Queen’s death may stitch frayed union fabric

IN FAIRY tales, a kiss may transform a frog into a prince. In the real world, the cold kiss of fate may turn a prince into a king.

Admittedly, being the new monarch is not the role Charles once confessed during an illicitly recorded telephone conversation to desire above all else — that of being his paramour Camilla’s tampon. Nevertheless, it’s a title that the petulant, stoop-shouldered septuagenarian has coveted for a lifetime.

For the past week, social media has been bursting with the wider world expressing bemusement at the apparent love that those in the UK retain for their monarchy.

Or, at least, for Queen Elizabeth II, whose death last Thursday has unleashed an unprecedented protracted and elaborate national mourning.

The saturation media coverage that her death has received within the UK was, of course, to be expected. For 70 years Elizabeth was the single constant and reassuring presence during the decline of British power and influence internationally, and social and cultural decay at home.

But the degree of attention her passing has elicited internationally has been remarkable in a world that largely dismisses monarchy as an anachronism. For a moment, events of global import were reduced to mere punctuation marks in the royal narrative. This time, at least, the response has been measured and merited.

It’s been the grand but emotionally restrained behaviour of stiff-upper-lip British legend, none of the public paroxysms of breastflagellating grief and keening that marked the death of Princess Diana, almost exactly 25 years earlier.

Part of the difference between the two occasions, of course, lies in the nature of the protagonists.

On the one hand, a beautiful socialite princess wronged by her callous, philandering husband and dead in a ghastly car accident before her time.

On the other hand, a 96-year-old woman drawing to the serene end of a full life – albeit of unremitting duty, which from the outside often looked less like service than servitude – and who had for more than a year been in faltering health following the death of her beloved husband.

Another part of it is perhaps that the passage of time has exposed the metaphoric rending of garments that accompanied Diana’s death for it was, at least in part, a somewhat embarrassing episode of mass hysteria, rooted in the modern age’s pathological obsession with celebrity.

Many predicted at the time that the flinty-hearted queen’s failure to dip the Royal Standard at Diana’s death, along with public anger at Charles’s perverse and unmanly obsession with the physical antithesis of Diana – Camilla’s jutjawed resemblance to one of the queen’s elderly fell ponies is the stuff of blissful Freudian speculation – signalled the beginning of the end of the monarchy.

Instead, the opposite happened. The more dysfunctional, feckless and unattractive some of her offspring were revealed to be – auctioning political influence; preying on pubescent girls; consorting with criminals; and on American chat shows elevating petty family squabbles to the level of scarring emotional abuse — the more clearly have shone the steadfast values and unswerving work ethic of Elizabeth Regina.

Also, unlike Prince Harry’s temperamental show pony, the fell pony has put not a fetlock wrong. Camilla has slipped uncomplainingly into the traces that will pull The Firm into a new era.

She has earned grudging admiration from even the harshest critics of “that woman”, moving with aplomb from hated Jezebel to being the respected, if not loved, Queen Consort.

This week, a BBC journalist controversially speculated that the new king was taking over at a moment when the Scottish desire for independence was unabated. Charles III’s reign could be defined, he warned, by the “eventual dissolution of the UK”.

Judging from the television footage of the vast, respectful crowds that turned out along the 240km route to Edinburgh to pay homage to the passing cortège, the opposite may be as likely. The queen’s death may well stitch up the frayed fabric of the union.

And in a Western anglophone world that feels under existential threat of climate change, new diseases, opportunistic warmongers, and desperately unimpressive leaders, the queen’s lifelong emphasis on faith, service and humility may have another unexpected effect. Traditional values, hitherto widely derided in the post-Second World War period, may reassert themselves.

Liz too would be chuffed.