Thoughts on Tom Nairn, Prince Philip, and the modernity of the British monarchy

The British monarchy prides itself on its exceptional antiquity, its hundreds of years of nearly uninterrupted legitimate succession. It even occasionally alludes to rule by divine right and even at times to the healing royal touch.   But it has a powerful modern side. The Duke of Edinburgh was in effect a Prince Consort of the Jet Age, the great patron of British science and engineering.   That image is not a familiar one today for the Prince stood for a certain prickly backwardness, and a pioneering anti-wokeness.

It is tempting to dismiss the antique monarchy as mere mumbo-jumbo that makes no difference. For Tom Nairn, in a celebrated book, The Enchanted Glass, which demands republication just as much as the recently re-issued Break Up of Britain, the monarchy mattered. It embodied, and more than that sustained, a backward antique state, one that made it impossible for a proper modern democratic nation to emerge.  It kept the nation infantilised. More than that, it also helped keep the nation stuck in an Edwardian time warp, incapable of transforming itself economically and industrially.  

That thesis does not quite fit with the story of the new Prince Consort egging on the nation’s engineers.

Although not keen on bicycles the British monarchy  were, on one side of their face,  the very model of a modern monarchy. The great royal rituals are, as David Cannadine revealed in the 1980s, inventions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,  created alongside the great royal processional way that is The Mall.  The monarchy spoke through radio long before most people had receivers.  In 1953 the Coronation was broadcast on television, to a nation in which the TV set was a rarity, generating a boom in sales.  

The emphasis on the modern was particularly evident in the new Elizabethan Age, as the cliché had it.  This was the era of heroic test-pilots, sleek new jets, the Comet airliner and its tragedies.  It was also the time when the UK had (really) easily the most ambition nuclear electricity plans in the whole world.  It was building its own rockets too.  Prince Philip was intimately associated with all this. His visits to nuclear reactors, his flying in the latest aeroplane, were all staples of newsreels and television.     But it went deeper.  He had particularly strong and enduring relations with aeronautical and scientific and technological institutions.  He was Grand Master of the Guild of Air Pilots and Air Navigators; Honorary President of the Royal Aeronautical Society, President of the Council of Engineering Institutions and patron of many more such institutions.   Prince Philip was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1951, he was President of the Royal Society of Arts from 1952. Anyone interested in the history of modern British science or technology will see his name pop up again and again as the author of the preface or a celebratory history or a worthy biography. It is telling that Prince Philip House is the home of the Royal Academy of Engineering, a body he had an important backroom role in creating.

The British machines of the 1960s and 1960s which generated such royal enthusiasm could not compete with those of republican America. They were extravagant gestures, technological equivalents of a bloated civil list, great status symbols of little economic worth.  They were, as many claimed at the time, machines made for prestige reasons, not ones which could earn dollars. Great power delusions were condensed into glistening metal.

There is a persistent myth that in the UK that the aristocracy and the ruling class more generally were dim-witted Luddites.  In this story it is only with the North Country,  middle-class Harold Wilson that technology enters the story.   It is a misunderstanding.  In fact, the Labour roundheads cut back on the technological extravagance of the cavaliers. Harold Wilson’s white heat was about restraining excesses. To the horror of Tory England he cancelled the TSR2 and nearly ditched the Concorde.  Wilson’s Britain recognised, though not nearly enough, that it had to cut its technological and scientific coat  to suit its cloth.  

It is tempting when discussing royal matters to turn to explanations rooted in blood rather than soil. Did the monarchy’s modernising impulse come to the last great power monarchy through an infusion of teutonic technocracy? After all, the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas gave the monarchy the modernising Prince Albert. The Battenbergs, soon translated into Mountbattens,  brought dynamism and media savvy, and enthusiasm for technology too, in the form of Lord Louis Mountbatten.   Surely his nephew, Prince Philip,  of the house of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, who also changed his name to Mountbatten, was continuing this tradition?  In the mythologies of British history, where the Germans are the moderns, and the British the ancients, such a story would make perfect sense.

It is however nonsense. The modernising impulse needs to be found much closer to home.  What both Louis and Philip Mountbatten had in common was that they were both British naval officers.  One ended up as First Sea Lord, the other late in life with the Gilbert and Sullivanesque title of Lord High Admiral.  The Royal Navy was the beating technological heart of the British state, deeply committed to the view that in matters geostrategic modern machines trumped men.  The 1950s enthusiasm for bombers and bombs, reactors and rockets,  was just one manifestation of this long standing elite project.

That world was long gone. But in recent years have seen a nostalgic look back at this Dan Dare world has become quite common.  It is part and parcel of new elite fantasies about global Britain as a science superpower.   But it should remind us that an over-weaning focus on innovation is far from an exclusive enthusiasm of the left, even in the UK.  Technology and reaction can and do go together, even in the UK.  The problem of the monarchy is not that it entrenched backwardness, but very modern forms of privilege, in very modern ways.  It matters because it is modern, not because of its antiquity.