A Holloway professor marks his students’ essays on monarchy against Prince William’s three registrations and a couple of very public private citizens
Monday, 19 October 2026. Holloway. A pile of student essays on the British constitution, red pen running dry, 9.30pm.
Thirty Essays On The Constitution And Not One Mentions A Range Rover
I set my seminar group an essay this term: What is the purpose of a constitutional monarchy in the twenty-first century. Thirty students answered. Twenty-six mentioned Bagehot. Nineteen spelled him correctly. Not one, I noticed tonight, mentioned the most illuminating constitutional document of the week, which is a set of three personalised number plates.
If you missed it, the report on Prince William’s three personalised number plates describes registrations reading NOTYET, NOTHARRY and DISTASTEFUL, attached respectively to an Aston Martin, a Range Rover and a Bentley. One for waiting, one for avoiding his brother and one for disapproving of almost everything. As a summary of hereditary succession, it is more concise than anything in my reading list.
Bagehot Would Have Wanted A Plate
Walter Bagehot famously divided the constitution into its dignified and efficient parts. The dignified part inspires reverence. The efficient part gets things done. I would now propose a third category, the vehicular part, which communicates the monarchy’s emotional condition to motorists on the M4. NOTYET is dignified. NOTHARRY is efficient. DISTASTEFUL is both, and also has heated seats.
The line in the report that my students should frame is the observation that William has been on the management training programme since birth, and the only person with a longer probationary period works at the Post Office. That is a better explanation of primogeniture than my entire lecture on the Act of Settlement, which, I discovered last week, two students slept through and one attended by mistake, believing it was a seminar on property law.
Private Citizens With A Press Pool
Meanwhile, the brother. The companion piece I edited on Thursday notes that Harry and Meghan insist they are private citizens while arriving at barrier-lined charity visits with pooled press, cheering crowds and a commentator logging the origin of a belt. A constitutional expert in the piece needs three cups of tea and an aspirin to explain the arrangement, and concludes that they are private citizens for obligation, public figures for security, royal celebrities for engagements and ordinary parents when asking photographers to go away.
I want to be very fair here, because the charities they visited do real work, and because I have taught enough young people to know that a visit from someone famous can change a teenager’s year. The joke is not the charity. The joke is the category. Britain may need a new constitutional status, which I suggest we call privately public, to be administered by a Home Office department of six hundred civil servants with a form containing three boxes. Yes. No. Depends who is paying.
The Gold Stick Problem
The sister piece, on Harry and Meghan’s return to Britain and the Gold Stick, makes the sharper argument. If people discover they can help a child in a recording booth without anyone holding a ceremonial stick, the whole administrative basis of British pageantry starts to look shaky. I read that sentence aloud to my wife over supper. She said that is the most radical thing I have edited since 1991. I said thank you. She said it was not a compliment, it was a warning.
Red Pen, Final Verdicts
So I have marked the essays tonight with a new rubric. Five extra marks for anyone who understood that the British constitution is unwritten precisely so that nobody can be blamed for it. Five more for anyone who noticed that the monarchy’s most effective modern communication tool appears to be a car registration. Ten marks off for anyone who wrote that Queen Victoria designed the Bentley. Two did. They are both from the same flat in Tufnell Park, and I am beginning to suspect a shared source.
The best essay came from a quiet young woman from Barnsley who argued that the monarchy’s real constitutional role is to give the country something to argue about that is not the economy. She concluded that if the royals did not exist, the newspapers would have to invent them, and might do a better job. I gave her a First. I wrote in the margin that she should write for us. She wrote back on an index card that she would rather be paid in money than exposure. She has a great future in British public life.
A Fourth Plate
Before bed I drafted a fourth number plate for the royal garage. It would go on a modest family hatchback, perhaps a Skoda, and it would read SERVE. No Aston, no Bentley, no feelings wheel. Just a car that goes where it is needed, parks badly outside a community centre and drives home again. I doubt the palace will take it up. They will say it lacks urgency. They said that about the twentieth century as well.
Red pen dry. Coffee cold. Essays stacked. Somewhere on the M4 a man is waiting, a man is avoiding and a man is disapproving, and all three of them, it turns out, are the same man.