The latter-day Bagehot weighs in on royalty and introduces a geographical line of thinking, pitching a media-friendly new leisure class based out of penthouse apartments against the old landed leisure class based out of country homes:
I have a hunch that modern, urbanised Britain is a bit baffled by the royal family. Or rather, they are familiar enough with the purely royal aspects of royal life: the ribbon-cutting, hospital-opening, state visiting thing. But they feel little or no sympathy for the parts of royal life which overlap with the habits of the old-fashioned rural aristocracy.
http://viewshed.matinic.us/2010/11/18/70/