of all our divisions, but as UnHerd Britain will reveal in full Technicolor over the next few weeks, the Royal Family reign over a deeply divided kingdom across many more issues than that.