Two things happened in Britain this week that nobody has put side by side yet. John Healey resigned as Defence Secretary because the government would not commit sufficient funding to defend the country. His armed forces minister Al Carns resigned the same night, adding that the defence investment plan was not only underfunded but designed to fight the last war rather than the next one. The Ministry of Defence wanted eighteen billion pounds over four years. The Treasury offered thirteen and a half billion. The gap between what is needed and what was committed is the reason two ministers walked out.
The same weekend Britain held Trooping the Colour at an estimated cost of ten million pounds.
That ten million covers the military personnel, the horses, the musicians, the operational logistics, the pageantry and the ceremonial infrastructure. It comes from the Sovereign Grant, allocated by the Treasury, or from the Duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster. It is public money in various forms funding a birthday parade for a monarch.
Nobody is suggesting Trooping the Colour should be abolished on the basis of cost alone. These things are complicated. Tourism, soft power, cultural identity, the economic return on royal ceremonial events, all of these factors are part of a legitimate conversation about value.
But the conversation about value is exactly what is not happening. Because the institution and the press that covers it have spent the week asking whether Harry should have attended, deploying lip readers to decode a trapped coat, counting the rows between Harry and the celebrity section at a basketball game, and analysing an icy glare. Nobody asked what ten million pounds of pageantry produced in a week when the defence budget was exposed as critically underfunded.
Al Carns was explicit. Britain is spending money on legacy systems ordered by a previous government. The military needs investment in the technologies being tested in Ukraine right now. Drone warfare, electronic countermeasures, autonomous systems, the actual shape of modern conflict. The Treasury offered four and a half billion pounds less than the MoD said was necessary to prepare for that reality.
And the balcony had fewer than twenty people on it.
The slimmed down monarchy that Charles and William have championed as fit for purpose in the modern era produced a Trooping the Colour that one commenter accurately described as an Ozempic balcony. Lean to the point of gaunt. The extended family gone. The cousins absent. The people who made the event feel like a living institution rather than a corporate headshot, cleared away in the service of a principle about working royals that the National Audit Office has since demonstrated is applied selectively and inconsistently.
Ten million pounds for a parade that attracted fewer wide shots than usual because the sparse crowds outside Buckingham Palace were reportedly not being shown in full.
Two ministers resigned over defence funding the same week.
Republic protesters showed up for the second time asking about Andrew and Epstein.
The Duke of Kent stood alone filming the flypast on his phone.
The questions about what the British public is getting in return for the cost of the monarchy are not new. But they land differently in a week when the Defence Secretary quit over an underfunded military and the Chancellor would not find the money to close the gap. The Treasury can decline to fund readiness for the next war. It can find the money for the birthday parade.
That is a choice. And choices have a politics.You said: woud the british royal family do the right thing?