15.09.2022

Behind the death mask

Paul Demarty goes in search of Elizabeth Windsor’s personality and finds very little apart from cynicism, unpleasantness and self-entitlement

There is a conventional joke in the leftwing and muckraking press: upon the death of an elderly royal or eminence grise, print an article or cartoon with the headline, ‘Old woman (or man) dies’.

Part of the joke is what you would call the performative contradiction - if it was just a matter of some random geriatric passing on from this mortal coil to a hereafter of your choice, then there would be no sense in printing such a story at all. It would not be funny, but cruel and bizarre. The joke is on us: that humanity has contrived a situation such that, in the year of our lord 2022, public life hinges on the expiry of a 96-year-old figurehead, and her replacement by a 73-year-old eldest male issue.

We do not yet know whether, now he is finally on the throne he has coveted for decades, Charles will follow darling mama’s example and retreat into a mere ornamental existence. The word ‘figurehead’ literally refers to the vulgar sculptures one used to find on the bowsprit of a wooden ship; such is primarily the role of the British monarch - a symbolic repository of executive power to be wielded by governments acceptable to the long-term interests of the British state. For 70 years, we have watched Elizabeth II monotonously read from scripts provided by spin-doctors and civil servants as to what ‘her’ government is to do. Her son Charles’s opinions are too well known for quite the same glamour to take hold, we expect: that strange combination of aristocratic agrarianism and new-age woo, which has marked his adult life, will be forgotten for the moment, but recalled at the least misstep by those who have long had to suffer his tedious lobbying (we should recall the case of the notorious ‘black spider memos’). Nonetheless, he will remain an instrument of power in much the same way.

Scandal

What is there to say about Elizabeth herself? The tributes, such as they are, end up being less about her and more about ‘events, dear boy, events’: the archive footage of her handshakes with Nelson Mandela, Martin McGuinness, president after American president, ad infinitum, are a fossil record of the opportunistic shifts of British policy, always with a fearful eye on what the Americans might be doing. Beyond that, the personal reminiscences are tepid at best. Exemplary - alas! - is the case of Jeremy Corbyn, whose Twitter account recalled their shared fondness for making jam; he sounded like a man trapped at the funeral of a close relative he had always secretly despised, searching around for anything nice to say.

Indeed, so far as we have any evidence, she seems to have been a cynical and unpleasant person except to her closest family members. In the annals of public scandal, this is clearest in the case of Diana Spencer - chosen as brood-mare to Charles with plenty of oversight from ‘darling mama’. Alas, her heir treated his bride with contempt, with the result that both were engaged in sensationally public affairs, and the marriage fell apart, with the public mind ultimately inclined to favour Diana.

Throughout this period, the palace behaved with unbecoming cynicism, relentlessly briefing against the mother of the second in line to the throne to the effect that she was a stupid and possibly insane parasite. With Diana’s death in 1997, this all spectacularly backfired; but, of course, it is merely the most public example of the abuses suffered by hangers-on, toadies and precarious employees of this oh-so-serene institution, which preserves the old upstairs-downstairs arrangements in the cruel form that they actually existed, rather than the fantastical portraits of noblesse obligée of TV shows like Downton Abbey.

The whole dismal Diana episode displayed both the ruthlessness of ‘the firm’ in controlling its own image and its almost laughable stupidity in doing so. None of the queen’s preening sycophants understood the public mood half as well as they thought. Had Elizabeth died in 1998, it is quite possible that the present blanket imposition of treacly pseudo-remembrance would have failed. We would not have oh-so-serious memorial tributes gazing out at us from the windows of betting shops and funeral parlours for the next few weeks.

We know nothing except palace rumours of Elizabeth’s actual political opinions, which naturally and necessarily makes her a hypocrite, as the post-war social democratic consensus gave way to neoliberalism, or empire gave way to mass immigration from the former colonies, or for that matter the old patrician elite ideology gave way to ‘official’ anti-racism, bourgeois feminism and so on. She cannot have endorsed the contents of all the dozens of queen’s speeches equally without being simply insane.

The indications, such as they are, are not good. Footage emerged a few years ago of a young Elizabeth joining her uncle, Edward VIII, in a cheerful round of Nazi salutes; for all the protestations of ‘manipulation’ by the known Hitlerite, Edward, there is plainly a greater sense of solidarity among the great noble families of Europe than between each tentacle of this class and its nominal subjects. Revenge against those who dispatched the Hohenzollern cousins of the Saxe-Coburgs would have been welcome, and only the circumstance of war between Britain and Nazi Germany - a pile-up of regrettable treaty obligations - obliged the obvious pro-fascism of the British royals (and wider establishment) to be abandoned and retconned out of history.

Apart from that - or, indeed, including that - her childhood was utterly typical of the top aristocracy, too posh even to board at a public school. The famous virtues of state attributed to her - constancy, stoicism and so on - may, with just as much long-distance psychological rigour, be put down to the defence mechanisms built up in a childhood of nannies and governesses, hidden away from the world. (Gordonstoun may have been a typically miserable public school, rife with bullying and - we now know - sexual abuse, but at least it got Charles out of the house.) Winston Churchill famously credited her with an uncanny air of authority at the age of two - perhaps true, but more likely Churchill was the first of very, very many to project his own neuroses onto the blank slate of Lilibet.

The fiasco of Edward’s abdication and marriage to Wallis Simpson pushed her father onto the throne, with a crisis of confidence in the monarchy all around him. There were bigger problems to come, however, with the war (and Edward shuffled off to the Bahamas, where his Nazi sympathies would not be so embarrassing or such a security hazard). George VI reigned for 16 years - years in which great demands were placed on ceremonial patriotism by war and post-war rationing. He is generally reckoned, by those who keep score on this sort of thing, to have done a decent job, but produced no male heir before his early death of cancer, which set the stage for a queen to reign again.

If George steadied the ship, Elizabeth rather put it in dry dock. Compared to her obvious predecessor, Victoria, in whose honour the word ‘Victorian’ conjures up an image of Protestant piety, patriarchal propriety and imperial glory, what would ‘Elizabethan’ be (apart from ruffs, theatre and bowls on Plymouth Hoe, as it has been for four hundred years already)? The national crises of her time, over which her governments presided and from which they occasionally hid in her skirts, were crises of acute and terminal decline. Decolonisation had already begun before her coronation - indeed it had, with the partition of India, already reached its bloody nadir. With the Suez crisis of 1956, its completion became unavoidable, and indeed it proceeded apace. The long boom, as cities were rebuilt and industries propped up, gave way to the deindustrialisation of the Thatcher years and after.

Celebrity

The need increased, in such times, for royalty as a popular product of mass consumption. It was in the 1960s that the decision was made to loosen the protocols a little, to advertise the royal family as a group of celebrities. In certain respects, this was a stunning success - royalists never fail to point out the ‘tourist attraction’ value of the monarchy, and it is worth noting that nothing like the same fame is granted to, say, the king of Sweden.

Inevitably, however, the price was paid in giving up some control of the narrative. The royals had succeeded in totally blackballing Marion Crawford, one of Elizabeth’s governesses, who wrote a thoroughly unsensational book about her experiences in 1950. Now, however, they had effectively let the tabloids in; and, as time went by, their rickety operation would prove very leaky indeed.

This process reached its climax with the Charles and Diana saga - the fairytale wedding that gave way to a nightmarish marriage and an unendingly weeping sore for palace PR people to dress. Part of the strategy seemed to be to keep the queen herself out of it: it was the other members of this inbred elite Brady Bunch who had their soap opera antics and pratfalls exposed. Her husband’s racist outbursts were largely laughed off, and his likely infidelity discreetly ignored; all the better to present her as an impeccable matriarch possessed of magnetic virtue.

So far as global politics went, Elizabeth supported and received graciously the founding of the Commonwealth, whereby she remained sovereign of a number of newly-independent countries. She was not shy of intervening in those countries’ politics - most notoriously in the case of the sacking of Australian Labor prime minister, Gough Whitlam (he was ditched by the governor general, and Elizabeth declined to overrule her crony, effectively making it official.) She had a long beef with the Canadian Liberal prime minister, Pierre Trudeau, who had republican leanings. She clung on - so it is said by the palace wags at Private Eye - to this zombie empire as a token of former glory, and discreetly supported Brexit as a correction to national humiliation. It is argued, in interminable media puffery, that under her rule the empire was largely dismantled, as if she should be somehow credited with it - indeed, almost as if she were a fairy godmother, touring the four corners of the earth to dispense national independence with a wave of the magic wand and a bibbity-bobbity-boo. In reality, the best that could be said is that she took the newly-straitened international circumstances of her kingdom stoically on the chin.

Above all, she defended … herself - the privileges accorded to the royal family, the eye-watering public subsidies, the vast benefits of land ownership, the historic titles and glorious country piles maintained at the expense of the taxpayer. Of the vast trove of viral footage to have been birthed in the last few days, perhaps the most telling is a short video of the new king refusing to sit down at a desk until some helpmeet moves two small items of stationery a few inches to the right, which rather captures the royals’ limitless sense of entitlement and inversely-proportional competence in ordinary human affairs. The royals inhabit a Potemkin village version of aristocratic society as it existed in the middle ages - or even under the absolutism of Elizabeth’s early-modern namesake. Their continued existence defends those more contemporary monarchical structures, of the corporate CEO and the quasi-presidential prime minister (government-appointed officials in highly public roles, after all, have long been nicknamed ‘tsars’).

As the defeats of the workers’ movement disaggregated opposition to the establishment she headed up, so people became more atomised; and ‘the firm’, troublesome princesses notwithstanding, succeeded in keeping itself in the script. The pageantry of monarchy became a more and more important ideological buttress; the English, especially, became addicted (though the crown is of totemic importance to committed unionists in Northern Ireland and Scotland, of course).

The result is the triumph this week of the worst, most servile and credulous aspects of British culture, with nary a peep of dissent permitted. Republicanism was never going to have a good time of Lilibet’s death; but our defeats have robbed us of any base in society from where we can object to the bowing, scraping, forelock-tugging idiocy in which we have all but drowned.

paul.demarty@weeklyworker.co.uk