Cry, the Beloved Country
The Last Ten Days Have Changed Us Much Less than the Tory Press Thinks
The spectacle of mourning is over, the last post has sounded, and normal life has resumed, insofar as normality is possible in a country that generally seems to prefer to keep reality at arm’s length.
I mostly avoided the whole thing. I’m not trying to make a virtue of this. I respect those who wanted to feel part of it, but pomp and circumstance leave me cold, and I felt no more sadness about the death of the Queen than I would have felt about any other stranger’s death I might have heard of.
Perhaps I missed something. Perhaps if I’d watched I might have felt part of ‘history’ or at least that part of history that is marked by the deaths of great men and women. Maybe I would have felt the new national unity that so many rightwing pundits celebrated all last week.
I might even have felt ‘touched by the sacred and divine’, as the Mail’s Stephen Pollard claims to have been while watching the ceremonies. Is God only present at the burial of kings and queens? Does my absence mean that I’m a member of the ‘largely leftist intelligentsia’, which according to Pollard, believed – until the last week – that ‘post-imperial Britain is a small island, rendered even more irrelevant by the supposed idiocies of Brexit?’
It probably does. And now, Pollard triumphantly demands, I, and others like me, have been ‘muted’ by the grandiosity on display. After all, as Pollard asks, ‘would four billion people…interrupt their routines to watch the obsequies of the monarch of an insignificant country?’ Would any other funeral ‘attract so huge a throng of respectful leaders?’
Like the other ‘enlightened types’ and members of the ‘progressive intelligentsia’ who Pollard senses have been ‘quietly fuming’ over the last ten days, I can only gnash my bien pensant teeth at the phoenix of national renewal rising up from Westminster Abbey.
After all, as Andrew Neil reminded his readers, the events of the last week have proved that Britain ‘ISN’T the declining power the liberal elite loves to portray us as’, because ‘contrary to the miserabilist musings of much of the establishment commentariat and its social media echo chambers, whose default position is always to run Britain down, the condition is actually rather good.’
Is there any point interrupting my miserabilist musings to tell Neil that he IS ( I can use capitals too) the ‘establishment commentariat’? Not really, because pundits like this cannot be separated from their strawmen without risking the affective disorder that toddlers feel when their comfort toys are mislaid.
And so I must accept my place among the unpatriotic ‘elites’ (Andrew you ARE the elite!!), who ‘wallow in running us down.’ Or the ‘agitators and academics’ who claim that the UK is a ‘divisive, racist, nasty hellhole’.
All of us must now stand humbled at the sight of ‘the Britain of all classes, regions and ethnicities, shuffling along the banks of the Thames together in harmony and shared grief’
Bilge And Bile
And we’re not the only objects of Neil’s wrath. Even the venerable old New York Times has become a ‘ludicrously malevolent’ newspaper, according to Neil, which pours ‘bile and bilge’ upon us, in the form of some mild criticisms of the Royal Family and the classist society that it embodies.
All of this is an insult to the country and also to the Queen, who, according to Neil
has brought back to the fore virtues she lived but which had become increasingly unfashionable: duty, responsibility, reserve, civility, modesty. The Queen never mistook royalty for celebrity, a distinction that has sadly elude Meghan Markle, thereby undermining what could have been a fresh and seminal contribution to royal life. In an age when popular culture is infested by the self-promoting, vacuous, preening narcissism of social media and reality TV, a renewed appreciation of old-fashioned qualities is not before its time.
So much to unpick here. Firstly, anyone who has paid any attention to Andrew Neil’s career may wonder when he ever showed any of the virtues that he projects unto the Queen, and the same can be said of so many people who have made similar observations over the last ten days.
I’m not denying that the Queen served the nation, admittedly from a privileged position and within a very specific set of parameters.
But whenever I hear this kind of praise, I also think of teachers who change students’ lives every day in the classroom; of the delivery workers who came to my door throughout the pandemic when everyone else was under quarantine; of the doctors and nurses who kept people alive in the darkest days of the pandemic, even at the risk of their own lives, because this useless, negligent government could not even organise PPE for them, unless it provided a profit to their Tory pals.
I remember how that same government told us to clap for them, and now it won’t even give them a pay rise. I think of the duty, responsibility, reserve, and civility shown by millions of people in many different jobs and professions that hold this country together, without any recognition or reward.
You will live a long time before you ever hear people like Neil even acknowledge their existence, let alone praise them. So call me a member of the progressive intelligentsia, but this kind of talk disgusts me. And so does the toxic hatred directed at Meghan Markle, tempered only by Neil’s fake use of the word ‘sadly’.
I won’t go into the saga of why Markle and Harry left the royal family, but there is nothing sad in Neil’s response to it. Those who think the Queen’s death has made us a kinder, gentler country, should ponder the vicious and unrelenting hatred directed at Markle from the rightwing press and social media over the last ten days. Every movement, every gesture, every facial expression and choice of clothing came under the merciless scrutiny of these trolls, both famous and anonymous.
Even the sight of Meghan holding her husband’s hand was held against her by this self-righteous pitchfork mob. Neil belongs very much in their ranks, and his toxic panegyrics deserve only contempt and ridicule.
Perhaps if I’d actually turned the television on, I might have had a different funeral experience. I might have ‘rediscovered a sense of nationhood’, as Sarah Vine claimed to have done. I might have imagined, as she did, that ‘she’s watching. I hope she is. I hope she’s there, with Prince Philip squeezing her hand, looking down and seeing what she meant to us, to this bruised and battered country, to this disparate nation of ours'.’
Oh to feel something like that, were it not for the fact that such sentiments are so manifestly hollow and mawkish that you want to cover your eyes. But Vine was positively measured in comparison with the Telegraph’s Alison Pearson, who could be heard swooning at ‘the click of spurs, the hypnotic death-beat of the drums, the crunch of synchronised boots, the flashes of scarlet and gold.’
To paraphrase the Gang of Four, this is a woman who loves a post-imperial man in uniform, almost as much as Lydia Bennet once did when she rushed off to join the dashing Mr Wickham.
I generally prefer YouTube videos of the Nuremberg rallies when I need the sound of synchronised boots. And so the only part of the funeral service I did see was Kwasi Kwarteng, our new chancellor, grinning and muttering to himself to the horror of Suella Braverman, who was sitting next to him.
Let’s pause here to imagine how the media might have reacted if a Labour minister had burst into a fit of possibly chemically-induced giggles at the funeral of the Queen.
That minister’s career would have been over, and images of the giggling fool would have been splashed all over the Tory press for weeks. But Kwarteng being a Tory, the response was ‘muted’, as Stephen Pollard might say, and neither the press nor any of Kwarteng’s colleagues have even mentioned it.
Tomorrow the giggling chancellor will tell the nation of his plans to remove the cap on bankers’ bonuses to stop them flitting off to Europe. The man who co-authored a book calling British workers the ‘worst idlers in the world’ will also cut benefits to part-time workers in order to force them into full-time work, to fill vacancies that once might have been filled by European workers, had it not been for the great spasm of xenophobic nationalism which has now brought to power what Ed Davey rightly calls the most right-wing government in history.
Over the next two weeks all kinds of similar delights await us, as Liz Truss and her band of nincompoops, lackeys and knaves seek to make bricks out of Brexit straw.
Tax cuts for the wealthy, charter cities and low-tax zones, cuts to national insurance, renewal of fracking, the removal of the sugar tax, a new assault on the Northern Ireland protocol, a new assault on the rights of undocumented migrants – this is the moment when the Brexit right finally attempts to turn its libertarian fantasies into reality.
This is the worst possible government for the worst possible time, led by a cruel, arrogant and entirely ideologically driven prime minister who doesn’t care about the mayhem she is about to unleash and will never lose that smirk no matter how bad it gets.
Nothing I have seen or heard over the last ten days makes me believe that this country will be fundamentally changed by the Queen’s death and the accession of the new King – not for the better or the worse.
We won’t be any kinder or more caring or more generous, or more united or any ‘greater’ than we were two weeks ago, because national ‘greatness’ is not decided by who sits on the throne, or the click of spurs.
As grand and as historic as it may have been, the last ten days have been a distraction, and now that it’s over we must brace ourselves for what is about to come, and dream of the day when we can bring about the political defeat of those who have done so much harm to the country they spent so much of the last ten days praising.
A visceral account of the public display of affection for the Queen's funeral. Most commentators didn't know her and yet chose to expose us to hours of obsequious hollow dross. Others manifested the usual malignant spite towards Meghan Markle. Now it is all over, we can all breathe a sigh of relief as Liz Truss and Kwerty Keyboard fix the cost-of-living crisis - for the rich elite.
Personally I was quite glad to hear of Missis Kwin’s passing from a BA pilot thirty seconds after touching down in San Francisco and even more glad to have arrived back in Blighty the day after the funeral. That this will damn me for all eternity in the eyes of Allison Pearson and Brillo Neil is just the icing on the cake.