The mourning after

The Coronation of King Charles III is over - and a magnificent performance it was, from the Edwardian cadences of Parry's I Was Glad to the couture of Princess Kate, Penny Mordaunt and the Garter robes. The ceremonies went well. Very well.

Too well.

I don't support the monarchy, but I had thought that a case could be made for the Coronation as a great national event that would bring people together in a way that was free from party politics. The excess of the ceremonies would be the whole point - self-ironic camp. We revel in this kitsch and don't take it seriously. We're the nation that produced Monty Python. We're not Americans.

But it didn't work. There was something off.

The ritual and spectacle didn't quite mask the reality of a state and nation in decline. The disjunction was ultimately too obvious. In the middle ages, a coronation was a demonstration of power. Yesterday, the ceremony gestured discreetly but embarrassingly to the feebleness of the modern British state. A Britain which is diminished by Brexit, staggering along as those who really run the country are unable to keep it functioning amidst economic stagnation and looming recession. The smart marching soldiers might serve as a painful reminder of the underfunding of the real army. The lavish resourcing might point to a contrast with those who find themselves on picket lines striking for their livelihoods. The minute-perfect timing might have seemed a bit too perfect for those waiting for NHS operations. When Republic protestors were arrested by the police, the real story was not uniformed fascists suppressing dissent, it was just the Met being the Met: dimwitted officers of another badly-run public service reminding everyone of their desperate need for reform and leadership.

And the sea levels continue to rise.

This is not a cheap point about spending a hundred million on a king in an age of food banks, as if having a president would suddenly make Britain parsimonious about spending money on state events (it hasn't worked for France, America or India). It is about a more general air of unreality. Yesterday came too close to going through the motions. 

The aesthetics were triumphalist, but there was a ghost at the feast. The artificiality was too disconcerting - symbolised, perhaps, by Liz Truss turning up as if she'd been a real Prime Minister, or by the Commonwealth heads of government who marched into the Abbey straight from planning their republic referendums. There was an underlying elegiac mood.

This was not the start of a new reign but the end of an era. It was the final celebration of a certain kind of monarchism and a certain kind of Britain. In 1953, people were still living in a fool's paradise. Talk of a "New Elizabethan era" still meant something. We'd won the War, don't you know. Churchill was back in Number 10, like some ham actor who returns for an ill-judged sequel. The collapsing of the Empire still hadn't become too obvious, and no-one had yet heard of the EEC. Britain in 2023 is a very different proposition. There were well-meaning gestures toward multiculturalism - and there was real power in a Hindu PM reading from the Bible, and in Black and Asian aristocrats attending the King - signs of real substantial changes in British society which can't be dismissed as tokenism. And yet in some sense those were the elements which most served to emphasise the theatricality of the proceedings. The rituals combined to make us ask, Who are we, really? It is a question that has not gone away since 2016, and it can't be avoided like it was 70 years ago. When the Queen was buried, there was more in that coffin than Elizabeth Windsor.

We live in serious times; grim times, even. Yesterday came dangerously close to suggesting that we are not a serious country. The Britain revealed by the coronation was not a proud resurgent Brexit nation or a cisheteropatriarchal imperial despotism. It was a second-rate country which just isn't very good.

British politics, deference and sexuality - An episode from the 1960s

An exchange from the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse between counsel and the veteran Labour politician Lord (Dick) Taverne.

Gays in the media, 1983-2007

A few months ago, the gay journalist and campaigner Terry Sanderson published a complete collection of his Gay Times "Mediawatch" columns from 1983 to 2007.  The columns, which dealt with coverage of homosexuality in the British media, form a valuable resource on this aspect of British social history.

Cavaliers and Roundheads

In this post, I want to write about a basic divide which Brexit has exposed between authoritarian and liberal views of our constitution.  Let's call it the divide between Cavaliers and Roundheads: supporters of strong executive power versus supporters of strong Parliamentary control of the executive.

Hardline Brexiteers are Cavaliers because we have a hardline Brexit government, and they are reverse-engineering their views backwards from that - but it's worth bearing in mind that it didn't have to be this way.  The authoritarian and liberal views of the British constitution are much older than Brexit, and it is only chance that has put the Brexiteers on the Cavalier side.

Brexit and World War II

The UK's national identity is intimately bound up with its victory in World War II.  This is largely because that was the last time that we won anything important, even though the victory also belonged to the rest of what was then the British Empire, the USA, the Soviet Union and the Free French forces.

References to World War II have accordingly become a cliché of the Brexit debate.  This post rounds up some of the occasions on which the cliché has been deployed by supporters of the Leave side.

Deckchairs Rearranged

Useless May is now finally about to leave Number 10 after three years in office.  It has seemed like a lot longer.  May is undoubtedly the least successful Prime Minister in modern times: Callaghan, Major and Brown were titans of statesmanship by comparison.  Part of the explanation for her fate is her own flaws and weaknesses: she was popular until people found out what she was like.  She is a living example of how quiet, socially awkward individuals can be overpromoted because everyone assumes that they must be good at the technical stuff.  Capax imperii, nisi imperasset, as Johnson might write in one of his Telegraph columns.  But this isn't just the story of one individual who was inadequate to her role.  Theresa Mary May is the fifth Conservative prime minister in a row to lose her job over Europe, and she will probably not be the last.

There is every likelihood that the Tory Party will turn on Johnson too, sooner rather than later.  He can't go on making incompatible promises to his warring factions: he is going to need to start taking some decisions.  There is a good chance that his time in office will be a short one - but he can still do a lot of damage in the meantime.  He must be one of the few people in the United Kingdom who is even less suited to the premiership than May.  He is Donald Trump with an Oxford degree.  A charmless cultivated eccentric of the sort that this country has produced for centuries.  A man whose only fixed political principle seems to be a manchild's resentment at having to follow rules (an instinct which, not coincidentally, shines through his writings on the European Union).  A journalist who was fired for lying and whose current newspaper defended an Ipso complaint with the argument that it was obvious that his columns were not meant to be taken seriously.  His latest pronouncement - that Brexit is quite a lot like the moon landings when you think about it, so we can do it if we believe hard enough - is so desperately ludicrous that he probably more or less believes it.

Myths of Brexit - A Note

The 17 million voted for a "no deal" Brexit.  A customs union with the EU - let alone membership of the single market - would be a betrayal of the referendum result.

That is what we are currently told by the more zealous Brexiteers.  But are these claims true?