God save the queen

I want to share a discussion that a friend and I had this weekend about some of the differences between our prime minister, and the US president. It's worth thinking about, given the political events of recent years, in which our prime minister has assumed so much power as an individual, and in which he has been so close to George Bush.

We were talking about the treatment the two leaders of state receive from the political institutions of which they are part. 'Politics' is of course supported by the media, so part of this treatment must be attributed to treatment by the media.

Our standard of journalism is higher, I believe, than in the US, but it would be very wrong indeed to suggest that there's little criticism of Bush in American politics.

'But we don't revere him like they seem to,' my friend suggested. She was talking about the ceremonial treatment of 'Mr President' in the US.

In the UK, we have little such ceremony to apologise for our political leader: either there's no ceremony at all, or else our ceremony surrounding the prime minister is actually in itself more often critical of his position. Our politics treats the prime minister in a way that puts him almost permanently on the defensive. With the sorts of institutions epitomised by the televised prime minister's question time, and by the dragging of our prime minister onto Radio 4's Today programme, I think our political leader almost always has a struggle, to prove himself.

There's some relationship here, we thought, between the treatment of the prime minister in our politics, and the fact that we have a ceremonial head of state; where the Americans lack one, other than their president. It goes some way in suggesting an explanation for American reverence of their president: for us, it's our queen who's to be revered; but the Americans have no institutional point of reference higher than the president, except perhaps for God!

This explanation asserts that we necessarily have a need and fixed capacity for reverence. Whether or not that's the case is the same question as in asking, would we necessarily revere politicians more, if we didn't have a royal monarchy? I believe we probably would, but whether this capacity for reverence is in our fundamental human nature, or rather induced by our sensationalist media is a more difficult question. Perhaps the need is natural, but the capacity is media-controlled. I believe that the media reflects human nature, so I'd say certainly that both are at work in reverence.

Were we to be without our royal monarchy, I'd expect most of our reverence to be diverted to popular celebrity; already celebrity attracts the greatest share. Perhaps this is a reason why worship of celebrity as well is healthy for politics: in that it helps to divert some of our capacity for reverence away from our political leaders, who should remain instead under clear-sighted scrutiny. (Perhaps even the occasional reference to our nominal national religiousness helps also to keep things in perspective.)

What then is the difference in this function between celebrity and royal monarchy? There must be some difference if what we've theorised about the relationship between the monarchy and political reverence is true; America has celebrity too. It seems as though the value in this function of a royal monarchy is in its hybrid state between political institution and popular celebrity: such that it attracts just the right sort of reverence away from politics proper.

Big Bully

The Sun this week exposed what it described as the previously hidden truth about Jade Goody: that she is really an ignorant, bullying racist.

As a consequence of having been filled in, once out of the Big Brother house, on the latest of her treatment by the media, 'Jade', according to her agent John Noel, 'is completely distraught and is receiving medical attention for shock and depression'.

That's not surprising really, considering the roller coaster that life must be for her, at the whim of the media. She has been thrown from anonymity via celebrity and now towards notoriety; a tabloid darling one week, a figure of public hatred the next, it's not surprising at all if she's suffering emotional whiplash.

No doubt though, Jade must by now be a tougher cookie than most. This is hardly the first time that she has been on the receiving end of massive media harrassment. Since first appearing on Big Brother, Jade has been ridiculed as stupid and overweight; and that's on top of the more general but constant intrusive and demeaning commentary on her private life that she suffers as a personality in the tabloid eye. (And hasn't she done well despite it? - fitness video and all!)

The real ignorant, bullying racist, to use the tabloid press' own terms, is the great British public itself. We are the ones who buy the Sun and the Star each morning, and tune in by the millions to Big Brother each evening. Channel 4 has been the scapegoat for this latest media 'debate', but what is not emphasised enough is that the popular media does not so much create attitudes as it does reflect them. The questions of racism and bullying on Big Brother have been provoked by the programme's editors; obviously Big Brother's makers thought they would make for good television. And why did they think that? Not because racism or bullying is entertaining, but because the British public is as much a racist and a bully as Jade Goody is (which, truly, is not that much). The C4 executive board met yesterday to discuss recent events; they will have been asking themselves, 'did we give them a little too much reality this time?'

Julian Baggini's excellent article on Guardian Unlimited today discuses the truth about so-called 'racism' in Britain today.