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Royalty Inc.

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Patt Morrison is a columnist for The Times and longtime royal watcher.

HAS there ever been a favorable book review that still made the author want to smack the reviewer? Maybe this is the one.

“The Firm” is a phrase dreamed up by its former chief executive, King George VI, to describe the business of the British monarchy. Royal writer Penny Junor took it for the title of what is, for a popular book, a substantive and detailed work.

The subtitle -- which will keep it from being erroneously shelved in the “business and money” section -- is “The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor.” But here’s where the author may not thank me: Do not buy this book if all you want is nearly 450 pages of yet more dishy, trashy gossip about the royals.

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There are certainly personal nuggets, and Junor, who has written about the royals for years, is evenhandedly critical of virtually every major royal (Charles can be weak, his father can be a bully) except the queen and Prince William, her grandson and heir presumptive.

Yet the most engaging characters are not these familiar lead players in the Windsor repertory company, nor even “Mrs. PB,” as Charles’ office has referred to Camilla Parker Bowles, now the duchess of Cornwall. It’s the supporting players who are as loyal to the monarchy as they are dependent upon it, the human engines of a through-the-looking-glass corporation that still uses ancient titles such as “Silver-Stick-in-Waiting” the way I might say “mailman,” and where the lord chamberlain runs almost everything but the Lord Chamberlain’s Office.

There’s David Ogilvy, the earl of Airlie, whose grandmother was a close friend to the queen’s grandmother, Queen Mary, and whose advice, like having the queen pay taxes, sought to make the monarchy, as it has been characterized, a “lean, mean, monarchy machine”; Sir Michael Peat, as in the accounting firm Peat Marwick/KPMG, who partnered with Ogilvy to streamline the crown’s operations; Mark Bolland, the flamboyant “Lord Blackadder” (to use Prince William’s nickname for him), a man all eminence and no grise. His post-Diana marketing campaign resuscitated the reputations of Prince Charles and Camilla with the kind of canny PR that saved Tylenol after the poisoning scare, but it drove a wedge between Buckingham Palace and Prince Charles’ place a few palaces down the road, according to Junor.

Running a monarchy is, to quote President Bush’s often repeated line, “hard work.” Junor argues, not originally but compellingly, that the British royal family is a serious trade -- not clotheshorse celebrities with lifetime tenure and not a misbehaving sideshow to keep the tabloids in tall cotton. It is an important institution even now, when its principals no longer go “once more unto the breach” with flailing broadsword, nor dispatch enemies to the Tower. The sovereign has no political power but immense influence and, like an outrigger balancing a Hawaiian canoe, the monarchy helps keep Britain and the Commonwealth from capsizing.

To put it in Hollywood terms, this book is not about just “Monarch: The Movie” but also the production notes and credits. Junor details the thought processes of a “firm” ever mindful that among its former CEOs, King Charles I was beheaded for high-handed power grabbing, King Edward VIII bailed on the job for wanting to make an honest woman of the wrong woman, and even Queen Victoria got booed for hiding herself away.

The court is always anxious to show it gives good value. News stories recently reported that the royal family cost each Briton about 62 pence last year -- the price of a couple of pints of milk. Junor, at her back-story-telling best, explains antique quirks like the Civil List, which is usually referred to as the income the royals get from the government. But the monarch once owned every teaspoonful of British soil and still owns tens of thousands of acres, half the kingdom’s wet-sand shores and the seabed as far as a dozen miles offshore. For a couple of centuries now, the sovereign has forked over the income from all that to the government -- and what the government gives back is called the Civil List, so it’s technically the crown’s money to begin with.

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Like some singular business pursuits -- pornography comes to mind, maybe pathology a la “CSI” too -- being royal is titillating to watch, but it is probably deathly boring to perform in its endless takes. Junor lays out the dreary routine: the same fixed ceremonies on your calendar for life; your days planned six months in advance; “no spontaneity, no last-minute plans, no ducking out of commitments”; being expected to admire the manufacture of better microchips or better manure; to make small talk with people you will never see again -- all under proctological press scrutiny. I can’t imagine a more unappetizing job description that doesn’t require scraping dead puppies off freeways.

The rewards, if you can call them that, are the best of cars, holidays, horses, clothes, food, displays of public adoration -- along with flunkeys constantly attending (and watching) you, and palaces whose plumbing would demand a tear-down in Beverly Hills. No wonder the Firm has to beget its members; who would volunteer for such servitude?

What Junor can detail but not explain is the DNA-deep dictates of service and duty that keep the royals in harness, their capacity for survival while nations and -isms tumble, and Britons’ DNA-deep love for their peculiar institution of royalty. Monarchs and subjects have been dancing this national pas de deux for more than a millennium, and there’s no sign that the music will stop any time soon. *

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