Politics

The Queen’s death has prompted an outpouring of mourning around the globe. But that sense of loss apparently doesn’t extend to the newsroom of the New York Times, where tragedy was inevitably greeted as an invitation for clickbait. Having previously hired the services of Russia Today’s Jonathan Pie to castigate Britain, the world’s worst newspaper has now blundered again, publishing an opinion piece on its homepage that most would regard as insensitive at best. The piece was by Harvard academic Maya Jasanoff, titled ‘Mourn the Queen, Not Her Empire’ – a command which, er, scarcely needs saying given HM’s love of the Commonwealth. Indeed, on her watch, Britain shed its

I am a republican, always have been, and yet I now feel a great sense of loss. And not only because a 96-year-old mother, grandmother and great-grandmother has died, which is always an occasion for sadness, whether the deceased was a monarch or an ‘ordinary’ member of the public. No, also because Elizabeth II represented something incredibly important. She embodied values that are at risk of extinction. She represented history in an era of anti-historical hysteria, forbearance in a time of narcissism, and public service in an era of self-worship and self-regard. That was the great irony of Elizabeth II: she was the pinnacle of the establishment and yet she

There are events in politics that everyone knows are coming but no one can quite anticipate what they will mean. The death of the Queen is one of these. Her Majesty reigned for 70 years and no MP has served under any other monarch. There is no institutional or political memory of the passing of a sovereign.  The Queen provided continuity through a period of remarkable political, cultural and technological change. Her death removes one of our links to the past. In particular, it severs this country’s most direct link to the wartime generation. When she last stood on the Foreign Office balcony with such determination to watch the wreath laying