I doubt this week’s royal visit by Charles III to Washington will do anything to change that. The first visit to the United States by a reigning monarch since 2007, it is to mark this year’s 250th anniversary of American independence — their repudiation of our Crown. The actual Horrible Histories version of these events was in the style of football commentary, naturally featuring George III. I think overall it manages to ridicule everyone equally. But wondering how they’d portray the meeting between Trump and Charles III brought home to me how differently Brits and Americans still feel about many aspects of the transatlantic relationship.

For a central theme of British history, over the period most frequently covered by Horrible Histories, was the tendency of British people to leave Britain and set up home literally anywhere else around the world. The aggregate result was, for a long time, a global empire comprising both extended-family settler states and also colonial holdings. Meanwhile the particular, ambivalent “specialness” of Britain’s relationship with America stems both from this common genealogical story, and also from America’s later role in bringing that empire to an end.

In its aftermath, Britain’s self-image and economic survival has been shored up from three directions: closer economic ties with Europe, vague ties of (sometimes) goodwill with a post-imperial “Commonwealth”, and a close, if subordinate, military relationship with the USA. For a long time, this trifecta afforded British grandees more than enough opportunities to think and act internationally, as if Great Britain were still a global imperial power. But as the long 20th century comes to an end, it’s growing increasingly clear that the settlement won’t hold much longer.

In extended families, there are always topics you shouldn’t raise over Christmas dinner. In this case, the most sensitive is the British Empire, and America’s role in dismantling it. This story has been sanitized over the generations, but my step-grandfather, an RAF pilot and Colditz captive, felt it viscerally and hated Americans. I never really understood why. Hadn’t they fought alongside us in the war? Perhaps, I wondered, it was because American soldiers had liberated him from Colditz before he could put his escape plan into action, and so spoiled his fun?

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It was only recently that I learned more about the punitive terms of US wartime loans to Britain, and the way US politicians demanded an end to Britain’s “imperial preference” trade protectionism as a condition of wartime assistance. From a US perspective, this was all robust realpolitik aimed at bolstering the US national interest. From a British one, it weakened Britain economically and helped foster the disintegration of the British Empire, which had been a US foreign policy aim from Woodrow Wilson onward. In this context, I’ve come to wonder if my step-grandfather, an upper-class Englishman, spoke that way about America because he understood that our cousins across the Atlantic had both aided Britain in the Second World War, and also played a key role in ending the empire he’d been raised to govern.

In turn, it was this same process of disintegration that later prompted the famous line uttered in 1962 by Dean Acheson, erstwhile US Secretary of State, about how Britain had “lost an empire and not yet found a role”. Acheson made the remark at a West Point Military Academy conference, in which he predicted that Britain would need to move toward Europe. This would be necessary, Acheson said, because seeking to expand our influence via the Commonwealth and “special relationship” with the USA wasn’t enough to make Britain a “power” in our own right. In particular, he thought, Britain had tried to carve out a role on the basis of “being the head of a commonwealth which has no political structure or unity or strength and enjoys a fragile and precarious economic relationship”. This role, he thought, was “about played out”, and what would most likely replace it would be closer union with Europe.

What Acheson left out of this is that British politicians came to believe we needed closer union with Europe because imperial preference had been forcibly ended, in favor of the GATT. The integration with Europe that Acheson predicted wasn’t realized until 1973, when Britain joined the Common Market. But by that point it was viewed as an alternative trading bloc to replace the erstwhile imperial one (a decision that would, in turn, have further negative consequences for British manufacturing).

Three years later, and one year after the referendum that confirmed Britain’s EEC membership, Elizabeth II visited the USA to mark the bicentennial of America’s independence from the British Empire. In her address, she cited the Commonwealth whose geopolitical force Acheson dismissed so brutally, as an example of the positive influence America had exerted on Britain. For, she said, America taught us the moral importance of freeing peoples to govern themselves. As she put it: “Without that great act in the cause of liberty performed in Independence Hall two hundred years ago, we could never have transformed an Empire into a Commonwealth!”

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I wondered, on reading this, whether she intended the ironic subtext. We might also wonder if the point when the empire disintegrated is also the one where British monarchs became slightly ridiculous, as well as historically important. Either way, we very much do have the USA to thank for the Empire having become a Commonwealth. Indeed, when it was formed, the point of the Commonwealth was mostly to give the formerly imperial British monarch somewhere to visit, other than bits of the British Isles. As critics pointed out at the time, including Acheson, as a group it was never cohesive. These days, at least some of its members are so far from friendly they’ve taken to voting via the UN for Britain to send them money.

But is it time to revisit our wider alliances? In its current form, the Commonwealth has proved too internally contradictory to be supportive; but America’s rival internationalist body, the UN, itself now also feels a relic of the past. This year, Trump withdrew US funding and membership from multiple UN-affiliated organizations, and this is hardly the only recent indicator that the postwar age of internationalism is coming to an end. History is back, sometimes horribly so.

Meanwhile Britain is, to put it mildly, not well-placed for balance-of-power games. We import too much of our food and energy, and our military is down to three men and a popgun. Everyone in Europe hates us for Brexit, and everyone in Britain hates Trump for tariffs, Greenland, Iran, petrol prices, and killing the housing market, to name but a few. This is all further complicated by a Net Zero commitment that has left Britain deeply reliant on China, a fact we don’t really talk about: we just wave through the London super-embassy with the secret underground rooms a few feet from important data cables full of sensitive City messages.

But we’ve come back from worse. On the occasion of Elizabeth’s 1976 visit, to mark a major anniversary of this most testy and rivalrous of special relationships, we were as gravely in the doldrums as we are today. Then, as now, we had Belfast car bombs, failing utilities, and an overwhelming sense of government sclerosis. Our transatlantic cousins had would-be Presidential assassins too: security for the Queen was beefed up in the wake of two attempts to murder President Gerald Ford in 1975.

And yet eventually the sclerosis ended. A few years later, a radical government was elected and (even if improvements were unevenly distributed) the country changed. So for those on either side of the pond now tempted to paint Britain in shades of disaster: it wasn’t all over then, and I doubt it is now. Likewise, notwithstanding the “No Kings” boomers and their fears of Orange Caesar, I fully expect the American republic to survive its 250th anniversary as much a republic as ever.

But not everything is the same as it was in 1976. In Britain, we are militarily much weaker. Every indicator is that this will matter as time goes on. But there are deep historic reasons to feel nervous about closer military cooperation with Europe. There are also more recent, Iraq and Afghanistan-shaped ones for feeling nervous about leaning too far toward America. With this in mind, I wonder if we haven’t been too quick to forget about, or dismiss, the friendship of our other cousins: those who, like America, had their roots in Britain’s imperial expansion and have since become polities in their own right.

Britain will surely continue to need and feel a deep kinship with America, one that goes well beyond bare political calculation. But as postwar history attests, we also sometimes have divergent interests, not just in the distant past of 1776 but in the present era too. So in the short term we must hope that Charles III has the wit and grace to adapt to his new role as emollient regal vanguard for Britain’s new small-power politics, and that in this role he inclines more toward important than slightly ridiculous.

Meanwhile, though, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand all remain within the Commonwealth. These are also globe-spanning special relationships and deep ties that Britain might benefit from reinforcing. As history rumbles back into gear, sometimes horribly, we might all be relieved to ease the pressure on the American special relationship, by remembering there are other branches of the extended family too. Even if that that sometimes means getting into trouble with the cousins Down Under as well, for making songs about them escaping from prison disguised as kangaroos.

In later life, wags would joke that Prezza had once “worked for Cunard … and he still works pretty hard to this day”, but his early seafaring career connects us to an increasingly distant past, where a life at sea was still a fairly typical career choice for British young men with a taste for adventure.

During that six-week voyage, Eden had presented Prescott with bottles of beer for his prowess in the ship’s boxing ring, and Prescott would go on to describe Eden as an “old Tory gent” for his courtesy and good manners (although he was less keen on the snobbish Lady Eden). Yet the 18-year-old firebrand still considered the former Conservative Prime Minister a class enemy.

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At sea, Prescott’s union bosses considered him a troublemaker, and a sense of social inadequacy gnawed at him throughout his life. This was sharpened by his educational experiences, first by failing the 11-plus (a source of trauma for so many of his generation); then the embarrassment of unacknowledged dyslexia during his time at Ruskin College; and when a middle class student at Hull University said he belonged to the “lumpen proletariat”, he only realised later that he’d been insulted.

His whole career was a sort of revenge for these humiliations, and the taunts in the Commons chamber from patricians such as Nicholas Soames — “mine’s a gin and tonic, Giovanni, and would you ask my friend what he’s having?” — left Prescott with a seething hatred of the Tories, and a steely commitment to ousting them from the government benches.

This is why Prescott and his one-time flatmate Dennis Skinner (another Ruskin alumnus) parted company; for Prescott’s hero was Ernie Bevin, Attlee’s hard-headed right-hand man. Thus, Prescott rallied to support John Smith over “one member, one vote” in 1993, and then backed Tony Blair over the demise of “Clause IV”, that explicitly socialist commitment to “the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange”, that was perceived by party reformers as a drag on Labour’s electability. For just like Bevin, Prescott always wanted power.

But in the public imagination, his political skills were perhaps under-appreciated (although not by those who worked with him), and it was his human qualities that made him so attractive as a public figure. Yes, he mangled his words, “the green belt is a Labour achievement, and we mean to build on it”‘, or after a rough flight “it’s great to be back on terra cotta”, but that was part of his unrehearsed charm.

To some he was that recognisable type, the bolshie shop steward or the barrack-room lawyer with a combustible temper — but he was also a champagne socialist in the very best sense of “nothing being too good for the workers”. In the Seventies, the NUM leader Joe Gormley had said that he looked forward to a time when every miner “could afford a Rolls Royce in the driveway and a Mini for the wife to go shopping in”, although not many achieved that dream. So though Prescott may have been mocked for his “two Jags” and his enormous mock Tudor house on leafy Saltshouse Road in Hull, with its battlements and gargoyles (known locally as “Prescott Towers”), and for his junkets to the Maldives and croquet on the lawn at Dorneywood, he and his glamorous Liz Taylor-esque wife Pauline, blow-dried to within an inch of her life, lived out the aspirations of so many working class families. At a certain level, you just had to respect the hustle.

Although Oliver Cromwell may have been one of his political heroes, Prescott was no puritan — “never knowingly under-lunched” in the lingo of the Westminster lobby, and only the truly gifted could open their “clack” (as the throat is known in parts of the North) and neck a pint in under five seconds like Prescott could. He had an authenticity, too, and so many of the tributes to him since his death have noted his kindness and consideration, especially to ordinary people, or how he spoke up for those overlooked places in the North unvisited by prosperity.

Here was a man who could literally walk with kings and never lose the common touch — although the future Charles III was perturbed by his habit in meetings with him of sliding down the seat with his legs apart “his crotch pointing a little menacingly” and balancing his teacup and saucer on his paunch.

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It’s depressing that an unabashed working-class figure like Prescott is still treated as a curiosity and a stage Northerner, and says a lot about how little has changed since he entered politics. When he first stood for the deputy leadership of the Labour party, in 1988, around a third of Labour MPs came from working-class jobs, but the proportion has now dropped to just 13%. Little wonder so many politicians struggle to connect with the electorate, as Prezza did so literally.

Throughout the Labour Party’s history, the middle-class and working-class elements of what is still cringingly referred to at moments like these as the Labour movement, were held together in an uneasy alliance. The Labour historian Kenneth O. Morgan noted that although the party was “mostly led by middle class professionals, from the Webbs to the Blairs, [Prescott] was the token proletarian on Labour’s front bench in the grand old tradition of Jimmy Thomas, Ernie Bevin, and George Brown” – and, latterly, we might add, Angela Rayner.

But, ironically, Prescott’s hard-headed devotion to the New Labour project led directly to the final victory of the bourgeois strain in Labour, and the complete dominance of a New Establishment — drawn from the hauts-fonctionnaires of the BBC, universities and public sector — who can be just as snooty and out of touch as the Old Establishment that he first encountered on the deck of the Rangitata.

If vicars are often an object of projection, so much more the Archbishop. Any assessment of Justin Welby’s 10 years of office, therefore, will say more about me than him. The Archbishop is a living, breathing Rorschach test. Still: here goes.

Welby is hard to read because he is seemingly open and yet emotionally closed at the same time. Even before he landed the top job in the worldwide Anglican Communion, he was adept at not granting access to his inner world. The social polish you learn at Eton, with its arsenal of confident self-deprecation, is precisely the sort of self-protecting buffer zone that you need to survive being the nation’s punch bag.

There has been great pain in his life: dysfunctional alcoholic parents, the loss of a seven-month-year-old baby daughter in a car accident. Understandably, he has suffered periods of crippling darkness and has admitted to taking anti-depressants. He is brave in talking about his bruises, and yet also strangely hidden, both open and emotionally distant. And since he is not a natural people person, his openness can come across as scripted.

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Welby smiles to reassure, but in repose his face crackles with all the scary intensity of an officer on the Death Star; yes, a bit like a born-again Director Krennic. People say he has a thunderous temper when things don’t go his own way, which I can quite believe. Sometimes you can’t keep it all bottled up. I like Welby, but I am frightened of him.

Back in 2012, I interviewed him for The Guardian when he was still Bishop of Durham. Paddy Power had him at 6/1 to be the next vicar to the nation. We discussed woman bishops, still seen as a long way off. How would he reconcile the competing demands of those who see it as a theological necessity and those who deem it a theological impossibility? How would he square the circle, I asked? “Well, you just look at the circle and say it’s a circle with sharp bits on it,” he laughed. Anglicanism has always involved a certain amount of shape-shifting from its leadership. The phrase “all things to all men” is from the Bible, after all. But that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a good thing. Ideologically, Welby can be what you want him to be.

Here’s an example. A few days after that Guardian interview, the Rev Rod Thomas — an evangelical conservative — and I discussed who should get the top job on Channel 4 news. Thomas was against women bishops and believes homosexuality is a sin. I thought the opposite. Yet we both agreed that Welby was the right man for the job. That’s the power of a circle with pointy bits. Some see a circle, others see a square.

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Women bishops were approved within a few years, and the Church has now agreed on prayers for blessing same-sex marriages. Rod Thomas was made a bishop in 2015 and kept on board. But he is far from happy. “We should not mislead people into believing that we can ask God to bless those things that He has revealed are contrary to His will,” said Bishop Rod recently. I think he may have been more deceived than I about that circle.

Welby’s church, his circle with pointy bits, turned out to be this: a collection of morally-progressive, liturgically-charismatic evangelicals with a hint of woke. Damaged public schoolboys who find it hard to express their feelings in everyday life are often attracted to forms of worship that let it all hang out. Welby talks in tongues. The whole thing is so achingly sincere. This is surely what Prince Harry would be like if he got God. It’s the sort of religion that some of us watch through our fingers with embarrassment — like dad dancing.

With Welby, open evangelicalism has become the new centre of gravity in the Church of England. More Radio 2 than Radio 4, undemanding and depressingly easy listening. “Let’s be clear, I’m one of the thicker bishops in the Church of England”, he told me back in 2012. There remains stiff competition for this title, I can tell you. And Welby is not even close. He has a keen and lively intelligence and a steely will. But Welby’s Church of England, it might be said, no longer feels the need for academic-minded bishops. Better some B-school MBA or a Certificate in Church Planting than a proper PhD in Patristics for the modern cleric on the make.

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And here is my real beef with Welby’s Church: managerialism. The backdrop to Welby’s appointment was the banking crisis and the subsequent Occupy camp at St Paul’s Cathedral. The Church needed to get a bit more this worldly, many thought. It needed to understand finance and business. When it came to capitalism, Welby was a grown-up, having worked for Elf Aquitaine in a previous life. And 11 years in the oil industry clearly shaped his thinking about organisational structures. The old, slightly bumbling high-table, soft-power understanding of Lambeth Palace was not for him. Welby wanted to change things and have access to levers of real executive power.

But the Church of England is not set up like this. It never has been. The parish system is the very model of subsidiarity. If anything, the Church is a bottom-up institution rather than top-down. You bow to your bishop, but you don’t necessarily do everything he asks. Under Welby, however, the centre has grown ever stronger, the parishes increasingly weaker. Max Weber famously divided power into the charismatic, the traditional and the legal/rational. Welby is the first archbishop who has tried to govern through the latter.

The “Save the Parish” movement was established as a fightback. Too many bishops became middle managers, hidden behind their laptops. Directives and new initiatives came down from head office, which many of the clergy, myself included, received with an inner groan. In the face of declining attendance, we all had to learn that evangelical up-speak, and get on with the paperwork. Morale has plummeted.

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The Church’s reaction to Covid was the depressing conclusion of Welby’s legal/rational approach to power. Buffeted by abuse scandals — including that of a previous friend and mentor, John Smyth, who beat and sexually harassed young boys on Christian summer camps — Welby read the Covid situation in the light of his safeguarding nightmares. Safeguarding was the one area where rules could be imposed on the clergy. Churches were to be closed to protect the faithful from infection. Clergy were allowed into their churches to check them over for insurance purposes, but not to celebrate the holy mysteries, even on their own. The shepherds abandoned their sheep.

It was a terrible directive and a lot of us — myself included — ignored it and were put on the Lambeth Palace naughty list. The gap grew wider between the clergy and the powers that be. “If I had my time again, I would be more cautious about closing the churches,” Welby later admitted. But the damage was done. For many people, a pattern of churchgoing had been broken never to be taken up again. Sunday schools were abandoned, the vulnerable left to fend for themselves. Parish treasurers pulled their hair out as finances went into a death spiral. Zoom was never a realistic alternative for a religion that is inherently physical, all about the body and the blood.

In a couple of months, Welby will preside over the coronation of King Charles III, and the Church of England has never felt weaker. It’s not his fault. Secularisation is a feature of the Western world, not of any specifically failed leadership. But nonetheless, Welby has failed to speak the right words for our time.

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In a moment of crisis, Welby’s answer seems to be organisational restructuring — redirecting more and more resources into big, successful, glitzy, mostly-evangelical churches, while letting smaller ones wither on the vine, run by the unpaid or the retired, all exhausted. This feels like what a CEO archbishop would do. Not a pastor or an evangelist. And, most depressing of all, the whole thing seems to be an exercise in bureaucratic navel-gazing.

Welby is a well-intentioned man, but he is unable to read the room — or, rather the nation. When in 2020, he abandoned his fine 13th-century chapel to take the Easter service online from his kitchen, I imagine he thought he was expressing solidarity with those who were stuck at home. But most people didn’t see it like that. It felt like a silly gesture, a gimmick. And a kick in the teeth to those of us struggling to keep the Church show on the road.

Some say Welby will go after the coronation. I don’t know about that. But what I would want from the new man or woman is someone who could help revive the morale of the clergy. “It’s just not so much fun anymore,” said one senior cleric to me recently. On the front line, in the parishes, it feels like the Archbishop doesn’t much care about us. Or if he does, he has been refusing to show it.

But, for all these innovations, the most culturally influential thing that happened over that long weekend was probably a sermon preached over at St Paul’s Cathedral by Canon Henry Scott Holland.

You will know the words. I know them by heart, having used them countless times at the crematorium. They still constitute one of the most requested texts at funerals. Yet few people are aware that they are taken from a sermon. Rarely can a text have been so butchered in interpretation. Taken out of context and written in swirly script on saccharine condolence cards, one sentence per line, as if it were a poem, this text came to be presented as meaning almost the opposite of what was intended:

“Death is nothing at all. I have only slipped away into the next room. I am I, and you are you, … whatever we were to each other, that we are still.”

Within a decade, millions of men would die in the trenches of northern France. Later, six million would be murdered in the Holocaust, and be slaughtered with the development of new weapons of war including the nuclear bomb. How could they keep on reading out “death is nothing at all”? What a ridiculous thing to say.

Yet the second half of the 20th century — perhaps because of the horror of the first half — ended up being the “death is nothing at all” era. Many people stopped wearing black at funerals. Guests were invited to wear something colourful to celebrate a life. “I don’t want people to be sad” is the thing I hear most often from the dying.

Most people of the post-war generation never saw a dead body, still less touched one. Whereas Victorians gathered around the bedside of their dying relatives, after the war, people started more and more to die, not at home, but in hospitals surrounded by bleeping equipment and medical professionals. The curtains came to be drawn around death. We protected our children from it. We told our dying relatives that they were going to get better. Then at the funeral we all smiled, played upbeat songs and said death wasn’t real. Death was eliminated from the public square.

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It is crazy that a sermon preached on the occasion of the King lying in state could have come to express and propagate this sentiment because it is certainly not what Scott Holland meant at all. Here, for instance, is a latter bit of the same sermon:

“White light breaks itself against the blackness of a closed coffin, flung up before the eyes of all, to embody the irreparable disaster of a death which has touched the very heart of our National life… Is this all that is left? Is this the end of that royal splendour of life? Ah, then death is a dreadful thing. It is blind. It is dumb.”

It’s not all that hard to see how the mistake was made. Holland was a Hegelian, and in typically Hegelian fashion he was doing a bit of dialectical thinking from the pulpit. “I suppose all of us hover between two ways of regarding death” is the opening line of his sermon. He then goes on to express these two ways. First the “all is vanity” approach: “It makes everything we do here meaningless and empty.” This is the thesis. Next comes the antithesis, which is the “death is nothing at all” bit. Finally, comes the synthesis – and I will come to that. The Scott Holland “poem” is thus only one side of the equation. What is absent is the cold dark emptiness of loss.

The Queen’s funeral will have little of “death is nothing at all” sentimentality about it. It will be properly serious, sombre, and mournful. The King of Terrors, as Holland titled his sermon, will have his due. The liturgy for the Queen will be from the Book of Common prayer. Reassuringly old-fashioned with the words of scripture magnificently vested in 17th century prose: “Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.” These are sentiments for ashen faces and broken hearts.

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Like all proper Christian funerals, it expresses unambiguously that death is real. We are mortal creatures and we die. “As in Adam all die.” No qualification. God alone is immortal. Yet “so too in Christ shall all be made alive”. This is 1 Corinthians 15, and where thesis and antithesis come together gesturing — perhaps no more — towards some magnificent culmination, some synthesis where both death and life are true. Death and resurrection. It will be the first lesson of today’s service.

The extraordinary thing about the Queen’s funeral is that, when you strip away the fact that the congregation is full of monarchs and presidents, that it is in Westminster Abbey, and the sermon is by the Archbishop of Canterbury, what is being said here, and the form of liturgy that is being used is remarkably ordinary; in fact, very similar to the prayers and form of service that I use week in week out at the local crem. At its core, there is a democracy in death.

Her funeral will not be too long — the Queen hated long services — and it will be to the point. It will be dignified and unfussy. Away with the showy individualism of “I did it my way”, once the most popular song at funerals. The reason so many of us love the late Queen is precisely because she didn’t do it “my way”. The weight of vocation fell upon her shoulders, unbidden, unchosen. No wonder she chose The Lord’s my Shepherd, the 23rd Psalm, as one of the hymns for her funeral. “My head thou dost with oil anoint,” the congregation will sing, reminding us all of the coronation anointing, and of the promise the Queen made to serve both Christ and nation. It is indeed a pretty high calling. As the Dean of Westminster will say in his bidding prayer:

“Here, where Queen Elizabeth was married and crowned, we gather from across the nation, from the Commonwealth, and from the nations of the world, to mourn our loss, to remember her long life of selfless service, and in sure confidence to commit her to the mercy of God… With gratitude we remember her unswerving commitment to a high calling over so many years.”

The final hymn of today’s service speaks of us casting “our crowns before thee”. The Queen has finally fulfilled her promise and laid down her office. Monarchy comes to an end. Only the king of kings prevails forever.