Royally Irrelevant

Things have been going rather well for Prince William recently. First he got married to a beautiful girl who seems to genuinely love him, then he was made Duke of our fine city, and now he’s been named the most influential man in the world by an online poll.

The website, AskMen.com, suggests the result is due to his successful revamp of the royal family, making them “accessible and cool”, paired with the fact that he is a “hard worker determined to use his global profile for good causes.” As such, he’s beaten off Barack Obama (placed 10th) and David Cameron (ranked 49th) to the position of top global influence.

But this is utter bollocks and testament to the decreasing relevance of the Royal Family in modern society.

World’s most influential man or born lucky?

Ultimately, the Royals are a collection of rich people who happen to live in nice houses and sporadically pop up at public events to wave and smile at the poor people. All attempts to ‘modernise’ them, be it through the supposedly ‘cooler’ WillKat, or the recent removal of the gender bias towards sons-in-laws of succession, are just pointless tweaks to a fundamentally pre-modern institution.

The fact that the readers of a single website have decided that William is the most influential man (whatever we take ‘influential’ to mean) over the leader of the world’s only remaining superpower is really rather sad.

Now I’m sure William is a perfectly nice person, but out of all the things he’s entitled to (palaces, crowns, the ability to appoint prime ministers) this particular title is not one of them. I do not understand the continuing obsession that a large portion of the public appears to have with our royal family.