Philip Collins
(Picture: Daniel Hambury)The British are brilliantly creative at inventing traditions. When the Prince of Wales was invested in 1969, the service was made up more or less on the spot but made to sound as if it were as old as time itself. This weekend, over a four-day bank holiday weekend, a series of commemorative events will unfold to mark a national first — the platinum jubilee, 70 years on the throne, of a serving monarch.
There will be a Trooping the Colour on Thursday, which members of the royal family will join on horseback, and a platinum jubilee pageant along with lots of smaller events across the nation. Sneaking in a bit of fun among the otherwise planned spontaneity, the Princess Royal will go to the Cazoo Derby at Epsom, a celebration which certainly hasn’t featured in any previous jubilees.
The whole weekend is unprecedented yet it will wear the robes of established history. That is the trick the monarchy always pulls — to be part of the present which evokes a past that never really was. To be extraordinary — royalty is a different order of pageant — and yet seemingly ordinary at the same time — have a flutter on the Derby.
This duality is the key to the appeal of British monarchy. There has been a rash of well-known people making fools of themselves in recent days, tweeting pictures of flags in The Mall and suggesting that this is the sort of display that authoritarian regimes go in for.
In fact, the pageantry of the British monarchy is far too odd for any of that. There will be no serious display of military might. There is too much of a sense, in a royal ritual, that the participants have raided the dressing-up box. It is somehow characteristic that it should all be out of time too. The Queen’s actual platinum jubilee passed in February. The celebration is four months late.
The relaxed nature of the affair is an important point. The monarchy under Queen Elizabeth II has survived intact for 70 years by a vow of silence. This is a sovereign who has lived through a media age and who has never yet given an interview.
There is something intrinsically and deliberately old-fashioned about the Queen which does not apply even to her heir, the Prince of Wales. After Britain’s departure from the European Union, the death of the Duke of Edinburgh and the platinum jubilee of an elderly monarch, this bank holiday weekend will not be quite an unadulterated festivity. We will look back on it as the event which marked the beginning of the end of an era.
These feelings will turn up in our politics, as they always do. The case for leaving the European Union was based, rightly or wrongly, on a patriotic appeal to national independence. The Labour party walked into the trap. A mixture of Remainer cosmopolitanism and Jeremy Corbyn’s obvious distaste for the foreign policy and the armed forces of the country he aspired to lead, made the party of the Left look and sound unpatriotic. The message came back regularly from the 2019 general election campaign.
This never used to be the case. Clement Attlee famously brought forward a general election to 1951 (which he then lost) because he didn’t want his friend the king to be away on a Commonwealth tour during a change of government. In the event, George VI was too ill to travel and his daughter Elizabeth undertook her first serious royal duty, shortly before her accession to the throne in February 1952.
The Corbyn leadership associated Labour with republicanism which, whatever its virtues might be, is a disastrous electoral proposition. One of the most emphatic changes effected by the leadership of Sir Keir Starmer is that he is comfortable expressing the language of patriotism. Sir Keir has talked about his pride in being knighted by the Queen for services to the law. He has reclaimed the patriotic stance of the post-war Labour government and regularly refers to his support for Nato, the accomplishment of Labour’s greatest ever foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin.
Meanwhile, the Conservative party is making the headlines because some of its senior members believe the Prime Minister has no respect for British institutions. Boris Johnson’s decision to dilute the ministerial code seemed to show that he thinks institutions are there to serve him rather than the other way round. This weekend will be a paean to service. Patriotism is back in politics and the parties are quietly changing places.
