Feb 26 2007
The Queen: A reflection the British people
Saint Diana.
Yes, that’s what I said. Saint Princess Diana.
… and that’s enough to turn my stomach.
The Queen is often a quiet reflective movie on the disconnect between the British people and their monarch, Queen Elizabeth II. The story traces back those few fateful days just after the death of Princess Diana. It is also a story told largely through the eyes of Queen Elizabeth II, who is played magnificently by Helen Mirren.
Many of us remember waking to the frontpage news of Diana’s mangled car in some nondescript Paris tunnel and the worldwide grief that ensued. It was truly a hideous death. Here was a once member of the royal House of Windsor dying by the roadside pleading for help, coked and drunk out of her ever-loving mind, while the paparazzi stood by snapping their horrid pictures.
The director thankfully omitted those gruesome details from the movie and limited it to the reactions of the Royal Family on the phone and watching TV. I thought then as I do now that this was a tragedy of the first order but not in the way most people think of it.
This is also a movie about the ascension of Tony Blair to the office of Prime Minister and the values of the Labour Party moving to center stage.
The movie lovingly portrayed Tony Blair’s angst over the future of the Monarchy as, with Diana’s death, the British people demanded Queen to come to Buckingham Palace and give Diana a full state funeral.
The Queen, quite rightly, believed that Diana’s death should be borne with quiet dignity— a quality, she said, that the world has always admired in the British people. What is more, since Diana is no longer the wife of Prince Charles, and wife to the heir to the throne of Great Britain, her funeral should be handled by family members as a private affair rather than an affair of state.
The real tragedy exemplified in this movie is how a large portion of the once stolid British people, who once ruled the waves and a fourth of the earth, have become a febrile, hysterical people.
Perhaps this is too harsh to say, but in Great Britain and America, people “touched” by her death behaved like little school children desirous of consolation from an adult. When that adult (the Queen) tacitly chided them to behave more like the adults she believed them to be, they threw a tantrum like the grubby little children they have become.
To illustrate this point, here are a few comments on the movie left by British citizens:
There is nothing about the royals themselves that could be considered worthy of the public respect which they demand. The fact is that we are expected to bow and scrape to them simply because they were born with the name of Windsor or obtained it through marriage. It is part of the culture of deference that is one of the most objectionable features of life in modern Britain. Attitudes to the monarchy demonstrate how deeply the habit of ring-kissing is ingrained in our ‘democratic’ political system. Of course the Tories are true-blue royalists. The striking thing, however, is how willing all of the opposition parties are to kowtow to the Queen.
(I’ll spare those reading this post the more vicious comments, but here’s the link if you want to read it.)
Neither the armada of the Spanish Empire nor the V2 rockets of Adolf Hitler was able to force Britain to lower the Royal Standard from it’s place at the pinnacle of the flag pole. In fact, not once in all of Britain’s history has the flag of the House of Windsor bowed. It took the might of the British people and Tony Blair’s Labour government to commit that remarkable feat. Unlike customs in the United States where we fly our flag at half-staff, the Royal Standard DOES NOT (or did not, anyway) fly or bow. It is the flag of the sovereign (i.e. the Queen does not pay taxes to herself).
True to her oath as Queen of Great Britain, she placed the British people before herself, even though they no longer shared the same values. She came to London, conducted a national address to Her subjects, and gave Princess Diana a state funeral (Unbelievably, it’s the same one prepared by the Queen Mother for herself.). She underwent all these humiliations to appease the British people and their leader, Tony Blair.
Don’t get me wrong. I honor Tony Blair for his staunch support of America at great political costs to himself and his party. When no one wanted to come up to bat for us, he stepped forward. But it seems for his entire political career he played to have it both ways.
Whatever affection the American people feels for Tony Blair, we should be reminded that Tony Blair is the Prime Minister under whose leadership stripped the British aristocracy to nothing, dissolved the House of Lords into a common political appointment racket, castrated the British military, and forced the Monarchy into nothing more than a figurehead without any real teeth. It is also under Tony Blair’s leadership that the British are becoming more European at the expense of their alliance with the United States. It’s all part of his efforts to “modernize” Britain.
In a word, many of the worrisome attitudes and actions of the British of late can be traced either directly or nearly directly to Number 10 Downing Street.
He ripped the Monarchy into just a figurehead and portrayed himself as the savior of the Monarchy. He touts Britain’s alliance with America while eroding it by joining and catering to the EU.
I am gratified that Mr. Blair chose to support America in our War on Terror, but the backlash against him by the media and his own Labour Party was not unexpected. One cannot suddenly reverse a lifetimes’ position and transform magically into a Winston Churchill.
To paraphrase what the Queen said to Blair at the end of the movie, the media will turn on him and it will come unexpectedly and all at once… and so it has.
To this day I marvel at all the shrines erected in Diana’s name (and they are literally shrines). Her death was tragic and her life was tumultuous to say the least. But this was a woman with severe personal problems.
This should garner our pity, not our adoration.
The true Saint of the latter half of the twentieth century, Mother Teresa, died only a few days after Diana half a world away… and the world shrugged.
Update 2/26/06 10:32 a.m.
In all fairness, however, Tony Blair’s government might be an improvement on Margaret Thatcher’s. I bears reminding that Thatcher’s government was the one who proposed that the national debt be distributed equally among the entire British citizenry without regard to income. This meant that the poorest citizen would take on the same percentage of the national debt as billionaires.
Although I disagree with many, many things that the Blair government has done, not least of which is legislating entertainment to become politically correct (For instance, the BBC banned the Benny Hill Show to suit the feminists; they showed him the door without so much as an apology. The Benny Hill Show is shown exclusively outside of Britain now.), perhaps their censorship, their heavy taxation (people in the country can’t afford to enter London for a holiday for all the fees. I mean really, 20 pence to just use the toliet?)— perhaps all of this benefits the British people as a whole in comparison to the immoderate laissez-faire “let them eat cake” policy of Thatcher’s government.
Who knows what’s going on with Britain? They’ve destroyed centuries of traditions in the name of modernization, and I can’t honestly tell you if they are the better for it.
Only time will tell.