After Elizabeth’s death, I read this Facebook post by Billy Bragg. I don’t always agree with Billy, but in that post he captures something that I also feel, and provides a broader context for what I’ve written below – and he says it better than I can.
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My life and that of royalty have never intersected in any direct or practical sense. The royal family has no symbolic value to me in terms of my sense of self or my broader identity. I give not one single shit for titles and regalities for their own sake – though I do have a regard for them as part of the tacit structure underpinning the constitution and institutions of society. I feel no sense of personal grief or loss at the death of Elizabeth as a person, however important her death is for the national life.
Other people feel differently and, to be clear, I’m good with that: I am not criticising other people’s feelings, although I found the actions of the person who took their mother’s ashes to see the coffin quite bizarre.
One of my clearest memories of the days following the death of Diana was the general feeling of ‘yes it’s sad, but life goes on’ even as the TV and newspapers were filled with volumes and volumes of nonsense and self-flagellation. There were similar reactions to the response of the media to the deaths of the Queen Mother and Prince Philip, the media then as now performing the same function as water companies discharging raw sewage onto clean beaches. I have never understood why an understandable payment of respect should become such an outflowing of effluent.
This is not the country that it was when Elizabeth became the monarch; nonetheless, like the ship of Theseus, there is a sense of deep continuity that she herself represented, and I suspect that lies at the heart of a lot of the reaction to her death. With her passing, something has finally been lost symbolically as well as in reality. The institutions of the United Kingdom have long been in decline, and implicit respect for those institutions has attenuated proportionately to the lack of reciprocal respect shown by those same institutions to us. In truth, the country of which Elizabeth became queen was finally extinguished when Johnson and his cabal of chancers and bullshitters lied to her with impunity to hammer through their pet programme of national suicide.
That is why the narrative being pumped onto the beaches and into our fresh water systems stinks: it is the wrong story with the wrong emotional arcs and touchpoints; it jibes because the narrative of national mourning is being superimposed onto a much more nuanced society that is resistant to being emotionally manipulated for the benefit of a hereditary elite before whom we are expected to tug our forelocks.
Norman Lamont famously remarked of the then Tory government that ‘we give the impression of being in office but not in power’ and that will be true for Charles, I suspect: he’ll have a harder time of it than his mother, who seemed to generate validity by virtue of longevity. It would go too far to think that the monarchy falls with the death of Elizabeth, but the current and dominant idea of what the monarchy is passes with her, I think, at the same time as we transition from one mendacious and useless PM to another.
We are in a country with nothing even remotely like leadership in any of the high offices of state, unstuck, untethered and adrift while the consequences of our past and the stupidity of Brexit manifest themselves.
In another context, Randy Newman sang:
‘No one likes us, I don’t know why,
We may not be perfect, but heaven knows we try.
But all around, even our old friends put us down …’ (Political Science)
We’re increasingly the subject and object of that same disparagement, and all the while the world that emerged post-1945 changes and realigns. The illusion of stability that Elizabeth represented is shattered, and that, it seems to me, as well as some genuine grief at her death by many, explains the long lines in Edinburgh and London to pay respects as much as anything.
Even so, the queue does two other things: the first is to act as a reminder to those who see the country in terms of a monarchist/republican duality that there is a more nuanced reality in play that should give pause for thought. The second, oddly enough, is to generate a sense of optimism that something, however diffuse, remains: some substratum of identity and decency that stands in opposition to the Tories and points a way towards change in a changed world.
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