Klan Windsor’s Smartest Move

Why do the British persist in keeping a royal family when most sensible European nations gave theirs up like a bad habit long ago? And how can the British continue to take their royal family seriously when its younger members behave like they're on a stag weekend in Krakow? I can't answer the first question, because it would involve doing actual research, but I can answer the second – we keep the royal family because, if we got rid of them, we would have to invent something else to take their place.

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Human beings are the same everywhere, we cannot resist gossiping about and judging each other. Thousands of years ago we all lived in small communities and gossiped about the people we all saw everyday. Now we live in huge communities, called nations, but we still gossip about the people we all see everyday – the only difference is that now we see them on TV or the internet instead of by the village well or gathered around the mammoth carcass. I can talk to any random stranger on the train about Barack Obama or Kuba Wojewódzki, but nobody will have heard of my neighbour Piotrek, even though he is a massive idiot.

In most societies, we call the people that we all know 'celebrities.' The problem with celebrities, though, is that they choose to be celebrities. This means that, whatever we say about them, we cannot escape the feeling that they are the kind of people who like to have other people talking about them, which means we're doing them a favour rather than purely satisfying our own desires to talk about and judge people. Really clever celebrities, like Marilyn Monroe or Wojciech Mann, make it seem like they never wanted to be celebrities, which is why we love them the most, but a few moments of reflection show that this can't be true.

The genius of having royal celebrities is that they genuinely did not choose to be celebrities – they are just born that way. It's like having a national tree that produces a new crop of famous people every twenty years or so. The royal family is the ultimate soup opera. We can all chat about them, judge them, love them or become enraged by them in the safe knowledge that they are as real as the family that lives upstairs. A few hundred million pounds per year is a small price to pay for this level of national entertainment.

A survey conducted by The Mirror newspaper a few days after the Prince Harry photos appeared reveals a lot about British attitudes to Klan Windsor:

Question 1: Have you seen the naked photographs of Prince Harry on the internet?
Yes: 22%
No: 57% Don't know: 21%
Leaving aside the 21% of people who had been looking at pictures of naked men on the internet without being sure they were of Prince Harry or not, the results indicate a surprising lack of interest in a story that dominated national newspapers for days.

Question 2:Prince Harry’s exploits in Las Vegas are an embarrassment to the Royal Family.
Yes: 40%
No: 30%
Don't know: 30%

Although a majority thought Harry had embarrassed his family, almost one in three thought there was nothing for his grandmother to be worried about. Another third were unmoved.

Question 3:Prince Harry’s exploits in Las Vegas show he is more in touch with the British people than his brother.
Yes: 31%
No: 27%
Don't know: 42%

This is a very interesting result. More than a third of people think chasing naked floozies around a hotel room makes Prince Harry more likeable than his brother William. Less than a third of people thought it made him less likeable. In other words, showing their buttocks on the internet is one of the most popular strategies adopted by the British royal family since they changed their name so everyone would forget they were Germans.

Jamie Stokes