U.K.: Nation goes nuts for baby prince

The whole country is giddy with joy, said Robert Hardman in the Daily Mail. The “whoops of joy and the honking of horns outside Buckingham Palace” told the world: “Britain could not be more pleased” with the arrival of William and Kate’s royal heir. “Has a happier mob ever stormed the gates of a palace than the thousands who surged around the queen’s door?” Even more revelers thronged the pubs, said Harry Hawkins in The Sun, waving Union Jacks and drinking to the health of the new royal, third in line to the throne. It was a national party. For this “momentous day in British history,” our newspaper actually changed its masthead to The Son. Even the hundreds of reporters camped out at the hospital smiled and cheered as they tweeted the news.

It wasn’t always like this, said The Times in an editorial. “Queen Victoria’s parents would be aghast.” Her birth, in 1819, was marked with a one-paragraph announcement in The Times, the only news outlet of the day. Even the arrival of our current queen, in 1926, warranted only six column-inches on page 4. Why, in this republican age, do we embrace “the gaudy theater of the monarchy,” dressing in Union Jack prints and camping outside the hospital in oppressive heat in hopes of a mere glimpse of the infant prince? Perhaps it is because in an increasingly diverse country, “our monarchy is what we have in common and what distinguishes us from other lands less fortunate in their traditions.”

But don’t you agree with me that all this hubbub is rather undignified? asked Zoe Williams in The Guardian. The media “vied furiously to see who could have least regard” for Kate’s privacy as she went into labor, “while the royal family tried in vain to maintain a sense of pomp” by insisting on “absurd, pre-digital practices” like announcing the birth via a piece of foolscap hung on an easel behind the palace gate. The “unique lunacy of royal-watching” is that we pretend it’s about our nation’s timeless monarchist tradition, when it’s really nothing more than an excuse for “unabashed prying.”

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Yet the royals must be grateful for the country’s enthusiasm, said The Guardian. The monarchy’s insane popularity these days is “an almost incredible recovery from its dim decades at the end of the last century, when this level of support was almost unimaginable.” Queen Elizabeth spoke of an “annus horribilis” in 1992, the year Windsor Castle caught fire “and a mutinous public refused to pay for restoration.” That was also the year that two of her children’s marriages fell apart, in highly public ways that utterly humiliated the royal princes: Andrew by photos of Fergie with her toes being sucked by a playboy and Charles by Diana’s tell-all book about their unhappy union. At the time, there was serious talk that the monarchy might soon be abolished. Now look at us, fawning over our future king. “Monarchy has a logic-defying resilience.”