Monarchy is a shared national delusion (Matthew Lloyd/Getty Images)
It is perhaps not seemly to dwell on the failures of Elizabeth II during the Platinum Jubilee, but they are here, flotsam around the ship. Monarchy is a shared national delusion: that we are special because we have a witch-goddess of ancient lineage and the French have Emmanuel Macron.
When has she come closest to peril? That’s easy, in your royal pub quiz: the death of Princess Diana. But why did she come so close? Because the royal family were not emotionally responsive when Diana died? Because they did not lower the flag, or leave the castle to meet their desolate people? Nonsense: this was an act of projection, of guilt buried under the anti-Jubilee of a death.
We understood why the monarchy shook when Diana died: because she died, because she married into a family that is dysfunctional, because we like it that way. Diana was not gilded by her status. She was killed by it. Her marriage was arranged when she needed a love match, and in that brief burst of understanding was our grief. Or it should have been.
Now Tina Brown’s The Palace Papers is here, and it adds detail to the groaning library of royal biography, which is an odd genre prone to be read not with understanding but with glee. Because if you understand you can’t go on with the game. Brown divides the royals into functional and dysfunctional: good and bad. I am more cynical: I divide them into victims and survivors.
The victims pile up with their awful testimony: who survives this family? Not Edward VIII, possibly a Nazi-sympathiser. But he wanted something less suffocating than a crown and married a woman who gave him less. The Queen Mother responded to his gift by telling people Mrs Simpson was a prostitute and denying her the title HRH. She was a sore winner but for some people nothing is ever enough. Brown speaks the party line here. The family, “always believed that it was the excess public attention that had promoted Edward’s delusion of outsize significance and the coddling of dangerous emotional needs”.
There is Margaret, denied the man she loved, and by her sister, who then deceived herself about the cause of Margaret’s depression: because the Queen is a survivor. “Once,” writes Brown, “when one of Margaret’s inner circle called her to say her sister was threatening to throw herself out of the bedroom window the Queen replied, ‘Carry on with your house party. Her bedroom is on the ground floor’”. That’s a cold response to suicidal ideation. Margaret married a monster on the rebound and filled herself with fags, Famous Grouse, and nothing. When it was suggested to the Queen that a therapist might help her sister, the Queen replied, “Perhaps when she’s better we could consider that”. “It was one of her lifelong dreams to ride on a bus,” writes Brown sadly of Margaret, but I doubt it would have saved her, even if she had become a conductress. Margaret’s desire to be cremated at Slough was her personal elegy, made with apt disgust.
