Suddenly I no longer feel like a grumpy misfit lost in a Britain I don’t recognise

THERE have been times over the past few years when, like so many others of my generation, I’ve felt out of place in a Britain that seemed hardly recognisable as the country I’d been brought up to love.

The virtues I’d been taught to admire from my birth in the Coronation year — uncomplaining stoicism in the face of adversity; self-sacrifice and self-restraint; modesty; good humour; pride in our history and traditions; politeness and consideration for others — all seemed to have gone out of fashion, as surely as bowler hats, the Pogo stick and the Slinky.

Think of Rudyard Kipling’s most famous poem, If, and you’ll understand the qualities I have in mind — the sort, I was brought up to believe, that made us proud to be British.

I’m not claiming for one moment that I possessed them myself, to any significant degree. All I mean is that my fellow Britons, who in my youth believed almost unanimously that these were great virtues, no longer seemed to think them particularly admirable or worth aspiring to, in this me-me-me age of the selfie, the bilious Twitterstorm, The Jeremy Kyle Show and Naked Attraction.

Indeed, aspects of modern Britain left me bewildered. I’m thinking of the glorification of victimhood, real and imagined; the mania for pulling down statues of men once regarded as public benefactors; and some of the idiocies spawned by Harriet Harman’s Equality Act.

Virtues

(Why on Earth, for example, did my local authority feel it important to know my sexual orientation, ethnic background, religious beliefs and gender identity before I could unburden myself of my views on a proposal to install trafficcalming humps on my road? Totally irrelevant, I thought, and none of the council’s business.)

More and more, I felt like a washed-up relic of a vanishing age, a grumpy misfit in a land peopled by a strange breed with whom I had little in common — least of all when it came to my views on the difference between right and wrong, and the proper way to behave towards our fellow human beings.

But I now see that I was guilty of attaching far too much weight to the picture of our country presented by ranters on social media, exhibitionists on trashy TV shows and politicians terrified of annoying vociferous pressure groups, no matter how few people they may have represented.

What has changed my mind is the public’s huge outpouring of love and respect for our late, beloved Queen. Suddenly I feel at home again among my fellow countrymen and women, young and old.

Here was a woman who was the living embodiment of all those abstract virtues I’ve listed above. Indeed, it was these very qualities of hers that touched such a chord in the hearts of so many of us.

Time and again since her death, those who have been asked why the Queen meant so much to them have come up with the same reasons: her commitment to duty and public service; her selflessness, modesty and unfailing interest in other people; her quiet sense of humour — evinced by her radiant smile — and the way she preserved her apparent ordinariness throughout her extraordinary life.

I’m not thinking only of those smartly dressed men and women, with posh accents and archaic titles, who have been wheeled out by the TV companies to sing her praises. We’ve heard the same sentiments, again and again, from the crowds who have lined the roadside to bow to her passing hearse, or queued for hours along the south bank of the Thames to pay homage at her lying-in-state on the other side of the river.

Of course, I’m well aware that huge numbers would have turned out to witness the pomp and pageantry of any monarch’s obsequies, whether he or she had been a good or a bad person.

Affection

But I think we must all agree that in the case of Elizabeth II, the crowds have been drawn by something that goes far beyond the wish to see the Grenadier Guards, the Royal Horse Artillery and the rest doing their magnificent stuff with the discipline and precision for which they’re world-famous.

They’ve been drawn by profound affection and respect for the late Queen, born of a deep appreciation of her sheer goodness.

I’ve been struck by the number of people who’ve said this week that she reminded them of their own mothers or grandmothers, and even that she looked like them.

I was going to say the same about my own dear, late mum — and I suppose it would have been true, up to a point, insofar as she and the Queen were both shortish and good-looking (alas, I take after my father, who wasn’t), with similar hairstyles and the same liking for handbags and headscarves.

Having been born only a year apart, they also wore similar fashions through the decades (the great difference being that my mother either bought her frocks from M&S or, more often, sewed her own).

But, let’s face it, they didn’t really look much alike. I suspect that so many of us saw similarities to our own near and dear, of that wartime generation, because of their attitude to life; their selflessness, kindness to others and determination to keep smiling through, whatever fate might throw at them.

This past week has reassured me that those qualities are far from dead in modern Britain, and that the great majority of us appreciate and aspire to them still.

Ask anyone who has joined the queue for the lying-in-state (as I am determined to do tonight, having attended both Churchill’s and the Queen Mum’s) and you will be told that almost everyone there, of every race and creed under the sun, is friendly, patient and polite — the very virtues that the Queen personified.

Civilised

Don’t be deceived by the loud-mouths and show- offs who spread their misanthropy through social media. Among all those hundreds of thousands in the queue for Westminster Hall, and the millions more who mourn all over the country, I reckon you’ll find the true and enduring spirit of the civilised, commonsense Britain I was brought up to love.

Indeed, I’m reminded of that sublime observation by one of my heroes, the 18th-century statesman Edmund Burke: ‘Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field.’

But let me end with an idea which, I see from today’s last instalment of his masterly series on the Queen, has also occurred to the historian Dominic Sandbrook.

Yes, I know that many, including Boris Johnson, have suggested that the late Queen should be known to history as Elizabeth the Great. But surely ‘the Great’ implies huge power and magnificence (think of Alexander, Alfred, Charlemagne, or Catherine of Russia).

I reckon the epithet doesn’t quite catch the essence of Elizabeth II, who had very little power under our constitutional monarchy, and generally preferred country picnics and Tupperware tubs to the splendours thrust upon her by her hereditary office.

Meanwhile, others have suggested Elizabeth the Dutiful. But doesn’t that sound a little patronising to you?

No, in my book, she deserves much higher praise for a quality that sets her apart from a great many of her ancestors. Mr Sandbrook is right. Let’s call her Elizabeth the Good.