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We're told the monarchy steps up in a national crisis.
This time it's been absent
For any monarchy that wants to be central to national life, presence is
important. In the media, in popular culture, at public events and in the minds
of its subjects, the monarchy’s usefulness and mystique need to be reinforced
and appreciated on a regular basis. According to the BBC royal correspondent
Sarah Campbell, “the family mantra” of the House of Windsor is: “We have to be
seen to be believed.”
Often, this means a physical presence: the never-ending cycle of public
appearances that, in normal times, makes up their self-consciously dutiful
schedule. These play a big part in sustaining the popularity of our relatively
lavish monarchy. In 2018 the pollsters YouGov found that almost a third of
Britons said they had “seen or met” the Queen in person. No elected British
politician has been enduring or famous enough to match that.
Yet the last eight months have been very different. Since the pandemic took hold
– the greatest crisis in Britain’s modern peacetime history – the royal family
has retreated from view for long stretches. And in these absences the limits of
our monarchy as a source of national unity and reassurance can be discerned.
On 19 March, just before the first lockdown, the Queen left London, then the
part of Britain worst hit by Covid-19, for Windsor Castle, in Berkshire. She has
spent most of her time there since, with shorter stays at the secluded royal
estates of Sandringham in Norfolk and Balmoral in Scotland. She has sometimes
disappeared from public view for months at a time. On 1 June, the BBC reported
that she had “been photographed riding in the grounds of Windsor Castle – the
first time she has been seen outside since the coronavirus lockdown began”.
Since March, most public royal activities have been cancelled. On 5 April, with
the UK’s Covid-19 death toll already nearly 5,000, the Queen made a brief TV
broadcast, describing the pandemic as “an increasingly challenging time” but
promising that “better days will return”. At Easter, and on the 75th anniversary
of VE Day, in May, her messages to the nation included short passages about the
public response to coronavirus. In July she knighted the NHS fundraiser Captain
Tom Moore in a scaled-down ceremony at Windsor Castle.
In October she performed her first public engagement of the pandemic, meeting
scientists working against the virus as part of a visit to the chemical weapons
research facility at Porton Down in Wiltshire. Last weekend, in London, at a
ceremony preceding the Remembrance Day commemorations, she wore a mask in public
for the first time.
The Queen is 94, and needs to conserve her energies. Prince Charles and Prince
William caught coronavirus early in the pandemic. So in some ways, her seclusion
since March is easy to justify. Younger members of the royal family have opened
Nightingale hospitals and become more active online for Covid-related causes.
According to the Daily Telegraph, “Covid-19 has changed the Royal family for
ever.” Campbell says the monarchy has become “more informal”, “more personal and
intimate”.
Perhaps. But what it hasn’t done is guide its subjects through the crisis in any
sustained way. The Queen’s April broadcast, arguably the one memorable royal
response to the pandemic, was watched by 24m Britons – a big audience, but no
bigger than those for her Christmas broadcasts in calmer times. Given the
glaring inability of Boris Johnson to act as the father of the nation, this
crisis has been an opportunity for the monarchy. So far, it has not been taken.
This failure is all the more striking because for the last decade our popular
culture has been full of stories about the monarchy playing a key role in
national crises. The 2010 film The King’s Speech, about George VI and the second
world war; the 2013 play The Audience, about the Queen’s relationships with
pivotal 20th-century prime ministers; and the Netflix series The Crown, which
starts again on Sunday and places her at the centre of Britain’s turbulent
postwar history. All these highly successful dramas have presented the monarch
as a vital source of continuity and stability.
It is likely that this message has met with royal approval. Last year the
Crown’s creator, Peter Morgan, told the Guardian that he met members of the
royal household four times a year – “people who are very high-ranking and very
active within the organisation” – to tell them “what I have in mind” for each
series. Buckingham Palace issued only a partial denial.
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/13/monarchy-national-crisis-royal-family-pandemic