It looks as though BBC Radio4 is going to be something of a no-go area for the next couple of weeks.
The wall-to-wall coverage of the death of QEII and the subsequent fawning hagiography, where people who barely knew her regale us with inconsequential anecdotes of the minutiae of royal protocol allowing them to see, uniquely, the momentary all-too-human interactions of the real person under the crown. Frankly, they should have found something better to do than facilitate the beefing up of the repetitive narrative of a long reign until it becomes an unassailable national myth.
I will be glad when the broadcasters begin to focus on the logistics of a State Funeral, that will at least give them something real to concentrate on, rather than scratching around trying to find something concrete to say about someone who is best known for what bad things she (as opposed to her dreadful family) hasn’t done rather than achieving something of moment.
The high point of nationalistic absurdity came, courtesy of our (God Help Us!) new Prime Minister who actually said in all sincerity (in so far as that wooden dummy is able to articulate that quality) that QEII was, “one of the greatest leaders the world has ever known”!
Truss does the memory of the late Queen no service by stating such a ridiculous claim. Such sycophantic hyperbole tells us more about the vacuity of the speaker than giving an insight into the character of the Queen. The truly dreadful delivery of Truss’s speech made it appear as though it had just been thrust into her hands and that she had to make the best of an impromptu performance as she winged it through the to the stilted peroration.
Johnson, lurking in full sight on the back benches, just couldn’t stay away from an occasion to raise his debased profile, but he must have seethed internally as he saw a golden opportunity for his particular populist pomposity, thrown away on a ventriloquist’s dummy.
It is at times like this that I pity John Crace, The Guardian political sketch writer, who actually has to sit through and watch the unutterable tedium of politicians scrabbling around for their five minutes of televisual fame as they mouth yet more platitudes about a person they hardly knew. John suffers for the rest of us, and I do look forward to his acerbic take on the sad (in all senses) spectacle of politicians emoting on a Grand Occasion!
Tomorrow QEII’s coffin will be on the move and at least we will have a change of scene from damp people laying flowers on a granite bridge in the Scottish Highlands.
We were in London during the lying-in-state of The Queen Mother and the queue to view her coffin, when we passed it on an open top tour bus, stretched from the south bank over the bridge and into the distance!
Why? This was a woman who was allegedly slighted by a member of the press umpteen years previously and did not talk to the media from then on. She was an almost totally remote figure, who kept herself remote, apart from the hand waving and hat wearing that is a sine qua non of female royal ‘duty’. And yet, an estimated 200,000 people over three days queued to see her coffin! Extraordinary! Why did they do it and what did they hope to get out of it?
I do not for a moment doubt the sincerity of the grief that many people have expressed, and their sense of loss is palpable, and I too, am not insensible to the power of symbols – but, for me I look askance at such public displays of emotion for an unknown, highly privileged, fabulously rich person who are where they are because of an accident of birth.
I feel infinitely more concerned for the well-being of Salman Rushdie who has solid achievements to his name, than I do for the well-being of any member of the so-called House of Windsor.
I do not wish ill to the royal family, but I certainly look forward to the day when their personification of the built-in, hereditary, inequality in Britain is finally broken.
Like Truss, a Prime Minister ‘elected’ by a tiny minority of the population, and Charles III who is king and head of state because his mother has died, both are emphatically Not In My Name!
