I loved my gran. And my gran loved the Queen; because of the second world war; because of the corgis; and because of getting a television to watch the coronation in 1953. When I lived with her in the early 70s she had just upgraded to a colour TV and would not allow me to watch the old black-and-white films of Kurosawa or Truffaut that I coveted as a child, as she had “paid for colour”. However, if “coloured” people came on the TV, such as Ken Boothe singing Everything I Own on Top of the Pops, the channel would be swiftly changed. It seemed there was one rule for blah blah blah insert punchline here. Take my wife! Please!! I’m here all week!!! Try the Daylesford Organic farmshop hampers!!!!
My gran was a spiritual forebear of that generation that voted for Brexit, ruined their great-grandchildren’s futures and then promptly died. And I loved her. My gran’s royalism was formed by the crucible of the Blitz, by wattle and daub Coventry immolating on the eastern horizon and by the Queen Mother picking through great craters with a grateful public on Pathé news, perhaps the most selfless and inspiring act of any member of the royal family until the current Queen paid Prince Andrew’s £10m sex-case costs. With our money. She could just have auctioned that jewelled hat surely, the one that gets driven around the Mall in its own car.
I’m a Queen sceptic now, I suppose. But in the summer of 1977, the year of the silver jubilee, I was dressed in a patriotic polythene tabard-wristband combo that came free with issue 32 of Marvel’s Captain Britain comic and I ran around the street party in the rectangle of green grass in the middle of the housing estate singing the national anthem in sunshine-sticky bliss, my egg-white face stained with Mum’s homemade pavlova. I was 28 years old.
I’m joking of course! In 1977 I was nine!! And to this day I bitterly regret making a stupid scrunched-up monkey face to my mum’s camera as the royal car drove past us and the Queen waved her white glove, after our eight-hour wait at the railings on Solihull high street. “Why do you always have to act stupid all the time and ruin everything?” my gran despaired, not realising there was a career in it. She never really forgave me for spoiling the royal moment, though I think I partially redeemed myself by introducing her to my showbiz acquaintance Nicholas Parsons on lower Regent Street in 1993. He had seemed so much bigger in real life that my gran wondered how he fitted inside the colour television.
I want to enjoy the jubilee, but I am conflicted. The red, white and blue bunting that be-swaddles the celebration just makes me think of Rwandan deportations, the weaponised nostalgia patriotism of Brexit and Boris Johnson bewitching the bewildered as he waved the union flag while drooping deliberately from a zip wire. Funny Boris. It’s not my flag any more. I want my country back.
I entered a theatre in Derbyshire last week through a union flag forest foyer and suddenly turning into my surly childhood self again, immediately changed the house music playlist for my show that evening to include the Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen and the Kunts’ similarly suppressed single Prince Andrew Is a Sweaty Nonce. My gran would have slapped my legs.
But what does it mean to wave a British flag, now that Brexit has trashed our international reputation, compromised England’s relationship with Scotland and Northern Ireland and left our most precious cultural institutions at the mercy of the sadistic philistine gentleman thugs elected to deliver it? Having been the prorogue patsy of an early entanglement in Johnson’s spaff-woven silk-web of lies, the Queen is as much a victim of Brexit as that Ukip-supporting eel farmer whose anguilliformes are now all rotting in a warehouse in the Forest of Dean, but she stinks less of dead fish.
And given that democracy fans must respect the result of the Brexit referendum, whether we voted for it or not, we should make the best of the benefits it brings. On Wednesday, Jacob Rees-Mogg claimed scrapping EU vacuum-cleaner regulations was one of the “most interesting” freedoms offered by Brexit. I will use an anti-EU Henry to suck up my Remainer tears. I hear they also work well on the corpses of rotten eels.
On Monday, Kent county council gave a largely unreported £180,000 contract to the disaster relief charity RE:ACT Disaster Response to provide food and water to stranded Brexit backlog lorry drivers. Thoughtfully, this weekend’s compensatory package for the permanently parked has taken the form of a special deluxe jubilee parcel. Each stationary trucker will receive a Prince Andrew pizza slice, a Prince Philip “slitty-eyes” mask and a small furry wipe-clean vibrating scale model of the Queen’s final corgi, Willow, which can be plugged into the cigarette lighter in the driver’s cab to provide much needed comfort and relief.
It’s a strange time to celebrate the Queen. The patriotic fug that frames her is the same brain-fog that saw the failing Brexit government reach out to the stirring memory of imperial measurements. The return of the gill, the furlong and the peck are further attempts to distract from the gallons of Friday fridge wine, the perches of £840 rolled-gold wallpaper and the fluid scruples of vomit at the 18 December Downing Street party. So sod the Queen.
But in 2014, the traumatised Syrian war veteran Dr David Nott visited the palace and was overcome by a PTSD attack when the Queen asked him about his work. She invited him to come and feed the corgis with her, to take his mind off the atrocities he was reliving.
• Rescheduled national 2022 dates of Stewart’s 2020 tour, Snowflake Tornado, Edinburgh fringe shows and dates for the 2022/3 show, Basic Lee, are all on sale now
