Blair plays down Sophie affair

By CNN's European Political Editor Robin Oakley

LONDON, England (CNN) -- Tony Blair, the UK Prime Minister, is resisting pressure from Labour MPs to devise plans to modernise the monarchy following the row over a gaffe by the Queen’s daughter in law, the Countess of Wessex.

Rude remarks about politicians made by Sophie Wessex, the wife of Prince Edward, the Earl of Wessex to a “fake sheikh” -- a newspaper reporter posing as an Arab interested in doing business with her PR firm -- have brought renewed demands from MPs for reforms of the monarchy.

But Blair's spokesman says that nothing that has happened in the newspapers in recent days has changed his attitude to the Royal Family and that there are no plans for a review of their role.

With an election imminent and with the Queen coming up for her 75th birthday and her golden jubilee celebrations next year, Mr Blair is clearly not keen to become involved in the latest controversy about the future of Britain’s Royal Family.

Although Blair has reformed the House of Lords, the upper house of the British Parliament, by driving out most of the hereditary peers, his Downing Street office denied that he had encouraged Labour MPs to debate the role of the monarchy.

But Dr Tony Wright, an archetypal “New Labour” MP and one of his party’s constitutional experts, told the BBC on April 8 that Britain should move towards the model of the Scandinavian “bicycling monarchies”.

Wright, who chairs the Commons public administration select committee, said “If we don’t have something like a select committee or a commission on the monarchy it will be the end of the monarchy anyway. I am afraid the magic has gone.”

Two members of the Blair Cabinet, Trade Secretary Stephen Byers and Commons |Leader Margaret Beckett , have criticised Sophie Wessex’s remarks and junior minister Kim Howells declared that the Royals were “all a bit bonkers”.

Blair’s team deny that there has been any encouragement from the top for such interventions. But the latest row has seen a number of avowed republicans in Labour’s ranks step forward with calls for the monarchy to be replaced with an elected president, at least when Queen Elizabeth II’s reign comes to an end.

Ironically one of the disparaging remarks made by the Countess of Wessex referred to “President Blair”. Blair himself has been a resolute supporter of the Royal Family in public but many senior Labour figures are politically indifferent to the monarchy and its future.

There were reforms under the previous Conservative Prime Minister John Major. The Queen began paying tax on her income and the expensive Royal Yacht was decommissioned.

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The British Monarchy

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