On Royalty by Jeremy Paxman

Author:Jeremy Paxman
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2006-08-17T04:00:00+00:00

9. We are You

A king is a thing men have made for their own sakes, for quietness’ sake. Just as in a family, one man is appointed to buy the meat.

John Selden, Table Talk, 1689

In August 1929 the highlight of the season of plays at the Festival Theatre, Malvern, was a new offering from George Bernard Shaw. The Apple Cart has lasted less well than some of Shaw’s other plays, and is rarely performed nowadays. But at the time it caused a minor sensation. It was popular in Poland, where the king at the centre of the action was thought to be based upon the local hero, Marshal Pilsudski, the nationalist hero who occupies much the same role in the country’s history as Churchill does in that of Britain. But a production in Dresden was banned, as an affront to democracy.1 In Britain, the play disappointed figures on the left, because it turned upon the king being something more than a constitutional glove puppet.

The drama was set at some date in the foreseeable future when, Shaw prophesied, politics would have become such a discredited trade that no one of ability or honour would make it his life’s work. The true rulers of the nation were neither politicians nor monarch, but the plutocrats who controlled big business. ‘Money talks: money prints: money broadcasts: money reigns; and kings and labour leaders alike have to register its decrees, and even, by a staggering paradox, to finance its enterprises and guarantee its profits. Democracy is no longer bought: it is bilked.’2 In the age of Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini, the play imagined a future in which parliament had become a playground for egotistical lightweights and ruthless charlatans. The drama is a tussle for such scraps of power as remain between King Magnus on one side and, on the other, the Prime Minister, Proteus, and his tribune-of-the-people cabinet colleague Bill Boanerges – an orphan ‘picked up from the gutter by a policeman with his eye on the first presidency in an English republic’.

Magnus sees himself as a repository for values that find no expression in the tawdry trade of politics. In a declaration any modern monarch might wish they had made he proclaims:

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