BOOKS

This sceptred isle

Ferdinand Mount

THE ENCHANTED GLASS: BRITAIN AND ITS MONARCHY by Tom Nairn Radius (Century Hutchinson), f25, pp. 402

In this year's Birthday Honours list, there was, so far as I could see, no mention of Tom Nairn. I had not expected anything as flashy as a knighthood, but some small- er, more personal token of the Sovereign's appreciation might have been appropriate, an MVO perhaps. For Mr Nairn's services to the monarchy are not to be sneezed at and, in their way, may prove as monumental and enduring as the Paps of his native Fife. The Enchanted Glass is, I think, the first sustained examination of the monarchy in modern times which could be dignified by the word 'intellectual', as opposed to Willie Hamilton's knockabout stuff.

It is also the first hostile assault of any weight since the brief skirmishes of the 1870s when Sir Charle's Dilke and Joe Chamberlain took advantage of the un- popularity of the Widow of Windsor to speak up for Republicanism, 'the form of government to which the nations of Europe are surely and not very slowly tending', according to Chamberlain (both men hurriedly retreated in the face of public fury, bleating that they had not really meant it quite like that). The upshot this time is equally predictable. After 400 pages of quasi-Marxist polemic, the monarchy appears infinitely more desir- able. One returns with zest renewed to the great questions of the day: Should Prince Charles Give Up Polo? and Will Princess Anne Marry Sir Laurens Van Der Post? Mr Nairn has always been the most entertaining writer on the New, or Newish Left, partly because his bonnet is so bee-loud. As well as being a republican, he is a Marxist of sorts, a Scot, a nationalist, an enthusiast for European unity and for modernisation. He is also liable to bouts of exasperation and impatience with any of these ill-assorted causes. This buzzing to and fro does make The Enchanted Glass exhausting reading at times — it is any- thing but a systematic or coherent book but one comes away from it having seen a few stings inflicted on the body politic but also having been enlivened and provoked into thinking about Crown and State and Nation and the relationship between them, topics normally left in the lumber-room.

Mr Nairn tries to make a virtue of his disorganised approach by claiming that the subject is too hard to get at by ordinary methods or, to use Professor Ernest Gell- ner's metaphor about the problems of writing about nationalism, 'by simply drawing on the cards already available in the language pack that is in use'. Nairn claims we can only loosen our habits of thought about the monarchy and introduce a different perspective by 'a kind of side- ways or crab-like insinuation'.

This is Marxy blether. Whatever is worth saying on this as on most subjects can be stated in plain English, and Mr Nairn is at his best when he does just that. The first thing he rightly insists on is the serious importance of the monarchy. Where Mal- colm Muggeridge dismissed it as an over- blown, trivial and sentimental fantasy which only distracted us from reality, and John Grigg warned us that the court's archaism and snobbery threatened' the future of the whole system, Nairn empha- sises the monarchy's strength and its sig- nificance: 'Contrary to many appearances, the United Kingdom monarchy is not decorative icing on the socio-political cake. It is an important ingredient of the whole mixture'.

A phenomenon which invades the dreams of intellectuals, which makes re- publicans wobble at the knees in its pres- ence, which transports supposedly phlegmatic and rational persons into faery realms cannot be dismissed as merely 'a harmless bit of fun' to pull in the tourists or, more sourly, as 'irrelevant flummery'. Nairn rightly traces this shallow and mis- leading view back to Bagehot's picture of Britain as 'a disguised republic' in which the dignified parts of the constitution concealed the way the efficient part really governed us. We know, even as we purse our lips at the latest manifestation of Fergie-mania, that the thing goes deeper than that. Nor is it a confidence trick upon the gullible masses.

No amount of fulmination about the immor- tality and cost of the system can hide a basic truth: it is an expression of mass conserva- tism. . . People enjoy the monarchical twad- dle, and show very little sign of being robotised or 'brain-washed'.

Now that Queen Anne is dead, people no longer queue to be touched for the Evil, but still 'somehow visitation and touch do seem to bind society's fabric reassuringly together. They refurbish certain cohesive elements, a common identity.' Sir Arthur Bryant is alive and well and writing for the New Left Review.

True, the monarchy itself has to be deliberately refurbished and propped up from time to time. How quickly the proppers-up seized on the news of the Prince of Wales's near-fatal illness in 1871 (`he is no better; he is much the same'). The Duke of Cambridge exulted at the news of the seemingly miraculous recov- ery: 'The Republicans say their chances are up — Thank God for this! Heaven has sent this dispensation to save us'. Gladstone hurried down to Windsor to persuade the still reclusive Queen to permit the Thanks- giving to be as spectacular as possible:

What we should look to [he noted] was not merely meeting [republicanism] by a more powerful display of opposite opinion, but to getting rid of it altogether, for it could never be satisfactory that there should exist even a fraction of the nation republican in its views.

At all the great crisis points in the monarchy's history — the Restoration, the exclusion of the Stuarts, the abdication of Edward VIII — one can discern the men of business desperately trying to put the show back on the road: Clarendon, Somers, Baldwin, all cajoling, fudging, manipulat- ing, rewriting the rules. Far from the dignified parts being immensely ancient and the efficient parts subject to con- tinuous modernisation, as Bagehot thought, Nairn argues that the truth is more the other way round. The dynastic and ceremonial aspects of the system hav- ing constantly to be repaired and re- vamped, while the structure of government by the Crown in Parliament remains essen- tially frozen in its 1688 shape.

That is why, Nairn claims, the United Kingdom remains a fictitious, archaic country with no true sense of nationhood, hopelessly complacent and comatose. Being still subjects, we have no under- standing of popular sovereignty and are stuck in a land of illusions reminiscent of Kakania — the name Robert Musil uses for the Austro-Hungarian Empire in A Man Without Qualities (from the kaiserlich-und- koniglich attached to all official pro- nouncements).

In our own `Ukania,' Scotland plays the role of Hungary, enjoying only a tepid loyalty to the Crown and even less to the Parliament at Westminster. The only genuine nationalism in operation is English nationalism, but it is a love that dare not speak its name, since we all have to pretend to be Britishers or, more bogus still, Ukanians. Why cannot we have a `quiet republic' like they have on the Continent now, or a cluster of such repub- lics? Perhaps one day, Nairn concludes without sounding very confident about it, within a European federation of some kind, we shall shake off our royal shackles.

But because he is most of the time so awkwardly honest, he himself undermines even this half-hearted aspiration. For he concedes that 'our own monarchic version of national identity. . . flourishes best in a climate where ethnic nationality is damned or at least sneered at.' But is not a climate where ethnic nationality is not sneered at usually described as 'racist'? If monarchy really does restrain the nastiest impulses of the popular will, is that not a reason for clinging on to monarchy with all its faults? Nairn sportingly reminds us of the much quoted remark in The Magic of Monarchy, the little book Kingsley Martin wrote after the Abdication: 'The advantages of consti- tutional monarchy are. . . more obvious in the post-war than in the pre-war era. If we drop the trappings of monarchy in the gutter, Germany has taught us that some guttersnipe (or house-painter with a mis- sion) may pick them up.' In The Enchanted Glass, too, we are told that 'the Royal way of doing things may have its drawbacks, but was (at least until Thatcherism got a grip) more essentially civilised than anyone else's'.

Even if monarchaism is now archaic, it cannot be very archaic, for it is only since the second world war that these enviable quiet republics have managed to establish themselves. Moreover, is not the archaism (or the antiquity, if you prefer a less Pejorative word) of the essence? Was it not because the Italian monarchy was so re- cently established that it lacked the author- ity to put a brake on Mussolini, until he was finally on the skids? The new repub- lics, for their part, did not come into existence after a couple of White Papers and a civilised debate in parliament. They were set up in the ruins by anguished Peoples whose previous rulers had Poisoned themselves or been strung up by their heels.

And what about the older republics, Switzerland, for example, or the United States (scarcely mentioned by Mr Nairn)? Are they not open democracies of the very type we are urged to imitate, and are not they also 'frozen' in forms dictated by the date of their founding? In fact, we could argue that all successful long-lasting states whether monarchic, oligarchic or repub- lican — are similarly frozen in the after- math of some cataclysm (usually a brutal civil or colonial war) which had been so appalling that people said, 'Thank God that's over' and 'Never again'. Nairn i mis- ses the element of popular gratitude in all durable constitutional settlements, a grati- tude which crystallises over the years into reverence.

Besides, if we have been so slow to modernise, has it really been the archaism of the Ukanian monarchy or the sluggish- ness of Ukanian politics that has been holding us back? And is there any neces- sary connection between the two? The Queen and Mrs Thatcher may not love each other but they co-exist. The monar- chy has survived 'the grip of Thatcherism', and vice versa. Towards the end, one notices Nairn qualifying his generalisations on this topic with parenthetic phrases such as 'before 1979' or 'until Mrs Thatcher'. As a socialist, he is duty bound to hate Mrs Thatcher; a moderniser, he seems disposed to agree with her own boast that 'I have changed everything', and to admire her ability to crumble the cake of custom. Anyway, if we look beyond these shores not a thing Mr Nairn does much of — it is hard to see much correlation between republics and modernisation. Is France noticeably more modern than the Nether- lands, or Finland than Sweden?

What Nairn never quite gets hold of is the indifference of legitimacy. Legitimate regimes, whether monarchic or republican, can take in their stride failures of adminis- trations or policies; they see political par- ties and political fads come and go, without being much implicated in their rise or fall. That is why legitimacy is still so much prized and why so much trouble is taken to conserve it. Again, Nairn never quite gets hold of the distinction between fiction and faking. He calls Burke, Scott and Disraeli `master-fakers', as though they were all hoping to fool the crowd. But the whole point of Burke (I am not so sure about Disraeli) is that we are willing and con- scious co-authors of the fiction of continui- ty. We, most of us most of the time anyway, have a clearish idea of what we are about and why. We know that the Queen has to brush her teeth, that the Hanoverians were makeshift imports, that Mrs Thatcher writes the Queen's Speech, and the rest of it.

By eschewing international compari- sons, Nairn also misses another important point: monarchy tends to be a comfortable neighbour. Unlike universal revolutionary creeds, it does not proselytise much, although it may resort to defensive alliances and interventions in times when it feels its own existence threatened by a Napoleon or a Lenin. Legitimacy, being the incrustation of acceptance, is not for instant export. It must (if you will excuse the clubman's trope) be laid down in the purchaser's own cellars; it cannot be matured in bond.

But the age which is its virtue is also its hazard. Unpleasant musty smells and sick- ly tastes creep into the brew. Monarchy of the British sort may be conspicuously liable to be dunked in syrup and give off strange effluvia, because of its antiquity, although the relatively hygienic Danish monarchy claims to be older. But republics with written constitutions may become over- encrusted with sycophancy and capital letters too. People also go weak at the knees when they meet the American Presi- dent, the heir of all those Signers and Framers and Founding Fathers.

Yet we are usually happy to ignore such defects, so long as the arrangements con- tinue to settle beyond argument the crucial questions: how is it to be decided who is to rule? And how are they to be got rid of if they fail? For this purpose, what counts is not the historical authenticity of the claims to authority but whether that authority actually exists and is habitually recognised. Legitimate regimes prosper on enthusiastic expressions of loyalty, but they do not insist on them. What matters is less the size of the crowds along the route than the certainty of the proclamation that Eliza- beth is our undoubted Queen. That being settled, we can move on to discuss every- thing else — Gramsci's concept of hege- mony, the Duchess of York's maternity wear.

By reminding us, intentionally, of how the system really works and, unintentional- ly, of its advantages, Mr Nairn has done us all a bit of good. On second thoughts, a CVO, I think.