Taking liberties

The royal wedding will bolster the monarchy’s popularity once again. But after the bunting is put away, the powers of the institution still need a thorough examination

Prince Charles: the presumptive heir to the throne.

One of the very first things Eric Pickles did on his arrival at Eland House, the headquarters of the department for communities and local government, was not to draw up a list of charities he wanted to drive out of business. No, it was to insist that pictures of Her Majesty the Queen were affixed to the office walls. As an ardent royalist, he views himself as a minister of the crown, serving in a cabinet which is, in effect, a sub-committee of the Queen’s privy council.

He’s not alone. The presence of the crown hangs heavily over those who nominally serve it: government ministers, the civil service, soldiers, sailors and airmen, the police, and, of course, scouts and guides – the youth paramilitary wings of the British state. You don’t have to be a professor of constitutional law to spot the missing player in all this: the people. Many of the state’s leading actors, from permanent secretaries to council chief executives, look upwards to the Queen, not downwards to the people. If they forget to do so, the dangling of knighthoods and honours snaps them back into line.

This is not because the British are particularly deferential or subservient. It is purely a product of our constitutional history. Britain, having existed in some form or other for a thousand years, has never been invaded, conquered, or undergone a revolution which permanently changed the constitution.

This is the official version, of course. In fact, we went through a bloody revolution in the English civil war, and became a republic between 1649 and 1653. In 1688, we were invaded by the Dutch under William of Orange, who stole the crown from James II. The constitutional crisis in 1936 meant that one king was swapped for another (the one with the stutter in that film), so that the supposedly unbroken line stretching back to King Alfred has more twists and turns than a ride at Alton Towers. For Prince Charles to claim to be descended from William the Conquerer is technically true, in the same way that most of us can claim to be descended from John Milton, Wat Tyler or anyone else whose genes are sloshing about in the pool.

For constitutional change to be effective, it must come from the people. In Scotland during the 1980s and 1990s, the constitutional convention drew together the Labour party, Liberal Democrats, TUC, Church of Scotland, and hundreds of thousands of citizens to demand a Scottish parliament. Only the Conservative party and the ‘tartan Tories’ in the Scottish National party refused to take part. It was popular, effective, and ultimately successful. A bit like the Yes to AV campaign, but in reverse.

There are two barriers to reform. One is the popularity of the royal family itself. A royal wedding every few years keeps the crowds entertained. The second is the complexity and obscurity of the monarchical influence on our affairs. Mere mention of the royal prerogative sends most people off to sleep. In The Law and the Constitution, published in 1885, AV Dicey defined the royal prerogative as ‘the residue of the discretionary or arbitrary authority which at any given time is left in the hands of the crown’. The problem is that these powers are today mostly exercised by prime ministers and ministers, without reference to parliament. A Ministry of Justice review in the dog days of the Labour government fizzled into nothing.

In recent years we have seen a major chunk of the royal prerogative undermined, with Tony Blair, and now David Cameron, only taking Britain to war after asking parliament first. Cameron’s establishment of a fixed-term parliament is another bite out of the royal prerogative. It should be more than a one-off.

There’s a rather good example of how to reform a monarchy without chopping any heads off, and that’s Sweden. There, in 1974, the Instrument of Government codified Sweden’s parliamentary democracy, making the Swedish monarchy subservient to the democratic constitution. Many of the king’s powers were transferred to the speaker of the parliament and the privy council was abolished. Bills passed in the parliament do not require royal assent. As is now being considered here, the Swedes also changed the rules for succession to equal primogeniture, allowing princesses equal right to princes to succeed to the throne. When King Carl Gustaf dies, his daughter Princess Victoria will become Queen of Sweden, not her younger brother Prince Carl Philip.

Such a constitutional settlement could easily be imported to Britain. The perfect occasion is the succession of Charles III. His first move on becoming king should be to establish a constitutional convention on the Scottish model, with the aim of giving his powers away, and placing the monarchy on a constitutional footing, like his bicycling European cousins. Were Charles to do so, his short reign would be a beacon of enlightened modernity, studied for centuries to come, and not be remembered for all the weird stuff about homeopathy.

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