Myths, hoaxes and frailties of the British royal family

Unlike the other European monarchies, Britain is not only an epitome of English imperial nationalism, but the very source of the constitutional legality from which Britain's own legal system emanates: the laws of the British parliament base their legal force on the assent of the crown, and hence all power deriving from such laws. The executive acts under royal prerogative, and with the involvement of the monarch's privy council, while justice is administered in the name of the crown, and a myriad of institutions act under the shelter of a 'royal charter' that grants them ad-hoc privileges.

Consequently, any circumstance that challenges the pompous legitimacy of the royal house threatens per se the whole of the British constitutional system, whose precariousness derives precisely from its personification in the figure of a monarch, whose dominance depends on the implicit consent of his subjects. The formula the British monarchy chose to obtain this adherence was to use the tabloid press as a transmission belt for the narrative represented by the royal family, on whose shoulders has rested the responsibility for keeping alive the myth of British greatness, before and after the loss of empire. The theoretical framework of this myth was a child of its time, and in substance no different from the imperial mentality prevalent in Victorian-era Europe, which essentially justified the drive for white hegemony in the racial inferiority of the indigenous people of the colonised lands, reasoned through spurious use of the scientific work of Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer and Gustave Le Bon, and the humanistic studies of the likes of Thomas Arnold, Alfred Le Chatelier, Louis Massignon and Ignaz Goldziher. The British royal family embodied like no other the imaginary of an imperial nationalism, paternalistic and condescending, reluctantly assuming the providential responsibility of maintaining a natural order by ruling with the firm but benign hand of the upper-class white man over the inferior races of the world, who were portrayed in the press of the time as infantile and backward. What is peculiar about the English case is that these stereotypes are still part, in a more or less veiled way, of a certain way of understanding journalism, precisely because journalism feeds back into the culture of British supremacy predominant among the most favoured social classes in Britain, and is therefore one of the pillars on which the aristocratic structures that hold power in the United Kingdom are sustained. This mentality has permeated national culture to such an extent that force of habit has rendered invisible the weight that over-understandings about race have in British society, something that is not lost on people from other countries who find themselves in the bureaucratic necessity of filling in ethnic classification forms in their dealings with the civil service, having to state not only whether they are black, Asian, Arab or Caucasian, but also whether or not a white person is British.

It is not surprising, therefore, that statements by a mixed-race person who had briefly been part of the royal family by marrying the orphan of Princess Diana of Wales - herself a posthumous victim of English tabloidism - have provoked what in the eyes of other constitutional monarchies might be seen as hysterical tabloid over-reaction. Back in 2020 there were histrionic reactions in the tabloids to the removal of statues of Victorian heroes who made their glory and fortune as slaveholders. On that occasion they did not go beyond putting the aesthetic and the ethical on the same moral plane, assuming a role as defenders of historical traditions that diverted attention from the systemic racial problems existing in England and exacerbated by Brexit. This time, however, the threat has been far more shocking, because it has been directed at the Achilles' heel of the British establishment, the unwritten alliance between the tabloid press and the royal house. Thus, the corporatist reactions of the tabloid press have been inversely proportional to the substance of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex's revelations in the course of an interview on a prime-time US television programme, provoking no small amount of dismay in what is known as Westminster Village; the virtual perimeter where establishment journalists and politicians cohabit and overlap, where there is no shortage of contemptuous jocularity towards ethnic minorities, between pints of beer. The prime minister himself, who was a journalist before he was a dignitary, has not shied away from making extemporaneous comments that might well have come out of the mouth of Oswald Mosley or Enoch Powell. 

Paradoxically, the UK's membership of the European Union cushioned the empire's pecuniary loss, while at the same time allowing it to defer a review of the role played by imperial nationalism in shaping contemporary Britain, relying on a surrogate for English supremacism called Euroscepticism. Brexit changed all this abruptly, inevitably turning the internal contradictions of British society against itself, as a not inconsiderable number of citizens of Anglo-Saxon origin perceive the presence of fellow British citizens from the former colonies as an existential threat, demanding equal rights and recognition of their contribution to the country's current greatness. An example of this can be found in the official narrative of the Second World War, reduced to an Anglo-American exploit in which the participation of several million colonial Asian and African soldiers in the fight against the Axis has disappeared from the construction of a memory that has made Winston Churchill and Queen Elizabeth pop icons beyond any hint of criticism, weaving a collective self-deception based on a mixture of selective memory, ignorance of history itself, and folkloric exaltation of a past as epic as it is idealised. 

That is why Oprah Winfrey's interview had the same effect as pointing out that the king was naked, by saying in public what everyone knew. And that is why the prime-time confidences of the wayward royal couple will do more damage in the long run to the legitimacy of the crown than was caused by the Hitleresque velebrities of the abdicated Edward VIII, then great-uncle of the current British monarch.