Ghastly, fake and a bit drab ... no wonder HM sounded below par
Quentin Letts endures a State Opening shorn of the ceremonial
WHO could blame the Queen if she sounded a little below par at yesterday’s State Opening of Parliament?
Instead of a mid-morning trundle to Ascot after poring over the newspapers’ racing tips, she had to head to Westminster, and without the hospitalised Duke of Edinburgh. Who’d be a monarch?
The ceremony, shorn of much of its pomp, felt not so much royal as municipal. No horsedrawn carriages, the Crown on a pillow in the back of a car and not even any pageboy trainbearers. Swizz. It was a wonder the marching band had not been told to wear council traffic-marshal high-viz tabards. Take away the ceremonial and you leave it all looking a bit drab. And that is before you analyse the v. short speech, much of which could have been written by Harold Wilson.
Awaiting Her Majesty was the ghastly, fake, Brexit-hating, pocket-filling, claret-gargling, cliche-spouting modern House of Lords: a worm-farm of bien pensant quangocrats, activist judges, busybodies, fallen stooges, ex-MPs and a few last mouldering viscounts.
Suggestion to Downing Street: why not steal a march on Corbyn’s rich middle-class Labour revolutionaries – who as I write this are mounting a spittleflecked protest at the gates, in risibly small numbers – and axe those last hereditaries? Some of them would be glad to be put out of their misery and never again have to listen to a turgid Europhile speech by Lord (Quentin) Davies of Stamford, whose hair had yesterday changed from its old raven to something closer to orange.
The Upper House is never going to be helpful to the Tories and if Theresa May ejected the last blue-bloods she might at least create a sense of radicalism. Among those sitting on the Lords benches in his ermine robes yesterday was the Lib Dems’ Viscount Thurso, a hereditary who became an MP, was dumped by the voters, and then sashayed back to the Lords in a Lib Dem hereditaries’ byelection which had an electorate of just... three.
Thurso, a James Robertson-Justice lookalike, cut a portrait of blithe entitlement. On the other side of the Chamber was
Lady Uddin, a sometime Labour ‘community activist’ who, since an expenses fiddle, has taken to wearing a headscarf. Look, I’m a minorities victim!
State Openings always make me boil, even when we are not having a heatwave: in the morning there is the spectacle of the unelected peers and the skin-crawling moment when the Supreme Court judges come prancing in, Lady Hale and Lord Neuberger and co greeting peers and bishops like chums at a cocktail party. Have these judicial snoots no idea just how corruptingly cosy it all looks?
In the afternoon, we have the reassembled Commons, the green benches filled with almost exactly the same crop of inadequates, Whips’ suck-ups, sexscandal survivors (K. Vaz) and rhubarb merchants as the last Parliament. Richard Benyon (Con, Newbury) actually made a pretty decent proposer’s speech, pointing out that his great-great-grandfather had been an MP from 1860-76 and in all that time made not a single speech. The late speaker George Thomas, when he heard of this feat, clutched his brow and said ‘why can’t we have a few more like that these days?’
Kwasi Kwarteng (Con, Spelthorne), seconding, had a juicy dig at George Osborne’s ‘scrupulously fair’ editorship of the London Evening Standard. Biggest laugh of the day. The main political interest in the Commons lay in the performances of Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May. Mr Corbyn did not receive much of a whoomph of support from his backbenchers. His best moments were when he talked about the Grenfell Tower fire. His worst moments were, well, everything else. He spoke for too long.
When Mrs May rose, Blyth Valley’s Ronnie Campbell (Lab) did a neck-in-noose gesture. But Mrs May started well, being statesmanlike as she discussed terrorism and the Grenfell Tower fire. She was later blown a little off course by interventions but she finished the day stronger than she had started it.