06.11.2025
Was always time to talk about a republic
Scandal alone is not enough to do away with the House of Windsor. We need determined political activity to put an end to the monarchy and establish the democratic republic, argues Paul Demarty
A weekly publication schedule is always a hostage to fortune, and mere hours after my last article on the travails of the British royal family went to press,1 Buckingham Palace finally creaked into action concerning the erstwhile Prince Andrew.
Readers will be aware that, as of this time of writing, this man is formally stripped of his old titles. His lease on the Royal Lodge - a vast mansion in the grounds of Windsor Castle - is summarily terminated. This is all accomplished on the authority of the king and the heir to the throne. He remains, bizarrely, eighth in the line of succession, since excising him would require primary legislation. But, unless a meteor strikes Windsor at the wrong moment, that is unlikely to make much difference in practice.
He is not completely out on his ear, however. He is to be found accommodation on yet another royal estate, Sandringham. He is to receive a lump sum payoff, according to The Guardian, in the six-figure range, to cover moving expenses. (What are they doing for that kind of money? Flying his crusty boxers over on a magic carpet?) To follow is an annuity, “which is designed to prevent him overspending in his new life as a commoner” - a bizarre formulation ‘The Graun’ does not deign to explain2. Presumably it is some kind of insurance against him simply being hoovered up as an asset by some foreign government. We shall see if this sum is enough to keep this preposterously venal man in the manner to which he is accustomed.
Clean-up
We are, in short, in the clean-up stage of the Prince Andrew affair - although part of the clean-up is the excision of the P-word altogether. Newspapers from The Guardian to the Daily Mail have already replaced the ‘Prince Andrew’ tags on their websites with ‘Andrew Mountbatten Windsor’ - a change also reflected in Andrew’s Wikipedia page (this was the pre-existing house style in this paper, we do not hesitate to gloat).
Those inclined to deceive themselves congratulate Charles and William for acting ‘decisively’, even though this scandal has been bubbling for almost 15 years, and swoon at the assertion that “Their Majesties wish to make clear that their thoughts and utmost sympathies have been, and will remain with, the victims and survivors of any and all forms of abuse”. Such is the British monarchy in the modern age: prop up the prodigal son with millions of pounds over decades of scandal and, when it finally becomes too much to bear, issue a statement in vacuous HR-department jargon.
Of course, it may be in fact the case that these two men were, in fact, far more concerned about the allegations that kept washing up at the door of the Royal Lodge than was apparent in their actions heretofore. It is generally accepted that, in the worst days of Andrew’s scandal - his initial association with Jeffrey Epstein at the time of the latter’s imprisonment for child sex trafficking, and his calamitous 2019 interview with Emily Maitlis on BBC’s ‘Newsnight’ - he was protected largely by his doting mother, the late Elizabeth. She has been dead for three years, during which time the king and crown prince - we are given to understand by the royal lobby - have become increasingly uneasy at their association with Andrew.
The problem for them is that it is clearly the institution that has protected Andrew, even as his position became completely untenable. They are now in charge of it, and their dilatory practice in dealing with this scandal is at issue. The same problem arises as in any potential cover-up: what did they know, and when? They certainly cannot have had any more faith in Andrew’s 2019 excuses than the rest of us.
Where does this leave the Firm? It is certainly a good moment for us republicans to hawk our wares. At issue is not merely the peccadilloes of one man - really, by the historic standards of the kings, queens and princes of England, quite mild ones. It is the impunity Andrew enjoyed for years, the way scrutiny of his financial affairs has been frustrated by the united front of the British state, never mind the small matter of his association with Epstein.
This is a weak point in the very idea of monarchy, which amounts to nothing more than the idea that society gets along better if the centre of sovereignty is something insulated from the cut and thrust of day-to-day political life. To have a king just is to have a king who can protect his family from the consequences of its actions by mere acts of fiat. That is why one has a king instead of just a prime minister.
Yet ours is a constitutional monarchy, where the power of the king is largely exercised through an oligarchic parliament, which is not robustly insulated from popular opinion (though for our part we do not call this arrangement ‘democracy’). So far as things are trucking along smoothly at the palace, the government of the day - and above all the permanent institutions of the coercive and bureaucratic state - enjoys all the benefits of royal impunity. Royal scandals, among their many effects, can disclose this all too cosy arrangement.
Robust institution
Having said that, we should not overstate the danger presently faced by the monarchy. There is a tendency, among liberals of republican persuasion, to imagine that this or that scandal will somehow cause the monarchy to wink out of existence. After the death of Diana Spencer in 1997, the standard form of this idea was that Elizabeth should be the last of them, and the country would simply not tolerate Charles on the throne. Now the idea has taken hold that Charles should be the last of them. Thus Will Lloyd concludes a not-uninteresting piece in the New Statesman, these days effectively the house journal of Blue Labour:
William should stop the rot and acknowledge the truth when his father dies. The mystique is gone. Charles III should be the last King of England. He is the last Windsor who really believes in any of the hocus-pocus of his house. William doubts that God exists. How can he go through with a coronation in Westminster Abbey without acknowledging that God has put him there, on the throne? Abolition would be contested and vicious. Or, the monarchy could end very beautifully.3
This is a rather thin thread of hope to cling to. The monarchy, after all, survived Wallis Simpson and Henri Paul, and for that matter William IV’s many mistresses. In the end, it survived Oliver Cromwell. It is a robust institution, for all it seems entirely directionless at present. Lloyd notes acerbically the lack of interest in reading on the part of William, the fact that, when he accedes to the throne, he will be the first in more than a century not to have read Bagehot on the British constitution. By the same token, however, he need not feel any great existential dread, not understanding his predicament. How can he go through a Westminster Abbey coronation as an agnostic? We reply with Napoleon Bonaparte: Paris is worth a mass.
Examples could be adduced from further afield. There are many kings and queens in northern Europe, mostly living quiet lives and wheeling themselves out for ceremonial occasions. Juan Carlos of Spain abdicated in 2014, after a scandal over an elephant hunt in Botswana; but there is still a king of Spain. There is, indeed, still a king of Belgium, despite the numerous controversies of the life of Leopold II - from genocidal exploitation of the Congo (long his personal fiefdom) to underage sex scandals of a distinctly Mountbatten-Windsor flavour.
The job of work done by the institution in modern pseudo-democratic capitalist societies is, in part, to promote the idea of a space above politics - a vantage point from which the interests of the politicians seem trivial and self-interested. It is thus a natural support for the permanent parts of the state - the bureaucracy and army. Our armed forces, after all, swear their loyalty not to parliament or even the country, but to the crown. Lloyd correctly intuits this, calling the ideology “Windsorism”, and equally correctly replies that “politics is not a squalid exercise in ‘division’. We need more politics, not less.”
Yet he is wrong in expecting that the current wave of anti-systemic politics represents a unique danger to this ideology. The anti-system people, after all, react precisely against the evident ‘squalidity’ of actually existing politics today; this might lead them to more radical monarchism, as it did during the expenses scandal of 2009, when there were frequent calls for the queen to dissolve parliament. Anti-systemic politics - or populism, if you prefer - is a style, or perhaps even a source of inchoate energy, rather than a programme. Left at that level, it becomes attached to a particular programme by cathexis rather than rational argument, which, of course, leaves it at the mercy of the paid persuaders of the bourgeois media.
No anachronism
We can put this another way by saying that it is fruitless for opponents of the monarchy to reject it on the basis that it is an anachronism - a strange fetter to be cast off on the way to the future. It is a more or less well-functioning institution that plays an indispensable role in the statecraft of many countries; indeed, arguably, the republics of France and the United States are able to continue only because their presidents increasingly approximate to monarchs anyway (consider the recent protests in the US - ‘no kings’, indeed). It is absolutely and irreducibly of our time, as proper to us as it was to the peasants of the 1300s, and to suppose we have outgrown it is a delusion.
What would it mean to outgrow it for real? It would mean creating a mass culture of truly substantive and democratic republicanism. The masses so convinced would understand that constitutional monarchy, far from being an anachronism, effectively expresses the universal presence of domination throughout bourgeois society. At one time, kings - according to the prevailing theory - found their place in a great chain of being linking illiterate peasants to the orders of angels and God himself. So it is today, really, except the peasants have become workers and petty bourgeois, the squires are supplanted by managers, and God by capital.
Jeremy Corbyn
To really grasp monarchy as an affront to democratic life is inescapably to denounce the tyranny of the boss over the factory floor, of the private equity magnate over innumerable factories he sees as mere cost centres, of the world’s governments over their petty fiefdoms. The substantive alternative to such tyranny is not a modern liberal-capitalist society shorn of supposed ‘feudal relics’, but the dismissal of all such tyrants great and small, and with it the establishment of democratic control of all social life - in a word, socialism.
The obverse is also true. Those, such as Jeremy Corbyn, who shrink from addressing the question of the monarchy - or do so only at opportune moments like the current fiasco - are unequal to the task they set themselves (Your Party’s Political Statement does not even mention the monarchy). Our goal is not merely an alternative set of election pledges, but a wholly different structure of politics. We are against good kings as much as bad princes, and preparing the mass of society for authentic collective self-government means saying so loudly and continuously.