Reminds me of the Hugh Laurie joke "I used to be Princess Anne's assistant but I quit because I realised that however hard I worked they were never going to mak

Reminds me of the Hugh Laurie joke "I used to be Princess Anne's assistant but I quit because I realised that however hard I worked they were never going to make me Princess Anne". The difference between how it works in theory and how it works in practice is everything. British law is largely unwritten - until the EU gave us them we had no written bill of rights and most of our laws are based on precedent rather than anything parliament has decreed. If you do the immigration test one of the things you might be asked is what sort of constitution Britain has (correct answer "an unwritten one"). To try and understand Britain based on what is theoretically true is an exercise in futility that will rapidly lead you away from anything resembling reality. I don't know if you have to live here to really understand it but what you imply simply doesn't tally with the way the Royal family are viewed. It's a strange combination of soap opera, duty, alien otherness and sentimental fondness. For most people there's more of a feeling of pity for them than any idea that they're better than us. They are an anachronistic anomaly but that's how they're viewed - so different, so outside that the comparisons you make really aren't there, any more than you'd compare yourself to something in a museum. Now that's obviously not true of everything to do with the class system which at it's top levels embodies almost everything you say (the Prime Minister for instance is to me far worse, an elitist fop with none of the Royal family's sense of duty or propriety) but to pick on the Royal family is a little like protesting against BP by not buying sweets in their garages when you're filling up your car with petrol - it's really not the problem.