Michael Fry: Harry and Meghan have it wrong on 'modernised' monarchy

Much of the book is second-rate, like the man himself, but one part of it may be of some durable value in showing the workings at the highest level of the British state in the midst of its decline and perhaps on the eve of its fold. This is the part dealing with relations between the Prime Minister and the Queen in the particular case of Scotland.

Cameron walks like a gentleman and talks like a gentleman, yet you cannot get more ungentlemanly than cliping on the Queen. That was just what he did in 2014 by revealing her views on indyref1 – which are presumably still her views today, since the issues remain live. Her own advice to the nation at the time, to “think very carefully about the future”, was even then unconvincing as a piece of matronly loving care.

Today it looks like a blatant effort to sway votes. There’s nothing especially surprising in the Queen wanting to keep the UK united. I’m more inclined to blame Cameron for his clumsy manipulations, which continued beyond into the EU referendum and so originated the Brexit disaster.

David Cameron landed the Queen in the spotlight in his autobiography

Even worse, three years after indyref1, Cameron’s book exposes the Queen where he should have protected her. It must be the old Etonian thing again – entitlement, or an in-built sense of the eternal deference between officers and men with special rules for the officers that are nobody else’s business. But not in a decomposing political system, sarge. The rules about the political insulation of the monarchy have become everybody’s business in Brexit Britain, as we saw in the agonies over the prorogation of Parliament. The Queen granted a request from Boris Johnson only to see it quashed as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Your Majesty, that’s not exactly the done thing either.

All this sets up an interesting context for another referendum we may need to hold before long, not in 2020, but perhaps a couple of years after that, when we decide on the constitution of independent Scotland. Up until recently, I would have bet my bottom dollar on a popular vote in favour of continuing the monarchy with the Queen and her successors as heads of state. They form, after all, our oldest human establishment. By tradition, the royal line of Kenneth MacAlpin, uniting the Scots and Picts in 843, actually preceded the existence of Scotland, which was built around it. I confess it is the historian in me that writes these words. In that capacity, I would be loath to lose this link with a long legacy.

Most other people of the same view are driven by more modern motives, drawn from the civic Scotland of the Unionist era – jobs for the boys, letters for the girls, knighthoods for the nitwits, gongs for the grovellers, only publicly visible in everything from the lamppost outside the provost’s house to the Braemar Highland Games. It is an elaborate structure that touches many Scots, perhaps most Scots. That is why the SNP have declined to turn themselves into a republican party. The monarchy, they insist, is a question that can validly be settled only after independence.

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For myself, I think and expect that our future in Scotland will be different and less congenial for royalty. Devolution and Brexit will turn out to have been an ordeal by fire for the old order, altering nearly everything and destroying much, so that whether we like it or not, we need to rebuild on terms fit for the 21st century.

That may seem a daunting prospect and indeed it is still too daunting for half the electorate. But we should remember, we do not start from nothing. In 1707, the Treaty of Union ended national independence, yet it also preserved a lot of the historic Scotland. The Scots people never got a mention in its couple of dozen clauses, yet otherwise, the content could have reminded them that this had been a country of popular sovereignty. The theory was set out in a classic work by George Buchanan, the tutor of King James VI. Buchanan was a fearsome teacher but a horrible man, leaving a pupil who had mastered the doctrine but rejected it. This schizophrenia persists through the rest of Scottish history.

So it is that the concept of popular sovereignty survives in Scots’ hearts and minds even after 300 years of incorporating union with another country that clings to a different constitutional concept. In England the doctrine of the state is a doctrine of absolutism, also known as the Crown-In-Parliament. The latter term describes its history better. Once it was ruled by absolute kings and queens, who could be legally challenged by nobody. Over time, and for their own good, they gradually transferred power to elected representatives of the nation at large. The personality exercising the power changed from singular to collective, yet the power remained as absolute as before.

There is a clear contrast between the two concepts. And an independent Scotland will be fully entitled to enforce its own after it has left the Union of 1707 and can no longer be compelled to accept the alien concept. Will it be a republic, then, if that is what Scots prefer?

I pose the question because at this moment the monarchy appears shakier than it has been for a while – not as much as at the abdication of King Edward VIII or the funeral of Princess Diana, but certainly more than at the various recent jubilees and anniversaries, with their pageantry stage-managed to celebrate Great Britain. Now, with Brexit, a mask has fallen and a cat has been let out of the bag, so that we see what has been going on beneath the facade of pomp and circumstance.

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In fact, the UK, which scarcely a decade ago seemed to be a global model of moderation and stability, has since shown it is no better than any other crisis-ridden state of our age. The Queen offers no defence against that – she is a victim of it, the catspaw of Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings. What could she say even to Jeremy Corbyn or Nigel Farage? “Think very carefully about the future”?

I wonder if the future King Charles III, growing all humble and twinkly in his dotage, can be any better. Do William and Kate, dutiful but dull, promise a modernised monarchy? I think the truth of the matter is actually to be found in Harry and Meghan, desperate to give us that modernised monarchy, according to the woefully mismanaged media campaign they have been conducting. They put out the politically correct message that they love the planet, especially its African bit, and at the same time expect to control that message even after they have sent it soaring into the public domain. Then they are upset when they can’t.

Here are a couple of 30-somethings who just do not understand the world they live in, least of all the world of monarchy. The monarchy as it has evolved cannot do things any other way, because the state it represents cannot. Both, in other words, are impossible to reform.

Regular readers will feel no surprise to learn that I have always counted myself a monarchist – more on historical grounds, as mentioned above, than as a matter of political principle. But Brexit has made me think twice, and the future of Scotland could be about to make me change my mind.