My mum supported Scottish independence and the Queen - this is why

My late Mum, Mary Kane, was a joyous Yesser in the last several years of her life, struggling on sticks to the voting booth in 2014. But what a royalist she was!

To her sons’ eternal consternation, there were Charles and Di tea-trays, Jubilee mugs and clippings of significant royal articles all over the house. Any visit to her would begin with a careful mapping of Windsor family manoeuvres across the media. Her invitation to a Holyroodhouse Palace event, as part of some carers’ celebration, was often fondly recalled. OK, Mum ...

Any republican suggestions from her boys would be angrily rejected, and usually for the same reason. “She provides stability! You need stability! Something that doesn’t change!” My mum’s childhood – an obscure father, in and out of orphanages – was certainly unstable.

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But I gradually came to realise that her deeper instability was as a child growing up during wartime, collectively facing a terrible foe. The royal family gave her a lodestar amidst all that (not that, with Nazi sympathisers now known to be laced through the family network, they entirely justified her faith).

Yet they appealed to my mum’s sense of modernity as well as tradition. I compare photographs of Mary Kane as a district midwife, and Elizabeth Windsor as a coronated Queen, in the same year. It’s easy to see why my mum would identify with her agency and clarity. Both of them are face forward, heads tilted upwards, confidently into the post-war light.

So it’s not that I don’t understand the sentiment about Elizabeth as a “rock of the nation”, to fastidiously quote Liz Truss. But my acute sense of that is a British nation, opposing an existential military threat, under conditions that would demand all the symbolic and affective resources we had. But can’t we finally put that down, let it go?

My dad was sternly silent about most things, though I intuit he wouldn’t have wildly disagreed with my mum on the royals’ continuity role. But dad was a very different creature: a self-declared cynic, battling daily with anti-Catholic prejudice in his white-collar environment. Moral advice came to his sons via the 11th Commandment—“Thou Shalt Not Get Caught”. And out of this complexity, there was only one real-life story he would occasionally tell us all about the Windsors.

“Oh aye, Prince Phillip … When I was posted at a naval base during my national service, we used to watch the young women being escorted on to his ship, every other night. And then escorted off again, after a few hours”. Mum would snort loudly (“John!”). Dad would roll his eyes.

An outrageous, scurrilous claim? I found this in Politico magazine the other day: “Though Elizabeth’s life had been one long rehearsal for the role [of Queen] it came sooner than expected and seems to have caused considerable marital strife. The dynamics changed immediately, with Philip turned, in his own words, into ‘a bloody amoeba’ while his wife surrendered herself wholly to her new duties.

“The Duke of Edinburgh seems to have had an existential crisis and spent ever-longer periods away from home. There were rumours of affairs that went on well into the 1980s”.

This is a recognisable frustration to me, borne by the men of my father’s era – an early manhood defined by collective violence and uniform-wearing. (My dad’s pal was killed at his side by a sniper, as they patrolled Berlin in the late 1940s). And these meat machines were then released into peacetime, now full of women wanting to move forward from confined domesticity.

So it’s interesting. I fully take on board Tom Nairn’s classic definition of the monarchy as an “enchanted glass”. It’s a mirror that represents a nation to itself, but in a much more harmonious and non-conflictual way than it actually is. A distracting shimmer, cloaking the operations of a ruling class.

Not all Yessers are against the monarchy

BUT one might also note the rise of the royals as a disenchanted glass – something in which the pathologies and tensions of the age, private and public, are writ large. Stephen Frears’s 2006 movie The Queen perhaps kicks off this perspective. It dwells dispassionately on the monarchy as not just “The Firm” (itself a harshly reductive term) but as two competing “PR firms”.

On one side, Elizabeth’s spectacle of distant, inscrutable post-war authority; on the other, Diana’s empathy-driven, media-friendly populism, as the “Queen of Hearts”.

I’m told by fans that this is the continuing fascination of Peter Morgan’s The Crown series (starting a new season this November) – the Royals depicted as rats in a cage they feel indebted to maintain. Yet how much more disenchanted could the glass be, as we peer into the murk of racism over Harry and Megan’s child, or (even worse) Andrew’s various associations and accusations?

The aforementioned Politico piece depicts Elizabeth as a self-abnegating and tireless defender of her role, grimly missing out on her youth in service to the Crown.

So was the impish grandmother who leapt out of James Bond’s helicopter, or had tea and marmalade sandwiches with a CGI bear, recovering some late joy? Or was this the most perfumed of dead cats, dropped on the public’s table to distract from the increasing bankruptcy and corruption of The Firm itself?

It would be dishonest to say I’ve had no positive royal experiences. I once attended a social work conference in the 2000s, where Princess Anne was the keynote speaker. She was fluent, informed and manifestly compassionate, a powerful advocate for the rights of children in care services.

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Also, in my environmental circles, I’ve met some green advisers to Prince Charles who were (and are) of a very high quality. I am stockpiling the popcorn, so I can watch the developing tensions between a “Green King” and the carbon-encrusted Brexiteers of the new Truss regime. But even as I write that last sentence, the old recoil arises in me again. Why am I gazing upon these unelected, hereditary figures, passively hoping that their whims might flow this way and that? The revulsion I felt, in the post-Brexit wranglings, that a “Queen” could even remotely “become politicised” by the negotiations – that hasn’t gone away.

Writing in 1981, Tom Nairn got to the nub of the problem with the royals. “The ‘magic’ of our monarchs is the sweet odour of decay arising from a mountainous dunghill of unfinished bourgeois business. The exaggerated popularity they enjoy is one manifestation of a nation which turned its back on progress generations ago.”

I’m a sanguine kind of indy-minded Scottish republican. The crooked timber of humanity can steer us towards sentimental acceptance, as much as any other vice or limitation. But the Royals are an upper limit on our democratic imaginations, crippling our ability to envision and enact radical institutional change in our lives. That’s my enduring position.

If you are mourning, I honour your mourning. But if the Queen’s passing inches us even slightly towards the abolition of the British monarchy, it bends the arc of history in the right direction. Sorry, Ma’am. And mum.