T
HE Diamond Jubilee? How was it for you? Mine got off to an irritating start. I had intended to tone up the lower musculature with a 50-mile bicycle ride but the weather was so foul that I stayed at home and concentrated on the laundry – with occasional glances at the evil square eye and the BBC’s risible coverage of the pageant on the River Thames. Others have already chewed over the
callow presentation; the “HRH the Queen” gaffe; the patronising astonishment that a lady of 86 might actually be able to stand up for an hour or two; the constant use of the word “Amazing!” to describe anything that moved, no matter how mundane. Agreed, it was crummy TV, unenlivened by the demotion of John Sergeant to the role of circus cheerleader, the rain-splashed wittering of Anneka Rice and the Battersea Park antics of the honey from that Bruce Forsyth dance show. With not a Dimbleby in sight the whingers complained about a lack of gravitas, but in fairness to the BBC it would have taken a lot more than a Dimbleby in ripest form to breathe life into such unpromising material, even had the skies been blue. Nothing wrong with a Jubilee. Long life to the Queen and let’s have another. It is unexplored territory: until this year only Queen Victoria had gone Diamond but, after 63 years and 216 days, she called it a reign. Will Queen Elizabeth II have another
Jubilee after 70 years or must she wait for 75? In which case what do we call them? If the names correspond with wedding anniversaries, in 2022 we could have a Platinum Jubilee, which sounds faintly Essex. Enough of the precious metals. My point is that hundreds of vessels are all very impressive if they happen to be warships riding at anchor the length of the Solent, as they were in the Coronation Spithead Review, conforming to the Victorian verse of Henry Newbolt: “Stand by to reckon up your battleships / Ten, twenty, thirty, there they g o . . .”
As today’s Royal Navy might more efficiently be reviewed in Beeston Lock someone hit on the idea of a waterborne tribute that replicated an ancient form of royal progress. Alas, one tugboat looks pretty much like another and they were pretty much the same tugboats at the end of the procession as at the start of it. The problem was that in seeking relief from the monotonous spectacle on the water, the BBC failed to offer rewarding filler items. Richard E Grant reciting Wordsworth was one thing, and so was the Warhorse display on the brutal concrete ramparts of the National Theatre. But even in dumbed-down 21st-Century Britain you need more than lots of people saying “Amazing!” By the time of the royal visit to Nottingham,
my mood had improved. I was a Coronation-year baby so the Queen and Prince Philip have been constants in my life. I do not mean that I am a royalist of the tents-on-The-Mall variety and once I even went through a phase of being sniffy about these things. Such attitudes tend to recede with the acne,
S P E CTATO R The
and I was struck during the jubilee, listening to various phone-ins, how hopelessly ill-informed and ungracious were those complainants who relate the modern UK monarchy to “p r iv i l e g e ” rather than to service and example. Their argument seemed to be that our Head of State is unelected. So what? Elections may well be expressions of popular will, but they have never come with guarantees of joy. It is not as if we are offering each new
sovereign executive power and if we ignore the abdication hiatus of 1936, the Windsors have for more than a century advanced a succession of superb candidates for the throne.
Manifestly, to judge from the scenes outside
Buckingham Palace in early June – and those in Nottingham on the 13th – the system ain’t bust, so why fix it? To answer the cynics who whinge about
‘The annual cost of the monarchy is 62p per taxpayer – a pack of extra strong mints’
the cost of monarchy, the facts are that it was reduced by almost eight per cent in 2010 to the equivalent of 62p per taxpayer per year. Th a t ’s a quarter of a pint of bargain beer. A third of a weekend broadsheet. A packet of extra strong mints. This particular taxpayer offers up his 62p in full appreciation of the outstanding value he is getting. The alternative to an hereditary Head of State is an elected figure. If we follow the example of modern European republics it is likely to be some dull ex-politician (bringing with him the decent possibility that a skeleton will eventually clatter out of his cupboard). Perhaps, given Britain’s disagreeable obsession with fame and the famous, we would seek achievers from other areas of life. But somehow I cannot see Cheryl Cole opening Parliament or Joleon Lescott taking the salute on Horse Guards’ Pa ra d e . Finally, to another point raised by some contributors to radio phone-ins: should the Queen step down? Don’t be silly. Monarchs are anointed for life. In the fullness of time we will once again find ourselves singing “God Save the King”. Down my street we hope to be singing “God Save the Queen” for a very long time to come.
Jeremy Lewis NOTTINGHAMSHIRE TODAY 143
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148