In the short term, the Queen’s passing will boost support for the monarchy. But that could soon fade away
Our monarchy, however restrained and “constitutional” it is always said to be, is actually a totalising system. We are all the monarch’s subjects. Ministers, members of parliament, military personnel and police officers in England and Wales all swear oaths of allegiance to the crown. All our mainstream media are preoccupied by the monarchy, as the days since the Queen’s death have relentlessly made clear. Whenever there is a big royal occasion, most journalists, politicians and other public figures speak about it with one approving voice. These rituals are so familiar that their strangeness in a society that is supposed to be a diverse, irreverent democracy – and their particularity to this country – is not much noticed and even less discussed.
One consequence of our monarchy’s half-hidden domineering quality is that, at moments of great royal drama and ceremony like now, this country suddenly finds little room left for anything else. Since the Queen’s death much of public life has been suspended: strikes, football matches, parliament, party politics, the Lib Dem and TUC conferences, key decisions by the new government and the Bank of England, even a “festival of resistance” planned in London by the usually fearless and single-minded climate activists of Extinction Rebellion. A country which, by general agreement, is in the middle of one of its worst peacetime social, economic and political crises, with much of its population terrified about how they will get through the winter, has prioritised more than 10 days of elaborate mourning instead.
Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist
