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.
