The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Her Majesty missed her own speech... and it was a good thing for her she did
Having had a bit of a go at the royal family last week, I will frankly admit that even my hard, old, republican heart was melted a little by the lack of the lady who has put the Queen into the Queen’s Speech for more years than I (and in fact, most of us), have been around.
It’s rather like the story, The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time – the conceit being that it didn’t bark so wasn’t there – or that very eerie portrait painted by the troubled Branwell Bronte of himself and his three far more gifted sisters.
In frustration, he rubbed out his own image, with the result that the first thing you look at, rather than the clever, famous faces of Charlotte, Emily and Anne, is the space where Branwell should be.
Those present at the Queen’s Speech event paled into insignificance beside the woman who wasn’t there.
It makes you wonder if it was her lateflowering, extremely cold dishing out of ultimate revenge.
She’s been trotted out dutifully to so many excruciating rituals over the years, mainly in the name of governments who hadn’t a clue what they were doing, that she now finds that not being present is the most powerful image of all.
It’s rather like the exception that proves the rule of her oft-quoted remark that she has to be seen to be believed.
You wouldn’t put it past her. She may be aff the legs, as we say in these parts, but she’s nobody’s fool, that woman. You don’t get to be Queen for 70 years without learning a trick or two about working the room.
In the style of Roy Hattersley and the tub of lard and Boris Johnson and the empty chair (which sounds more like a Harry Potter title than I care to contemplate with any equanimity), the Queen, Gawd bless ’er, was represented not only by Prince Charles, got up in the admiral’s uniform that Mr Princess Anne decided not to wear on his wife’s Australian tour, but by a crown on a cushion.
I used to go to a pub in Sheffield (don’t ask) called the Crown and Cushion, so perhaps I feel a special affinity with this strange, surreal sight, mainly through a glass, darkly, as the Good Book says.
I suspect, indeed, that you might have needed a slurp or two to make sense of the pomp and circumstance, not to mention the content, of the Queen’s Speech but unfortunately, this obviously wasn’t enough of a “work event” for Boris Johnson to bring his own.
Though the way he and Keir Starmer
were giggling and gurning together going down the aisle and into the hallowed chamber, you might be mistaken for thinking that someone had smuggled in a couple of clinking bottles of ready-mixed cocktails in a plain brown wrapper. Maybe that was what was under the crown.
Even I am beginning to see some value in a figurehead with a bit of gravitas built in, although I am not sure that the Prince of Wales will be able to live up to his mother’s sheer stamina.
He looked knackered before he even opened his mouth but that was perhaps because he had already read what was in the speech before he had to deliver it out loud. That would have knocked the stuffing out of anyone, let alone a personallyopinionated 70-something who knows he is going to have to do stuff like this to the end of his born days.
Mind you, if the cult of Johnson continues, poor old Charles may find himself sitting on the second-best throne,
looking with some discomfiture at the presence beside him of the blond equivalent of a See-You Jimmy hat.
Meanwhile, back in what passes for the real world, the recently rather quiet Michael Gove endeared himself yet again to the struggling public by telling it to “calm down” about the unlikely appearance of an even vaguely helpful emergency budget.
I suppose at least he didn’t add the David Cameronian “dear”, as he obviously wasn’t addressing only women, the poor little loves, trying to make all those difficult decisions about whether to feed themselves or their kids, or to buy the Lee Anderson 30p cookbook. Delia Smith, I suggest, will not be having many sleepless nights.
Mr Gove did so, it seems, using a variety of badly produced accents, including Scouse and American, thereby alienating both home and away support in one fell swoop.
Patronising does not begin to cover it,
especially for someone not brought up to extreme privilege and of whom, therefore, in spite of his decision to hitch his political and career wagon to it, we might have had the right to expect rather better.
Still, in a Cabinet made up of jobs nobody knew existed with names no sane person could ever make up, he can now add to his portfolio as secretary of state for levelling up, housing and communities and intergovernmental relations, the coveted brief of the Ministry of Silly Talks.
He looked knackered before he even opened his mouth