Unhappily, I Must Agree.

 The royals are still relevant, unlike the Church of England.

Despite the embarrassment of Andrew the institution still binds us, in contrast to a distant, imprudent clerical leadership

Jenni Russell

Wednesday October 15 2025, 8.30pm, The Times

It has been another week of excruciating headlines for the royal family. Prince Andrew’s mortifying intimacy with the paedophile predator Jeffrey Epstein and new evidence of how untruthful he has been about that association have provided most of them. Once again the King is left with the agonising task of further distancing the institution from a younger brother whose amorality and arrogance have tarnished the monarchy but who cannot, as in centuries past, be neatly exiled to an obscure existence abroad.

Then there is the threat of a court case from Greenpeace over whether the Crown Estate is unduly profiting from leasing the seabed to offshore wind farms, thus driving up Britons’ energy bills. Parliament has decreed that most of the royals’ running costs be calculated as a percentage of Crown Estate profits, though the cash comes from the Treasury. And yet profit-making is always vulnerable to criticism.

So this may be a surprising week to claim that the royal family is still one of the most valuable institutions in Britain, and one of the few capable of binding the country at a time when it has rarely felt so riven and uncertain, but that’s where we are.

My teenage republican self would have been appalled at this. My parents thought the royal family an archaic, expensive, infantilising hangover preventing citizens from feeling fully responsible for their own affairs. At 13 I was threatened with expulsion from school for failing to stand up or sing God Save the Queen while sitting in the front row of the choir on speech day.

I chose outward conformity and private disdain, the easiest path; now I think how comfortably misguided that was. I didn’t see a role for the royals because I lived in a world buttressed by thriving organisations, surrounded by people who derived purpose and pride from belonging to parish councils, women’s institutes, churches, trade unions, hunts, rotary, youth or working men’s clubs, many of whom gained added status by appearing in the pages of well-read local papers. I didn’t realise how many would dwindle or disappear over the decades leaving the royal family as one of the few relevant institutions left.

The monarchy has always functioned both as a unifying, distant, magnificent spectacle and an absorbing source of gossip, a distorted reflection of the tensions and satisfactions of any family’s life. As the Victorian constitutionalist Walter Bagehot wrote, “A princely marriage is the brilliant edition of a universal fact, and, as such, it rivets mankind.” But a third role is officially recognising those who contribute to society. Its ability to do this with grace and conviction is one of the reasons for its survival.

Thousands of citizens meet the royals every year as the family members attend charity dinners, recycling centres or ribbon cuttings. Royal garden parties host 30,000 people annually and hundreds more go to investitures. These encounters are where support for the institution can be gained or lost.

This month the actor Gary Oldman revealed how unexpectedly emotional he felt on being knighted by Prince William at Windsor Castle, describing it as singular, wonderful and surreal. He had felt momentarily speechless. “It’s a big deal,” he said. “The journey one’s made from a kid in Deptford to, you know …” He was describing the momentousness of feeling valued and part of a greater whole. Last week I too was at the castle for an investiture, as a guest. I expected the event to be a formulaic production line. I was mistaken.

In recent years many of us have become dismally accustomed to most interactions with the state or its offshoots being a bruising disappointment, ungracious, inefficient or begrudging. Not here. In the longest-inhabited castle in Europe, overseen by Holbein and Rubens portraits, tapestries and gilded ceilings, the staff were welcoming, the Prince of Wales absorbed and animated in his conversations, the range and diversity of people being honoured, from the Midlands to Montserrat, moving. Everyone had the solemn pleasure of feeling like beads on a long historic chain.

No other institution could accomplish this with such a sense of place and past and therefore convey the restful understanding of our own insignificance. Our brief moments of glory today, the castle reminded us, will inevitably be followed by obscurity tomorrow.

Donald Trump understood the point of it; a man unerringly drawn to power was enchanted by the royals’ symbolism and glamour. The British people see it too. Despite the crises of recent years and the damage wrought in different ways by Andrew and Harry, two thirds of the country support the monarchy and fewer than a quarter prefer a republic.

This stands in stark contrast to the other traditional pillar of British society, the Church of England. The church has been so damaged by vacuous leadership that only 25 per cent of the country and 54 per cent of its own members view it favourably. It wrote itself out of the national conversation by lazily going into hibernation during Covid. Justin Welby’s half-hearted apologies after resigning as Archbishop of Canterbury for his handling of a sex abuse scandal added to the sense of connivance. Incredibly, there was no sense of urgency about repairing the damage. The 11 languid months it took to appoint his successor have left the impression that an archbishop is quite unnecessary to our national life.

This month Canterbury Cathedral damaged its reputation still further by staging an ugly display of peel-off graffiti all over its ancient stone in a desperate attempt to appeal to alienated youth. In its hypocrisy, its smugness, its failure to see how it is perceived and how irrelevant it has become, it is making the mistakes that the monarchy is doing its best to avoid. The Times.