They hang by a frail thread when a nothing story like Sophiegate can unravel their cause so quickly. The first instinct is to demand nothing less than immediate abolition - on logical as well as emotional grounds. It's clear that any of the current modernisation proposals are bound to fail, just as they always do. The Lord Chamberlain, Richard Luce, can try to draw up guidelines for royal working practices, just as MPs can demand a register of royal interests. The two just do not mix, for royalty rests on medieval concepts of bloodline and heredity while modernity seeks to reward merit and offer equal opportunity.
Modern royalty is as silly an idea as a plastic crown or a perspex sceptre.
It is a contradiction. Moreover, for purists, modernisation means accepting a principle they regard as plain wrong. Committed republicans object to the very idea of selecting Britain's head of state not on merit or democratic will but by the accident of birth. Slimming down the number of HRHs does nothing to tackle the fundamental wrongness of that practice. Republican instinct opposes it.