Storm clouds on the horizon for the British monarchy

The English intelligentsia, writes Dalrymple,

are hostile to the monarchy as never before. Ever on the lookout for old institutions to destroy, little but the monarchy remains for their attention. Thanks to the expansion of tertiary education and the decline of industry, the intelligentsia are larger and more influential than at any time in history; they never rest until they get what they want.

Moreover, the British population is

so disconnected from its country’s past that it has not the faintest idea of the constitutional role of the monarchy. So weak has understanding become that those who defend in public the extravaganza of the royal wedding and its expense are reduced to performing a cost-benefit analysis. The security and other arrangements will cost £x; but the receipts from the extra tourism, television rights, and kitsch industry — royal memorabilia such as plates, mugs, biscuit tins, and bogus commemorative coins — will amount to an estimated £x+n, even if most of the kitsch will be produced in China.

There is, says Dalrymple,

something undignified about the use of the language of profit and loss about a monarchy that has lasted, with a short break for revolution, a millennium. If after a thousand years the best or only thing you can say for a political institution is that it brings in a few extra tourists, who are a market for foreign-produced junk, attachment to that institution in an age that prides itself on its rationality and ability to found itself on self-evident first principles is not likely to be very strong or to last long.

The whole point of a constitutional monarch,

that he is head of state and symbol of national unity not by virtue of a popularity contest or of any personal qualities, and is therefore above the fray to whose violence his very existence places a limit, is entirely lost on young British people, who believe in their own unlimited sovereignty. If they celebrated the wedding at all, it was for them just another occasion to get drunk.