On 5 November 2017, leaked documents from two offshore tax havens in the Cayman Islands revealed that the Duchy of Lancaster – the Queen's private estate – had used offshore private equity funds to avoid paying tax on its holdings.1 The so-called ‘Paradise Papers’ were 13.4 million leaked documents revealing how more than 120,000 people and companies globally used offshore investments to avoid paying tax. The papers showed that the Duchy of Lancaster's investments had put funds into an array of businesses, including the retailer BrightHouse, Britain's largest rent-to-own company which has been ‘criticised for exploiting thousands of poor families and vulnerable people’ by charging huge interest rates on purchases using cost credit.2 The Duchy responded to the Paradise Papers by claiming that ‘our investment strategy is based on advice and recommendation from our investment consultants and appropriate asset allocation’, essentially shifting accountability.3 On 7 November 2017, the Chair of the Duchy, Sir Mark Hudson, was knighted by the Queen at Buckingham Palace in a pre-planned ceremony the monarchy seemingly saw unfit to cancel.4 The Queen has never publicly apologised for investments made on her behalf that investigative journalists have argued contribute to exploitative practices leading to poverty in debt.
Later on 7 November 2017, another leak from the Paradise Papers revealed that Prince Charles's private estate, the Duchy of Cornwall, had invested millions of pounds in offshore companies, including Sustainable Forestry Management, a Bermuda-registered business run at the time by Charles's best friend Hugh van Cutsem.5 The investment was put into land to protect it from deforestation in mid-2007. In January 2008, Charles featured in a charity video discussing tactics for protecting rainforests. As the Guardian commented, ‘the Duchy should have publicly declared the investment in a company that might have indirectly benefited from the impact of the Prince's longstanding support for conservation projects’.6 In response to the scandal, the Duchy claimed that Charles had no ‘direct involvement in investment decisions’, and again Charles has never publicly apologised for investments made on his behalf that potentially exploit conflicts of interest.7
In the days following the Paradise Papers revelations, the then Labour Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell called for the monarchy to publish full financial and tax records for ‘complete openness and transparency’.8 Buckingham Palace has never directly responded to this request. In July 2018, the Duchy of Lancaster's Annual Report made no direct reference to the Paradise Papers or the investments revealed within. Instead, in a section on ‘Strategic Risk’, the Keeper of the Privy Purse Alan Reid reiterated that management of the investment portfolio was made independently: ‘the Duchy employs an investment consultant to advise overall and an investment manager to manage the financial portfolio on a day-to-day basis’.9 This could be seen as an attempt to absolve the Duchy of responsibility for the investments. In September 2018, the Guardian revealed that HM Revenue and Customs would block individuals involved in tax avoidance schemes from receiving knighthoods or honours, because ‘poor tax behaviour is not consistent with the award of an honour’ and these individuals will ‘bring the system into disrepute’.10 No mention was given to the monarchy's involvement in ‘poor tax behaviour’, given its obviously pivotal role in the honours system.
The representation of the Paradise Papers as a ‘scandal’ was a rare moment for the British monarchy, where it faced (temporary) overt public criticism and (temporary) attention drawn to its means of accumulating wealth. On 6 November 2017, the Guardian represented the findings on its front page, using the iconic etching of the Queen's profile on British coins next to the headline ‘Queen's cash invested in controversial retailer accused of exploiting the poor’, to make critical connections between the monarchy, wealth accumulation and class-based exploitation.11 Three weeks later on 27 November 2017, very different representations emerged when Clarence House (Prince Charles's Communications Offices) announced that Prince Harry would marry Meghan Markle. The couple's relationship and marriage dominated royal news, due primarily to Meghan's status as a bi-racial, self-identified feminist, divorced, American actor. According to Google Trends, UK searches for the term ‘British royal family’ at the time of the engagement announcement were more than double those around the time of the Paradise Papers leak:12 the engagement announcement foregrounded familial relationships – the royal family – rather than the institution of monarchy and the investors caught up in the Paradise Papers ‘scandal’. That is, media representations of Harry and Meghan's engagement – such as the Daily Express's ‘The Look of Love’ and the Sun's ‘She's the One’, all including photographs from the couple's staged engagement photocall – obscured (whether intentionally or not) political-economic issues of monarchy and capital, through moral economies of familialism and (heteronormative) love.13
Running the Family Firm is about the British monarchy, media culture, power, capital and inequalities. It probes conventional understandings of what monarchy is and why monarchy matters by exposing the systemic relations between the media culture of monarchy and its political and economic formations: how it looks versus how it makes its money and power. Academic anthropological accounts often position royalty as superficial, and nothing more than symbolic.14 In media and public commentary, the contemporary British monarchy is typically positioned as an archaic institution, an anachronism to corporate forms of wealth and power, and therefore irrelevant. However, the relationship between monarchy and capitalism is as old as capitalism itself. Whilst most academic books on monarchy have had a historical focus, Running the Family Firm centres monarchy in debates about culture and economy in contemporary Britain. In academic terms, it uses a British Cultural Studies approach to read political economy through culture, and argues that media representations of the royal family are staged as affective and ideological projects to distance the monarchy from issues of capital and inequalities, and ‘produce consent’ for monarchy in the public imagination, as illustrated in the Paradise Papers moment.15
Running the Family Firm works with concepts of the ‘frontstage’ and the ‘backstage’ of monarchy. It argues that media representations (of, for instance, familial intimacies or spectacular royal events) constitute the ‘frontstage’; that is, this is what we see. Meanwhile, ‘backstage’ there are a host of political-economic functions, infrastructures and modes of production that reproduce the institution. This is what we typically don't see. This book aims to pull back the stage curtain and expose those systemic relations that are usually obscured. To do this, I conceptualise the monarchy as a capitalist corporation, oriented towards, and historically entrenched in, processes of capital accumulation, profit extraction and forms of exploitation – processes that the Paradise Papers made temporarily hypervisible. ‘The Firm’ is a longstanding nickname for the British monarchy (see Chapter 1), but I use this name more literally to refer to the monarchy as a corporation, using ‘Firm’ and ‘corporation’ as analogous. This enables me to describe an institution and its corporate investments, wealth, assets, operational tactics and actions.
The central thread of Running the Family Firm is how these processes of capital accumulation occur alongside our emotional investment in the monarchy as a ‘family’: what I call the Family Firm. It describes how the reproduction of power and privilege happens in tangent with, and through, affective notions of family and other forms of benevolence, belonging and identity in media culture. In sum, the corporate power of monarchy (the Firm) is disguised through media representations of the royal family (the Family Firm). By analysing five key royal figures from across Elizabeth II's reign (1953 to present) – the Queen, Prince Charles, Prince Harry, Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle – I ask what are representations of these figures doing to conceal capital relations and reproduce monarchical power? What might a wide-ranging analysis of these figures reveal about how the Firm represents itself as a successful family over time? What forms of capital, both ‘old’ and ‘new’, are being mobilised by the Firm? How does the Firm seek to (re-)establish forms of social hierarchy, belonging and exclusivity, which help to reproduce global inequalities and ideologically reinforce inequality as a necessary system? These are not easy, stable or frictionless relations. Indeed, I argue that media representations of monarchy are often highly contradictory, constantly shifting and reactive. But in drawing out the economic, political, social and cultural functions of monarchy, I ask what our investments in monarchy are investments for; what is reproduced in media representations of tradition and family; and how revisiting these historical issues sheds light on processes of division and difference in Britain today.
In 2019 the world's richest 26 people owned equivalent wealth to the poorest 3.8 billion, and in 2017 the UK's wealthiest one thousand people owned more wealth than the poorest 40 per cent of households.16 These growing inequalities leave the poorest worse off, as 1.6 million UK people used a food bank in 2019, and in 2017/18 around 14.3 million people lived in poverty.17
In this context, sociologists have returned to questions of class to understand economic disadvantage and poverty.18 Alongside this, academic research on ‘the elites’ has also experienced a significant resurgence. The sociologists Mike Savage and Karel Williams's Remembering Elites was amongst the first recent studies to identify the ‘glaring invisibility of elites’ in sociological research.19 The economist Thomas Piketty's influential volume Capital in the Twenty First Century concluded that the richest were disproportionately benefiting from neoliberal capitalist regimes, and the geographer Danny Dorling's Inequality and the 1% demonstrated how social mobility is stagnating.20 Other research has explored how elite wealth is maintained, the forms it takes and the systems perpetuating such unequal access to elite lifestyles.21
Much of this research focuses on transnational, ‘meritocratic’, neoliberal corporate power and the ‘new rich’, overlooking older, inherited forms of wealth, and ‘old’ forms of political and institutional power in reproducing economic and cultural dis/advantage in Britain. Despite claims that landed power is in decline,22 the investigative journalist Guy Shrubsole demonstrates that long-established, land-based wealth holding (by, for example, the Crown, the aristocracy and the church) remains central to systems of power.23 Seventy per cent of British and Irish land is owned by 0.28 per cent of the population, illustrating an enduring landed elite.24 Almost one-third of UK wealth is inherited, and a social mobility study found wealth has remained within a select few British families for a thousand years.25 These forms of ‘old wealth’ increasingly intersect with capitalist logics of ‘new’ wealth elites. ‘New’ global elites often own international property portfolios, reflecting the model of ‘landed’ wealth.26 Meanwhile, aristocrats are expanding their investments, perhaps best exemplified by the Duke of Westminster, whose original land holdings have now broadened into sixty cities globally, and incorporate forms of rentier capitalism in tourist or entertainment attractions, shopping centres leased to businesses, privately owned public spaces, and asset management services.27 This expanding portfolio demonstrates how ‘old’ traditions of landownership facilitate ‘new’ capital forms, and how ‘putting land to work’ in new ways ensures the persistence and mutability of aristocratic commercial activities in contemporary Britain. Various forms of elite wealth intersect and converge through comparable cultural, political, social and economic behaviours.28 Whilst this is not to overstate the aristocracy's endurance, it does demonstrate the persistence of the aristocracy as a privileged class, and the ongoing importance of kinship and inheritance as a form of wealth accumulation.29
One possible explanation for competing narratives that aristocratic power is in decline versus their interactions with new forms of capital is that the aristocracy tends to remain invisible to avoid public scrutiny. Whilst centuries ago power was linked to spectacular forms of visibility (see Chapter 2), now ‘gate-keepers’ curb access to this demographic.30 These range from managers of stately homes, National Trust employees and journalists at ‘elite’ magazines such as Tatler and Country Life, and aristocratic lifestyles tend to include ‘exclusive’ sporting activities such as polo or shooting.31 In an increasingly networked world, the aristocracy's invisibility in contemporary Britain is incredibly powerful.
An exception to this invisibility is in institutionalised and/or ceremonial forms, such as the House of Lords, or the British monarchy.32 Indeed, these visual spectacles are so visible they disguise invisibility through theatrical masquerade. The co-constitutive and co-dependent relationship between invisibility, visibility and power is one key theme of Running the Family Firm. As I explore, the monarchy promises access to aristocratic cultures: royal events are media spectacles for public consumption (Chapter 2) and key royal figures are represented as ‘modern’ and ‘progressive’ through mediated public intimacies (Chapter 5), representations of ‘ordinary family’ life (Chapter 6) and claims of multiculturalism and postracialism (Chapter 7). However, I argue that this access is limited and carefully stage-managed, seemingly concealing monarchy's vast wealth, hidden tax arrangements, corruption, unspoken political influence, labour relations and trans/national relationships (Chapter 1).
Running the Family Firm argues that we must invest in the language of monarchy and Marxist notions of class inequality to understand inequality today. Elite studies must recognise how forms of power intersect and converge. It is only by revealing these relations and placing the monarchy at the centre of class analysis, which Running the Family Firm aims to do, that its importance to British socio-political life is revealed.
Growing divides between Britain's rich and poor were illustrated viscerally in June 2017, when a reported eighty people died in a fire in the high-rise, social-housing building Grenfell Tower in the London Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. This is an area with extreme inequalities between the poorest and the richest, who live in close proximity. The cladding covering Grenfell Tower's exterior so it looked more appealing to wealthy neighbours was highly flammable, used by the management company instead of fireproof alternatives because it was cheaper.33 As the sociologist Tracy Shildrick notes, ‘the disaster … epitomises so much that is unfair and divisive with neoliberal capitalism’.34
Various royal family members visited the Grenfell Tower site in the aftermath as part of their philanthropic engagements (see Chapter 5 for a discussion of royal ‘work’).35 Following the Queen's visit, the Daily Mirror published the headline ‘A Tale of Two Leaders’, which contrasted a photograph of the Queen talking to Grenfell Tower residents with one of the then Prime Minister Theresa May at the site flanked by police officers to avoid local and national public anger at the role of government in the incident. This commentary seems to present the Queen as the antithesis of the policies that many blame for causing the fire: the austerity policies of the state, and the elite power of global investors gentrifying the London property market. Here, the Queen represents a paternalistic and patronising morality in opposition to the immorality of the ‘new elites’, embodying values of history, heritage and protection against external threats. Yet, Grenfell Tower is less than two miles from Kensington Palace, the official London residence of royals including Prince William and Kate Middleton. This demonstrates a physical proximity between the monarchy, its property portfolio, the casualties of austerity policies and the greed of financial capitalism. Indeed, whilst Tracy Shildrick describes the visceral visual comparisons between ‘luxury tower blocks and the haunting images of the burnt out shell of the Grenfell Tower’, the opulence of nearby Kensington Palace provides an equally stark visual contrast.36
In ‘A Tale of Two Leaders’, the left-of-centre Daily Mirror fails to identify the Queen as part of the systems of class greed and inequality that facilitated the Grenfell incident. Similarly, many people's response to the monarchy's exposure in the Paradise Papers, and its involvement in tax avoidance schemes, was one of surprise. The Labour MP Margaret Hodge said she was ‘furious’ with the Queen's advisers for bringing her ‘reputation into disrepute’, and claimed the Queen would be ‘completely shocked’ to learn of the schemes.37 She continued, the ‘monarchy is one of the most trusted, loved and respected institutions in Britain and it symbolises the integrity of Britain in the world, and to see it sullied by these sort of activities is outrageous’.38 Such bewilderment that the monarchy might engage in immoral practices to accumulate wealth is revealing of its positioning in the public imagination as the opposite of corporate forms of wealth and power. Yet, as the American politician Bernie Sanders argued, the Paradise Papers evidence an ‘international oligarchy’.39 In this new order of elites, ‘old’ and ‘new’ wealth intersects through interest, debt, capital gains, tax schemes and entangled family relationships.40
One argument of this book is that the inequalities inherent to monarchical systems of rule combine with those of financial capital. I argue that the monarchy acts as a façade, through which the mechanisms of inequality are disguised and naturalised. Another explanation for sociological research's overlooking of the aristocracy is that there has been a ‘turn away’ from earlier Marxist debates about the ruling class and economic class struggle. Because of this, Marxist frameworks like those of Silvia Federici and Ellen Meiksins Wood exploring how late capitalism remains rooted in historical forms of exploitation, extraction and class-based inequality are overlooked.41 Meiksins Wood argues that:
there has been no fatal disjuncture between a capitalist economy and a political-cultural ancient regime suspended in time somewhere around 1688. On the contrary, the formation of state and dominant culture has been inextricably bound up with the development of capitalism, conforming all too well to its economic logic and internal contradictions. Britain may even be the most thoroughly capitalist culture in Europe.42
It then follows that the monarchy, the aristocracy and the gentry have always been capitalistic, while premodern forms of status, privilege and prerogative continue in our understandings of class, belonging and national identity.
Economic theories on royal power further demonstrate the monarchy's capitalist logics. Academic anthropological accounts of ‘inalienable possessions’, such as Annette Weiner's work, focus on what she calls ‘the paradox of keeping-while-giving’, where ‘inalienable possessions’ (things that cannot be traded and are conserved through inheritance; the Crown Jewels are one example) are hoarded, while symbolic replacements are offered as a form of exchange, even while it reproduces inequalities.43 Similarly, the anthropologist David Graeber argues that contemporary capitalist economic relations are organised around (im)moral logics of exchange and reciprocity.44 Debt repayment, for example, is positioned as a moral imperative. But there are still hierarchies of precedence and privilege which order moral relations of inequality.
In Chapter 1, I argue that royal funding and/or wealth is offset in public discourse against notions of monarchy's wider cultural, historical or economic ‘value’ to British society (for example, that oft-repeated mantra ‘the monarchy is good for tourism’). Monarchy is understood here as a form of Weiner's ‘keeping-while-giving’, where monarchy may be accumulating wealth but the royals are represented as socially responsible and ‘giving back’ through, for example, philanthropic activity or notions of royal ‘work’. The historian Frank Prochaska argues that, whilst monarchs like Henry VIII were seen to rule by divine right, after the English Civil War it was generally believed that ‘privilege entailed responsibility to the less fortunate’.45 That is, monarchy had to be seen as ‘giving something back’.
Such discourses also position royal figures as productive, and active in capitalist labour markets (Chapter 5). This reflects forms of ‘philanthrocapitalism’, which describes how philanthropy functions as a form of capital to make corporations and/or wealthy individuals ‘look good’ which then offsets inequalities, as well as generating more capital from customers drawn to a ‘socially responsible’ company.46 Visiting Grenfell Tower in the fire's aftermath makes the royals appear to be ‘giving’, even while the monarchy ‘keeps’ its power, and ‘keeps’ its privileged position in the very London borough that facilitated the unequal conditions for the fire.47 Royals reproduce inequalities in the very act of appearing to mitigate them.
Moral economies are further reproduced through ‘categories’ of wealth. New forms of capital in Britain get caught in a contest over legitimate possession and belonging. In Chapter 1, I describe how Victorian industrialists were seen as ‘vulgar’ compared to the ‘respectable’ landed gentry. ‘Family Firms’ were promoted at the time because they drew on moralising language of ‘the family’, and gestured towards a form of inheritance reflecting the model of the aristocracy. Likewise, I will demonstrate how notions of history, heritage, national identity and familialism structure our emotional investments in monarchy. The Firm becomes the Family Firm. This is not a corporation but a bastion of Britain's heritage. The monarchy is important because it symbolises national identity. Hence, the Firm's wealth is depoliticised through these moral economies.
Running the Family Firm describes the monarchy as a corporation, the Firm, in order to look behind the moralising economies and expose capitalist logics. As the Paradise Papers demonstrate, the reproduction of the monarchy's wealth is partly dependent on the monarchy being run as a corporate business, exploiting procedural loopholes to maximise profit and avoid taxation, alongside corporate giants such as Apple, Nike and Facebook, who were also embroiled in the Paradise Papers ‘scandal’. Considering the Firm as a corporation allows new ways of understanding the monarchy's wealth, assets, operational tactics and actions. For instance, in 1992 the Queen's self-identified ‘annus horribilis’ (‘horrible year’) – one of her reign's most sustained periods of public criticism – was partly characterised by anger at ‘public funds’ being used to restore Windsor Castle after a fire.48 The fallout was so dramatic that some royal scholars predicted the end of the monarchy.49 Instead, 1992 concluded with the monarchy paying ‘voluntary’ income tax to assuage public criticism, and the monarchy's cost to the taxpayer has not raised substantial public concern since.50 Indeed, the Republican movement has all but disappeared into fringe campaigning, despite the rising social inequalities outlined above, and despite the exact sum of this ‘voluntary’ income tax, as well as the size of the wealth the income is taxable from, remaining undisclosed.
It is interesting to reflect on the similarities between the Firm and the taxation of global corporations such as Starbucks. In 2012, responding to public anger that it had paid no UK corporation tax for three years, the managing director of Starbucks, Kris Engskov, announced ‘we will propose to pay a significant amount of corporation tax during 2013 and 2014 regardless of whether our company is profitable during these years’.51 Admitting that ‘the tax authorities were unaware’ of these plans, Engskov's announcement is essentially ‘voluntary corporation tax’ because it is not based on official profit calculations.52 The tax lawyer Conor Delaney said this ‘made a mockery’ of the tax system, because it skirts the laws of taxation for good publicity.53 We could ask whether the Firm is doing the same.
Whilst the journalist Nicholas Shaxson describes tax havens as offering ‘escape routes from the duties that come with living and obtaining benefits from society – tax, responsible financial regulation, criminal laws, inheritance rules and so on’, I argue that the Firm has been doing this for centuries by being legally exempt from taxation. Meanwhile, it presents ‘voluntary’ taxation as benevolent giving (or, as Weiner would say, ‘keeping-while-giving’).54 Likewise, whilst scholars such as Nadine El-Enany and Ida Danewid have described how the Grenfell Tower fire reflects colonial logics of racial capitalism because the inequalities in global cities like London are built on institutional racism and racialised dispossession (and, indeed, the majority of the Grenfell victims were people of colour), the Firm has been invested in racial capitalism for centuries through the British Empire: from providing charters to imperial corporations like the East India Company, to continuing to use goods stolen during colonisation (such as the Koh-i-Noor diamond from India used in the Crown Jewels), even while sympathising with Grenfell victims (again, what Weiner calls ‘keeping-while-giving’).55
It is notable in this context that global corporations are often nicknamed ‘empires’ (for example, ‘Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook Empire’). This plays on the language of imperial empires to describe how ‘a non-state body such as a corporation or a religious order can also establish control over peoples and nations’.56 But describing the Firm as a global business empire is more than a metaphor. Rather, it is recognising how contemporary corporate capital works similarly to historical forms of racial capital, how they remain co-dependent and how this is embodied in the sovereign body of the British monarch(y).
The monarchy is a model for the capitalist regime. Running the Family Firm argues that there are in/consistencies in how the monarchy historically exploited its legal status to its advantage, and has adapted to various periods of capitalism to sustain power and accumulate wealth. For example, long before offshore tax havens, the aristocracy and the monarchy were avoiding tax by investing landed estates in trusts.57 Likewise, as the social scientist Guy Standing argues, ‘rentier capitalism’ – the monopolisation of property – historically began with the monarchy's attempts to raise capital through fee extraction, from the patent system and copyright laws, to landlordism and the enclosure of public space.58 In medieval times, the Crown collected rent – called ‘landgable’ or ‘hawgable’ – on urban property where it owned the land.59 Where autonomy over rent was granted to local authorities, the town paid an annual payment – the ‘fee-farm’ – to the Crown.60 Indeed, the negative reaction in 1992 to ‘public funds’ restoring Windsor Castle was misplaced, given that all monarchical wealth comes from public funds at some point, via different extraction tactics.
A popular mythology of monarchy is that it is apolitical. Constitutionally it is banned from being involved in party politics, and as the constitutional scholar Walter Bagehot wrote, ‘the Crown is … the “fountain honour”; but the Treasury is the spring of business’.61 In February 2021, the Guardian released documents which countered understandings of the monarchy as apolitical. The documents showed that the historical procedure of the ‘Queen's consent’ – where government ministers ask the Queen's permission to debate laws and bills which will privately or personally affect her, such as those relating to her private assets or position as landowner – was not merely a formality as widely understood, but rather the monarchy had used the procedure to persuade government ministers to alter laws in its favour. This included a ‘transparency law’ which would have revealed the Queen's wealth, and road safety laws which would have affected the royal estates.62 The constitutional law scholar Thomas Adams said the documents revealed ‘the kind of influence over legislation that lobbyists would only dream of’, demonstrating again how monarchy's power goes beyond other corporate, state or political actors.63 Running the Family Firm also counters this mythology of the monarchy as apolitical, and argues that the monarchy is a deeply political institution which ensures the social, political, cultural and economic order. The monarchy is involved in ‘shoring up an ancien regime’, and as such is central to understanding rising inequalities.64
Britain is invested in monarchy as a family: the royal family. The sociologist Michael Billig's important work Talking of the Royal Family used discourse analysis to explore how British families spoke about the monarchy, and found that comparisons were often drawn between ‘ordinary’ families and their royal counterparts.65 Such framing allowed the families to negotiate the monarchy's wealth and power, because the royals were seen as ‘ordinary’ and ‘just like us’. More recently, the cultural theorist Jo Littler argued how elite figures like the royals contradictorily draw on ideas of meritocracy to position their wealth as ‘earned’, and therefore we, too, can be rich and privileged if we ‘work hard enough’.66
I argue that these ideas are re/produced in media culture. If the reproduction of (corporate) monarchical power happens alongside, and through, emotional investments in the royal family, media representation is how this is maintained. Running the Family Firm draws on the academic work of British Cultural Studies, particularly Stuart Hall, to read the political economy through culture and argue that media culture is a key site through which class power is exercised and understood.67 Hall notes the importance of ‘conjunctural analysis’: situating the present in historical trajectories and mapping power relations as they change over time.68 Considering ‘the conjuncture’ means we can attend to the specificity of the present, and consider how we got here. In Running the Family Firm, this means asking what it means to study the British monarchy at this socio-political moment. Hall's work also recognises the important role of media culture in shaping practices of state and society: the media is one ‘mechanism of consent’ for securing power.69 ‘Culture’ and ‘society’ are not separate; rather, British social, political, cultural and economic life is staged through media culture. Whilst media representations are what we usually see of monarchy (for example, royal ceremonies or royal babies), Running the Family Firm turns this narrative on its head to expose what we don't see. This is a complex process of cultural politics to reveal what is usually concealed. To use the metaphor of theatre again, it uses the ‘frontstage’ of monarchy to expose the ‘backstage’.
In a broader historical sense, representations of monarchy have always been ways of ‘producing consent’ for royal power.70 Monarchies have been considered as theatrical productions, from court masques as literal stagings of royal power (see Chapter 3) to the royal court as a dramaturgy of ritual, etiquette and hierarchy (see Chapter 1) and the royal event as spectacular ceremony (see Chapter 2).71 Historians have analysed representations of global monarchies through portraits, artefacts, coinage, plays and performances.72 Developments in print and electronic media accelerated this further. Queen Victoria's reign was represented in print, news media and newsreel coverage, and interwar monarchs used radio to communicate directly with their subjects.73
The contemporary monarchy is telegenic and digitised (see Chapter 2). Running the Family Firm draws together a range of materials on monarchy since 1953, including newspapers, magazines, books, films, television productions, portraiture and paintings, websites, social media outputs, public opinion polls, government reports, cartoons, political commentary, historical archive material and memorabilia. I have also undertaken ethnographic fieldwork at royal tourist sites, events, galleries and museums. This material ranges from ‘official’ representations produced by the monarchy to activist or republican texts, commentary from journalists and commentators, entertainment texts, fandom materials and public commentary on social media. This multi-textual analysis illustrates the complexity of monarchy as a social form and cultural representational system. I use investigative research methods to map monarchy across various media, physical and embodied sites, to explore how the cultural political economy of monarchy works across varied textual spaces.
Running the Family Firm explores the relationships between the corporate power of the Firm and representations of the royal family using analysis of five key royal figures: the Queen, Prince Charles, Prince Harry, Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle. In describing them as ‘figures’, I draw on Celebrity Studies approaches of celebrities as collections of images, discourses and narratives, or, as Richard Dyer writes, ‘a complex configuration of… signs’.74 These signs can be (re)contextualised within their social and material conditions of production. Figurative methodology has also been developed in feminist work.75 This describes how particular figures are brought into being through representations across a range of cultural sites, with figuration operating as ‘a constitutive effect and generative circulation’.76 Claudia Castañeda describes how ‘unpack[ing]’ these figures reveals details about both the figures themselves and the cultural, political, social and economic relations they ‘body forth’.77 Crucially, this book is about the representation of royal figures. It is not about them as individual people. Indeed, the Queen's ‘real’ personality is irrelevant for our purposes. Not everything that is represented in media culture is ‘true’, and nor am I claiming such. Likewise, this is not a book that systemically addresses specific media forms, nor does it undertake ethnographic or qualitative analysis about people's responses to monarchy, although these contribute towards the argument. What matters are the representations circulating about royal figures, and how these representations work alongside, through and in service of broader structural relations that keep monarchy in place.
For my five royal figures, I ask how and where is this royal figure represented? What work does this figure do? What is the meaning of this figure? Using a figurative method, each royal figure embodies the various ways in which the Firm remakes itself as a successful family over time. That includes through national identity or identities, (geo)politics, sovereignty and landscape (the Queen in Chapter 3), through landownership, conservatism and class hierarchy (Charles in Chapter 4), through ‘philanthrocapitalism’, masculinities and the military-industrial complex (Harry in Chapter 5), through the (social) reproduction of conservative, ‘middle-class’, nuclear ‘family values’ (Kate in Chapter 6) and through ideologies of diversity, post-imperialism and post-racialism (Meghan in Chapter 7). Each royal figure makes up the (Family) Firm. I do not cover every royal, and I have chosen case studies which reveal key themes in the Firm's reproduction. This selective approach reflects representations of monarchy in wider media culture, where the wider royal family is displayed on and hidden from the royal stage when relevant. Prince Edward, for example, is absent from this book as he is absent from royal events focusing on the ‘core’ family members, usually including the Queen and (until his death in 2021) Prince Philip, Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles, Prince William, Kate Middleton and their children, and (prior to their resignation) Prince Harry, Meghan Markle and Archie. In this book, ‘unpack[ing]’ these royal figures demonstrates not only how systems of representation ‘produce consent’ for the monarchy but also how the everyday construction, mediation and consumption of these representations ‘produce consent’ for, and reveal something about, various phenomena across British social, political and cultural life.78
Academic scholarship on monarchy has focused on accounts of historical royal figures or families,79 the monarchy on film,80 other media representations of monarchy,81 audience reception,82 monarchy and gender,83 monarchy and social class,84 monarchy and national identity,85 royal wealth,86 monarchy and Empire,87 monarchy and British politics,88 royal events89 and anti-monarchism.90 There are many popular biographies about monarchy, from those within the institution and journalists and/or commentators outside.91 Running the Family Firm is the first to connect the culture and the economy; that is, it is the first account of the cultural politics of monarchy.
I have chosen to largely discount the royals’ official titles, and instead use their colloquial names: the Queen, Charles, Harry, Kate and Meghan. This was purposeful, both because the full titles are so unwieldy that it is impractical to use them throughout, and to reflect the construction of the royals in the public imagination. As Michael Billig writes in his analysis of people talking about monarchy, people demonstrated a ‘cheeky familiarity’ rather than a ‘hushed reverence’.92 Running the Family Firm is interested in how this ‘ordinariness’ is established.
Chapters 1 and 2 explore the ‘backstage’ and ‘frontstage’ of monarchy, respectively, and the co-dependence of invisibility and visibility. Chapter 1, ‘The (Family) Firm: Labour, capital and corporate power’, outlines my conceptual framework of the monarchy as a corporation: the Firm. It maps the mechanics, technologies and industries involved in ‘backstage’ labour of the Firm's reproduction. The chapter also argues there are a web of capital relations: the exploitation of low-paid workers through ideologies of class subservience; the ‘revolving door’ between the Firm and global corporations; the murky rules of royal financing; the secrecy of royal wealth; the networks of contacts; the exploitation of political relationships for profit; and the abuse of political privileges. I unpack the historical relations between ‘family’ and ‘firm’ to consider how ideas of ‘the family’ moralise wealth.
Chapter 2, ‘“The greatest show on earth”: Monarchy and media power’, focuses on the ‘frontstage’, and how representations reproduce public consent for the monarchy. The Queen has reigned during a period of rapid technological expansion: from the emergence of television, through tabloid newspapers and paparazzi, to social media and citizen journalism. The Firm has consistently faced new challenges in how the public engages with monarchy. Starting with the Queen's 1953 coronation – the first royal ceremony to be televised live – the chapter traces ‘the media monarchy’ to the present day. It argues that all royal representations are stage-managed and precisely manufactured, and indeed royal visibility is balanced with a paradoxical but co-dependent invisibility, to ensure monarchy retains its mystique.
The subsequent chapters each use a royal figure as their case study to unpack what the Family Firm looks like. Chapter 3, ‘“Queen of Scots”: National identities, sovereignty and the body politic’, explores the relationship between the monarch(y) and national identities. On 20 September 2014, following the Scottish Independence Referendum, the British broadsheet the Daily Telegraph's front page featured a photograph of the Queen in the grounds of her Balmoral Estate in the Scottish Highlands, under the headline ‘Queen's pledge to help reunite the Kingdom’. This chapter uses this to explore how the Queen's body becomes a site of symbolic struggle over discourses of national identity and citizenship during the referendum, embodying interrelations of ‘Britishness’, ‘Englishness’ and ‘Scottishness’. I argue that when British status quo was under threat, representations of the Queen shifted from banal to purposeful symbols of authority and historical legitimacy. The photograph reveals the Firm's violent history, usually obscured in representations of the Family Firm.
In Chapter 4, ‘Let them have Poundbury! Land, property and pastoralism’, I analyse Poundbury, a 400-acre urban extension to Dorchester in Dorset, England, built on Duchy of Cornwall land using the architectural principles designed by Prince Charles in his book A Vision of Britain.93 Charles's vision rejects modernism, and Poundbury recreates a conservative blend of ‘familiar, traditional, well-tried and beautiful’ architectural styles.94 I propose that Charles links architectural trends to society and culture, and his vision of Britain is concerned not only with the architecture but also with managing the citizens populating it. Poundbury stages a traditional understanding of monarchy based on relations of feudalism, imperialism, pre-industrialisation, anti-urbanisation and classed, raced and gendered hierarchies; while contradictorily functioning as part of Charles's ‘property empire’ and reproducing forms of capitalist wealth.
Chapter 5, ‘“I am Invictus”: Masculinities, “philanthrocapitalism” and the military-industrial complex’, uses Prince Harry's involvement with the Armed Forces and the Invictus Games to consider the Firm's relation to global military capital and philanthropy. It argues that representations of Harry narrate his redemption through philanthropy, both through the redemptive masculinities of his royal figure (from the ‘playboy prince’ to the ‘philanthropic prince’, via the ‘soldier prince’), and in the redemption of a ‘good soldier’ from a ‘bad war’ in the ‘War on Terror’. Harry's performances of intimate address and talk of royal ‘duty’ represent the Firm as socially responsible, as the younger royals perform a populist and progressive version of monarchy. More broadly, Harry's persona condenses and disguises the neocolonial complexities of recent global conflicts in the Middle East, ambiguities in ideas of state responsibility versus individual rehabilitation, and the role of corporate capital.
Chapter 6, ‘The heteromonarchy: Kate Middleton, “middle-classness” and family values’, considers how the Firm is reproduced through patriarchal, nuclear, conservative, heteronormative family values, which are contextualised in authoritarian neoliberalism and rising global anti-gender movements. It suggests that the monarchy's power is dependent on the subjugation of women's bodies through reproducing an heir. The chapter also considers relations of social class. Due to her non-aristocratic background, Kate Middleton has been represented as ‘middle class’. I argue that this is strategic for the Firm to appear to open aristocratic cultures to the middle classes through performing ‘ordinariness’ in, for example, the Kensington Palace Instagram account. However, this ‘openness’ is merely a gesture, and the monarchy is becoming even more remote through Kate's indeterminate persona and staged photoshoots.
In Chapter 7, ‘Megxitting the Firm: Race, postcolonialism and diversity capital’, I explore Meghan Markle's introduction into the monarchy as a bi-racial, divorced, self-proclaimed feminist, American actor with a working-class background. Harry and Meghan's wedding was represented as a feminist, post-racial, meritocratic utopia, with Meghan's identity ‘diversifying’ the monarchy and illustrating its ‘progressive’ values. In the context of a monarchy built upon racism, colonialism and sexism, and in the broader contexts of Brexit, growing global far-right movements, increasingly factional political ideologies and widening global inequalities, I describe representations of Meghan as ‘diversity capitalism’, used to extend and diversify the Firm's markets. The couple's resignation from the Firm less than two years after the wedding illustrates how Meghan carried too much symbolic weight, and, rather than resolving royal histories of racism, (post-)colonialism, gender and social injustice, representations of Meghan merely pulled these inequalities into view.
The conclusion, ‘The post-royals’, expands upon Harry and Meghan's departure and uses these emerging representations to tease out the key themes of Running the Family Firm. Their resignation temporarily disturbed the monarchy's careful balance of visibility and invisibility, and emphasised issues of commercialisation and corporate capital, the media/monarchy relationship, and interrelations between the elites and the monarchy. This makes their departure an interesting point for me to leave this research, and going forward, to continue asking the key question ‘why does monarchy matter?’