Is the Monarchy Perfect?, by Lord Altrincham and Others

[p033] Is The Monarchy Perfect? by Lord Altrincham and Others (John Calder, 12s. 6d.) FROM the sustained campaign of press vituperation, anony- mous letters, lurid threats and vicious personal abuse to which they were subjected you might have supposed Lord Altrincham and Malcolm Muggeridge had been caught trying to plant an atom bomb in the cellars of Buckingham Palace. What they had actually done—very nearly as mischievous, some thought—was to venture into print with a few critical observations on the current state of the monarchy. The articles they wrote are reprinted in this volume together with some notes on the subsequent rumpus and some make- weight essays by other hands. Both Altrincham and Muggeridge, it will be remembered, let some welcome fresh air into a notoriously stuffy subject. Altrincham offered some candid strictures on the Queen’s mode of speaking; Muggeridge quoted criticisms: of her style of dressing. Both stressed the vacuity of “her tweedy court circle and the almost comic ineptitude of some of her advisers. The fact that the royal circle is drawn exclusively from among one small class of wealthy idlers neither surprises nor particularly worries a socialist. If you have an hier- archical social system with working people at the bottom and tweedy nitwits at the top it is inevitable that the court, being at the top, shall consist of tweedy nitwits. Once get rid of this class structure, as socialists mean to do, and courts and courtiers are no longer a problem. Altrincham and Muggeridge, however, both feel that the crown has a valid function, which it could perform efficiently and to everyone’s satisfaction if only the Queen were more effectively advised and her social circle included a few non-tweedy types. This is surely an illusion. The whole point of royalty, in the first place, is that it represents a sort of fairy-tale life as lived by the best people on a splendid scale unimaginable to lowly mortals, where nobody works or is bothered by the mundane trials of everyday existence. The thrill of shaking hands with royalty, for those to whom it is a thrill, is that one is touching briefly a dream made real. Thus faith is fortified in everyday life as a laying on of hands may fortify it in church. Having the Queen trotting round shaking hands accompanied by a miner or a shop assistant would destroy the illusion. It is necessary for those around the Queen to be fairy-tale folk, out of this world. ” On the other hand, if you take an honest engine-driver, dress him up in top hat and tails, give him a title and money to waste and turn him loose in court circles you have not got a democratic element who is going to help make the court a cross-section of national life. You have simply got another wealthy idler. If you don’t give him money to waste and he has to earn his living, he’ll be too busy on the railway to put in much time at Ascot or Windsor giving court life the trade union touch. No, like it or not, the Queen is stuck with her tweedy people. In a country where royalty is the apex of a class hierarchy, she must inevitably dwell among the best people at the top, where the air is thin and the intellectual resources few. P.G. Radiation Hazards