Should the UK abolish the monarchy?

The tidy story about the monarchy — that deference dies with each generation — did not survive contact with this vote. It was the 65-and-overs who came closest to backing abolition, while the 35-44s, mid-career and presumably mid-mortgage, were the institution's fiercest defenders; the 16-24s sat somewhere in between, hardly the vanguard the abolitionist case usually assumes.

The sharper divide ran along gender. Men split the question almost exactly down the middle, but women broke decisively for the status quo, a pattern that sits oddly against the general drift of republican sentiment as a "modernising, egalitarian" cause — on this evidence it was men, not women, more evenly torn on hereditary privilege, while women here proved the institution's more reliable constituency.

The result lands within a familiar British pattern: majorities for keeping the Crown even as majorities also tell pollsters they'd prefer it reformed or shrunk, a country more comfortable tinkering with the monarchy than abolishing it outright. It echoes the broader post-2016 argument about what "modern democracy" should look like, without translating into appetite for actually dismantling the thing.

What swayed the floor were two very different registers of argument. The Yes case, from Slawomir, was a constitutional one — "All citizens supposed to be equal against the law - obviously not the case with the royal family" — while the top No voice, Mark, made a case that was almost dynastic gossip dressed as constitutional preference, wanting to "see Will have a chance since his dad is being such a muppet."

Britain's republicans lost the vote here, but not for want of trying to make it a principle rather than a soap opera — the chamber, in the end, seemed happy to let it stay both.