Elizabeth II's Tasteful Nudes

The Emperor’s New Clothes is one of the most reassuring stories humanity has come up with to tell itself. It’s reassuring because, after acknowledging that there will indeed be occasions on which our emperors strut about naked, it tells us that: a) there will always be a plucky and honest young lad about to tell it how it is; and b) when that plucky lad speaks up, his truth-telling will be universally heard and believed, and the situation will be rectified. The system works!

The trouble is that reality, as demonstrated time and time again, makes a mockery of the Emperor’s New Clothes. As a parable it fails, because it is completely at odds with the way the world really works.

This is beautifully illustrated by the way the world - and in particular Britain, but also in particular Australia, and in particular pretty much everyone else as well - has responded to the Queen’s death. And this response is pretty much representative of the attitude of the media, the political establishment, and vast swathes of the public itself, to monarchy.

Because when it comes to the institution of hereditary monarchy in the year 2022, let’s face it: we all know the Emperor’s got no clothes.

I was thinking of writing a piece about why monarchy is terrible and stupid and should be abolished, and then I realised how foolish I’d look if I did, because everybody already knows.

Everybody knows that monarchy is a dreadful idea. Everybody knows it’s dumb. Everybody knows that is total and utter anathema to the principles that we like to tell ourselves we believe in. Indeed, many of the most ferocious defenders of the monarchy are those will on other occasions vociferously denounce anything they see as even a little bit “undemocratic”.

We all know that monarchy is, to put it mildly, idiotic. We know that kings and queens are fun things to put in stories, and interesting to read about in history books, and that having them actually exist in the 21st century is batshit insane. We know that the wealth and privilege afforded to royals is obscene. We know that not a single member of the royal family has done anything to merit the amount of love and attention lavished on them, let alone anything to earn their fortune. We know that bowing and scraping before people on no other basis other than the family they happen to have been born into is damn silly.

We know this, but we don’t care. We have decided that we liked acting like idiots, we like showing deference to people who don’t deserve it, and we like acting inferior to rich people for no good reason. We’ve decided that every principle of equality, democracy and commonsense that we apply to the best of our capacity in everyday life should be ignored wholesale when a royal person is involved.

And that’s the monarchy’s great secret, of course. That’s why it still exists, and will still exist for many generations hence, no matter how many thinkpieces you read about how hard it will be for Charles to live up to his mother’s legacy.

The monarchy - at least the British one - has skilfully managed the transition from “the institution that everyone knows is incredibly important” to “the institution that everyone knows is incredibly unimportant but has agreed to act as if it’s still incredibly important because otherwise unspecified bad things would happen”.

The lack of importance is vital, of course. If the royal family actually DID things - if it went about declaring wars and beheading people like in the old days - the people would very quickly decide it had to go. Only by steadfastly doing nothing, by being as useless a pack of parasites as ever refused to find a decent dentist, can the royal family survive.

In the modern era, knowing that kings and queens are just people like anyone else, nobody would stand for them presuming to actually try to rule anyone. And so, being just people like anyone else, they do nothing, thereby allowing everyone to keep on treating them like they’re not just people like anyone else.

It’s a nice little deal we’ve got with them: as long as you agree to never matter, we’ll keep pretending that you do.

Which is why the Emperor’s New Clothes will never play out in real life. The crowd has already accepted that he’s got no clothes, and declared that it doesn’t matter.

If the story were told to reflect reality, as soon as that little boy called out “The Emperor has no clothes!” everyone around him would tell him to shut up and stop ruining an emotional moment for them. Someone would tell him that it’s not whether he has clothes that matters, it’s what the lack of clothes represents. Somebody would tell him that it was disgusting of him to disrespect the Emperor given all the years of service to nudity he had selflessly given. Someone would chip in that for all the flaws of a naked Emperor, when you look around the world at the terrible state of all the countries where Emperors wear clothes, you realise that having an Emperor with no clothes is the best way to ensure a stable democracy. Another person would point out that putting clothes on the Emperor would cost a fortune and in the end not actually change anyone’s lives in a material way. And yet another would bring up all the tourist income that is generated by overseas visitors coming to see the Emperor walking around in the altogether.

Finally, of course, after six or seven hundred angry op-eds decrying the habit of today’s youth of trying to tear down this country’s proud an ancient traditions of public nudity, the boy would be arrested and charged with sedition and everyone would breathe a sigh of relief and buy the commemorative edition of the paper with the 32-page liftout highlighting all the key aspects of the Emperor’s naked body and speculating on whether any of his relatives would also be getting naked soon.

So I’m not expecting a republic any time soon. People love staring at the Emperor’s bits too much.