How do young Brits feel about the monarchy?

This is an audio transcript of the FT Weekend podcast episode: How do young Brits feel about the monarchy?

Lilah Raptopoulos
If you’re British, you’ve very likely seen this video of Paddington Bear visiting Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
It was put out just this June to celebrate her 70th anniversary on the throne.

Paddington Bear
Thank you for having me. I do hope you’re having a lovely jubilee.

Queen Elizabeth II
Tea?

Paddington Bear
Oh, yes, please.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Paddington’s the popular children’s book character. And he downs the tea without sharing it with the Queen. And then when he realises how rude that was, he offers her a marmalade sandwich that he keeps for emergencies in his hat. But it turns out the Queen also has an emergency marmalade sandwich.

Queen Elizabeth II
I keep mine in here.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Which she keeps in her iconic purse.

Queen Elizabeth II
For later.

Lilah Raptopoulos
It’s super cute. And if you had to summarise how it presents the Queen in one word, the best word by far would be grandmotherly. She was the nation’s grandma. Sweet, a little mischievous would definitely give you a cookie even if your parents said no cookies. I’m playing this video for you because people in the U.K. have been coming out in droves since the Queen died last week. As I record this, there’s a five-mile long queue snaking around central London to see her coffin. And a much larger proportion of the people out than any of us expected are young. I was curious how young people are processing this event and how they’d seen Queen Elizabeth when she was alive.

Imogen West-Knights
It got me thinking about the fact that for young people, I guess I’m talking about people under 30. In their memory, the Queen has always been an old person, an old woman.

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s Imogen West-Knights. She’s a friend of the podcast, and she’s been speaking to young people around Buckingham Palace since last weekend for a piece in the magazine this week.

Imogen West-Knights
And I think there’s a sort of softening thing that we do when we look at older women and we kind of grandmarify them a bit and maybe they become kind of cute and, yes, soft in the public imagination. So it’s interesting to me that a lot of younger people did think of her in that sort of fond, cuddly kind of way. And I think that’s something that the Crown do encourage as well, you know, the whole Paddington Bear thing.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Today we talk with Imogen about what she’s been hearing on the streets of London. We also bring in our own producer, Lulu Smith, for a conversation about young people and the Crown. Then I speak with our US business editor Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson about where we’re spending our money in time now. Post-pandemic, we wanna to spend because we’re restless, but we have less money because of inflation. And that collision has affected how we interact with culture. This is FT weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
Last Thursday afternoon, before the news broke that the Queen had died, Imogen published a piece in Slate magazine saying that we should brace ourselves for a rollercoaster. By that night, it was happening. Public events were cancelled across Britain, the news shifted to almost exclusively royal coverage, people started coming to Buckingham Palace to lay flowers and to lay Paddington Bears and to lay marmalade sandwiches. And Imogen headed out. She wanted to see the crowds for herself and know who was out there and why they’d come. Imogen, thanks for being here.

Imogen West-Knights
Nice to be here. Nice to be back.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So I have to ask, you know, after the Queen died, you spent that weekend around Buckingham Palace and you were talking to people who came out to mark the Queen’s death. And before we get into reflections, I’m curious, just can you paint the picture for me a little bit? Like what did you see?

Imogen West-Knights
Yeah. So I went on the Tube to Green Park, which is the nearest station to the palace. And even at the station it was really busy and on the pathways that lead up to it.

Lilah Raptopoulos
And was it like I mean, it’s I imagine it’s very different from a royal wedding there.

Imogen West-Knights
Well, it’s odd, right? Because they’re preparing for the funeral. So they’re building all this infrastructure around the palace at the moment. So they were kind of like lorries beeping and construction noise, but also this sort of sombre, quiet, I don’t know. It was all just very odd. And then it changed over the weekend. So I think as more and more people were coming down, they had to put in more crowd control staff, more marshals, more barricades.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Did it feel sort of like a congregation of people just kind of looking for a place to be? Did it feel like disorganised?

Imogen West-Knights
Yeah. No, it did feel like people weren’t really sure what they were supposed to be doing when they got there. I think there were a lot of people who had just come down because they felt that they ought to insert themselves or to have some kind of memory of what they were doing on that weekend. Because, you know, it’s a massively historic moment for people in this country because it’s never happened for almost everybody who is alive in this country, who’ve never had the death of a monarch.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Imogen is 30. So it isn’t just that she and her peers don’t remember the last time that a monarch died. Their parents don’t remember, maybe not even their grandparents. There’s, of course, a script for formal proceedings around the death of the Queen, but people don’t have a template for how they’re supposed to act and feel right now, which makes this gap this week between the Queen’s death and the funeral on Monday, a kind of liminal space. You can’t get away from the coverage. So people are waiting and thinking about the monarchy and maybe for the first time they’re forming their own defined opinion about it.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Imogen, I’m especially interested in how young people are reacting to the Queen’s death. Did you find that there were a lot of young people out over the days that you were there?

Imogen West-Knights
Yeah, no, I did. I saw lots of teenagers, people in their early twenties. I mean, obviously, it’s a self-selecting crowd as people who do want to be there and therefore probably feel pro the monarchy in a general sense. But I guess I was surprised, particularly by, I spoke to quite a few younger women who felt like the Queen in some way represented something positive for women, like having a female head of state was something that they thought was good for them.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Imogen says some young people like that King Charles has spoken out so publicly about the environment.

Imogen West-Knights
And obviously that’s something that younger people are thinking about a lot at the moment.

Lilah Raptopoulos
A lot of other young people she talked to came out just to feel like they were touching a part of history. But I wanted a more subjective take. What does it feel like to be a young British person right now?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Imogen, like, I don’t know how you would identify, but you’re a young British person and I don’t expect you to speak on behalf of all young British people. But you’re also a journalist and a cultural commentator. And first of all, where are you coming to all of this from? Like, what was your perception of the monarchy entering Buckingham Palace or thinking about this before she died?

Imogen West-Knights
Yeah. I mean, I don’t remember picking up anything specifically to do with the monarchy from, for instance, my family or from adults that were close to me. You know, I didn’t grow up in a household where we spoke much about the royals. They were just kind of background noise. But yeah, I grew up in London, so I was obviously, I guess, near to where the royals were a lot of the time that I didn’t you know, that’s a thought that I had when I was at Buckingham Palace this weekend is I’ve kind of forgotten that they’re literally here like that. Where they live is also where I live, like they live in London because it feels like they don’t really they live in so many ways on a completely different plane of existence from the rest of us. So I think unless you grow up in a rabidly socialist household, which I didn’t, you know, my parents are not monarchists or antimonarchist. I don’t know. There’s just something in the air. Like, I remember being very young and thinking that it was sad for people who are not from Britain because it’s the best place in the world. And, you know, where did the idea come from? It came from everywhere. And I think for me, when I was a child, the monarchy was very much a part of that. And then as I got older and more educated and learnt about Britain’s place on the world stage. Yeah, I don’t. I don’t have any fondness for the monarchy or the royal family personally and the people that I mix with as an adult don’t either. You know, we’re all annoying leftists.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So Imogen is basically anti royalist, but she says that’s not the point. The point is that people her age have never really had to seriously contend with the politics of the monarchy because the Queen was always just there doing what the Queen did. Whatever you might have thought of the institution.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Can you explain sort of what you understand the sentiment to be among young British people, your friends and otherwise sort of around the monarchy? Like even though it’s broad, how would you explain it? Like who likes it and who doesn’t?

Imogen West-Knights
I mean, it’s difficult to generalise how young people feel about the Queen. I think the feelings vary. You know, the spectrum is as wide as it is for older people. I just think that maybe the Queen is something slightly different because of this thing, of her being a sort of benevolent grandmother figure to many. And actually, I have also been surprised among people I know who are not pro the monarchy and feel that we shouldn’t have one and that it’s, you know, we should have elected public officials, etc, who have admitted to feeling a little sad because it’s just she’s always been there.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Why do you think the grandmother image has become such a big thing, like especially for people who are grappling with the Crown’s role in colonialism and things like that?

Imogen West-Knights
I think it’s because partly she just looks old. She was old, and when she appeared in public, she didn’t do a lot of talking. You know, she talked to people, but what she said to them wasn’t often reported. So you kind of just had the image, you know, she would turn up at the opening of or whatever, shake some hands, wear a nice little outfit and smile at people and wave. And I think that allowed people to kind of, yes, just sort of look at her and think, oh, she’s a like smiling old lady. It’s an image thing because actually there was very little else to go on.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right, yeah I wanted to ask you, you know, I would love to think through this culturally with you, like, I mean, one thing I was thinking is that, you know, there might be a dividing line for how different generations think about the Queen and the royal family. Like maybe it’s people who remember when Princess Diana died and people who don’t. Maybe it’s, you know, that like the kind of culture that different generations have been consuming around the royal family has something to do with how they view the Queen and the monarchy. I’m curious if you think that, like, you know, millennials were maybe more likely to watch The Crown. Gen Z, maybe more likely to be following Princess Diana fashion Instagram accounts?

Imogen West-Knights
Yeah, I think The Crown did come up in conversations that I had outside the palace with people who were, let’s say, 25 ish. I was talking to a guy from the Isle of Wight who was talking about how he loved the monarchy because he was fascinated by them and the kind of glamour of their lifestyle almost, and had talked about getting interested in them since watching The Crown. And so I think for some people having the lens of something like The Crown as the primary lens through which they look at the monarchy, makes them almost more like celebrities than they might otherwise have been because, you know, they’re the people off the telly, that they know their stories and they’re paid by beautiful people and that they can kind of, I don’t know, think about women as slightly more, yeah, celebrityfied kind of way, rather than as part of a power structure that has any actual bearing on their lives.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I would love to bring our producer Lulu on because I’m kind of curious to both of you like how you think this period will affect what people will think about the Crown and what young people will think about the Crown, like Lulu was saying this morning that it’s been bizarre to see this sort of like archaic image of Britain in the news that doesn’t really connect with how you live day to day and like see that sort of reflected back at you. And I’m curious about it. Lulu, you were also out talking to people for us last week and you are also a young person in Britain. What are your thoughts about it?

Lulu Smith
Yeah, my sense of it is like even if you’re kind of politically engaged young person, then the monarchy isn’t or hasn’t really been anywhere near the top of your agenda. Like there are so many things that are wrong constitutionally and politically, unlike in the world, that if you are going to focus on like abolishing the monarchy, it would seem kind of arbitrary. But this has brought it to the fore in a way that has never really happened before. So I feel like a lot of people are engaging with the question of like what the monarchy means and whether they want it to exist in the first place. Whether that’s going to lead to any kind of significant change, you can say, but it’s definitely going to change the temperature of things, I think.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Imogen West-Knights
It is probably still sort of too soon to say because I think a lot of it will depend on what Charles does next. And he’s coming to the throne at a very interesting time. Cost of living crisis, price of gas, price of electricity, just general bad feeling in this country. The vibes are off, I’ve got to say, everything feels very, yeah, unstable, provisional, post-pandemic. So I just, I don’t know, I mean, already we’ve kind of had a demonstration of the fact that the Queen was extremely good at not appearing imperious, and Charles has already fallen that hurdle. There was a clip going round of him, gesturing in a kind of angry looking way for an aide to take something off his table when he was signing some papers, which no one’s ever seen the Queen do something, and she’s been around for a very, very long time. So I think already with seeing that his command of his public image is maybe not as good as the Queen’s was, and that may come to have effects further down the line. I don’t know. What do you think, really?

Lulu Smith
I think also seeing like King Charles across the news, like his hands being kissed outside Buckingham Palace and all of the press being commanded by the same story, it’s almost like you’re kind of getting the cultural export that is England or other countries see reflected back in a way that feels very archaic, anti-modern in a way. It seems to kind of contradict the internet age that we are so accustomed to now. This hasn’t happened for 70 years, but when it last happened, it was more in key with the kind of cultural atmosphere of the time. Whereas now there’s such a weird dissonance between the coverage and the kind of ceremonial aspects, and then the way that we’re used to receiving that information through, like the chaos that is social media or 24 hour news outlets. It does feel like we’re sort of trapped in this vortex of like it’s always like a time warp or something.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Imogen West-Knights
I really I really agree with that. Yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Imogen and Lulu, thanks so much for talking through this.

Imogen West-Knights
Thanks for having me.

Lulu Smith
Yeah, thanks.

Lilah Raptopoulos
You can find Imogen’s Dispatched from Buckingham Palace in this week’s FT Weekend magazine. I’ve put the link to it in the show notes.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
I’m going to sound like a broken record. But have you noticed that we’re in yet another weird phase of the pandemic? I think it’s the it-isn’t-over-but-we’re-pretty-over-it phase with a twist, which is that most of us aren’t paying too much attention to the virus itself anymore. But right when we’re ready to spend, the economy isn’t having it.

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson
I think now we are in quite a distinct phase where certainly in a place like New York, where both you and I are, pretty much everything is open. There’s very little not available to us culturally or economically in terms of shopping and things like that. But this has collided with a massive shift in the economy with a kind of 40-year high in inflation. So I you know, I think there’s an interplay of kind of time, money, priorities going on at the moment.

Lilah Raptopoulos
That is my colleague, Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, we call him Edge. He is the FT’s US business correspondent. And I recently invited him on to an Instagram Live to talk about where we are now.

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson
I do think particularly for people who are not, you know, don’t have a lot of money in the bank, there is a very different financial backdrop now where gas is costing a lot more than it used to. Food is costing a lot more than it used to, up to double digits. And so that doesn’t leave quite as much left over for everything from your HBO subscription, to your new outfit, to the concert ticket you might want to get.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So we’re two and a half years into Covid-19. There are more things to spend money on, and in turn, our habits are changing again.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I definitely find myself focusing more on experiences, although there’s been this tension. I mean, you were talking about time and money, and I’m curious about that because I feel this tension of like the things that I bought got bougier in the pandemic and more expensive. Like my candle selection is really like my budget for candles really went up and then I went out there and now I’m spending money on dinners and I have less money for candles, but I’m still used to the candles. I can’t go down in the

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson
And now you and you are not alone. You’re not alone. I interviewed the CEO of Newell Brands, which owns Yankee Candle, among a load of other weird brands like Sharpie pens. But he was saying, yeah, early in the pandemic, everybody liked candles. It was people who’d never bought a scented candle before, suddenly felt the need to have 20 of them around their bath tub but they have now gone back to not buying candles again.

Lilah Raptopoulos
OK.

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson
Now, I think it’s worth remembering quite how weird our spending was on some stuff . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
It was weird.

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson
 . . . in the early months. And so we all now have a rice cooker and we have candles and we have some very weird ingredients in our cupboards for most ambitious moments. But that was when we had nothing else to spend money on. And a lot of us also had stimulus payments from governments coming in, which kind of paid off the credit cards and gave us a bit more cash to spend.

Lilah Raptopoulos
What Edge is seeing in the data is that consumers are being more selective than they used to be. Take for example, theatre. Inflation is making us price sensitive, so people are seeing fewer productions, but they’re spending a lot of money to see flashy shows with big stars.

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson
Broadway attendance is down by about half in the most recent season versus pre-pandemic, so it’s kind of not every theatres reopened. They’re not all running of capacity. They’re not running as many shows. But for the big shows like Music Man, for example, Hugh Jackman, I think is in that. I checked this week how much orchestra tickets would be for that show. They start at $292 and they go up to $2,850.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Wow. Wow.

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson
Yeah. We were seeing a trend towards blockbusters across media.

Lilah Raptopoulos
In a weird way, what the data is showing is that people are staying in harder and going out harder. We want it all, even when the money’s tight. Maybe, especially when the money’s tight.

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson
I have a theory on this that I’d be interested in your thoughts some. I think we always felt a little bit guilty about slumping down on the couch at the end of the day, watching Netflix, you know, playing a video game, just kind of indulging in entertainment. And I think that we’ve got rebranded through the pandemic as a kind of necessary self-care kind of health break. Do you think that’s the case?

Lilah Raptopoulos
I think so. I mean, like people talk about having a limit now that they didn’t used to, you know, like we used to kind of work ourselves to the bone. I don’t know if this is like some weird Covid trauma thing, but there’s something very comforting about being home. So, like, staying home is a place to recharge and watching a TV show alone and like doing something digital online is OK.

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson
I actually I looked up the figures on this and Pew, the research organisation, found that again among Americans, 35% say that going out is now less important to them. But 21% say that going out is more important to them. Only 9% are actively trying to avoid crowds at this point.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson
So I don’t think it’s that we’ve kind of we fear the outside world, we don’t want to be around other people, we think they’re like sick. But I think it’s much more of a kind of ‘no I deserve this.’

Lilah Raptopoulos
The one you end up doing, whether it’s treating yourself to more nights in or paying for big experiences depends a lot on how you’re holding up in this economy. You know, it really depends on which one you can afford.

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson
What we’re seeing now from the survey is a real split in spending between people who earn under about $150,000 a year and families that own over that.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson
The wealthier, you know, Americans certainly are really prioritising travel. They’re prioritising experiences. They are prioritising newness. So Nordstrom has, the US department store group said, actually, it’s not price for them. It’s newness. They want the stuff they haven’t seen for the last couple of years. But they’re kind of the poorer, lower income families are, you know, trading down from Walmart to the dollar stores. You know that there’s a real pinch on the clothing companies, the apparel companies like Gap and actually department stores, Kohl’s and others. And they’re saying we’ve been stuck with a lot of excess inventory because people just don’t have the money to buy clothes once they filled up the car and fill up their grocery basket.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Whatever your income level is, it does seem like this post-Covid Roaring Twenties dream is not exactly materialising. That’s something that struck both Edge and me as we were preparing for this conversation.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I was thinking about around that time that we were getting the vaccine. So like February, March, April 2021, people were trying to rebrand this like post-Covid era as the Roaring Twenties. Anna Wintour was telling our colleague Anna Nicolaou that there would be a Roaring Twenties boom for luxury goods and high fashion. And we were all going to want to go spend a bunch of money and get all dressed up and look our best and go out there and, like, live our best lives. Anyway, I’m looking around and I’m thinking like, are we in the Roaring Twenties? Like, is this 1999? And it doesn’t really fit [laughter]?

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson
Yeah. You know, it’s funny you say this because I, you know, I spent my time talking to CEOs and asking them, you know, what’s what the future holds. And I had one of those conversation myself with the CEO of Wynn Resorts, the casino owner in Las Vegas. And about a month or two back, I thought I have not heard anybody mention the Roaring Twenties for a while [laughter]. And I, I hope there’s a service called Sentieo, which keeps transcripts of all of the companies’ earnings calls when they’re discussing their numbers with Wall Street every quarter and you can search them. And so I just searched the words Roaring Twenties. No CEO had mentioned this phrase since, I think mid-to-late 2020. At the same time, it’s quite hard to get a room in a high-end hotel in Tahiti, I believe. I have not tried, I have to say. But there is a very robust world of high spenders out there who are interested in kind of bespoke, tailored, privileged experiences and even at the more within reach income brackets, then people are doing the big trip. They’re doing the bucket list trip this year if they can get to the country on their bucket list. And there are no kind of travel restrictions still.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
Edge, my last question that we’re getting quite a lot of. We’re getting a lot of questions about the consumption of alcohol, which was not going to be my last question. But did you have any off the top of your head knowledge on that?

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson
I can tell you I did not learn to bake bread or speak Mandarin. I did improve my cocktail game. And I have been a very faithful contributor to the growth of the American distilled spirits industry.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Excellent, as have I.

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson
And this game goes to kind of bifurcation of high-end and low-end income groups. Even as everybody is worried about the rising cost of food, of petrol, people are kind of really cutting back and trading down from deli meats to spam, you know. And in some cases, you’re also having the spirits industry talk about this trend of premiumisation, which is not a neologism I like very much, but people are still trading up to the good tequila, the good gin, and that doesn’t seem to be going away. I’m not unhappy to see the craft gin revival, you know, still going strong. Yeah, I think that’s going to be with us for a while.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Uhmm, Edge, this was really fun. Thank you.

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson
We covered a lot of ground.

Lilah Raptopoulos
We did. We talked about we put the world to rights.

Lilah Raptopoulos
You can watch our whole conversation on the Financial Times Instagram account. I’ve put the link in the show notes.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s the show this week. Thank you for listening to FT Weekend The Podcast from the Financial Times. Next week we’re talking to my colleague Jemima Kelly about NFTs and whether NFTs in art are actually kind of over. She is hosting this season of another great podcast called Tectonic, which you should check out. We also have Katy Hessell on. She just came out with a book called The Story of Art Without Men. It’s an anthology of women artists throughout history, which is something shockingly that has never really been done. Thank you to everyone who came to the festival a few weeks ago. It was such a delight to meet so many of you in person. We will have an episode dedicated to that in the coming weeks. A personal request from me if you like the show. It turns out that leaving a five star review on Spotify or Apple podcasts or wherever you listen is really still the best way to help people find the show who don’t know about it. And it’s the best way to support the work that we’re doing. You can also recommend our show on your social media feeds and tag us. That really helps us too. We love hearing from you, so do say hi. You can email us at ftweekendpodcast@ft.com. The show is on Twitter @ftweekendpod and I’m on Instagram and Twitter @lilahrap. Links to everything mentioned today are in the show notes alongside a link to the best offers available on a subscription to the FT. Those offers are at FT.com/weekendpodcast. Make sure to use that link. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos and here is my incredible team. Katya Kumcova is our senior producer. Lulu Smith is our producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer. This week we were executive produced by Manuela Saragosa. And special thanks go to Manuela and Cheryl Brumley. Have a wonderful weekend and we’ll find each other again next week.

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