Mocking other people’s grief at the loss of an elderly relative is never a good look. However, the North Korean-style blanket coverage of the Duke of Edinburgh’s death last week, with the BBC going into full obsequious state broadcaster mode, invited scorn and was bound to provoke anger among sections of the peasantry.
On Saturday the Northern Ireland page on the BBC website prioritised seven Philip Battenberg “stories”over news about attacks on police officers during a twelfth night of violence in Belfast. If this made me cross, imagine how it resonated among Northern Ireland’s republican community.
Reverence for the royal family always requires a tin ear and a bit of shouting down of the non-compliers, for it rests on the falsehood that the royal family is special. It is not. To be generous it is, like most families, a mediocre assembly of flawed individuals. To be less generous, some of those individuals are dysfunctional meddlers in love with their own unearned influence.
To recall the Scottish parliament and suspend campaigning in the Scottish elections because a 99-year-old member of that family has shuffled off this mortal coil is ridiculous. Of course, we should respect the family’s bereavement, and those who could not muster an ounce of grace in the face of it did themselves no credit. Everyone is important to someone, but no one is important to everyone. To suggest that they are because they have a royal title is an insult to those who mourn others, of whom there is no shortage at present.
This mourn-fest is misjudged during a crippling pandemic, at a time when loyalists are rioting in Northern Ireland and deep fissures are opening in the prime minister’s Brexit deal. It throws up wider questions too. Why do we define our nation through one undemocratic institution that is far from universally loved? Why do we need people to defer to them? And why do we require everyone to play along or risk excoriation?
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When I was a little girl I loved princesses in coruscating carriages. Now that I’m a grown-up, not so much. Deference and sycophancy are at root immature. The make-believe world of the monarchy, the UK’s unelected second chamber, all the lords and ladies and silly titles, make for an infantilising constitutional settlement. We should swap it for a mature, modern democracy where each nation has its own elected head of state and the countries on these islands, including all of Ireland, respect each other and co-operate as friends.
Fiona Rintoul is a writer, translator and journalist