The Queen is 70 today. Her 70th birthday is a reminder that Prince Charles will succeed her before long, and it is a prospect that not many Britons face with great cheer. The Queen’s children have let her down badly. It is not that three of the four have separated, but the manner in which several of the parties have conducted themselves since their separations. The have turned the Royal family into an object of tabloid press entertainment. But there are serious consequences. The separation of Charles and Diana and that of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson, of themselves, were not profoundly destructive. After all, Princess Anne and the Queen’s sister, Princess Margaret, separated and divorced their husbands with a semblance of quiet dignity and the two husbands, Mark Phillips and Lord Snowdon, did not engage in the destructive, public antics that Fergie and Diana have. Charles and Diana sought out friends of friends in the press to pursue their vendetta against each other. Both lost, and so did the monarchy.
As a consequence, opinion polls in Britain are showing increasing doubts about the monarchy and Prince Charles’s succession. Only 41 per cent think Prince Charles is up to the job. A majority think the monarchy will not last another 50 years. None the less a majority still favour the monarchy over its replacement by some form of republican government. That support can clearly be put down to the dignity and grace of the Queen, despite the antics of her family. That was displayed admirably in the nation’s grief over the shootings of schoolchildren in the Scottish town of Dunblane. In that instance, the Queen played the classic role of a constitutional monarch … as a symbol for the whole nation, above and apart from grubby party politics. Incidentally, the Queen’s support on that occasion came from Princess Anne and Princess Margaret, showing that divorce of itself is not the difficulty.
The Queen’s role at Dunblane was the sort of role that many Australians would like to see for an Australian Head of State, without the family baggage that goes with it.
The juxtaposition of the Queen’s 70th birthday, the last 43 of which have been celebrated while she has been on the throne, with the Fergie-Andrew divorce and the Charles and Diana divorce negotiations, show at once the strength and weakness of constitutional monarchy. The Queen represents good sense, continuity and stability. She could be trusted by all sides of British politics to fulfil not only the ceremonial role, but also the constitutional role of dealing with the transition from one government to another. That cannot be said of her heir. And this is the weakness of monarchy; you have to take whomever the accident of birth throws up.
A majority of the British people may accept the good with the bad. They may feel that it is worth tolerating the weaknesses of one monarch in one generation because other monarchs in other generations make up for it.
In Australia, however, three other factors make the present form of constitutional monarchy less desirable. First, the monarch is British-born, not Australian-born. Second, there is a religious test for the position. Third, the succession laws are discriminatory against women because younger sons take the throne before older daughters. These arguments hold irrespective of the quality of the occupant of the British throne or the heir to the British throne.
The great benefit of a presidency is that the nation has a fair chance of vetting prospective incumbents. Moreover, if they turn bad during the term they can be removed. It may be that a presidency would not yield a head of state who commands as much respect and admiration for such a long time as the Queen, but a president’s children, however badly behaved, would not besmirch the office of head of state because it would not be hereditary.
This, of course, has been the tragedy for the Queen as she celebrates her 70th birthday. Without their conduct, she and Britons generally would have been celebrating today and giving thanks to a woman who has carried out her role with great dignity and humanity in times of enormous change not experienced by many of her predecessors.
Alas for her, as it is, there is talk of Britain becoming a republic and detailed scrutiny of the monarchy’s economic value that would in other circumstances be considered well out of place. The fortitude with which the Queen is bearing it is a tribute to her qualities as a woman. Britain can be grateful to her, even if she has ungrateful children.