Nigel Jones

Get well soon, your Majesty

(Getty images)

The news that the Queen had tested positive for Covid must have sent a shiver of dread down the spines of all but a tiny minority of hardhearted Republicans. Most of us don’t want to even imagine a country bereft of the monarch who has been a seemingly immortal part of the fabric of the lives of all but the very old. Yet the brute fact of human mortality means that we will have to face a world without this indomitable 95-year-old woman at some point. How will we cope?

Under the Treason Act of 1351 it was a capital offence to ‘imagine’ the death of a reigning sovereign, but in our time whole departments of state have long not only ‘imagined’ our Queen’s passing, but have planned for it down to the finest detail. Though the Queen has thus far managed to triumphantly defy both the bureaucrats in charge of her funeral arrangements and the Grim Reaper himself, she cannot – as much as we might wish her to – go on forever. It is therefore perfectly reasonable to ask what her demise will mean both for the institution of monarchy and for the individuals who will be left bereft in her wake.

In 1977 the poet Philip Larkin, asked to produce a verse to mark the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, wrote these lines:

‘In times when nothing stood

She is a symbol of the better angels of our imperfect natures.

But worsened, or grew strange,

There was one constant good:

She did not change’.

That admirably sums up what many of us feel about the Queen as a person: through seven decades, fourteen prime ministers, and unimaginable social, political and economic transformation she has remained: a rock of stability and a living incarnation of traditional values that, however unfashionable they now seem, still remain a benchmark of what we sneakily feel that we should – but rarely do – aspire to.

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