Death takes us to unusual places. Who would have imagined that Boris Johnson could have reinvented himself as the voice of the nation? Or that Theresa May could turn out to be a gifted after-dinner speaker with a nice line in gags? Or that the Met Office would decide to stop weather forecasting for the next 10 days? We can all just get wet instead. As a mark of respect. It’s what the Queen would have wanted. Apparently. Cancel culture.
After a minute’s silence at noon, a packed Commons met to pay its own tributes to the Queen. To try to find the words the rest of us couldn’t. To explain why a death that had been so anticipated had still come as such a profound shock. To make sense of the deep affection so many people felt for someone they had never met. Someone who for almost all her 96 years had kept her real self private to allow everyone else to impose their own needs and truths on her. The Queen had been whatever we wanted her to be.
It fell to Liz Truss to open the speeches. The best that could be said was that she was serviceable. Then it was never going to be any different, even if she had had more than three days in the job and had had more than passing contact with the Queen. The prime minister is not in touch with her own emotions, so how can she possibly connect with the nation’s? She can only report her feelings, not experience them. So her grief inevitably feels secondhand.
Not that she didn’t say all the right things. Truss echoed Churchill, describing the Queen’s death as “stilling the clatter of modern life”; she declared that the Queen had more than fulfilled the promise she had made to the country on her 21st birthday; she joked about James Bond and Paddington; and she looked to the future with thoughts of the new king. A new Carolean Age. But it was all somehow flat and profoundly unmoving. Unintentionally deaf to the public mood.
Keir Starmer was pitch perfect. Emotionally and verbally literate. When he spoke of love, you felt it. He understands grief. That when we are grieving for the Queen we are allowing ourselves to grieve for ourselves. For the mothers and grandmothers we have lost. Or never even had. For the hopes and dreams that will never be fulfilled. For the family that remains out of reach.
The Labour leader gets the Freudian subtext. Death’s psychological meaning. That no matter how we may try to fill the gap of someone’s death, part of us will remain inconsolable. Which is how it should be. As that is how we perpetuate the love we do not want to let go of.
At times Starmer sounded spiritual – almost religious – as he talked of the capacity for the Queen to dwell with us in our pain. Almost as if he was inviting us to make the comparison between the empathy of a monarch and the coldness of an uncaring government. He was so powerful, so convincing, that even the Tory frontbench nodded along when he told us she was the person to whom we turned for comfort during the pandemic. She was a leader we could trust.
There was no chance Johnson was going to miss out on a chance to make his own tribute. Even if he wasn’t going to bother to brush his hair or find an uncrumpled suit. Why break the habit of a lifetime for his first return to the Commons since he was kicked out of No 10?
These are the occasions he lives for. He may have been a disaster as a prime minister but he can write and deliver a speech. More than that, what made him unsuitable for No 10 makes him a great speaker. Like all narcissists, he suffers from a deep wound to the psyche. One that will never heal. So when he speaks from that wound, as he did here, he allows us to feel our own wounds.
Johnson unashamedly acknowledged the love he felt for the Queen. Unlike so many others, he talked in specifics rather than generalities. It was psychologically impressive. Though, as so often, it did all come as a stark contrast to how he had behaved. His staff had partied on the night before Prince Philip’s funeral. He himself had lied to the Queen over the prorogation of parliament. Here was the classic Johnson mind-body split. The man who believes his motives to be pure yet whose stock in trade is personal advantage and betrayal.
It was ironic that the next person to speak was Harriet Harman. The MP in charge of the privileges committee that will ultimately determine whether Johnson has to stand down as an MP. But now was not the time for point-scoring. Rather she was gracious enough to congratulate Johnson on his speech, before going on to extol the Queen as a role model for women.
The big surprise was May. She had predictably started off disconnected and without affect. Monotone, dull and boiler plate. Going through the motions you would expect of a former prime minister. Service, duty, war record and longevity. The Queen didn’t just know most of the world’s leaders. She also knew their fathers. The Queen had touched her, she said. Though you would never have guessed it from the way she spoke.
Then she told three cracking anecdotes and didn’t screw up the punchline. Not even once. Who knew? Most unlike her. The Commons loved her. As much for the relief as anything. Johnson had made them feel too much. And most MPs don’t like that. They prefer to operate as insentient beings. May allowed them to release the tension with laughter.
After that, many MPs began to drift away. All that had needed to be said had long since been said. Though that didn’t stop many from still queueing up to repeat themselves. MPs can never resist the sound of their own voice. Even when the most moving sound is silence.
