It’s a myth that The Independent does not cover the royal family – but we do try to maintain our unique perspective

It is a bit of a myth that The Independent never reports on the royal family. When the newspaper started in 1986, Andreas Whittam Smith, the founder-editor, said it had a “tinge of republicanism”. He wanted to avoid “fawning” coverage – although The Independent was not alone in that – and he also thought it was in the family’s own interest to tone down some of the celebrity soap opera.

The myth owes much to our report of the birth of one of Prince Andrew’s daughters, which was a short paragraph in the “news in brief” column. But most of our coverage of the royal family has been fairly conventional, if restrained.

There was a change, too, when The Independent went digital-only in 2016. Much of the downplaying of royal coverage was a matter of the amount of physical space allocated to it in the print edition: the website has no such constraint.

So we are left with that tinge of republicanism in our editorial line. We have argued consistently that as many members of the royal family as possible should lead normal lives and pay their own way. Twenty-two years ago, when it looked as if Australia might vote in a referendum to become a republic (in the end, 55 per cent voted no), I wrote a leading article for The Independent saying we should have a bicycling monarchy like that of the Netherlands: “On your bike, Ma’am.”

That remains our view. This week we wished Harry and Meghan well in their attempt to “step back” from a prominent royal role, and applauded their ambition to become self-sufficient.

While we have no problem with the pomp and pageantry of, say, the state opening of parliament – that no one knows why a flunky carries the “cap of maintenance” on a stick during the ceremony adds to the charm – we have always wanted to restrict the flummery and expense of the extended tribe.

And one of the welcome discoveries of the rolling constitutional crisis over Brexit of the past three and a half years was that Her Majesty is indeed “just a pen”. There is no vestigial royal prerogative that the monarch can exercise at her discretion. For all the alarums about the Queen being “dragged into politics”, in the end she wasn’t. Everything was decided by parliament, the Supreme Court, and ultimately the people in the general election.

It is time to scale back the institution of the royal family to match its purely symbolic and ceremonial role.

Yours,

John Rentoul

Chief political commentator