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Frank Coughlan
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A man holds a flag as people queue to pay their respects to Queen Elizabeth at Westminster Hall in London, last Saturday. Photo: Reuters/Clodagh Kilcoyne
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September 20 2022 02:30 AM
There came a moment, somewhere in the middle of last week, when I detected something switch. Hard to put a finger on it, but a measurable shift in tone.
A nation in heartfelt mourning for a beloved monarch seemed to move on to something approaching desperation and even panic. As if it couldn’t actually let go. This wasn’t simply a people honouring or even celebrating a queen who had served them steadfastly for 70 years, but a nation in a state of incoherent bewilderment at her passing.
Vox pops kept throwing up the same sentiment: what are we going to do without her? It was as if they didn’t know what Britain, or more specifically England, would stand for in the post-Elizabethan age. It felt as though this frail old woman had been the adhesive keeping an increasingly fractious kingdom and multi-cultural society together.
This is understandable to some degree. Monarchical continuity and certainty are an effective balm against the stresses and strains of political and social upheaval in the real world. But monarchy relies on ritual and tradition to justify itself and depends on genuflecting to a better past rather than making peace with a more challenging present.
Historian Linda Colley argues that Protestant Britain’s identity was forged in its endless conflict with Catholic Spain and France and in ruthlessly building an empire on which the sun never set.
This imperial behemoth began to crumble after the Great War, as did its Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman counterparts. Great sacrifice, suffering and ultimate victory in World War II restored lustre to a damaged brand, but in reality Britain was bankrupt and in the shadow of the United States.
By 1947, India – the jewel in the crown – was declared independent, having been incompetently partitioned by Lord Louis Mountbatten in the process.
Young Elizabeth was not long on the throne in 1956 when the then UK prime minister Anthony Eden became embroiled in his Suez campaign, a botched attempt to retake the canal. It earned Britain a severe dressing-down from the then US president Dwight D Eisenhower.
Britain was being taught hard lessons about new realities. Four years later, the next British prime minister Harold Macmillan’s ground-breaking “Wind of Change” speech on African decolonisation suggested that it occasionally heeded them. But reality and make-believe can often peacefully co-exist. Decades later, Tony Blair’s ill-fated war in Iraq was a miscalculation based on Britain’s desperate need to be seen as a global powerbroker. Even if it was to be on America’s coattails.
Brexit can be seen as the latest delusionary nationalist project devoid of economic credentials which feeds into this narrative of British exceptionalism. As long as Queen Elizabeth was on the throne these comforting myths seemed to have substance, even if the woman herself was far too wise to ever give them sustenance.
The UK public seemed to sense they were saying goodbye to more than just a monarch last week. Realising instead she was the last link to a glorious past that isn’t coming back.
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