Diamond Jubilee: The British fete their queen

“Nobody else does history and heritage like Britain,” said The Sun in an editorial. To celebrate the 60th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation, we threw the world’s largest river pageant, with a flotilla of 1,100 watercraft from all over the world—gondolas, kayaks, dragon boats, Viking boats—accompanying the flower-bedecked royal barge down the Thames. More than 1 million cheering spectators defied the typically British weather with their typically British aplomb. Never before have so many Union Jacks waved in unison. The unprecedented display was “an outpouring of love for a queen who has been at the center of British life for six decades.”

“We are a nation of Elizabethans,” said The Sunday Times. Most of us were born during her reign, and our world has changed utterly under it. That the queen is now so popular is a testament to her endurance and gift for reinvention. The 1990s, remember, were not kind to her. There was the “annus horribilis” of 1992—the year the marriages of two of her sons broke up and Windsor Castle caught fire—and then Princess Diana’s death in 1997, when the public excoriated the queen for her seeming indifference to their grief. Now, though, three quarters of Britons support the monarchy in general, and nearly one third call Elizabeth II our greatest monarch.

That’s because our queen is “utterly, totally, eternally reliable,” said Melanie Phillips in the Daily Mail. With her refusal to bow to fashion or give interviews, “she embodies authenticity in an age of charlatanry and spin.” Her subjects love her because she is our one constant in “a tumultuously changing, often disturbing or terrifying world.” And unlike a partisan politician, said Tony Parsons in the Mirror, the queen can lead us all because she is above politics. When she became queen at age 25, in 1952, British public life was “dominated by visionary giants” like Winston Churchill. Today we are ruled by “simpering pygmies” like Prime Minister David Cameron. “But as the politicians have shrunk, so Her Majesty has grown.”

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Spare me the fawning, said Polly Toynbee in The Guardian. The very idea of monarchy—the worship of some “ermine-wrapped fantasy of Englishness”—is humiliating. And the people who incarnate it, our own Windsors, are a “singularly undistinguished family” whose empty-headed, spoiled members can think of nothing better to do with their wealth and privilege than to hunt and go clubbing. “What are we doing paying homage to the unimpressive personages invested with this awe?”

You’re missing the point, said Jenni Russell in The Sunday Times. The monarchy “offers nostalgia, authority, permanence, Britishness, greatness, and unity.” The crazier the world gets, “the more reassuring it is to have a familiar figure with a handbag and a bright coat at the center of our national existence.”