Ross Clark Ross Clark

Are republicans becoming an endangered species?

How disappointing. Come Jubilee time and the Guardian can usually be relied upon to lead the way in publishing sour pieces moaning about ‘jingoism’, attacking the extravagance of a royal procession and trying to claim that the people who turn up to watch and join in with the celebrations are somehow outnumbered by people who would rather get rid of the royal family and live under a republic.

At the time of the Queen’s Golden jubilee in 2002, Mary Riddell wrote of a ‘family that knows how to command a deference out of kilter with its popularity’, adding that ‘a third of the population wants a republic, a third couldn’t care what befalls the monarchy, but damp-palmed curtseyers abound.’ Jubilee celebrations, she asserted, were ‘bogus and temporary’. For the Diamond Jubilee in 2012 Polly Toynbee upped the rhetoric further, writing that ‘the louder the bells, the more gaping the grand vacuity. What are we celebrating? A singularly undistinguished family’s hold on the nation, a mirage of nationhood, a majestic delusion.’

The left has understood that in a republican Britain there would be no guard against a Trumpian figure becoming our head of state

Surely, then, the platinum jubilee ought to be an excuse to wheel out the same sentiments again, bleating about the royal family and denigrating anyone and everyone who might be tempted to join a garden party. But apparently not. In vain have I waited for Dame Polly’s latest missive on Her Majesty, but she seems to be more preoccupied with Boris Johnson. Indeed, all we have had so far from the Guardian is a column from Rafael Behr moaning not about the Queen but what he sees as the Prime Minister’s efforts to exploit the platinum jubilee for his own ends. Indeed, Behr laid in to fellow leftists who attack royal occasions like the jubilee, writing ‘each generation of left activists has to learn the hard way that denigrating patriotic symbols is self-defeating; that it amounts to surrender in the battle to narrate history, ceding control of the story to nationalists.’

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