Putin shows us why the Queen matters

We ask the monarch to give up any freedom over her future in order to protect our democracy and we repay her with a relatively comfy life. Seems like a very good deal to me.

The British love their monarch — well, a significant proportion of them do. Recent polls by Ipsos Mori found that 46% of Britons say abolishing the monarchy would be worse for Britain in the future while only 22% say it would be an improvement. Statista found an average of 61% of people thought the UK should continue with a monarchy in the future, though that fell to 31% of people aged 18–24.

The Queen’s popularity will become obvious over the coming days, as the UK celebrates her Diamond Jubilee. There will be street parties, pageants, ceremonies, and more.

Yes, some of her family have let the side down, but to be fair her children are the product of a very, very weird existence. There is nothing normal about being a member of the British Royal Family, and the last 50 years has seen a massive transition from a late Edwardian concept of royalty through to today’s increasingly modern approach. All of them were born into this whether they liked it or not, and none of them have really escaped the fate that birth-right has thrust upon them.

They have had almost no choice about what they do with their lives, who they are, how they live, or where they live. Yes, it’s glamorous, but it is a gilded cage. None of them really had the option to become a train driver, doctor, or artist, or to marry someone totally inappropriate but whom they really loved. Prince Harry is the closest to any of them achieving that level of independence, and look at the backlash he’s faced.

The Queen, Prince Charles, and Prince William had their entire lives decided for them at birth. What the country asks of them, and how the system works, is that they occupy the top position in society so that nobody else can reach it. This creates an interesting dynamic in British democracy that protects it from politicians and others who crave power. Nobody with an unhealthy lust for power can become head of state in the UK.

An elected head of state opens up the position to people with ambition. Tying it to the line of one family means the head of state doesn’t need that ambition, and anyone with that ambition cannot do anything with it. Power tends to attract the wrong people, so blocking the top place from anyone is a healthy idea. While we allow politicians to vie for power lower down the chain, they can never reach the top.

This form of monarchy creates a complex muddling of loyalties and roles that helps preserve the fragile democratic status quo. In the UK, the military, judiciary, and parliament serve in the monarch’s name, not that of the prime minister, who runs the country. The monarch herself has no real power (yes, she has influence, but that is different), so there is a healthy disconnect between those who have power and the instruments by which power is exercised.

The Queen is the Head of State, but is clear that she serves the people and her country. This is how the constitutional monarchy was formed. It is ‘her’ country, and we are ‘her’ people, but she is ‘our’ monarch. To that end, unlike the politicians, she is us. Her interest in the country and its people runs uninterupted for her whole life. It is a long term vision that politicians vying for votes rarely have. Twelve prime ministers have served during her reign. They came and went; she remained.

The strange tangling of loyalties created by the constitutional monarchy means that the Prime Minister can order the military to go to war, but they do so in the name of the Queen. The military answer to the monarch, and therefore to the country. If a wayward prime minister ever tried to set the army on the people it would almost certainly fail because the army serves the crown, even if it takes its instructions from the politicians; I cannot imagine the army ever turning on the Queen, and this protects the country from a military coup led by a politician.

In this respect, I’ve often argued that the best justification for the Queen is Vladimir Putin. I have this written before but right now it has a lot more significance. Putin has become a dictator by taking the top position in the country. He controls the judiciary, the police, the army, and every aspect of Russia. If the Russians had not executed their Tsar, and had instead created a powerless constitutional monarchy, then — one could imagine, and I admit it’s a bit of a stretch — that Putin would have had to remove or gain control over the Tsar in order to crack down on his own people, or wage illegal wars as he has done. If that benign Tsar was very popular, it would have been much harder for Putin to become a dictator.

If a British politician wanted to become a dictator, they would have to remove the Queen to take on the top spot in the social hierarchy. They would need the military and police to switch allegiance from the Crown to a politician. They would need the judiciary, parliament, and a plethora of other institutions to renounce their allegiance to the Queen. It is just implausible to imagine this happening in the UK, which is a reassuring.

We have seen this play out in recent years. Boris Johnson is someone who could easily become an autocrat if he was given the chance. He is in power because he wants power, not because he has any particular political vision that drives his ambition. In that respect, he has more in common with Orban, Trump, and even Putin than he does with many former British prime ministers. It is generally accepted that he does not believe in anything, is wildly driven by personal ambition, is willing to lie enthusiastically to further his own gain, and feels he is outside the laws and rules.

When Boris Johnson tried to prorogue parliament, shutting it down so it could not vote against him, the judiciary overturned his decision because it was not lawful. It was an example of the independent judiciary, which serves in the name of the Crown, enforcing the primacy of parliament, which is the representative of the people, over the government which holds executive power at the Queen’s pleasure. These are separations of power, checks and balances, which run deep through the DNA of the country.

The need to remove the Queen in order to take control of all the power creates a pretty effective blocker to any politician getting too big for their shoes. It would be deeply unpopular, hugely controversial, and would cause such rifts in the constitution and social understanding of what the country is, that whatever the politician was doing would just get frozen by the wider chaos and panic. If the head of state was an elected politician, that safety net would be weakend; they could just rig an election to become president, then take over.

To some extent, this goes back to the English Civil War when parliament overthrew the monarchy and executed the king. A politician with authoritarian tendencies tried to take over the whole show — the military, judiciary, Church, and parliament. History in a nutshell: it went really badly. The English Civil War is believed to have led to the death of over 3% of the population, which is more than WW1. The British invited the crown prince back to become king but under new terms, and during the reign of several more kings and queens the constitutional monarchy evolved into what it is today. The British monarchy is very complex, subtle, weird, and embedded across society because of that evolution, and in response to the horror of the Civil War.

The UK has avoided falling to foreign or home-grown dictators. It regularly fires the most powerful members of society from the highest political office and peacefully transfers power to new people. It is constantly writhing, twisting, and changing in response to pressures from all sides of society, and from the world around it. British democracy regularly fails, being humiliated by political scandals, corruption, and perversions of power but so far it has always managed to correct itself. It is far from perfect, but looking at the rapid decline of liberal democracy around the world, and even at the decline seen in the UK over recent years, it seems to muddle through.

In that respect, I argue that the Queen, and the monarchy, have been a powerful force both in driving positive change, and in preserving a democratic status quo. In this case, it is both due to the British concept of the monarchy and how it blocks dangerous people from grabbing power, but also to the person of Queen Elizabeth herself.

At 96, the Queen still turns up to work with a smile. She leads by example, as she did with huge gravitas during the pandemic, in particular sitting in isolation at her husband’s funeral in front of the world’s television cameras. She epitomises the concept of duty in an era when duty is on the wane. And over 75 years of dramatic changes, booms, crises, wars, economic turmoil, and social change she has represented a constant in a way nobody else in society is remotely equipped to do. Up to a third of British people have met or seen the Queen at some point in their lives, often across multiple generations. That stable presence is reassuring in unstable times.

Every prime minister since Churchill has sat in an audience with the Queen weekly, in private, to share their thoughts on what is happening in the country, and to seek her council (whether they want it or not). She is the only individual in the country who has been privy to everything that has happened for the last 75 years and is therefore a repository of political knowledge that supports the relatively fly-by-night political leaders.

Her position means she has nothing to gain or lose. She is the Queen; she doesn’t have to worry about elections, and doesn’t have a side job or a future career to think about. We give her palaces and wealth precisely so she can focus on being the Queen and not be distracted by things like money, status, or retirement.

In effect, the country has an ongoing deal with the Windsor family. They sit as figureheads and block the top position in the hierarchy from anyone who has an ambition to take it — and they also open schools, visit hospitals, and put on a great show for visiting dignitaries, however unpleasant they may be. In return we let them live in our palaces, wear our diamond crowns, and ride in our carriages (none of which they actually own, don’t forget).

The alternatives are either an elected head of state who is low-key (I doubt you would recognise the president of Germany or Ireland in the street), or a head of state with power, where you run the risk of people like Trump or Putin.

The system of monarchy in the UK is quirky, anachronistic, eccentric, and often just mad. Some people complain about the cost of the monarchy. Others point to the large income they bring from tourism and foreign relations. As I see it, things are even simpler. We ask the monarch to give up any freedom over her future in order to protect our democracy and we repay her with a relatively comfy life. Seems like a very good deal to me.