NINETY per cent of the people living on these islands have known no other monarch than Elizabeth II.  

When she ascended the throne the railways had been recently nationalised and unified — when she died they were lost to public ownership, save some were in the possession of the state-owned railway of Germany from where much of her family originated.  

Elizabeth II became queen because her father was king. He became king only because his brother Edward had been forced to abdicate supposedly because the Establishment found his divorcee mistress Wallis Simpson unacceptable as royal consort.  

Other considerations came into play. So intimate with the Nazi ruling circles (and the German missions in wartime Spain and Portugal) were the former king and his right-wing US wife that the government exiled them incommunicado to the West Indies.  

When, in 1840, prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha married the German princess, Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, German was their first language.  

These Saxe-Coburg women are a tough lot. Queen Victoria reigned for 63 years, seven months and two days, a reign only surpassed by her great-great-granddaughter Elizabeth who stayed on the job for just under 71 years.  

The tangled lineage of the crowned heads of Europe threw up many wartime problems of loyalty. The European aristocracy — with their royal families — were members of a transnational elite that, like the late queen’s consort Philip, had options.  

A place could be found in the royal line-ups of many different states. Philip alone could opt for aristocratic or royal roles in Greece, Denmark, Germany and Britain — and only renounced his foreign nationality in order to marry Elizabeth.  

After an early education in Germany followed by a spell at Gordonstoun public school his pre-war enrolment in the British Navy — under the patronage of his uncle Lord Mountbatten — made Philip eligible as a spouse for the future queen.  

But when they married, Philip’s sisters were barred from attendance because of their Nazi Party membership while their husbands, functionaries in the Nazi regime, remained in detention. One was a senior Luftwaffe officer and another an officer in the SS.  

For a bunch of blow-ins from the Rhineland the British royal family is as skilful at obscuring history as it is at both creating and maintaining tradition. When she challenged him over his affair with Camilla, the then prince Charles told his wife Diana that he “refused to be the only prince of Wales who never had a mistress.”

By tradition, of course, when nobility marries a mistress, a vacancy is created. Things may have moved on and for sure this former royal mistress has been restored to a thoroughly bourgeois respectability by a discreet programme of mood music which even saw her sanctified by the blessed Monty Don in an appearance on Gardeners’ World.  

This is perhaps the most benign of the carefully constructed media narratives that help sustain the position of the monarchy in British public life.  

This last week we have been subjected to a sustained propaganda barrage that, if it took place in a socialist country, would be ridiculed as a “cult of personality.”  

Present-day princely duties include touting arms sales to Middle East monarchs — but the matriarch is just as tainted with Britain’s continuing history of colonial repression.  

Elizabeth was visiting her subjects in South Africa when apartheid was formally instituted. She was proclaimed queen while on a tour of Kenya and was imperial head of the Commonwealth when Kenyans were being beaten, murdered and herded into concentration camps by her colonial authorities.  

She was in Hong Kong when trade unions were repressed and sensibly stayed clear of Ireland while the servants of her crown were detaining thousands without trial and colluding with Loyalist murder gangs.  

Her reign saw colonial wars with the people of Cyprus, Malaya, Brunei and Aden. Then there are the interventions in Iran and Indonesia and wars in the Gulf and on Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq.  

Thus, it is impossible to sustain the myth of the royal family as a quintessentially British institution without disposing some of its disagreeable connotations.  

As to its popularity, the benchmark figure was set a couple of months ago with a YouGov survey which found that six in 10 Britons (62 per cent) think Britain should continue to have a monarchy, with only 22 per cent wanting an elected head of state.  

Over eight in ten Tory (84 per cent) voters and 77 per cent of Britons aged over 65 want the monarchy to continue.  

Nearly half of Labour voters (48 per cent) are monarchists and only 37 per cent are republicans.  

The longer-term trend has been for support for the monarchy to decline, dropping over the last decade by 13 points and among 18 to 24-year-olds opinion is almost at level pegging.  

Now that the future is with us, every instrument at the service of the elite is at work to buttress the notion that the monarchy is a permanent and necessary fixture of the British state.  

They need to. In 2011 nearly six out of 10 18–24-year-olds favoured a monarchy. This year it was down to 33 per cent.  

Will Charles make a good king — whatever that might mean — to an increasingly republican people? In May this year less than one third thought so. This was a substantial decline from January 2020 when 39 per cent held this view.  

But never underestimate the power of the state and the media to transform perceptions and opinion. Every marketing trick has been mobilised to transfer brand loyalty and after a week of monarchy mania 63 per cent now have confidence in his royal personage.  

We live in austerity times but Queen Elizabeth was crowned just as the post-war welfare state was beginning to transform lives.  

I was born in the year before the NHS. My first memory of a public event is of the street party held on the unmade-up roads of our newly built council estate and watching the coronation on the only TV set to be found down our street.  

It is in the manifold repetition of such instances that the ideological power of the monarchy is inscribed in the consciousness of many millions. 

In the minds of most of her subjects the post-war settlement — a National Insurance-funded NHS, pensions and benefit system, compulsory free secondary education, mass public housing, extensive public ownership of energy and utilities and transport — is synonymous with her accession to the throne.  

This and a carefully crafted image of public service and dedication to her formal duties has been buttressed by a sense that she embodied in her person many of the positive human qualities which are so manifestly lacking in her children and theirs.  

In adult life, what was this little girl — whose queen mother taught her to give the Heil Hitler salute, just like her uncle — really like? Who knows — no-one really understands a family except those who are born into it.  

While there is an avalanche of empirically verifiable facts about this deeply dysfunctional tribe, any real sense of its internal dynamics cannot be disassembled from our understanding of its role in underpinning the still dominant myths of nation.  

Our perceptions of the role of the royal family are shaped by a complex matrix of representations which acquire an appearance of transparency precisely because they are so ubiquitous and paradoxically, because they are so contradictory.  

The normal features of family life, intergenerational conflict, problematic relationships, arguments about position, status and money are all dramatised and exaggerated.  

Into this narrative is inserted a representation of the queen — dealing with her emasculated and antediluvian husband, her “simply impossible” heir Charles, paying off the underage victims of her predatory son — and disposing of a veritable mountain of honours to the deserving and undeserving alike.  

It takes a conscious effort to substitute a materialist analysis of the role of the monarchy for this constructed and idealised image. We can see in the survey figures the ambivalence the British nation feels about the monarchy.

In oppositional circles there is a discussion about the role of the royal prerogative in maintaining the peculiar British system of government which, rather than being based on a constitutional separation of powers, makes a fetish of the convention that the monarch rules in counsel, that s/he takes action only on advice from ministers.  

The monarch’s prerogative powers have existed since the transition from feudalism, but are shaped in the management of modern capitalism’s problems of legitimacy.  

Thus, Tony Blair had need to use them to make war on Iraq while much foreign policy and state patronage — appointments, pardons and honours — is exercised through these powers.  

The monarch’s reserve powers include the power to appoint and dismiss ministers; summon and prorogue Parliament and to assent to Bills passed by Parliament.  

By convention, royal assent to Bills is automatic, once a Bill has got through an elected Commons and the unelected Lords. As the backstop to our unwritten constitution the monarch has the power to sack the prime minister.  

We had a glimpse of the ways in which constitutional convention can be disregarded when 49 years ago this week the democratically elected president of Chile was killed and a CIA-sanctioned coup brought in US-sanctioned privatisation. The Chileans are still struggling to overcome the constitution that the coup imposed.  

There was faint echo of this a few years ago when — as a left-led Labour government seemed possible — various military and intelligence functionaries made noises about their loyalty being to the crown rather than a Jeremy Corbyn premiership.  

In the event capitalism’s first line of defence turned out to be the Parliamentary Labour Party in alliance with the mass media — and the only constitutional conventions violated were the Labour Party’s.  

The distinguishing feature of the British constitution is that is unwritten and enshrined in conventions which can only be disregarded if a greater authority can be invoked — and that is where the crown becomes the pivot on which state power turns and behind which the direction of its coercive functions are located.  

The corollary of this is that if profound change becomes necessary but constitutional convention makes it impossible, then change will come by overcoming these elaborate defences by which the existing order is protected.  

Nick Wright blogs at 21centurymanifesto.