AND at the end of the week, does it really seem any less important than it did in the instant 1 000-megawatt surge of collective astonishment on Monday night? Absolutely not; indeed if anything, it seems more important rather than less.
Re-viewing the interview with the Princess of Wales two things are clear. First, it was gripping television. But, second and more lastingly, it was a much wider political act. The princess has done more in a single hour to put the future of the British royal family at hazard than has been achieved in three centuries of diligent but desultory republicanism.
The issue is not whether there should be a royal divorce. That is not a subject upon which outsiders can have much of a meaningful view. Nor is it a constitutional issue. If, as seems likely, there is a royal divorce, then the system will have to accommodate. It has done so before, and it will undoubtedly do so again, however embarrassing that may be.
Nor is the question of the succession the main issue. This elevates suitability into a criterion for kingship, an idea for which there is, not surprisingly, no precedent. If suitability, or even popularity, were to be necessary qualifications for monarchy then there would be no kings.
No, the real question is whether any of this is any longer an acceptable part of a modern country. In the past decade every institution of importance in Britain, from the Rugby Football Union to the Labour Party, has had to face the question of modernisation. The answer in each case has always been not whether to modernise but how. The great exception has been the monarchy, but even here the question can no longer be resisted.
Ten years ago or more, the monarchy was able to finesse real modernisation because of the mass popularity of the rapidly expanding youthful royal family. But now that expansion has turned on itself and become destructive, not creative. The princess has shown that the populist reform of the monarchy was unachievable. The monarchy has not only not reformed; it has shown that it is even unreformable.
Yet reform of some kind is now unquestionably what is needed. The monarchy has become imprisoned within a set of traditions and rituals which may delight the tourists but which no longer satisfy this country’s civic needs. The princess’ career exemplifies one approach to reform but one which has definitively failed. Her husband’s high-minded good works exemplify another approach, but one which is as anachronistically patrician as hers has been destructively populist.
The real question is whether there is another way. In her interview the princess derided the Scandinavian model of monarchy, but there seems little doubt that this smaller-scale, less conspicuous model is the one which the British royal house will have to copy if it is to survive calls for its abolition. Unless they can do things differently, Britain will become a