Isla Campbell on a brief encounter outside Clarence House, the strange intimacy of modern royalty, and why she cannot decide whether the institution is absurd, necessary, or both
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
I was walking past Clarence House on a Tuesday morning when the King’s car came out. This is the kind of thing that happens in Central London with more frequency than anywhere else in the country, because Central London is where the royals actually live their royal lives, and the royal life involves a great deal of being driven between buildings in cars with slightly better upholstery than other cars. The car stopped briefly at the gate while a police officer spoke to the driver, and in that moment the King — who was sitting in the back seat and appeared to be looking at something on a piece of paper — looked up, made eye contact with me on the pavement, and waved. Not a royal wave, the one with the rotating wrist that has been parodied since approximately 1953. A regular wave. The kind of wave you do to someone you recognise from somewhere but can’t quite place.
I waved back. Obviously. What else do you do? And then the car moved off and I was left standing on the Mall with a wave in my hand and absolutely no idea what to do with it, which is, I think, the correct emotional state in which to approach the question of the British monarchy.
What the Wave Means
The republican argument about the monarchy is that it is an anachronism: inherited privilege dressed up in pageantry, a reminder that Britain’s class system is not a social unfortunate but a constitutional feature, a family occupying publicly funded palaces while ordinary people navigate a housing crisis that the Crown Estate’s land portfolio partly contributes to. These arguments are serious and I think about them seriously.
The monarchist argument is that the institution provides continuity, national identity, and a head of state whose legitimacy is not derived from political contest and who can therefore perform the ceremonial functions of statehood without the partisan associations that elected heads of state carry. It also provides tourist revenue, though how much of British tourism would survive without the monarchy is a question whose answer depends heavily on how you define the baseline. These arguments are also serious.
The wave complicates both. The King is not, when you see him up close, a symbol. He is a seventy-five-year-old man being driven somewhere in a good car, wearing what appeared to be a suit in a slightly unusual shade of blue, who waved at a stranger on the street in the way that people wave at strangers when they accidentally make eye contact and waving seems like the least awkward available option. The institution is enormous and ancient and politically complex. The man is a man. The gap between the two is where my royalism confusion lives.
The Modern Monarchy’s Image Problem
The Royal Family’s communications strategy has evolved dramatically in the past decade, partly in response to the criticism that the institution was opaque, out of touch, and insufficiently transparent about the public funding it receives. The evolution has produced a monarchy that maintains a substantial social media presence, releases carefully curated content showing royals in informal settings, and has made deliberate efforts to associate itself with causes — mental health, environmental sustainability, military veterans — that poll well with younger audiences.
The result is an institution that is simultaneously more accessible than it has ever been and more stage-managed than it has ever been, which are two things that are in tension in interesting ways. The informal photograph of a royal doing a normal thing is never actually informal: it is produced by a communications team, released through controlled channels, and designed to create a specific impression of approachability. The impression is not false exactly, but it is constructed, and the construction is visible if you look for it, which creates its own kind of distance from the authenticity it is meant to project.
The King himself seems genuinely interested in the things he is associated with — organic farming, architectural heritage, the Duchy of Cornwall’s social enterprise portfolio — in ways that do not read as constructed. He has held these interests for long enough that they predate the communications strategy that now packages them. This is reassuring about the man and does not resolve the question of the institution.
Where I Land
I do not think I am a monarchist in the inherited-deference sense. I do not think I am a republican in the principled-institutional sense. I am something more English than either, which is deeply uncertain about the whole arrangement while finding myself unreasonably moved by a wave from a car outside Clarence House on a Tuesday morning. The monarchy persists partly because it is constitutionally entrenched and partly because questions about it tend to produce exactly this kind of ambivalence rather than the conviction that reform requires.
What I know is that the institution deserves scrutiny — of its funding, its land holdings, its political influence, its relationship with decolonisation, its treatment of those who have married into it and found it less hospitable than its public image suggests. And that the wave was, regardless of all of that, genuinely rather charming. Both things are true. Britain, for better and worse, specialises in both things being true simultaneously.
Isla Campbell writes from Central London for The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. Her homepage is at prat.uk/author/isla-campbell.
Also waving at NewsThump | The Daily Mash | Private Eye
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/king-waved-at-me-now-i-have-opinions-about-the-monarchy-isla-campbell/
