The Spectator’s Notes | 23 November 2017

Windsor Castle on Monday night sounds like a children’s party magnified. The rooms were filled with golden-leaved trees. A giant block of ice carved with the initials of the Queen on one side and the Duke of Edinburgh on the other dominated the reception room. Her sons wore their Windsor coats. A magician made a table levitate and move unsupported round the room. As with a children’s party, there were no speeches, and everyone was pleased and excited. After 70 years married, the two nonagenarians involved presumably felt, among family and friends, that they had earned the right to be unserious. The occasion must have been sweet for Prince Philip. All those years ago, he was patronised. When he was newly engaged, someone at Windsor said to him, ‘You’ll soon get fond of this place.’ ‘Actually, my mother was born here, you know,’ he replied — spikily, but truthfully. On another occasion long ago, he burst out, ‘Why am I regarded as a foreigner? I fought for this country in the war.’ He did indeed, and is now almost the last such in our public life. In middle age, he noted to a friend of mine that people had been fascinated by the Queen in her youth, and then took her for granted, ‘But they’ll be interested again when she is old.’ They are, in both of them together.

For a very long time, Angela Merkel successfully appealed to the post-war German longing for consensus. She hugged potential rivals in her motherly embrace. The rise of Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) makes this much more difficult. As its name suggests, it really does offer something different. Given its pariah status, people assumed that parties would happily coalesce against it after its electoral breakthrough.