Politics & Power Quote by Anthony Holden

You can hear the journalist’s eye for momentum in the opening clause: “We could have a political movement going…” It’s not a wistful aside so much as a diagnosis of squandered energy. Holden is sketching a counterfactual in which diffuse public anger (or appetite for reform) might have cohered into something disciplined and electorally dangerous. The sting is in “if it had been properly organized” - a quiet indictment not just of activists’ failures but of Britain’s chronic tendency to treat constitutional questions as theatre rather than infrastructure. The monarchy survives, in part, because opposition often arrives as mood, not machinery.

Then he swivels from the would-be movement to the institution itself: “the Monarchy’s done itself enormous damage.” That reflexive “itself” matters. He’s not blaming tabloids, social media, or republican ideologues. He’s implying self-sabotage: a sequence of decisions, scandals, misjudged optics, or moral hesitations that erode legitimacy from the inside. In a culture where the crown’s power is mostly symbolic, reputational capital is the real currency; spend it badly and there’s no bailout.

“Possibly beyond the point of long-term recovery” is the line’s most journalistic move: hedged, but chilling. Holden isn’t predicting abolition tomorrow. He’s pointing to the slow violence of institutional decline - a future where the monarchy may persist administratively yet fail culturally, kept alive by inertia while losing the emotional consent that makes deference feel natural. The subtext is that in modern Britain, the crown’s gravest threat isn’t revolution. It’s irrelevance, arriving one unforced error at a time.