Even before Princess Anne’s head injury, with a king and princess both on long-term sick leave, royal family experts were arguing that its professional component, having previously been too big, is now dangerously small. If there ever was an intervening just right, nobody spotted it at the time.
Mercifully, given the family’s impressive birth rate, there is no suggestion it will have to resort, as in the past, to importing foreign workers who may not even speak the language. But if the labour shortfall is not yet acute or even noticeable, royal authorities allude to struggles that have perhaps been under-reported: vacant patronages, event planners who can’t lay their hands on a duke. The royal biographer, Hugo Vickers, wrote months ago that “the King’s cancer diagnosis is a reminder of what a foolish idea a slimmed-down monarchy is”.
Now Anne’s accident serves, according to fellow specialist Richard Kay, “as the most compelling warning of the dangers of a slimmed-down monarchy”. That the slimmed-down idea is actually an exclusively royal reform, adopted by Charles as the answer to his family’s periods of deep, self-inflicted unpopularity, only underlines the courage of royal commentators willing to address his alleged folly. Many of the remaining 11 working royals, they point out, are old. We have to consider a time when there will no longer be a Princess Anne, for all the humbler events, or enough duchesses to cover Wimbledon. To conceive of the cultural desert when Camilla’s book group, the Queen’s Reading Room, is just a memory.
Do we want the British royals –........