For a millennium there were Royal Sieges, Royal Weddings, and Royal Jubilees at Windsor. But nothing, in living memory, like this Royal Funeral; the Queen — a most revered and respected and beloved Queen — was to be buried within the King George VI memorial chapel. A million-strong crowd was expected. An invading wave of grief vaster than any the authorities had planned for, and more than Windsor could really take. A unique British Hajj.

It was standard for locals to see the Queen in Windsor. This is a Royal borough — the Firm owns 4,500 acres —  and the family took its name from the town. In return, the town received the Real Presence of Her Majesty, riding in horses in the park, or wheeling over asphalt in a Land Rover to her chapel. Windsor was charged with glamour by association.

After Elizabeth died, the town whirled into action: the paranoid iron railings, camera cranes and subcontracted stewards, whose hasty assembly marks every major public spectacle in the Kingdom, appeared. This was the heartland of the grieving process.

When the Queen was crowned, in 1953, a third of her subjects believed she was placed on the throne by God. There was no foreign travel, no wine, no Lady Chatterley’s Lover. No real teeth in the mouths of half the adult population. Stalin ruled Russia and virtually the whole of Africa belonged to Europe. The British had just informed the UN that they did not see how it was possible to abolish flogging in their mandated territories, thank you very much.

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Yesterday, there were thousands of people everywhere. Then thousands more. Walking from Slough and Staines through the misty morning, along closed roads, past tent cities set up for stewards in the greens around the town. More streamed in for the funeral.

The crowds are candidly patriotic. Monarchy is something they feel in their bodies. It is a powerful internal force, not a theory, not an idea. It’s an obvious decision: take the pram, and the dogs, to Windsor. They say the Queen was theirs. They say the same things, over and over: we expected her to go on forever; we knew her all our lives; we wanted to pay our respects. Trails of flowers are left, under trees, under the hard glare of the castle walls.

I’m reminded of Walter Bagehot, Monarchy’s most supercilious theorist. For the Kingdom, he said, the monarch was simply “a visible symbol of unity to those so imperfectly educated as to need a symbol”. The portraits of Queen Elizabeth, hung in every shop window across the town — including the Thai Massage parlour — are pure symbolism. She looks as exact and fictitious as the lines on a map. People are not always sure what to do when a symbol dies. I’m told they almost ran out of champagne in The Ivy Windsor on September 8. Hallowed British etiquette: if in doubt, drink.

Otherwise, a child walks up to one Elizabeth in an estate agent’s window, stops, pulls a handful of conkers from her pocket, and lays them there in a small line below the image. An offering. Walking around Windsor, Bagehot would have thought himself vindicated.

Yet he was too cynical. Being a fantasy does not make this unreal.When you speak to enough mourners, you realise Elizabeth was more than symbol. She was not abstract to Lee, a huge bull-thick slab of a man who is in charge of the catering in the Great Park. He cooked for the Queen twice when he was a chef in the Army. “She sat in the mess with 400 blokes, like anybody would.” The recollection cuts him somehow. “She remembered my name, three years after the first time we met.”

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Or David, a garrulous ex-guardsman, who is on his third wreath-laying trip to Windsor this week. Tourists are making him pose outside the castle gates with a corgi. He served in the household division. The Queen was as regular as post in his life for 18 months. What was she like? The memory enters his face and complicates his bonhomie. “She was… strict.” He always feared she would have him locked in a cell if he slouched on the parade ground.

Elizabeth was the people’s to make of her what they will. I begin to lose count of the number of mourners who compare her with their mothers, or grandmothers. “It’s like losing her all over again”, says one woman.

The mourning is not exclusively for the Queen then. It’s for them, and their families. They relate the Queen’s pain to their own; somehow this is the same pain their grandmothers felt. They saw them ground down by life and imagine that was the Queen’s fate too. All these grandmothers, never-ending in our heads, amen.

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A thick human hedgerow grows in two parallel lines up and down the Long Walk. We watch the funeral on jumbo screens. The silence here can straighten shoulders. When we sing God Save the King, the words feel curious in our mouths. Someone stumbles off to cry behind a portaloo.

Grace tugs the edge of her Union Jack shawl. She came to Britain from Ghana in 1985. “I am the Commonwealth”, she says. A producer from ITV keeps calling her, begging her to come to London to be interviewed. But Grace wants to be in Windsor. She turns her phone off.

“We have a saying in my country: when the frog dies you will know the length of the frog.” I ask her what sort of frog Elizabeth was. “A very good frog”, says Grace. “The best frog.”

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She tells me to wait under a tree, and returns with a cardboard cut-out, clearly well-used, of the Queen. “The moon and the stars will follow her,” Grace intones, posing for photos with machine-gun-bearing police officers.

After midday, we stand at the top of the Long Walk, waiting for the procession. There is static in the air. People say things out of nowhere. “Arlo, please stop, or I shall strap you in the pram.” Somebody says she will freeze her Bramley apples. “Once she’s in there, that’s it, it’s over — it’s over there, you can see the chapel.” Another, thinking ahead, wonders how long it will take to get back to Paddington.

A row of notables, in a dream of hierarchy, stands on the opposite side of the walk. They are wearing furs, white gloves, and spotless ruffs. On our side, there are no pearls, only Sandra handing rice crackers to perfect strangers. The first thing she did when the Queen died was post a poem on Facebook. They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old… “Me and Paul watched it all on the telly, everything”, she says. “There was so much we never knew.” She talks about the Queen like a song she can’t remember the words to. The telly told her to come to Windsor, so now she is forcing a rice cracker into my hands.

All of us shaped by television and language and the jokes we share, have never had so much in common: we are waiting on this smooth baize runway, in the sun, to watch her go home. And we are sharing the same frustrations in this crowd, which is ten heads deep. The same elbows in our faces, the same children crying and rustling; the irritations and bathos and peevishness, all the subterranean currents that flow beneath the splendour. Time feels like it’s buffering. Sandra sighs. There will be no more rice cakes.

It begins with a soldierly bellow. Then, hush. Then the squashed pom-pom thud of cannon half a mile away. They scatter rooks from the elm-trees, who corkscrew overhead. People tell each other to look.

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Look: the procession glints in the far distance. It moves into clarity. Cavalry in outline, a haze of red wool, eerie piping. Everybody is filming the slow, square marchers. Everybody wraps chains around these minutes, to keep them alive, to keep her with them.

They are filming the old style, the British high idiom, bury the Queen. Pageantry separate in kind and scale to any they have seen before, or will ever see again. A precious echo of the country this used to be. All this power kept in reserve for today. There are flashing swords, gorgeous armour, and blazing uniforms, but gentleness is the overwhelming impression. Militarism to send off a Grandmother, not to project power. Grief, not anger. We are its witnesses.

When the crown is level with my face there is so much brass in the air you can taste the metal. People close their eyes to stretch the crowded seconds out. The music rings flawlessly in a dozen directions. Skin and bone absorb the moment. A key is turned. History has been released from reality.

The car wheezes forward for the last time, followed by four billion eyes, through the gates of Windsor Castle. The Queen is swept along and swept up into the cheerful English heaven she believed in. She takes her final seat in the stands, with Charles I and George III, Henry VIII and Victoria, and all the others, even poor King John.

As dusk fell, we sloped back down the Long Walk, and the thumping drums faded away. Screens showed the Queen alive, accepting some carnations from school children. Elizabeth had no grand idea. No message of hope and change. No calls to arms. Her life was blockaded by duty. She seemed to ask nothing of us but to do ours too.

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.

However, since Liz Truss became Prime Minister, all this intergovernmental wrangling has ground to a halt. The death of Queen Elizabeth II, and the ensuing period of mourning, was always going to disrupt government communications. But what does that mean for Truss’s new administration?

There is, of course, an argument that this is a bonus for Truss. One of the immediate challenges for any incoming Prime Minister is to stamp themselves on the public imagination as being “prime ministerial”. What better way to do that than appear with the new monarch, King Charles III, as he travels around the United Kingdom? If you can’t generate attention, you can at least gain some authority.

Yet sometimes, making the best of a bad situation isn’t enough. And Truss’s real problem is that you only get one chance to make a first impression. We know that Team Truss had a “First 100 Days” plan, which they wanted to follow with 12 months of delivery in 2023, and then finally pivot into the election year of 2024. The public would quickly get to know their new Prime Minister by her actions. As Truss reiterated throughout her leadership campaign, she gets things done.

Her recent energy price cap announcement was not a stand-alone event — it was the start of a concerted programme of reform. The intention was to follow up with necessary legislation, information for households, and details for businesses and public services. And then to move rapidly to a “fiscal event” — a “mini-Budget” in old money — where promised tax cuts could be delivered without the threat of any doom-mongering from the Office of Budget Responsibility. This concerted activity and the generous giveaways would provide a powerful sense of momentum. The Leader of the Opposition, Keir Starmer, would be left carping from the side lines about a package of help three-to-four times larger than the one he had proposed last month.

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But instead of hitting the ground running, Prime Minister Truss has hit the ground mourning. In the background there has been discussion of government policy, but it has mainly consisted of questions and criticisms around details of the energy price cap. The problem is that her full policy requires legislation, which can only be passed and debated in parliament, when it returns to full sitting in mid-October. If a week is a long time in politics, the five weeks until the House sits again is an eternity.

Now, there is some press briefing going on. The abandonment of the sugar tax, and possibly the entire government anti-obesity strategy has been floated. As has ending the cap on bonuses in the City. These give the flavour of what the 100 Days Plan must have looked like. Sir Lynton Crosby famously talks of “getting rid of the barnacles”: that before a government can campaign effectively, it needs to rid itself of unnecessary distractions. These could be unpopular policies, ungrasped nettles, or unresolved disputes, but the Queen’s death has prevented this, disrupting the Government’s momentum.

Team Truss were clearly planning for a bolder strategy — what you might call the Joe Strummer approach: Cut The Crap. The Prime Minister wants to govern as she campaigned for the leadership. Directly, clearly and simply. She has said she wants a smaller state, and Labour have taken the bait. Without waiting to see any government policy, some Labour frontbenchers have immediately attacked Truss as a Thatcherite intent on cutting public spending. That’s hard to argue in the face of the energy price cap — one of the biggest unfunded public spending commitments ever made by a UK government.

Worse, it showed that some in Labour haven’t been listening to Truss, or taking her seriously. There’s more than one way to shrink the state — and getting out of people’s lives is an effective and popular one. One of the greatest weaknesses of progressive politics is the belief that what the country is crying out for is “more government”. A large part of the fuel that drives the campaign against political correctness is the sense that government is over-reaching, interfering in bits of life where it has no place. Liz Truss wants to tap into that. She instinctively knows that most people want to look after themselves, their families and their communities without government interference.

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The other headline announcement — uncapping City bonuses — has trapped Labour too. Missing the wood for the trees, opposition frontbenchers have spluttered in outrage at policies that would benefit fat-cat bankers rather than the general public. The point, of course, is what David Cameron’s team used to call the politics of “aroma”. It is not the specific policy detail that matters; it is the sense of the overall direction. “Hugging a husky” showed a greener, more compassionate, modern Conservative party. Uncapping City bonuses shows a government committed to Go For Growth — no old-fashioned prejudices or well-meaning sacred cows will be allowed to stand in the way. The point is to grow the pie, not, as Labour want, to talk about tax and redistribution of the proceeds of growth.

Is this a risky approach? Yes. Is it a clear one? Absolutely. The trap for Labour is that they adopt the Sunak Strategy. Liz Truss’s ideas are simplified not simplistic; and as Rishi Sunak’s defeat showed, treating the new PM as a simpleton won’t win votes. Truss may not have the right answers, but she has asked the right question. Growth is the only game in town. If Truss manages to keep it on The Grid when parliament returns next month, her lost 100 days might not be fatal.

There was something different about Elizabeth II. Millions treated her with a hint of the divine right of kings, a woman who lived above interviews, who loomed over her own society mysteriously, with more in common with Franz Josef or the Romanovs than her own son.

This is the end of that story. The remaining royals of Europe are anachronisms, whether they are beloved or not; whether they are effective at their constitutional roles or not. This is the end of something which began on Christmas Day in 508, with the baptism of Clovis, which was the true start of sacral European Kingship. The story of a once Germanic warrior aristocracy that conquered and ruled Europe for over a thousand years, after the barbarian invasions that finished off the Roman Empire. Their demise from Paris to St Petersburg — as a sociology, as a political faith, as a simple fact — has been the story of modernity.

This end was first noted by the Bavarian nobleman Count Albrecht von Monteglas in 1917, when he decried that the house of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, with a thousand-year history, changed its name to the pedestrian Windsor “for a mere war,” the true age of European monarchy was over. The democratic age had arrived. That great flattening force seen so clearly by de Tocqueville in America, had come home to the old world meaning — not even a Hapsburg, let alone a Hohenzollern, even a Windsor — would serve without the implicit consent of the governed.

Queen Elizabeth’s death marks the latest step away from divinely ordained monarchy, towards something else. No longer sacred, the European monarch would rather be a pilot, or a country gentleman interested in urban planning. Another step along the path we have travelled since the laying of hands on His Majesty to cure disease was suspended after Queen Anne. It is no longer possible to suspend disbelief. The magic — or rather the mindset — was gone. There have been tears for the Queen this week, but can we imagine the same for Prince William decades from now? Looking at him, I can’t shake the feeling that he is just a West Londoner. Not a unicorn on his crest.

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You don’t need tabulating political scientists to understand the British and their Queen. You need European psychoanalysts: Freud, Jung, Fromm. You need to understand the subliminal, the subconscious and the immense recesses of antiquity that haunt our psyches. It is here where monarchy draws its power. From the moment it was announced to her in Kenya, through her coronation as Queen of countries including Pakistan, Sri Lanka and South Africa, across a lifetime of the last post being sounded, over the by then mostly African Empire, that still existed when her reign began — she never stopped pretending. And for her, we never stopped pretending, either.

We pretended with her and for her — that the Commonwealth was real, that there was love and affection for her, or for us, in countries we’d conquered and lost, that we were still a great power. And if not an empire, then she ruled its heir. That her first minister was the equal of the men she received in what even the Kennedys realised was not splendour, but more a dowdy country hotel called Buckingham Palace. It could be beautiful, it could be felt, all this, but it wasn’t real. We all know a first principle of psychology is not to fantasise, but to accept who you really are.

As she aged, shrinking into her clothes, it became clear there wasn’t enough there, behind the insignia of government, to hold us up in the world.  The factories, the mines, the shipyards, the discoveries that powered the rule of Queen Victoria — we simply no longer had enough of them. The carpet has long been threadbare. The draught could now be felt in the house. This funeral is the last great pretence. The last funeral for a British world power. The world’s leaders will never gather like this in Westminster Abbey again. The crowds will not flock to London, let alone Edinburgh, like this again.

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This is third stanza of Rudyard Kipling’s Recessional. His great poem warning, amid the jingoism of Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, that this empire too would go the way of Nineveh and Tyre. This is the moment — “that all our pomp of yesterday” — is buried with that tiny body. The trumpets and the ensigns remain, but as folklore, and hardly as anything more.

If Kipling were alive today, he might walk the Royal Mile, in Edinburgh, and see tourists, not mourners. He would stop outside Buckingham Palace and note the mawkishness of the Paddington Bears; the flowers wilting in their cellophane. None of this has the Christian certainty of Elizabeth’s Coronation, it has all the hallmarks the post-Anglican way we mourn now. How we festoon grief with lilies, postcards and teddies.

He wouldn’t be able to write — “God of our fathers, known of old, Lord of our far flung battle line” — even as a lament, or a prayer. The gap between his world, Churchill’s world, the Queen’s world, and our own is more than a matter of years. The threads that bound Church, Crown and Country into “Onwards Christian Soldiers” are gone. That was a Christian empire. There is only spectacle left.

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Elizabeth II was believable: because she believed. The last European monarch to believe her role was a divine calling. Today the old religion is not felt, even by the King, so uncomfortable — a scholar of Islam, a guest at al-Hazar, a patron of Jewish charities — at being Defender of the Faith. Charles could only bring himself to say, in his first address to the nation, that his faith was “rooted in the Church of England,” like he had long outgrown it. 

The King is not a stupid man. “Big Ears” of the tabloid press has spent his life knowing there is nothing sacred about him. That nobody reveres him. Every charity, every interview, has been proving Count Albrecht von Monteglas’s point. This is not what he called “the true Royal tradition” but an institution that knows it must constantly fight to keep its popularity afloat in the polls. A permanent referendum. Charles III could never rule like a true Hanoverian: his appetites or insanities, easily justified to the public as simply the divine order.

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The earliest known direct male ancestor of King Charles is Theodoric I of Wettin, a Germanic warlord, at the edge of the dark ages. His family tree includes Charlemagne, crowned Emperor in Rome. It includes Hugh Capet, who turned his dynasty from the Duke of the Franks, into the Kings of France. And, of course, Henry VIII, Charles I and Charles II. All the way through this story his ancestors have tried to weld what was sacred at the time to their crown.

Only with such a long view does it become obvious what Charles has spent a lifetime doing. By trying to be the King of, every craft, every field, every hedgerow — the voice of the planet — he is trying to channel that one thing we still all still treasure. Our ailing world. It is actually a question about us: whether he succeeds in making us believe. But whatever we come to feel for him or respect him — it will not be the hymn book reverence Kipling would recognise.

No matter how sensitively you try to approach it, colonial history is an inherently divisive issue in Britain. It cannot be otherwise in a country where the descendants of those who were colonised live alongside the descendants of those who did the colonising. One’s story of successful expansion is the other’s reminder of humiliating subjugation.

Akala poignantly expressed this in his book, Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire: “Even at five years old, we already know on some level that, in this society at least, we are indeed lesser citizens with all the baggage of racialised history following us ghost-like about our days. We are conquered people living in the conquerors’ land, and as such we are people without honour.” It is an emotion rarely voiced and so rarely captured in polls or surveys.

In my fellow African immigrant circles, when we complain about racism in the West, we often sum up the situation with something along the lines of: “Well, it’s not their fault, it’s because we’ve had to leave our countries to come and live in their country, that’s why they think they can misbehave towards us.” Our situation is psychologically easier to handle because we came here of our own accord, usually as adults, and can at least envisage somewhere else in the world we could go if things were to become unbearable here. This allows us an empowering sense of autonomy.

But Akala was speaking about those who, like him, were born here, in the land of their former conquerors, and who can’t envisage living anywhere else. Britain is all they know. Naturally their frustrations at the current status quo are often stronger. Why is it that they have to live in the land of their former conquerors? Why do their life options seem restricted in comparison with their white peers? Why is it that they live in a world where even if they feel Britain is a white supremacist hellhole, they can’t simply say: “Sod it, I’m jumping on a plane and moving to an African or Caribbean country where I won’t have to deal with white racists?”

Race is sometimes, but not always, a relevant proxy for the key dividing line in our world which is between so-far successful groups and so-far unsuccessful groups. The Japanese, South Koreans, Singaporeans, Emiratis and increasingly the Chinese are not on the same side of this divide as Kenyans, Pakistanis or Yemenis. They are, along with most white or white-majority nations, in the successful group camp.

It is no coincidence that, even though they’re not white and have been victims of racism and colonisation in the past, you won’t find too many Singaporeans or South Koreans today focusing on the ills colonialism rendered their societies. Successful nations and peoples usually find the present quite satisfying; when they discuss the past, it’s generally for the feel-good reason of reminding themselves how far they have come. It is not that a South Korean may not face racism here in Britain, but that, like Jewish people today, they always have the option of a wealthy well-developed ancestral homeland they can move to, if need really be. This knowledge creates a completely different psychological dynamic.

A lot of effort, however, is put into recalling the colonial pasts of nations not doing that well today for two major reasons. First, to convince the world that this is not the result of current misrule, but because of problems that have their “root causes” in colonialism and, possibly, slavery as well. In other words, something attributable to external forces beyond their control.

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The second aim is to bring white folk, Westerners especially, down a peg or two. This group tends to consider itself more civilisationally advanced as a result of having built several dozen successful states across the globe. No amount of political correctness can hide this. Their sense of superiority at having built “developed” societies while we are still “developing” engenders in us a strong psychological need to make the point that the only reason they are so rich, and we are not, is because they robbed us through colonisation and slavery and caused the problems our nations face today.

Olivia Rutazibwa outlines this position: “It is only through sustained colonial amnesia in knowledge production in [Western] society that the ills in the global South are systematically and almost exclusively attributed to the now and the local (over there)… this allows for the sustained… presentation of Western actors as firefighters when they are more often than not the arsonists.” What is thus needed, according to Rutazibwa, is to “first and foremost foreground the transatlantic slave trade and the colonial encounter as the sites from which any thinking about development-related issues need to be addressed”.

In other words, you simply can’t discuss any development issues of Nigeria or Pakistan today without first discussing colonialism. Indeed, there wouldn’t even be a Nigeria today, a country comprised of hundreds of ethnic groups speaking some 500 different languages, if not for British colonialism. Though colonialism is often portrayed as having divided Africans, it actually forced together thousands of formerly disparate communities, city-states, empires and autonomous groups into 54 Western-style nation states.

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Nigerians over the years have countered by arguing that this forcing together of overly (culturally) different peoples has created an “artificial” country that struggles to develop consensus on national norms and forge a sense of nationhood. The practicality of this point is valid in Nigeria’s case, but we should also be aware that this is precisely the argument some deploy against multiculturalism in Western societies. They say white Europeans shouldn’t be forced to live with so many people from different cultures with different value-systems. So this particular critique of colonialism is a slippery slope. We can’t argue “forced” multiculturalism is bad for African states but good for Western ones.

What is certainly the case, however, is that colonialism brought massive disruptions to the ways of life of millions of people in colonised territories, rubbishing their cultures, belief-systems, values and traditions — all the things Queen Elizabeth is praised for upholding here in Britain. Postcolonial Africans are yet to recover (and may well never recover) from this assault on their identities and are still trying to figure out what exactly they are or want to be. People were also killed, something that cannot be glossed over. Colonialism wrought serious damage.

But it is not to blame for everything. It is fanciful, for example, to suggest that the $600 billion stolen from the Nigerian people by Nigerian rulers since independence is down to colonialism. If that had been used to fund roads, schools, hospitals, universities and power systems, Nigeria would be in a very different place today. We would definitely not be in a situation whereby three-quarters of Nigerians aged 18-24 want to emigrate to richer pastures, including often to the land of their former conquerors, Britain.

Nonetheless when the issue of corruption among African ruling elites is discussed, the fact that these stolen funds are often deposited in Western banks is often raised along with the implication that it is the white man who is again robbing Africa of its wealth. I cannot imagine that, were it to emerge that Boris Johnson had stolen £2 billion from the UK treasury and deposited it in a bank in Dubai, there would be people more concerned with the role of the Emiratis in the whole affair than in the fact Johnson stole £2 billion from Britain.

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The West has lost its virtue

By Paul Kingsnorth

Yet a tranche of white Westerners lap up these anti-colonial arguments. They nod their heads, displaying an incredibly paternalistic and patronising attitude to Africans, painting them as helpless children who, even when they steal from their people, probably do it because the white man has told them to. All this only serves to downplay the role of corrupt African leaders in impoverishing their people: how thrilled these rulers must be as those useful idiots make the “corruption is all the West’s fault” argument for them.

And no, accounts of massive corruption in African states are not exaggerated stereotypes. In a 2021 survey of citizens in 34 African countries, an average of 58% said corruption was getting steadily worse. And not just among their elites; a third of respondents had been forced to bribe the police at least once in the past year. They also rated their civil servants, judges and local government councillors as very corrupt. Worse, 71% said “ordinary citizens risk retaliation or other negative consequences if they report corruption to the authorities”, proof they see it as a systemic arrangement. Is that the white man’s doing as well?

Of course there are global structural hangovers from the colonial era that impede the progress of African and other (poorer) global South countries today. Western countries have far more influence over and within major international organisations — from the UN to the IMF and World Bank. African countries have very weak positions in these institutions because they lack financial muscle, determined by their position in the world economy. Basically, the more you pay, the more you say.

The general stance of Africans who live in Africa is certainly not to blame the former colonialists for the problems of their countries today. They place the blame squarely on their ruling elites as a cursory glance of a newspaper in any African country will evidence. A majority — 59% — of Africans aged 18-24 believe that the impact their country’s former colonial powers have on their education systems is positive, while a quarter (25%) disagree. A majority — 57% — also feel trade relations with the former colonial power have a positive impact, while 27% disagree. Surprisingly for me, 47% even think the former colonial power’s impact on their country’s culture and identity is positive and 46% think their access to its natural resources has a positive effect, compared with 32% and 36% who disagree, respectively.

Six in ten, meanwhile, believe that foreign companies have been allowed to take advantage of their country’s resources without sufficiently benefitting or contributing to the local populations. These figures suggest the majority of African youths who actually live in Africa have quite different views from those in the West who are attempting to speak on their behalf — usually Guardianistas or their equivalents in the US. Kehinde Andrews’s The New Age of Empire at least makes the argument explicitly. Most others hide behind implication to generally say the same thing.

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The age of empire is back

By Aris Roussinos

Any white person who would suggest colonialism is not one of the “root causes” of Africa’s problems today is engaging in colonial amnesia, white denialism (both real but over-exaggerated phenomena), or is simply a racist. This tactic has the dual advantage of putting whites on the moral and psychological defensive as well as rallying Africans and other black folk to join in repelling the racist denialists. And if any black people in the West suggest colonialism does not really explain all African problems today, the tactic will be to portray them as “brainwashed” by the white man, dim-witted coconuts or mercenaries who in order to reap the rewards of pandering to white prejudices, are enabling “ahistorical” arguments that ignore the legacies of colonialism and slavery. An “ahistorical” argument is any argument that does not firmly point to the white man as the root of Africa’s problems today. White people who make the “colonialism is the root cause” argument will be praised as “thoughtful” and generally given the thumbs-up for showing how informed they are; they get it.

But who is this helping? Certainly not the 500 million Africans who currently have to survive on less than $1.90 a day or the hundreds of millions more who live on $2-$5 a day which is still serious poverty. It is not helping those living in countries with 50% or higher unemployment rates who are dying of easily curable diseases because they often lack access to basic healthcare. It is not helping the Africans who often live under governments that often think nothing of unleashing open violence on them to stay in power.

It is, at best, helping some black folk here in the West who might genuinely feel better believing white people have what they have while black people lack what they lack because of colonialism.

The root cause of Africa’s problems today is not colonialism or Queen Elizabeth — it is the way it is being ruled. And until that changes, the status quo will remain the same, no matter how many times we yell “colonialism”.

At the same time, I found myself watching the life of an entirely different head of state: a young, somewhat shy woman suddenly elevated to immense responsibilities and duties in her twenties, hemmed in by protocol, rigidified by discipline. The new president could barely get through the day without some provocation, insult, threat or lie. Elizabeth Windsor was tasked as a twenty-something with a job that required her to say or do nothing that could be misconstrued, controversial, or even interestingly human — for the rest of her life.

The immense difficulty of this is proven by the failure of almost every other member of her family — including her husband — to pull it off. We know her son, King Charles III’s, views on a host of different subjects, many admirable, some cringe-inducing. We know so much of the psychological struggles of Diana; the reactionary outbursts of Philip; the trauma of Harry; the depravity of Andrew; the agonies of Margaret. We still know nothing like that about the Queen. Because whatever else her life was about, it was not about her.

Part of the hard-to-explain grief I feel is related to how staggeringly rare that level of self-restraint is today. Narcissism is everywhere. Every feeling we have is bound to be expressed. Self-revelation, transparency, authenticity — these are our values. The idea that we are firstly humans with duties to others that will require and demand the suppression of our own needs and feelings seems archaic. Elizabeth kept it alive simply by example.

With her death, it’s hard not to fear that so much she exemplified — restraint, duty, grace, reticence, persistence — are disappearing from the world. As long as she was there, they were at the centre of an idea of Britishness that helped define the culture at its best. Perhaps the most famous woman in the world, she remained a sphinx, hard to decipher, impossible to label. She was not particularly beautiful or dashing or inspiring. She said nothing surprising. She was simply the Queen. She showed up. She got on with it. She was there. She was always there.

Whatever else happened to the other royals, she stayed the same. And whatever else happened in Britain — from the end of Empire to Brexit — she stayed the same. This is an achievement of nearly inhuman proportions, requiring discipline beyond most mortals. Think of a year, 1992: one son, Andrew, divorced; a daughter-in-law, Sarah Ferguson, was seen cavorting nude in the tabloids; her daughter, Anne, separated; another son’s famously failed marriage, Charles’, dominated the headlines, and her house burned down. Here is how Her Majesty “vented”:

“1992 is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure. In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has turned out to be an ‘Annus Horribilis’.”

Dry, understated, with the only vivid phrase ascribed to a correspondent. Flawless.

She was an icon, but not an idol. An idol requires the vivid expression of virtues, personality, style. Diana was an idol — fusing a compelling and vulnerable temperament with Hollywood glamour. And Diana, of course, was in her time loved far more intensely than her mother-in-law; connected emotionally with ordinary people like a rockstar; only eventually to face the longterm consequences of that exposure and crumble under the murderous spotlight of it all.

Elizabeth never rode those tides of acclaim or celebrity. She never pressed the easy buttons of conventional popularity. She didn’t even become known for her caustic wit like the Queen Mother, or her compulsively social sorties like Margaret. The gays of Britain could turn both of these queens into camp divas. But not her. In private, as in public, she had the kind of integrity no one can mock successfully.

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Our Queen's sacrifice

By Helen Thompson

You can make all sorts of solid arguments against a constitutional monarchy — but the point of monarchy is precisely that it is not the fruit of an argument. It is emphatically not an Enlightenment institution. It’s a primordial institution smuggled into a democratic system. It has nothing to do with merit and logic and everything to do with authority and mystery — two deeply human needs our modern world has trouble satisfying without danger.

The Crown satisfies those needs, which keeps other more malign alternatives at bay. None has expressed this better than CS Lewis:

“Where men are forbidden to honour a king, they honour millionaires, athletes, or film stars instead; even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.”

The Crown represents something from the ancient past, a logically indefensible but emotionally salient symbol of something called a nation, something that gives its members meaning and happiness. However shitty the economy, or awful the prime minister, or ugly the discourse, the monarch is able to represent the nation all the time. In a living, breathing, mortal person.

The importance of this in a deeply polarised and ideological world, where fellow citizens have come to despise their opponents as enemies, is hard to measure. But it matters that divisive figures such as Boris Johnson or Margaret Thatcher were never required or expected to represent the entire nation. It matters that in times of profound acrimony, something unites. It matters that in a pandemic when the country was shut down, the Queen, too, followed the rules, even at her husband’s funeral, and was able to refer to a phrase — “we’ll meet again” — that instantly conjured the days of the Blitz, when she and the Royal Family stayed in London, even as Hitler’s bombs fell from the sky.

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Who can rule Britain now?

By Mary Harrington

Every Brit has a memory like this. She was part of every family’s consciousness, woven into the stories of our lives, representing a continuity and stability over decades of massive change and dislocation. No American will ever experience that kind of comfort, that very human form of patriotism across the decades in one’s own life and then the centuries before. When I grew up studying the Normans and the Plantagenets and the Tudors, they were not just artifacts of the distant past, but deeply linked to the present by the monarchy’s persistence and the nation’s thousand-year survival as a sovereign state — something no other European country can claim.

The Queen was crowned in the cathedral where kings and queens have been crowned for centuries, in the same ceremony, with the same liturgy. To have that kind of symbolic, sacred, mystical thread through time and space is something that is simply a gift from the past that the British people, in their collective wisdom, have refused to return.

A version of this piece first appeared on Andrew Sullivan’s Substack.

Elizabeth II’s incumbency was so enduring that any number of people lived lives here without such an experience. Now, her passing risks bequeathing something more akin to a shipwreck than a pre-ordained and pre-planned moment in time, the passage of which should bring, as well as grief, the solace of continuity. Britain has become a country in which we are part strangers. Precisely because the Queen prolonged a particular past, this week has been a temporal rupture.

In her spirit still lived her father and grandfather, the kings who, because of the two world wars, reigned over what was probably for the first time an overtly British nation-state, rather than a tenser union of once separate kingdoms. To mourn Elizabeth II is to mourn that 20^th-century Britain. In reality, it was a short era. By the Seventies, something that fighting the two wars had created was already dissolving. But the last genuinely optimistic decade of 20th-century Britain tied the Queen to two iconic imaginative forces that still, in rather different ways, exercise their pull.

In the first, Bobby Moore, born in the East End during the Blitz, climbed the steps at Wembley, and, not wanting to dirty the Queen’s white gloves, wiped his hands, before she handed him the Jules Rimet Trophy. For English football, that summer afternoon has constituted an ideal of greatness against which everything since has fallen short, even as there are any number of ways in which football in Britain is more inclusive than it was on 30 July 1966. If the 56 years of hurt were to end in Qatar this winter, there would be no fusion of the club rituals of football at 3 o’clock on a Saturday with the national team’s victory, no way of avoiding the question of what the World Cup was doing being played in the middle of European domestic seasons in Qatar, and there would be English not Union flags flown in celebration. Much more likely, there will be more years to add to a song written for an occasion where attaining that ideal in the Queen’s presence seemed in touching distance.

The Beatles are the second vehicle of collective emotion, running from war to the Sixties, to which the Queen was connected. John Lennon was born during the Liverpool blitz and Paul McCartney’s parents met in an air raid shelter. They played as children on bombsites. Then, like the Queen in the Fifties, the Beatles became in the Sixties the new outward face of post-war Britain, even as the shadows of the older Britain ran through some of their best songs from A day in the life to Eleanor Rigby. McCartney said that growing up, the Queen seemed akin to a film star: someone it would be impossible for a working-class boy like him to meet. But he did. He’s now a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour. As the Beatles were falling apart in 1968, McCartney, always at home in pre-rock and roll British musical culture, wrote a music-hall style ditty, “almost”, he said, “like a love song”, about the Queen. On Abbey Road, after he finishes singing “And in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make”, there is a gap. Then the 23-second Her Majesty begins: the last sound on the last album the Beatles made.

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Who can rule Britain now?

By Mary Harrington

The age of Queen Elizabeth II could not stop in the Sixties. Through the increasing political and economic fragmentation of the United Kingdom from the Seventies, the Queen served as an exemplary constitutional monarch. She might even be said to have practised denial in the face of what was changing: order being necessary, she knew that a public show of it is required from the person who bears witness to the underlying tumult.

Nothing symbolises the United Kingdom Union, not even the armed forces, as much as the monarchy. The monarch must represent the whole of the Union and be sensitive to its constituent parts. This is much easier said than done. The Queen in part succeeded because deep in her character ran an unwillingness to perform angst against some abstract standard of the way things are supposed to be. The Union is not helped by gimmicks and cannot withstand a lot of tortured contemplation. It just has to be lived as though it were self-evident that it and the tapestry that constitutes it matter. In appointing her last Prime Minister and meeting her end at Balmoral, she may have, at the last, still served the Union well. By appearing while dying with a smile on her face to meet Liz Truss, she has also given what seems like an accidental premiership unfolding in a national emergency a dignity in its beginning that it would not otherwise have.

Without her, though, the monarchy itself is less secure. There will be less of the already severely strained charity bestowed towards those inside it who let it down. Meanwhile, the Queen appears to have been the last tie binding the Sussexes to the Royal Family. If the attacks hit and wounded her anyway, the grief writ across Prince Harry’s face as he arrived at Balmoral tells its own story. Unless the emotions of his dash to Scotland brings reconciliation, the burden of protecting the monarchy from filial and fraternal score-settling now uncomfortably passes to its targets.

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The Age of Elizabeth Windsor

By Helen Thompson

Britain has lived through a not insignificant number of kings and queens who did more to jeopardise the monarchy than to preserve it. By contrast, the Queen made it an institution that attracted admiration, perhaps even abroad some envy. At the very point when there might have appeared every reason to doubt the purpose of a constitutional monarchy so overtly laden with pomp and pageantry, she gave it an almost transcendent purpose.

This achievement was not at all obvious in the first half of her reign. Probably she had not yet accomplished it. There was no war where she could demonstrate her fortitude as George VI did. While she was not born to be Queen and came to the throne at a young age, her accession did not have quite the air of tragedy that gave such meaning to her father’s life as king. She had to become through service the Queen she became, including the Queen who could so delightfully take tea with Paddington. Perhaps the Crown though instant in acquisition must be borne as a pilgrimage. Perhaps his utter inadequacy to the trek was why Edward VIII opted to dump it on his brother and niece. Perhaps it was a simple willingness to meet the longevity of the journey that took her so far. She appeared to find truth in an Aboriginal proverb she quoted in a speech in Australia in 2011: “We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love… and then we return home.”

More prosaically, the Queen possessed a seemingly innate capacity to practise self-discipline and humility. Her predictability on such matters is why many self-proclaimed republicans could respect her. Could anyone have doubted that she unhesitatingly would have thought that the Covid rules about funerals applied to the Duke of Edinburgh’s?

Nobody from the outside can know how much over seven decades the Queen sacrificed and where, for better or worse, she reached her limits. Over the past year, what she did not have the physical strength left to do, from the Cenotaph to the State Opening of Parliament, made the nearness of the end apparent. What was left though in the Jubilee was a chance for what is still, for now anyway, the United Kingdom to say thank you while the Queen was alive to receive the gratitude. On the last day, she left Windsor and came to London again to play her part. Now, with the help of the rituals she would have recognised, those of us who want the monarchy to endure through the parting must too try to rise to the change.

So it seems especially impertinent — hence especially appropriate — for an American to criticise your monarchy. Especially an American monarchist like me. I am not even a costume monarchist — I am not in it for the castles, weddings, and funny hats. I actually think of monarchy as a legitimate form of government. And by monarchy I mean actual monarchy: absolute monarchy.

There are only three forms of government: monarchy (rule of one), oligarchy (rule of few), and democracy (rule of many). Monarchy is good because it is better than oligarchy. Democracy is neither good nor bad — it is just impossible. With today’s voters, at least. It is not just that voters are not wise enough to control the government. It’s worse: the voters are not powerful enough to control the government. They — or at least the politicians they elect — have not had significant power for decades.

Monarchy is both the most common form of public-sector governance in history, and the universal form of private-sector governance (all corporations have CEOs). Any private-sector firm could operate as a republic or other oligarchical form. None do. There are no senates, assemblies or supreme courts in the private sector — let alone anything like the administrative state. Monarchy —ideally accountable monarchy, with a board of directors or some other safety mechanism — just works better.

So either the whole public sector today is mad, or the rest of human history was mad, and so is the entire private sector. As an American monarchist, I choose the former. But in Britain, how should you feel about it? You already have a monarchy. Not monarchy as a form of government — but as a theatre of government. It’s a sort of official soap opera, one that has been on-air a long time — about 300 years, by some counts.

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The Royal Family always wins

By Will Lloyd

As even its defenders would surely admit, the British monarchy is not a functional organ of governance. It is a living monument of history. The German for “monument” is evocative — Denkmal, meaning “an occasion to think”. To ask questions, perhaps. Simple questions. Dangerous questions.

Yet in this year of Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee, few Englishmen will stop to ask the simplest, most dangerous form of question that history can ask: to ask the past for a judgment of the present. One insanely dangerous way for you to ask is: what would Elizabeth I think of Elizabeth II?

Leopold von Ranke, not a Nazi Panzer commander but actually the inventor of modern history, wrote: “Every age stands equal before God.” Ranke’s law does not deny any era the right to judge any other. But it must allow itself to be judged in return.

At the birth of Elizabeth I, England was a minor power. At the death of Elizabeth II, the UK will be a minor power. In between, Britons ruled the world for a century and a half. In Elizabeth I’s time, England was a rising power. In Elizabeth II’s time, England is a fading power.

How would Elizabeth Tudor feel about all this? Petrified? Blimpish? If she had to characterise Elizabeth Windsor’s perspective of monarchy and government, what adjectives would she use? The term roi fainéant (a do-nothing monarch) is a millennium older than the Tudors — invented for the hopeless Merovingians.

How would the Tudors not find the comparison of the Windsors to the Merovingians obvious? Especially when they heard that the Windsors, unlike the Merovingians in France in the 5th century, had reigned over a palpable national decline? At least the Merovingians had the good grace to give way to the frankly much more badass Carolingians. The Windsors have given way not even to Parliament, but to a bunch of bureaucrats; to a gang of foundations, quangos, media conglomerates and university administrators. At least the early Merovingians won and held their crowns by the sword. Perhaps: once a costume dynasty, always a costume dynasty.

It is easy for Elizabeth II to judge Elizabeth I. For example, diversity and inclusion are among Elizabeth Windsor’s core principles whereas Elizabeth Tudor was a racist. But we need not accept Elizabeth I’s prehistoric racial theories to find her political insights relevant. The past, without being perfect, can usefully criticise the present.

It was Bagehot, the 19th-century theorist of the English Constitution, who best described the difference between Elizabeth I and II. Bagehot divided sovereigns into the effective (actually in control of the state) and the dignified (a crowned Kardashian, a long-haired Merovingian man-doll). A more modern version of these labels might be operating and ceremonial. Elizabeth I was the operating Elizabeth. Elizabeth II is the ceremonial Elizabeth. A costume Queen.

It is true that the binary is not absolute. In Bagehot’s day, Parliament was effective and Victoria was ceremonial. But Victoria certainly mattered much more than Elizabeth II, if much less than Elizabeth I. In our day we might say that both Parliament and Queen are dignified —the operating power lies in Whitehall (if it is in England at all).

Moreover, a really critical Tudor historian might question whether the decline of working absolutism in the English monarchy did not precede Elizabeth II. The Stuarts, alien in nation and suspect in religion, were never secure on the throne. James I ranted about divine right and absolute power, because he knew he doesn’t have it. Charles I seriously tried to be a limited monarch — resulting in the judicial murder of Strafford; Charles II was restored only as a limited monarch; don’t even start me on the “Glorious Revolution”. But surely Elizabeth I was peak England?

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By Helen Thompson

But was Elizabethan England really Elizabeth’s? To what extent was this woman actually the CEO of the government? Was she in charge — or was it “Leicester’s Commonwealth”? Was it really the Cecils who invented the Deep State? And Walsingham the intelligence community?

We do get a sense of the increasing importance of an early “deep state” as the Tudor dynasty boots up. Henry VIII was a kingly king, but his attention did seem to wander, and his policies did often seem driven by his advisers. I know of no indication that his father, Henry VII, meant anything but business — as anyone would expect of a chad rebel who seized the throne on horseback with his sword. For there were true kings on Earth in those days. But let us treat the Tudors as a homogeneous monolith and history as binary. Tudors both reign and rule; Windsors only reign, but do not rule. (Cromwell, also a monarch, ruled, but did not reign.)

One way to identify a ceremonial or dignified institution is to detect a situation in which a seeming organ of power is vestigial. An organ or organisation in a larger regime is vestigial if the regime could continue operating as usual without it. When Elizabeth I kicked it, that was the end of Elizabethan England. What followed was still very cool, but it was not Elizabethan England.

An objective political change can change the lives of everyone in the country — think of everyone who used to be an East German — and always somehow disrupts or replaces the governing elite. If Elizabeth II passes away tomorrow, the trash in London will still be picked up. If the monarchy did not exist, Whitehall would function as usual. If Parliament, the Cabinet, and the voters did not exist, Whitehall would function as usual.

What this “Elizabeth test” teaches us is that it is obvious to even the dogs in the street that democracy has gone the way of monarchy, becoming ceremonial or dignified. The 20th-century removal of politics and politicians, and hence voters and elections, from actual authority over the government, was the century’s great changing of the guard.

The Trump administration did not disrupt the elite. Disruption can be measured by number of jobs destroyed. How many elite jobs did Trump destroy? He annoyed and energised the elite. He was the best thing that ever happened to the New York Times. Thousands of public-spirited Ivy graduates must owe Trump their jobs to this day.

Brexit did not disrupt the elite. If anything, Brexit gave power back to some purely British institution — such as Whitehall (for Yanks, the British deep state). But Whitehall would much rather implement directives from Brussels — freeing the native mandarins from responsibility, the bane of all bureaucrats. The only possible recipients of power in Brexit did not even want it. The voters? They voted for Brexit, accepted a few weird bureaucratic complications, and went back to their fish and chips.

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The death of the conservative elite

By Park MacDougald

As Bagehot explains, putting a fake power in front of the real power has tremendous benefits. It is even better to have two layers of fake — both monarchy and democracy. This double panel acts as a perfect bullet-absorber for the civil-service oligarchy, which, though young, was already building its strength in Bagehot’s time.

The working Queen, Elizabeth I, must feel that her fancy-dress successor was in some way tricked out of her rightful power. Elizabeth I will judge Elizabeth II for investing in this trick — rather than exposing it, rising up and restoring the monarchy. For the people, too, were tricked — out of their right to a real monarch.

How did monarchies even become ceremonial? Usually not in one step. Rather, their first step was to become constitutional. It turns out that as soon as a monarchy loses any power, it very soon loses all power — and often its head as well.

Ultimately, the purpose of a ceremonial monarchy is to prevent the existence of a functional monarchy. Where a puppet reigns, no one else can reign; so no one reigns at all. So a murky, distributed oligarchy can rule — unchallenged by the clear, clean sunlight of irresistible central power.

The Whig oligarchs of the early 18th century installed the Hanoverians, a dynasty with no inherent support base in England, in place of the dangerous Stuarts. Any Stuart revolt — and there were two — would have to go through the Hanoverians first. But it is a long time since the early 18th century.

We can look at the UK today and ask: what would Elizabeth Tudor do? When we imagine Elizabeth Tudor waking up in the rejuvenated body of Elizabeth Windsor, it makes little difference that their actual roles in government have changed. Nothing at all has changed about the English constitution. The Queen reserves all her royal prerogative.

It is customary for the British monarch to use prerogative power only under her ministers’ advice — except in an emergency. While monarchy is nothing without a deep respect for custom, unfortunately it is an emergency. And has been, Elizabeth Tudor will tell you, for at least the last half-century.

The new old Elizabeth declares martial law and puts the police under her direct orders. She never considers the possibility that she has anything less than absolute power. Bobbies everywhere are shutting down the oligarchy — padlocking the buildings, imaging the servers, freezing the accounts. All state, media, quango and university employees are retired. Even primary schools are closed for the reset. Only essential productive workers still work — for now, everyone else can chill, and still get paid. As we learned under Covid, the paycheck is the essence of the bullshit job.

Of course, this day is only the start of the renewal of Britain. “The revolution was first in the mind of the king.” The truth about the revolution is that, in nations with a surviving monarchy — even a purely ceremonial monarchy, like Britain’s today — the revolution remains in the mind of the monarch.

A modern monarch who chose to be not a costume-king in the school of the Windsors, but at the very least a Patriot King in the school of Bolingbroke, would not have to work hard at all to regain monarchical control of the state. At least, regaining full control is much easier than regaining a tiny bit of control.

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By Dominic Sandbrook

The essence of the modern coup d’etat is the use of popular enthusiasm to gain stable, unified, direct control over the security forces. Everything about this transition must feel completely natural, inevitable and irreversible — in retrospect. This is exactly how it could feel — it won’t, of course — when Charles III finally takes the throne.

All agencies other than the army and police can be retired. This cannot be done with the security forces. No one wants anarchy in the UK. But also, no one actually needs the Ministry of Defence — what is it defending? Just bring everyone home already. At least temporarily.

Under direct royal command, military and police leadership must undergo a rapid purge and reshuffle. Staff who can show their (prior) commitment to the new regime are rapidly advanced; those known to be sympathetic to the old are sidelined. It may not be fair. What is? What ever was?

And power is a shark. It has to keep moving. Power for power’s sake is a dead fish. What does Charles III want to make of his Britain? What does he have the power to change? After executing this manoeuvre — anything. The Patriot King is the nation’s gardener; his goal is to make its lovely human flora burgeon and blossom. Obviously, his first job is building a new government — but the problem goes far beyond this. He has to build a new society and a new economy. Everything is a ruin.

If there is any set of people who need to be challenged the most, it is the highest elites. An aspect of the Elizabethan court which is almost impossible to explain to the modern world is that it is the centre of excellence in everything. In the early Elizabethan era at least, the best plays and poems in England were by courtiers. In the modern era, a royal court in the Elizabethan style would be surrounded by the country’s best scientists, filmmakers, mountain climbers. Not only would royal sponsorship select and fund the best people; it would even lead them stylistically. The style of the king would become the fashion of the country.

As opposed to — where does style come from, nowadays? Centres of excellence are hidden to those not in the know; they are widely spread across fields; sometimes they are taken over by bad people, and become centres of badness. But elites benefit from concentration; concentrating the elite of an elite around one centre is the way to create the most awesome elite. Such is the job of a royal court.

Of course, it all depends on the right king. In the history of kings, which is most of human history, there are awesome kings and not-so-awesome kings. But if we accept Elizabeth II’s responsibility for the condition of England, and try to hypothesise Elizabeth I’s reaction to that same condition, “not so awesome” doesn’t cover it. Imagine her inspecting some of what you chaps call “council housing”.

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Is Elizabeth II a bad mother?

By Tanya Gold

Yet as an American I must face the fact that London is the last city outside America which still has the right to call itself the capital of the world. “Though much is taken, much abides.” It will probably keep falling. It could rise again.

A proud, renewed and independent royal Britain, a based Britain, could easily create elite institutions and cohorts that challenged and surpassed the aging titans of the American world. Because of London’s legacy of world domination, anti-American nationalists everywhere would naturally become Anglophiles.

And even we Americans could easily throw off the vast carcass of our 20th-century regime by appealing to a higher power to restore order — were there any such power. One day we may elect a President with a mandate to peacefully cede sovereignty to our rightful king, Charles III.

The King is right there, on the inauguration podium. The President hands him the Bible and the nuclear football. He takes command and the President calls an Uber. From the river, a deep roar — a corps of Royal Marines, on enormous transatlantic Hovercraft, is cruising in formation up the Potomac…

Wholly forgotten amid the Jubilee celebrations was the fact that, when the Queen acceded to the throne, she became sovereign not only of the UK, but also of a Muslim nation from which a million Britons like myself hail. The caption, for those who don’t read Urdu, translates as: “Elizabeth II, Queen of Pakistan 1952 – 1956.” It is the most remarkable detail in the chronicle of the Queen’s reign which began in February 1952, just as my father was born in a village in East Pakistan that through the strange meanderings of history was located in her dominions. My family’s fate has, ever since, been twinned with Her Majesty’s.

Of all the titles Elizabeth Windsor acquired on her father’s death, “Queen of Pakistan” would be the shortest-lived. The monarchy of Pakistan, founded in 1947 as a homeland for India’s down-trodden Muslims, was quickly abolished. In time, so was the country itself, most of its population seceding to form a new country (Bangladesh). Although a rump state still claims the name Pakistan, the country of my parents’ birth no longer exists. Yet its sometime sovereign, Elizabeth II, miraculously lives on — the only remnant of the original Pakistani state as it existed before its collapse in civil war and genocide.

That national failure led to my parents’ emigration to the UK, and so my family fell once again under Her Majesty’s reign. They were “New Commonwealth immigrants”. But my father was truly a New Elizabethan, among the first subjects to be born under the new Queen — and born British, since the Nationality Act of 1948 established, with astonishing magnanimity, a common citizenship for the whole British Commonwealth. Three generations of my family have been born subjects of the same Queen, while a full five generations have lived under her reign, in the UK or the erstwhile Dominion of Pakistan.

In all this time, the monarchy has been the dominant political fact in our lives. The labels on our passports — India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the UK — have changed more than once; with the potential break-up of the United Kingdom they may do again. But while countries and their borders, governments and their ideologies, come and go, the one unfathomable fact that endures is the monarchy, whose legal subjects British-Asians have been ever since India was annexed more than a 150 years ago. And this legal relationship stretches back even further for those of Caribbean heritage, as far back as the 17th century.

No-one can claim the relationship began consensually. But whatever the iniquity of our initial subjection to this crown, it is that same crown that now guarantees our equality in this land. The Proclamation of 1858 that made my ancestors British granted them the exact same rights as all other subjects. It was Queen Victoria herself who had insisted on Indians “being placed on an equality with the subjects of the British Crown”, words that would be recited by Indians at political gatherings. The principle was frequently ignored, but it was, as Gandhi put it, our Magna Carta, an assurance of equal treatment, decreed by the highest possible source, that still holds true today.

Monarchy, the philosopher Roger Scruton wrote, “is the light above politics, which shines down on the human bustle from a calmer and more exalted sphere”. There’s something strangely celestial about that description, but he was onto something. As Shakespeare observed, “there’s such divinity doth hedge a king”. Elizabeth II is Dei Gratia Regina (“Queen by the grace of God”) and as even the imam of Cambridge mosque preached on Friday, “she is a servant of the Almighty Allah”. If, in our secular age, there can no longer be God-given rights, the monarchy’s pompous charade of divinity makes it the closest thing we have to an absolute — and that is what I’d like my rights to be.

Minorities don’t trust the “human bustle” — which is all we would have without a monarch. From history we learn that wherever a throne is eliminated, in due course so are ethnic minorities. Consider the multiculturalism of Mitteleuropa under the Habsburgs or of southeastern Europe under the Ottomans. A dozen languages were spoken in the imperial parliament in Vienna, while on any given day in an Istanbul cafe conversations could be heard in Turkish, Ladino, Greek, Armenian, French and Kurdish, at least. But since republican governments replaced these monarchies, the fate of every 20th-century cosmopolis on the continent has been one of merciless homogenisation through ethnic cleansing, population transfers or socio-economic strangulation.

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The Queen's secret history

By Mary Harrington

There’s a kneejerk association of monarchy with nationalism. But the two have mostly been pitted against each other since the imperial age in which European monarchies transformed into continent-spanning empires characterised, especially in the British case, by free trade and free movement. Nationalists opposed the cosmopolitanism and pluralism of these empires, eventually corralling their multiethnic populations into new nation-states, republics in the main, which now struggle to cope with a fraction of the ethnic diversity that their territories previously boasted under imperial rule.

Conservatives today won’t own up to a truth of which they should be proud: the original basis of our multicultural society was the imperialist, royalist ideology of High Toryism. This becomes clear from the debate around the Nationality Act of 1948 that enabled my father’s emigration. It was then the Conservatives who worried about Labour reforms destroying “our proud boast of the open door in this country to people from all the colonies”. The parliamentary statement by Lord Kilmuir, as Shadow Home Secretary, deserves quoting at length:

We deprecate any tendency to differentiate between different types of British subjects in the United Kingdom. We feel that when they come to the UK there ought to be an open door and reception for every type…We must maintain our great metropolitan tradition of hospitality to everyone, from every part of the empire.

What united — and still unites — all these disparate people is the Queen, mere loyalty to whom makes us all British. Our oath of allegiance is to “Elizabeth II, her heirs and successors” — no more, no less. The symbolism of that is profound. It means my mother, a hijab-wearing Bengali Muslim woman who speaks little English can be unimpeachably British in a way she could not be unimpeachably French (even her clothing would not be deemed in keeping with “Republican values”). The simplicity of our oath is one of our constitution’s forgotten jewels, its tolerant spirit generally diffused throughout the state — a state that isn’t truly a nation-state since it claims four different “home nations”. Apart from Scotland, all have an underwhelming sense of nationality. As Daniel Defoe’s ditty scorning English nationalism went:

A true-born Englishman’s a contradiction,
In speech an irony, in fact a fiction.

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By Dominic Sandbrook

By contrast, the nation-states born of decolonisation in the last century demand of its citizens fealty to a nation, that nation commonly being defined in ethnically exclusive terms. In Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, the Roma minority that once had only to express loyalty to the emperor is under pressure to become Hungarian. These are societies at the mercy of ethnonationalism and xenophobia, lacking that impartial light of monarchy which, at its best, allows people of all races and religions to appeal to something beyond their differences from one another.

These unstable political forces haven’t been totally absent even in our tolerant monarchy. In 1968, targeting East African Indians, the Labour government consciously restricted dark-skinned British passport-holders from entering the country, legislation which even the anti-immigrant firebrand Enoch Powell considered, in some of its clauses, to be comparable to the Nuremberg Laws. Still, shortly afterwards, Powell made the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech that made him the biggest name in UK politics.

Powell envisioned a renewed English nationalism, which arose from a disillusioned critique of imperialism not unlike those taking place in former colonies. He came to believe that the foreign adventure of empire — Powell was a veteran of the Indian Army — had suppressed English identity. Decolonisation was an occasion to rediscover it, as if it were an old oak in an abandoned garden. He railed against the “bogus mythical self-consoling invention of the British Commonwealth”, against the Queen’s new role as its Head, and of course against Commonwealth immigrants. The irony is that Powell could have made the same arguments as an Indian, say, and been regarded as a fairly standard postcolonial polemicist.

Queen Elizabeth deserves credit as probably Powell’s most successful adversary in those turbulent decades. She single-handedly preserved the old imperial High Toryism which Powell and later Tories had turned against, using her charm to launder out of it the darker stains of imperialism. Whereas for Powell, the nation-state was “the ultimate political reality”, for Elizabeth it was the British Empire in its new, egalitarian guise, the Commonwealth. In her famous broadcast on her 21st birthday, Princess Elizabeth pledged her life to serving “all the peoples of the British Commonwealth and Empire, wherever they live, whatever race they come from, and whatever language they speak”.

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The importance of being British

By Nigel Biggar

Of course, the Queen never addressed him directly, but she was shadow-boxing against Powell’s English nationalism. Powell’s ravings grew more virulent. “It is truly when he looks into the eyes of Asia that the Englishman comes face to face with those who would dispute with him the possession of his native land,” Powell would bellow. But all the while, Elizabeth would reaffirm her own commitment “to that new conception of an equal partnership of nations and races”.

Eventually, Powell’s decorum yielded. In 1984, he attacked Queen Elizabeth — from a family of immigrants herself — using a phrase that would later be invoked, knowingly or otherwise, by Theresa May: “citizen of nowhere”. She was, Powell claimed, more concerned for “a vociferous minority of newcomers than for the great mass of her subjects…threatening the place of the Crown in the affections of the people” — a prediction that was utterly refuted by the jubilant Union Jack-waving of millions over the holiday.

Like most, at times I found myself chafing against the kitschier aspects of the spectacle. But then, when I saw the circle of saffron-robed sadhus from Gujarat at Neasden’s Hindu temple ignite a sacred flame in honour of the Queen, I remembered all over again what the lighting of all those beacons truly symbolised: a celebration by our motley, many-hued human bustle of the light that shines above it.

But here’s the thing: I don’t hate Thatcher. It’s not that I’m a huge fan of her legacy or anything (although anyone who thinks that industrial relations were doing fine before her or that the Falklands were some kind of unjustified expedition is clearly a fantasist), it simply doesn’t matter whether I like her or not because she is just too interesting.

Thatcher wasn’t the first woman to lead a country, but unlike her predecessors, Indira Gandhi in India or Isabel Martínez de Perón in Argentina, she didn’t arrive sanctified by a political dynasty. She was, as Prince Phillip snobbily points out to the Queen in The Crown, a grocer’s daughter. In real life, such condescension came strongly from the Left. The Blow Monkeys, one of the bands involved in the Red Wedge tour to support Labour, released an album called She was only a Grocer’s Daughter in 1987; and even though several pop songs fantasised about her death, that never seemed quite as ugly as supposed defenders of the working class announcing that Thatcher was just too common to rule.

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How the Left betrayed feminism

By Sarah Ditum

Previous series of The Crown dig deep into the problems of exercising power while female. One of the most fraught moments comes in series one, when the young Queen wants her children to have the surname Mountbatten after their father, and her advisors overrule her on the grounds that the royal family must carry the royal name: should feminist sensibilities celebrate the triumph of the matrilineal principle, or mourn the crushing of a woman’s will? But Thatcher never had a name worth fighting over, and she certainly didn’t have anything as grand as service to God and country to rest her claims on.

Instead, she had to invent what being a woman in power on her own account looked like. She had to invent herself. As Caroline Slocock put it in People Like Us, her memoir of her time as Thatcher’s private secretary, Thatcher had to “manage the tensions between ‘being feminine’ — and therefore submissive — and being authoritative”. Women in politics walk a narrow path with firepits either side. Four decades and many female world leaders on from Thatcher, the strategies to make that crossing are better defined, but plenty of women still flounder on the problem that power is perceived as a masculine trait: succeed at being in charge and you risk failing at being a woman.

Donald Trump played off this relentlessly to help his defeat of Hillary Clinton, and Clinton wasn’t nimble enough to neutralise it. Part of her problem was that she really is a feminist: she has a consistent analysis of women’s oppression, and she used that analysis to explain the attacks on her. Unfortunately, telling people why they’re wrong to find you chilly isn’t a great way to make them warm to you. Thatcher, on the other hand, was the one who said: “I owe nothing to women’s lib.” She never appointed a woman to her cabinet. In The Crown, she tells a nonplussed Queen that women are “too emotional” in general for the business of government.

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Downton Abbey makes fools of us all

By Tanya Gold

All this was (and remains) maddening, because of course Thatcher owed something to women’s lib, whether you mean the right to engage in politics as established by the suffrage movement, or the right to have a job as established by the second wave. But tactically, separating herself from feminism was fundamental to her success. Feminism was something ugly, dangerous, even seditious.

Not very long after Thatcher came to power, the female separatist Greenham Common Peace Camp was established to protest against nuclear arms. This was something truly radical: a defiance of the patriarchal family, a denunciation of militarism. You could tell they’d got under conservative skins when Auberon Waugh claimed Greenham smelled “of fish paste and bad oysters”, as though it were a sickening riot of femaleness in excess. It was also in a way a gift to Thatcher, I think, because here was exactly the thing she was not. If you found the Greenham women alarming, look to Thatcher instead – trundling around in a tank with her head peeping out the turret, headscarfed and smiling, an unlikely but perfect confection of feminine grace and firepower.

Feminine grace. One of the caricatures of Thatcher was that she was mannish — Spitting Image put her in an aggressively tailored suit that was nothing like the gem-bright skirt suits she actually wore. Although she cultivated her voice into an artificially low register to avoid sounding “shrill” (if anything, Anderson’s excellent portrayal softens the Thatcher voice, which in retrospect is an extraordinarily odd instrument), in every other way she played up her femaleness. The Crown shows her to us at her dressing table, surrounded with the implements of ladylike self-creation; it shows her dishing up supper for her cabinet, a performance of the good housewife that is tantamount to camp.

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Why the Iron Lady is an icon for our times

By Ian Birrell

But while Thatcher expertly softened the edges of her authority with little-woman details, the truth is that she was able to take her place in politics because she had something that set her apart from almost all her sex: she had a wife. Or rather she had Denis, a husband so unusually supportive of her, and so notably happy to act the consort, that he essentially played the role that political wives have always done, enhancing her prospects rather than draining her efforts to support his own.

Thatcher’s rejection of feminism means she probably had very little idea how unique her own marriage was, although The Crown portrays it very sweetly — and the comparison with what we’ve seen in the previous series of Prince Phillip’s struggles and resentments at playing support act to his own wife makes Denis’s qualities obvious. He especially shines in episode two, when the Thatchers are invited for a hunting weekend with the Windsors at Balmoral. It is a disaster, with the Thatchers floundering against the opaque etiquette, but it’s not purely a matter of the posh excluding the commoners: we see Thatcher briskly telling Denis “we don’t want to catch any upper-class habits”. This is not a couple seeking assimilation to the aristocracy.

For my whole life, I’ve been interested in Thatcher mostly because she was a woman. When I was a child, she fascinated me simply because she had red hair and was female, like me; as I got older, I spent more time thinking about the subtleties of her public image, the calculations that had gone into making that persona. But the version of her in The Crown — and I think this is true to the historical Thatcher as well — is one who sees her sex as the least interesting thing about her. Class, though — class was always a preoccupation, and a propellant for her radical kind of conservativism. Margaret Thatcher, class warrior: maybe that’s a kind of Thatcher it’s politically allowable to like, after all.

The programme, part of Sue MacGregor’s Reunion series, brought home how much like a wedding the whole thing was. The Coronation ring, placed on the fourth finger of her right hand, is also known as “The wedding ring of England”. It is a union of sorts, being struck between the Queen and her subjects. And back in 1952, both sides enthusiastically consented. The Pathé newsreel of the time spoke of “The happy heartbeat of the cockney crowd. London is royal and gay.”

It’s not just our language that has radically changed since then. The aristocracy is no longer treated with deference, the Church of England has been substantially abandoned, Coronation is a street in Manchester, and Coronation Chicken has becomer retro at best, and an embarrassing empire hangover at worst. Which raises the question: are the British people ready to get married again, and to get married like this?

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How the Queen brings us hope

By Helen Thompson

This is not an academic question. The Queen was 94 this week. And the presence of Covid-19 within the palace walls was a reminder of her mortality. The Queen retains the love and admiration of her people — but what on earth would 21st-century Britain make of the Coronation service itself. It’s a ceremony that exposes in liturgical form the nature of the British state, and, in particular, its intimate relationship to God?

At the beginning of the service, the archbishop asks the people present of they are “willing” to “do homage and service”? As Archbishop Charles Le Grice preached in 1821 on the day of George VI’s coronation:

“The solemn ceremony of this day is not the pageant of a Monarch receiving the homage of his vassals; it is not the triumph of despotic power …. The poorest subject is a party to the covenant which the King now makes.”

In other words, consent is vital to the delicate constitution balance as played out in the coronation. Indeed, it is even there in the National Anthem itself: “May she defend our laws, and ever give us cause, to sing with heart and voice, God save the Queen.” (Not that everybody knows that verse.) But here we sing of the hope that the monarch will always give us a good reason to defend her; subtly suggesting, of course, that if she doesn’t, we won’t.

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My eulogy for Boris

By Giles Fraser

How will the congregation react to the next coronation? Not so much the hand-picked thousands in Westminster Abbey, but the wider congregation at home. I doubt they will dress up in their Sunday best, as they did last time, and hang on every detail of a three-hour church service. But will they even understand what is going on? Will the deliberately Christian nature of the service be alienating in a post-religious and multi-cultural society? Will the plummy accents of the lords and ladies in waiting feel like the sound of another age, as if we are being secretly governed by some occupying power?

Understanding the symbolism of the service itself — the emphasis on anointing, for instance, and its origins in the Hebrew scriptures — requires a level of theological literacy that has been largely lost. Will the puzzled onlookers be like awkward guests at a wedding who feel uncomfortable in church, itchy in their hired suits, who don’t know the hymns, stumble over the words, and who snigger during the prayers?

That sort of thing might not matter so much at the wedding of someone else. But at the coronation, “the People” themselves have to say “I do”. And it’s been so long since the last coronation, I wonder if we will understand that we too have a part to play in the ceremony.

I ask these questions nervously. The coronation may only be an ‘ornamental’ aspect of our constitution. But I do worry that any interference in the complex dynamic of informed consent that the monarch and the people are believed to express to each other through the coronation could have unknown consequences for our historic constitutional arrangements. Brexit challenged us with a number of constitutional questions that we were not expecting. Helen Thompson, Professor of politics at Cambridge, thinks that the death of the Queen could well do the same. It could precipitate a constitutional crisis for which we are ill prepared.

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Meghan and Harry are playing a dangerous game

By Douglas Murray

Republicanism is not especially strong on these islands — but when the leader of a major political party (Nicola Sturgeon) reacts to the Prince Andrew/Jeffrey Epstein scandal with the comment “I think there is a debate to be had about the longer term future of the monarch”, you just know that the death of the Queen is going to be a moment of opportunity for those who want radically to reshape our constitution. Especially with brand Archwell — more Beckingham than Buckingham — continuing to chip away at the mystique that royalty requires to successfully operate.

Part of the problem in answering the Republican challenge is that it’s not straightforward to say what the monarchy achieves for the British constitution. Even the Queen herself has described it as “a puzzle” and “always will be”. There were times, before dreary things like evidence based policy, when you could have got away with this sort of answer. To this extent, royalty and divinity do have something important common: they don’t readily give up their advantages to empirical scrutiny.

Perhaps I am fussing unnecessarily. Patriotism in these islands is on the up, and affection for the Queen herself, and indeed for the Prince of Wales, is probably as high as ever. Her Majesty has had an especially good Covid crisis — her broadcast on Palm Sunday was well received a home and across the globe. At a time of crisis like this, where death has come amongst us so visibly, our connection as a nation to our past, our continuity over time and symbolic links to each other, feels especially important.

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Britain's divisions go way, way back

By Ed West

In this midst of this, William and Kate are quietly getting on with the business of working out how to preserve the best of the Queen’s legacy. Even the relationship of England with Scotland — currently the weakest link in our constitutional settlement — hasn’t seen anything like the stresses and strains that other political unions, the European Union and the United States, have experienced in response to this virus.

But nonetheless, as we approach the end of the Queen’s reign, a moment of nervousness is not inappropriate — us getting ever closer to a moment where one wrong move could give us “President Blair” or some other similar indignity.

Over in the United States, they now have an elected official who behaves like the worst sort of dominating monarch. “When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total”, Trump recently boasted. By contrast, here in the United Kingdom we have a monarchy that, for those who can see past the pomp and the diamonds, goes in for quiet dignity and servant leadership. And long may that continue.

Happy St George’s day. And Vivat Regina.