Can the monarchy survive Andrew?

When Elizabeth II was crowned in 1953, millions had served in the war, and pledged loyalty to the monarchy. Much of the Empire - and the class system it connected to - was still intact, and Britain was going through a period of post-war religious fervour.

Millions of people will have taken the claims of the coronation ritual - the idea that our monarch is chosen by God and anointed in holy oil - literally. A large portion of the British public felt a deep, sentimental connection to the Royal Family. When the sociologist Michael Young interviewed working-class East Enders about their experience of watching it on often new TV sets, he found many had been profoundly moved, in ways most struggled to explain.

25 years later, when the Sex Pistols released God Save the Queen for Elizabeth’s silver Jubilee, it was seen as sacrilegious by officialdom, and banned from BBC channels. But its popularity shows that a portion of the population was beginning to kick against that deference. The empire had largely been lost, the 1960s satire boom had made mockery of the establishment culturally permissible, and 1968 protests had argued for a more plural society.

Over the next 20 years, affiliation with the Anglican Church - of which the monarch is head - fell from nearly 70% to around 40%. As WWII and the empire retreated into history, and the portion of the population who had served in the military declined, that deferential Britishness began to dissipate. The House of Windsor, which just a generation earlier had been at the head of the biggest empire in human history, a dominant church, and a military that millions of families were structured around - needed to reinvent itself.

Elizabeth II and her PR experts were remarkably successful in that reinvention. The televisation of the coronation had been an important first step, and the palace’s skill in making itself relevant to the drama and gossip columns of the emerging tabloid media was equally vital. But while support remained, it was arguably becoming shallower.

When the crises of the 1990s struck - the breakdown of the marriages of three of her children, and then the death of Diana, the mood was a little different. The mass expression of emotion showed people still cared about the royal family, but the fury at the Queen for refusing to fly the flag at half mast from Buckingham palace showed a new rebelliousness.

But, while support for Britain becoming a republic crept up towards the end of her reign, as long as Elizabeth lived, the nostalgia that she represented for the Britain of the 1950s and 1960s - when incomes were much more equal and the NHS being built rather than smashed apart - persisted, and support for the monarchy was robust. As soon as she died, it was clear that it was much flimsier than it had been for generations.

The crisis around Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor probably won’t kill off the monarchy yet - despite reports that Charles allegedly lent his brother millions to pay off Virginia Giuffre. Charles has probably managed to insulate himself from his brother enough for now.

But the fact that we are - finally - being allowed to see the scandal where, for example, the compelling evidence that the senior royal Louis Mountbatten regularly raped children in the mid-20th century was covered up for decades, suggests an institution with less power than it once had.

And the fact of the scandal will damage support for the monarchy still further - one recent poll suggested support for the monarchy has fallen below 50% in recent weeks. This effect is probably deepest in places where support was already thinning - already by 2022, royalism in Scotland, for example, had fallen to 45%, according to one poll.

In itself, this produces a further problem for the monarchy: the main attribute it used to be able to offer the country was that it was a unifier. As it becomes more divisive, what’s it for?

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Adam Ramsay is a journalist and author. His forthcoming book Abolish Westminster, due out with Faber and Faber in November, argues for abolition of the monarchy.

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