This is a topic of endless fascination as I was raised by liberal democrats (who walked the walk every day) but also in part by a grandfather who served in various Royal Navies for forty-three years. I was exposed to every aspect of the monarch, from tea-towel cartoon to commander-in-chief. To collapse this panoply of interests and history as an "inbred toffee nosed soap opera" is like referring to the founding fathers as wealthy slave owners hell-bent on preserving a certain standard of living - true enough from the perspective of pure political economy, but incomplete.
When I encountered Edmund Burke at my semiotics-imbued university, I did not know what to make of this impassioned defense of the old ways. Now that I have lived long enough to see these norms become just a political lever to be exploited, and torch-bearing mobs taking to the streets to protest the imagined behaviors of a real elite, it makes a bit more sense.
"But power, of some kind or other, will survive the shock in which manners and opinions perish; and it will find other and worse means for its support. The usurpation which, in order to subvert ancient institutions, has destroyed ancient principles, will hold power by arts similar to those by which it has acquired it. When the old feudal and chivalrous spirit of fealty, which, by freeing kings from fear, freed both kings and subjects from the precautions of tyranny, shall be extinct in the minds of men, plots and assassinations will be anticipated by preventive murder and preventive confiscation, and that long roll of grim and bloody maxims, which form the political code of all power, not standing on its own honour, and the honour of those who are to obey it. Kings will be tyrants from policy, when subjects are rebels from principle." - Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France