Isla Campbell on the engagements that never reach the diary, the language of the polite refusal, and the constitutional weight of a non-appearance
Buckingham Palace receives, in the course of any given year, substantially more invitations than the senior royals can, between them, accept. Building on my earlier dispatches at Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat, I want, today, to write about the engagements that do not happen, the language in which the Palace declines them, and the quiet political weight of a royal non-appearance.
The Volume Problem
The Royal Household receives, by my best estimate, somewhere in the region of several thousand engagement invitations each year. The senior royals can, between them, undertake substantially fewer engagements than that. The arithmetic is, in this sense, against the institution: there will always be, in any given year, substantially more invitations than there are royal hours in which to fulfil them. According to The Evening Standard, recent reporting on the modern royal calendar has documented that the senior working royals undertake, between them, substantially over two thousand engagements each year, which is, in human terms, an extraordinary workload but which still leaves substantial portions of the invitation pile unfilled.
The unfilled invitations are not, in the substantial majority of cases, refused on substantive grounds. They are refused on capacity grounds. The Palace, in declining, will use one of a small set of polite formulae, which include ‘unable to fit into the diary at this time,’ ‘unfortunately not possible on this occasion,’ and ‘with regret.’ These formulae are, in the trade, understood as procedural rather than substantive: the Palace is not saying anything about the inviting organisation; the Palace is, simply, saying that the calendar is full.
The Substantive Decline
There are, however, also engagements that the Palace declines on substantive grounds. These are substantially rarer, and they substantially do not appear in the public record. The substantive decline is the decline that the Palace makes because, in the institutional view, the engagement would create political difficulty. The institutional view is, in turn, formed by a substantial set of internal advisers whose entire job is to think about the political implications of royal appearances.
The substantive decline might, for example, apply to an event hosted by an organisation that is, at the time of the invitation, the subject of a substantial political controversy. It might apply to an event whose participation by the royal would, in the institutional view, create the appearance of royal endorsement of one side of a contested public debate. It might apply, in rarer cases, to an event whose other participants are, in the institutional view, individuals with whom the royal should not, for various reasons, be photographed.
The Political Neutrality Question
The substantive decline is, structurally, the principal mechanism by which the modern monarchy maintains its political neutrality. The monarchy is, by long-standing constitutional convention, supposed to remain above the substantial day-to-day politics of the country. The maintenance of this position requires, in practice, a substantial set of operational decisions about which events the royal does or does not attend.
According to The Guardian, recent reporting on the politics of the modern monarchy has documented the substantial care with which the Royal Household manages this question. The Household, in effect, runs a continuous risk-assessment process across the engagement diary, identifying invitations whose acceptance might, in the institutional view, compromise the political neutrality position.
The Language
The language of the substantive decline is, dear reader, indistinguishable from the language of the procedural decline. The Palace does not, when declining substantively, say so. The Palace says, in effect, that the calendar is full, and the inviting organisation is, in most cases, left to draw its own conclusions about whether the calendar was, in fact, full.
This is, structurally, a feature rather than a bug. The Palace’s ability to decline substantively without saying so is what allows the political-neutrality position to be maintained without the Palace having to engage publicly in the substantive politics. If the Palace had to publicly explain why it had declined a particular invitation, it would, in effect, have to publicly engage with the underlying controversy. By declining without explanation, the Palace preserves both its position and its silence.
The Recent History
I have written before, in my previous columns on royal protocol, about how the substantive-decline mechanism has, in recent years, come under substantially more strain than it had in the late Queen’s reign. The substantial expansion of contested public debates, particularly debates that touch on identity, history, and the inheritance of empire, has produced a substantial expansion in the number of invitations that, on examination, present substantive concerns.
The institutional response, as far as I can discern, has been to substantially expand the institutional risk-assessment process. The Household now runs, in effect, a substantially larger pre-screening operation than it did under the late Queen, in which a substantially larger team of advisers, considers a substantially larger volume of invitations, against a substantially more complex set of political considerations.
The Question This Raises
The expansion of the pre-screening operation is, structurally, an attempt to preserve a constitutional position that was, in important respects, designed for a smaller and less politically-contested public sphere. The position is, in my view, becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. The pre-screening operation, as it expands, becomes itself a potential subject of political controversy: the question of who is on the screening team, and what their criteria are, and whether they reflect the views of the country as a whole, becomes, in itself, a political question.
I do not, dear reader, know how this resolves. I suspect that the next two decades will see, in the British monarchy, a substantial reckoning with the question of how political neutrality can be maintained in a public sphere that is, in important respects, no longer willing to accept the silent decline as a sufficient answer. The form that reckoning takes is, in my view, one of the most important questions facing the institution, and it is, in many respects, a question that the institution itself is not yet prepared to answer in public.
For more of my dispatches on the institutional life of the modern monarchy, you can find me at my page on The London Prat.
For satirical takes on royal-protocol-as-political-question, see Private Eye.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
