Running the Family Firm

How the monarchy manages its image and our money

Laura Clancy

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781526158758
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526149329
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In recent decades, the global wealth of the rich has soared to leave huge chasms of wealth inequality. This book argues that we cannot talk about inequalities in Britain today without talking about the monarchy. Running the Family Firm explores the postwar British monarchy in order to understand its economic, political, social and cultural functions. Although the monarchy is usually positioned as a backward-looking, archaic institution and an irrelevant anachronism to corporate forms of wealth and power, the relationship between monarchy and capitalism is as old as capitalism itself. This book frames the monarchy as the gold standard corporation: The Firm. Using a set of case studies – the Queen, Prince Charles, Prince Harry, Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle – it contends that The Firm's power is disguised through careful stage management of media representations of the royal family. In so doing, it extends conventional understandings of what monarchy is and why it matters.

1
The (Family) Firm: Labour, capital and corporate power

The 2011 wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton was a key moment for the contemporary British monarchy. It attracted two billion television viewers in 180 countries, and one million visitors to London.¹ As has become tradition for royal events since Queen Victoria's reign as a way for royals to manufacture intimacy with audiences,² the royal family appeared for now-famous photographs on Buckingham Palace balcony (Figure 1.1).

1.1 The royal family on Buckingham Palace balcony, 29 April 2011

Although predominantly unnoticed, a host of Buckingham Palace staff were involved in staging the balcony: laying out and vacuuming the iconic red velvet drape (Figure 1.2). The cleaner doing this labour is just one staff of over a thousand working for the monarchy behind the scenes, largely rendered invisible behind the mediated royal spectacle. This chapter explores this backstage labour. It will pull back the stage curtain of monarchical spectacle to reveal the mechanics, technologies, infrastructures and actors behind.

1.2 Buckingham Palace cleaner vacuums the balcony, 29 April 2011

To do this, I introduce a key term used to describe the monarchy in this book: the Firm. This name has a long and debated royal history, seeming to originate with Prince Albert / George VI. The historian Denis Judd claims that in 1920, when accused of behaving inappropriately for the royal family, Prince Albert replied ‘we are not a family, we are a firm’, which Judd suggested demonstrated disillusionment with his uncaring parents.³ In the film The King's Speech (2010), he says directly to his father George V, ‘Papa, we are not a family, we're a firm’, to note a lack of familial intimacy.⁴ This demonstrates how the language of ‘the Firm’ has entered into accepted myths about the royal family. However, a more widely cited usage suggests a different meaning. During the Second World War, George VI reportedly stated ‘we are the Family Firm’ in reference to himself, Queen Elizabeth and Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret.⁵ This usage was positive, celebrating the royals’ enactment of ‘ordinary’ British family values to inspire strength and proximity between the monarchy and ‘the people’ during wartime.⁶ This framing has reportedly been adapted by the Queen to refer colloquially to the monarchy as ‘the Family Firm’,⁷ and multiple articles, reports, books and documentaries have used the designation uncritically.⁸ The historian Edward Owens uses it to describe the public relations strategy of monarchy in the mid-twentieth century, suggesting it uses ideas of ‘the family’.⁹

Whilst ‘the Family Firm’ softens institutional operations through ideas of familial intimacy, Running the Family Firm takes the name more literally to describe the monarchy as a corporation: the Firm. This chapter attempts to map the main features of the Firm's infrastructures, labour relations, modes of production, political economies, financial arrangements, inter/national relationships and networks, and the legal status of the Crown and its components. The empirical data take a classic journalistic approach of investigative research, consolidating a mass of material that was difficult to source due to the monarchy's reliance on secrecy. This material ranges from media representations (newspapers, books, documentaries, social media, blogs); statistical data (surveys); government, constitutional and legal documents; material goods (merchandise); and critical academic material on monarchy. It incorporates ‘official’ representations produced by the monarchy, activist or republican critiques, ‘objective’ commentary by journalists or commentators, entertainment texts, fandom materials and public commentary on social media. The story of corporate power and labour described here will reappear in later chapters.

I opened this chapter with the photograph of the Buckingham Palace cleaner vacuuming the balcony to illustrate the ‘backstage’, and each of these sections peels back another layer of the Firm's power. Analysing the Firm is comparable to a tapestry: from afar it appears a complete picture, but upon closer inspection its threads are tightly woven together, and the process of unweaving is near impossible. The Firm's history is so complex, and so bounded in unwritten privileges, that it is extremely difficult to undo its logic – if, indeed, it has any logic. I demonstrated in the Introduction how the monarchy is a key player in financial capitalism, but, whilst the Paradise Papers made this (temporarily) hyper-visible, on the whole the very invisibility of the Firm's social and economic power is its power.

Defining the Family Firm

Representations of the monarchy as an ‘ordinary’ family are commonplace in contemporary Britain. The feminist scholars Michelle Barrett and Mary McIntosh argue, ‘it is not the institution of monarchy that is popular, it is the royal family’,¹⁰ illustrating the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Why does monarchy matter?
• 1: The (Family) Firm: Labour, capital and corporate power
• 2: ‘The greatest show on earth’: Monarchy and media power
• 3: ‘Queen of Scots’: National identities, sovereignty and the body politic
• 4: Let them have Poundbury! Land, property and pastoralism
• 5: ‘I am Invictus’: Masculinities, ‘philanthrocapitalism’ and the military-industrial complex
• 6: The heteromonarchy: Kate Middleton, ‘middle-classness’ and family values
• 7: Megxitting the Firm: Race, postcolonialism and diversity capital
• Postscript: The post-royals
• Notes
• Index