The People's Queen: But not the intelligentsia's. Who will win?

The monarchy is Britain's peculiar institution, at least in the sense that it is headed for abolition, though more by attrition than by civil war. This does not mean that it is unpopular, far from it: The Queen's Golden Jubilee was celebrated throughout the land by millions. The Queen was sincerely cheered wherever she went. The crowds at Buckingham Palace were immense, and foreigners continue to express a strange fascination with the royal soap opera.

But in a supposedly democratic age, mere popularity will not save an institution, for it is not the people who count: It is the new clerisy, that is to say the journalists and public intellectuals. They are to institutions such as the monarchy what white ants are to wooden buildings. And in Britain, the journalists and public intellectuals who count have turned decisively against the monarchy.

On the day of the Golden Jubilee, the Guardian, the Pravda both of Britain's liberal elite and of the foot-soldiers who have long marched through the institutions, issued a facsimile of its edition on the day of the coronation of the Queen in 1953. The contrast between its attitude to the Queen and the monarchy in 1953 and half a century later could hardly be greater. Fifty years ago, it was unquestioningly respectful and fulsomely loyal; now it is carping, querulous, embittered, mocking, and resentful. The same is true of its Sunday sister publication, the Observer. No edition is complete without some reference to the alleged expense of the monarchy, its tax privileges, its lack of justification from philosophical first principles, the bad behavior of some royalty. Even the new gallery in which part of the royal collection of art -- the finest private collection in the world by far -- is displayed to the public has been criticized because wood from tropical rain forests was used in its construction, with the implication that the monarchy is a grave threat to the environment and responsible for global warming. Not very long ago, the Guardian ran an article envisaging the possible uses of Buckingham Palace once the royal family had been successfully evicted, and suggested a casino covered in neon lighting. If we can't get rid of the monarchy just yet, pleaded one columnist in the Observer, let's at least cut it down to size. This, of course, is a plea that will appeal to every malcontent with a university degree who believes that the System has failed to recognize his imperishable genius. The size to which the monarchy must be cut down is my size, the size of Me.

It goes without saying that the new-found hatred of the monarchy has nothing to do with anything it actually inflicts upon the population. The days of the off-with-his-head type of monarchy are so long gone that they are not even a vague or distant memory. The average citizen is a thousand million times more likely to be persecuted by the tax inspector (working at the behest of the democratic government that has arrogated unto itself an infinity of functions that must be paid for by taxation), or by burglars, muggers, and car thieves, than by any member of the royal family. The whole cost of the royal family to the country would not keep British welfare dependents and their offspring in fast food or video films for a single hour. The cause of the anti-monarchist upsurge is not to be sought in the practical harm the monarchy does.

It is not as if our society is lacking in proper targets for the reforming impulse. In the fifty years of Queen Elizabeth's reign, Britain has gone from being the least to the most crime-ridden country in the Western world. Despite a fourfold real increase in expenditure on education during her reign, Britain's population is by far the worst educated and most culturally debased of any industrialized country. Thanks to the National Health Service, Britain is the most unpleasant of the developed countries in which to fall ill. We have more teenage pregnancy, and our youth consume more drugs and alcohol, than anywhere else in the world; there is more antisocial disorder in our streets than in any other civilized country. Even the collection of trash and the cleaning of the streets (which are by far the dirtiest in Europe) is beyond the capabilities of modern British administration.

But none of this attracts the reforming zeal or passion of the liberal intelligentsia like the need to abolish the monarchy. The reason is clear: The problems are largely the result of the liberal nostrums hitherto applied, but the responsibility for them cannot be acknowledged. Furthermore, the problems are now so intractable that it would take real moral courage and integrity to tackle them, precisely the qualities our intelligentsia lacks. And since the entire raison d'etre of that intelligentsia, and the source of its fathomless self- importance, is the need for change, for "progress," it must turn its attention elsewhere.

So the intelligentsia attacks the monarchy with a pincer movement. On the one hand it demands that it justify itself by being modern and popular: It must no longer hold itself aloof from the population, but partake of its tastes, however low they may be. For example, the Queen can be bullied into having a rock concert on her grounds, as she did for the Golden Jubilee. On the other hand, if members of the royal family show any human weakness, have affairs, lose their temper, or lack intelligence and taste (as many of them do), they are attacked as having feet of clay, for being just like us, for not being special, and therefore for being undeserving of their position and privileges. The demands that the royal family be exactly like us and yet not like us are contradictory and cannot both be fulfilled: which is precisely why the intelligentsia makes them. However the royal family henceforth comports itself, it will be subjected to withering, if insincere and dishonest, scorn.

In my childhood the monarchy was both revered and disregarded entirely. It was brought out now and again for special occasions, like the best china, and thus managed somehow to be important and irrelevant at the same time. It was a sophisticated arrangement, unsuited to an age with a malicious rage for examining everything except the value of examining everything.

But what does it matter if the liberal intelligentsia -- still a small proportion of the population after all, the circulations of the Guardian and the Observer hovering between 400,000 and half a million - - carps, if the monarchy still retains the affection of the great mamajority of the British population?

Well, history shows that what the liberal intelligentsia wants, it usually gets in the end. It doesn't give up, for fighting the good fight is its existential purpose. The Irish intelligentsia's campaign on abortion is a fine example of its modus operandi: There will be referenda on the subject until the Irish population gets the answer right, whereupon there will never be another referendum. The British monarchy is in the intelligentsia's sights, and is therefore as doomed as capital punishment: which was, if anything, more popular than the Queen.