The Royal Family: Abolish, reform or carry on?

0:28Who doesn't love warm, carby comfort? This is a Global Player original podcast. I doubt there is anyone in this house who is not shocked and appalled by the recent allegations. Colleagues and many civil servants have told me their own stories of their interactions with Mr Mountbatten-Windsor, and they all betray the same pattern. A man on a constant self-aggrandising and self-enriching hustle. A rude, arrogant and entitled man who could not distinguish between the public interest which he said he served and his own private interest. That is Chris Brandt at the Commons Dispatch Box, a Minister of the Crown, not talking about a political opponent, but talking about a member of the royal family, the former Prince Andrew, the former Duke of York.

1:24A decade ago, a year ago, even a month ago, hearing a minister say that about a member of the royal family would have been simply unthinkable. Is he reflecting something that has become part of a national public mood? Not just about the former Prince Andrew, but about our overall deference to the royal family. Are we done with the monarchy? Are we demanding more of the monarchy? Do we want to see the monarchy reformed or are we happy to carry on? We're going to spend this whole episode debating public attitudes and your thoughts on our royal family and the monarchy. Welcome to The News Agents.

2:14The News Agents. It's John. It's Emily. It's Lewis. And as Emily was saying there, we thought it would be a really good moment after the kind of cascade of headlines and stories, obviously centering on Andrew and the royal family's response to the Epstein files and the kind of long running 15 year burn of the Andrew scandal. To take that as a starting point, but also consider wider questions about the royal family and its present and its future. because obviously although Andrew continues to batter the institution and there remain loads of questions not about Andrew which is now obviously also subject to a police investigation but also about how the royal family responded over many years under the late queen and under the current king but there are also lots of other inflections going on at the moment we're still in away living in the long shadow of the late queen's death we have a situation where the king himself is an old man he's an ill man he hasn't got much time to set out or develop really what his reign and kingship ought to be and the royal family itself afflicted by age and illness right through the generations finds itself at a really uneasy moment and exposed to and this is i think the central thing of it for me, it feels to me as if even the principle of constitutional monarchy, or at the very least how the Windsors do constitutional monarchy, how we do constitutional monarchy, feels increasingly ill at ease in an age where transparency, scrutiny and equality feel ever more present and vital values and how monarchy therefore can or even should reinvent itself for the 21st century.

4:00And that's why we've asked you to kind of help us with this and give us your thoughts and ideas and questions and let's start with this voice note from Tom Bunsudi O 'Brien. Hello I'm Tom I'm from Woking home to Prince Andrew's infamous Pizza Express alibi. I think we need at least two big changes for the monarchy to survive into the longer term. One we've got to trimmed down from 11 working royals and dozens of members of the extended family to a slim Scandinavian style core. And two, we need way more transparency, especially on the financial side of things. So a little less Downton Abbey, a little more Denmark.

4:41I think it's quite hard to argue with anything Tom's saying there. Something feels like it needs to change in terms of the transparency that we're now able to ask from, demand from the royal family. I was thinking back to the payment that the late Queen made in her son's name to Virginia Gufresne to make that trial go away in 2022. And even at the time, I remember there being this sort of fog around the number. Was it 12? And then somebody would go, don't be ridiculous. Well, What was it? Well, we can't tell you. Was it less? Was it more? Was it eight? Was it three? And we felt like the idiots because we might not have got our facts right.

5:25But actually, it was an extraordinary moment. That trial was meant to happen between Virginia Giffray and Prince Andrew on March the 10th. It had an actual date. They would both have gone to trial to face each other. And I think at the time, Prince Andrew's lawyers, they were looking at Virginia Giffray's mental health. They were going to all sorts of kind of pretty unsavoury places to defend Prince Andrew. And then suddenly the whole thing went away. And we still don't know anything about that. We still don't understand why this huge sum of money was being paid. And on the one hand, you know, we were told by the Treasury it wasn't public money.

6:00And I guess it was the Queen's money. But now we're kind of going, well, what does that mean? What was the Queen's money? Why don't we get any answers to what on earth was going on? Well, I was with someone last night, a very senior editorial figure who used to be at the BBC, saying, I think you've got this wrong. I think that some of it came from the Duchess of Lancaster, which I think is Charles's kind of private state. And I thought that just makes the point. Yeah, we might be wrong. We don't know how much of it. We just don't know. How is it we don't know? How is it that it's possible that we've got a royal family that exists with our consent, that we do not know whether 10, 15 million was spent, whether any of it was taxpayers' money or not, how that money came to be passed over?

6:45I mean, it's just incredible. I don't know. Maybe we were less curious three years ago or we expected it to be covert and opaque and covered up where the money came from. It was the jubilee year. The jubilee year. And we just didn't ask too many questions. but now given all that we've learned about andrew and the stuff that could be subject to criminal proceedings then people are saying hang on i need to we need to know this stuff i can definitely see the arguments for and i've actually for a long time subscribed to the arguments in principle for a constitutional monarchy i can see the arguments for it they are a rallying point for the nation they can be above politics they can embody the country in some way they provide a certain level of political stability that you don't necessarily get with elective politics.

7:27My problem, I think, is the way we do constitutional monarchy in this country. I think the way we do constitutional monarchy is inherently opaque, shrouded in secrecy. And there's a lot of nonsense, I think, talked, which has been peddled by the royal family for years and sort of supported the royal family in the media, talking about, you know, we can't let the sunlight in. You know, then that means the magic goes away. We wouldn't talk about magic in any other form of democratic government or any other form of parts of the British state. And just on the money, which I think is really important, and I think the Epstein situation has shone important light on, we should remember royal finances aren't kind of like one tidy system.

8:04They are a patchwork. Some of it is publicly accounted for. That's a sovereign grant. That's public money. It's transparently audited. It's about 80 to 90 million a year. But then, as you've alluded to, John, you hit the duchies. That's tens of millions of private income. I don't know what, I'm going to just say this, I don't know what a duchy is. I think of it as a biscuit, which I think is probably wrong. Well, exactly. Is it the household? Is it the estate? It's literally, yeah, it's like all the land and assets that come as part of being the duke of somewhere. So in this case, I mean, the king...

8:35Tens of thousands of acres of farmland. Yeah. You're getting the revenue from. And the security that goes around that. Yeah, because the queen, among his many titles, and the late queen was the Duchess of Lancaster, the Duke of Lancaster, the Prince of Wales, by default is the Duchy of Cornwall. Tens of millions of private income, Vast land holdings, a lot of which, by the way, has, for example, government property on it, which is then rented from the royal family. And it gets kind of murky because there are often bits of legislation go through Parliament where exemptions are made for royal buildings and things as part of those duchies.

9:07There is no freedom of information with any of this. There is limited scrutiny. The king legally doesn't have to pay income tax. He doesn't have to pay inheritance tax. His will, or the late Queen's will, is pulled into a vault and we never see it. You know, in a country which has become, as I say, increasingly obsessed with transparency, in Britain, where everything in public life, every MP, I mean, think back to Keir Starmer, right? Think back to Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves. The trouble they got into for taking a couple of tickets from a concert or, you know, for a donation which was publicly declared for some new suits.

9:41I'm not saying that scrutiny around that was wrong or the reaction to it was wrong, But you can compare that, the accountability we expect from the democratic part of our constitution and compare it with the royal part of our constitution. There is almost no scrutiny whatsoever. We audit councils. We audit quangos. We even audit parish meetings. The monarchy, parts of it we literally never, ever see. There's one other bit of Tom's question, though, where I'm not so sure, which is the idea that we've got to trim down from 11 working royals and dozens of members of the extended family to a slim Scandinavian style court.

10:12I understand the argument for that but if you're sitting I suspect in Buckingham Palace you are being inundated with requests from Jersey and Guernsey and the Isle of Man and Scotland and Wales and small little towns across the country where they want members of the royal family to come and open the church or be there for their big annual celebration of this or that or the other there is an enormous demand to have members of the royal family there and you think well that shows that there must be some kind of relationship that still exists between us and them. I totally agree with you, Lewis, about the accountability points and financial accountability and, you know, some of the opaqueness.

10:56But I still think, well, isn't it weird that there's still so much demand for them to be at these civic events? Yeah. And I guess I'm going to go back to Tom, whose last line was a little less Downton Abbey, a little more Denmark. Rationally, that is really hard to disagree with. But I guess when you're talking about the other European monarchies, I found that I couldn't actually name very many. I didn't know what they looked like. I couldn't tell you who was at the head. I couldn't tell you the difference between the Netherlands and Denmark. I mean, I know about Norway now because of all the kind of scandal that's come out of the Epstein.

11:33But I sort of found that I, you know, I think that is the problem. I hope I'm not offending lots of our European listeners and viewers, but I don't really know what Luxembourg and Andorra and the Netherlands look like in terms of royal families because they are so sort of normalized in a way. And I guess the point of what we have had, and it is the Downton thing, is that everybody in the world knows what our family looks like. and I wonder if a part of me is sort of thinking yeah on the world stage I know that any country I go to that when we're talking you know whether it's to US presidents whether we're sort of crossing into Asia whether we're trying to work out our new relations with Europe in a sort of post-Brexit era it does stand for something seen from the outside it makes us a little bit bigger and it gives us that soft power, which is recognition, quite frankly.

12:31And I'm not sure that I would necessarily be able to point to the difference between Mette Frederiksen and Denmark or her queen. Look, you've got, at the moment, Donald Trump talking excitedly about the fact that Prince William is coming over and that the king is coming over in the 250th year of the United States of America. This is a really positive thing. Well, he also talks excitedly about his wife's new film, Melania. No, no, but he doesn't talk excitedly. What I'm saying is about the Danish royal family or the Dutch royal family. Those royal families exist. I think he said they're very good looking.

13:07Well, he said, but those royal families. King Charles is waiting. But those royal families exist in the background of public life in those countries. Our royal family is absolutely in the foreground and particularly in the foreground of America, where most Americans would not be able to tell you who our prime minister is on any given occasion, but would know the intricacies of what's happening in the royal family. I think those royal families are very much in the foreground of those countries' political lives. But I think two things would be true. I think, Emily, you are absolutely right. I actually think one of the strongest remaining arguments for our monarchy sustaining is, I think it is, I think, undoubtedly true.

13:42And those on the Republican side, which I would increasingly sort of put myself, have to reckon with and just accept the fact that I think that, you know, there is a soft power which is confirmed from the royal family, from the Windsors. It seems unlikely that that would be replicated by a sort of elected British president or whatever it happened to be. I think you're absolutely right. I think when most people around the world think of the Queen or the King or whatever it happens to be, their mind instantly turns to the British royal family. It's the kind of sine qua non of kind of royal families around the world.

14:08And I think that's absolutely true. I think the question is, well, there's two sub questions to that. One, is it worth it? And I increasingly don't think it is worth it. I'm not sure that what I think it gets you something. I'm not sure what it actually gets you. what did we get for example from the trump state visit what do we get from him what are we going to get from wheeling charles over there from isn't that more a trump question than a royal question well but then i think if it doesn't get you anything with trump it doesn't get you anything with anyone because i'm not sure that any american president in the past or future is going to be more attached to our royal family than trump is well actually to that point we've had this from mark woodroff who's living in the usa right now greetings newsagents this is uh mark and i am living in America for a few years.

14:49So when I was in the UK, the royal family just seemed like a complete waste of money. Why are we paying all this money for gold carriages, etc. As I was paying tax over there. Now I'm paying tax in America. I think very differently about the royal family. So outside looking in, I realized they give our country a bit of mystique, a bit of grandeur. and it sort of makes you a little bit prouder of the country. Maybe it's because I'm paying tax over here that I don't care so much. But, yeah, outside looking in, it's a good thing, but I do feel it needs to be scaled down somewhat. So I heard from somebody very well connected that Trump is writing incessantly to the king.

15:34But that's just for himself. He just wants the prestige. How do we get out of it? I don't know. I suspect it does give us something. I suspect that it's also a family that has... and I'm not just talking about Andrew here, but has been mired in scandal for decades. Sure, sure, sure. I'm not sure that that, does that do much for us reputation-wise? But when the king says to Donald Trump, as I'm sure he probably has, Canada's part of the Commonwealth. You can't just talk about, I mean, there are areas where I just... But Trump's gone for Canada repeatedly, hasn't he? Yes, but maybe it would have been even worse.

16:01Well done, he hasn't invaded. Yeah, exactly. I mean, the second one, I mean, like, what I was going to say is that I'm not sure how much it gets us, but even if it gets us something, which I'm sure it does get us something, there's a flip side to that, which I also find it a bit depressing that that's what people think of us when they think about Britain, that they think about our royal family. They think about this institutional, hereditary tradition. It is anti-democratic. It's anti-egalitarian. And it basically makes us, I think, look pretty antiquated. I don't think there's any other way around it.

16:27So it kind of makes me depressed that that's what people think of when they think of Britain, as opposed to the many other things that we've offered and contributed to the world. And even if you accept that, and I accept that it's a complicated argument. Well, I definitely think, to go back to Tom's question, And to your point, John, yeah, I know that they get a lot of requests, but I'm not sure. I mean, these three people are all in receipt of sovereign grant. Prince Edward, the Duke of Kent, Princess Alexandra, the Honourable Lady Ogilvie, and Birgitta, the Duchess of Gloucester. I mean, I don't think most British people could pick them out of a line-up, but they're in receipt of sovereign grant money to do working duty part of the royal family.

16:59I mean, do we really need those people? When most other European royal families, they get by on a monarch and a crown prince. And actually, the advantage of that as well, by the way, is that, let's be honest, One of the problems with this extended royal family, they're in a gilded prison. We've seen it with Harry, we saw it with Margaret, we saw it with Andrew, these kind of wayward souls who basically have no purpose in life. They're told they kind of have to be there, but they're never going to be the person. No wonder. I mean, you can't make any excuses for Andrew, but there is a long litany of sadness and kind of tragedy and, as I say, listlessness in the family, which is, I think, bred by that position.

17:33Let them free. Let them go and do something else with their lives. Birgitta? The Duchess of Gloucester, apparently. Never heard of her. Well, quite. I mean, I guess where that gets us to is, can you keep some of the soft power, can you keep some of the real power, if you go down to something that feels like a slimline version, Coke light? If you basically, I'm sure you can get rid of Brigitte, poor Brigitte, but maybe Brigitte does a hundred days' work that none of us ever see, where people get to say, we had a royal today, and as a result of having a royal in the room, they managed to fundraise 200 times more than they would have done without her.

18:13I don't know how you calculate that price. I know that Princess Anne works, I think, 200 days, right? And I'm sure she feels like she'd much prefer to be on a horse, right? She's probably sick of having to sit in drafty halls, listening to ghastly recitals or shaking hands with dictators, you know. And I sort of think, for her sake, I'm sure she'd probably like a different life. But I also see that there is loads and loads of work that we never cover. We never talk about it. Like, we're certainly not going to talk about it on the newsagents. I don't think that's where our listeners, our viewers really are.

18:46But I am prepared to believe that actually the Charleses, the Andes, the Duchess of Kent, who we talked about last week, going into schools and literally becoming a piano teacher, music teacher, and sort of taking kids on. If there is a kind of noblesse oblige, and you're right, it's a really old-fashioned term. It's a really arcane, archaic turn. But if there are people who feel that they have been so well treated by a life of privilege that they are willing to put in 200 days of hard work, hard graft and travel up and down the country. Yeah, I'm kind of saying, well, yes, thank you. You know, go and raise money.

19:22Go and do help. Go and raise the prospect of these charities. I'm happy with that. But it's not complete altruism, is it? because I think one thing that I do think is just self-evidently the case is that the Windsors, and we don't ever talk about it in these terms, but the Windsors, let's just separate them from the institution, them as a group of people have a clear material interest in maintaining the status quo. Yes, they may do this work that it's self-directed, and I'm sure a lot of it is good and valuable, I wouldn't deny that. But at the same time, ultimately, they do that on licence, and they do it on licence, as we've already discussed, basically with an enormous number of institutional privileges which are granted to them by Parliament.

19:58opacity over their finances and unique tax arrangements which are not afforded to anybody else so yeah they probably go and open supermarkets and do church fates and lots of worthy stuff i'm not demeaning i do know that a lot of people get a lot of value from all of this stuff but ultimately as well there's an element of self-serving to it and even on the and stuff and the going to all of these events it's quite funny i mean i remember reading harry's book spare where he talked about how i think he was talking about and in particular but he was just talking generally about how there is almost a kind of competition among the royals to get themselves into the sort of court circular as much as possible, a kind of daily accounting chronicle of their lives.

20:32Your key performance indicator is how much you're on the front pages of newspapers. But it might be that, you know, these events can be very small. But what else do you get? You don't get promoted. You don't get a salary. You don't get a sort of annual review of how well you're doing your job. 360 degree feedback. It is a terrible, I mean, it is a crazy metric. I agree with you. But it's because there isn't a place... There was a cynicism to it, which was that some of these events were almost non-events, that they were literally turning up for 30 minutes at something and there was a sort of cynicism to it.

21:02So to try and get yourself to the top of the league, that was what Harry alleged in his book. But I think that you've still got soft power. I think it's perfectly possible. And this is what we're going to come on to talk about in the second half, that what we've got now just doesn't seem fit for purpose. And the anachronisms that you point out and the slightly depressing thing that all people think about is pomp and circumstances and ceremony and gold braid and all the rest of it. But is it possible to reform it? And that's what we're going to consider in part two.

21:33From a range of trusted voices and award-winning journalists. Call the cabinet here exclusively on LBC. Shavana Mahmood, the home secretary. Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan is in the studio. Welcome. Great to be back. Find out the latest news and hear every side of the story. Listen on our free Global Player app or the LBC app. LBC, leading Britain's conversation. Who doesn't love warm, carby comfort? satisfying sandwiches, loaded bagels, rich mac and cheese. Crape-worthy and smart, Hero Bread's loaves, bagels and noodles have just 0-5 gram snack carbs, 0 gram sugar and up to 19 grams of protein and 32 grams of fiber per serving.

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22:29The News Agents. So let's start with this voice note that we've had from Karen Geddes, who's living in Switzerland. If there were a referendum on whether to abolish the royal family, I'd be in favour of abolishing it to protect Kate and William's three children from a life of permanent exposure. they didn't ask to be born into the position and I think they'd all be much happier if they could live free and independent lives well that is the point Lewis that you were making and of course it is a gilded cage that they're living in where there are photographers everywhere they go and there's some of it that must be just absolutely unspeakable and awful and intrusive at the same time as being a life that is incredibly privileged, where you're not scrabbling about wondering whether you can put food on the table or any of those other things that, you know, many people in Britain do have to think about.

23:31So it's a kind of, look, you know, would I want to be born into royal family? I'd like the privileges of it. I'd like to be able to... You'd love it. But you'd want to be able to turn that tap off. And they can't. They can't hide from it. It's there permanently. I was looking at some of the polling, actually, and even in the last six months, this is polling from Ipsos, support for the monarchy has seen a decline. We used to be around 47 % in favour just since, I think, September, since King Charles stepped in to remove Andrew's title and it all became kind of quite a living issue. It's lost about 10%.

24:05It's now down to 37%. Who are strongly in favour, is that it? who believe that abolishing the monarchy would be worse for the country. So that number has shrunk by 10%, which is, I mean, pretty dramatic. If that was a stock market for you, you'd be saying that is huge. But there's still over half of us that think Britain will continue to have a monarchy 50 years from now. And I think the scientific phrase for not having a referendum on this issue is the can't be asked one, which genuinely I think is like there will be some people who feel really strongly. You know, I'm a Republican. I want to see the end.

24:47I'm absolutely, you know, gung ho. I want to see money coming into our government or our country or my tax money kind of accountable. and there will be loads of people who kind of go,

25:02I actually can't be asked. It's just not a central enough figure for me and I see what referendums do to this country in the past. Remain or leave for the Windsors. I think that's right and I would, if I had to put money on it, I'd say that we probably will still have a monarch in 50 years' time because constitutional inertia and political inertia in Britain is very, very strong. I do think, nonetheless, that that is dangerous for the royal family because the royal family, ultimately, it's not democratic, but it does rely, ultimately, on consent. One of the reasons that they are so obsessed with public opinion, one of the reasons why they have this deeply, deeply kind of favourable toading kind of royal core that kind of, you know, cover them everywhere and go everywhere with them, and they're so obsessed with what they do, is because they have for many years been experts in cultivating public opinion.

25:50And I think... But also, Lewis, because they give us extraordinary stories. I mean, you know, you have to be honest. The fact that they are on the front of the papers so often is not because we're all having a great time at a ceremonial dance in Tonga. It's because they have provided the press, the tabloids, you know, and the broadcasters with extraordinary stories. Right. For the last hundred years, it's been a soap opera nobody could take their eyes on. Indeed so. But what I think in a way that that's sort of my point. If we get to a point where the strongest, the reason they're still there is because to use your principle, Emily, people can't be asked to get rid of them, then that interest goes.