Envoy from a gone world

Over the past several days so many millions of words have been written about the Queen that I feel hard-pressed trying to add some of my own. Yet one can’t ignore the Platinum Jubilee for any number of reasons.

The most trivial one first. As someone who has never stayed in the same job for more than eight years, I admire Her Majesty’s staying power. Seventy years – and she wasn’t a child on her accession.

Not only has she stayed in the same job all this time but, largely to her magnificent efforts, the job too has stayed more or less the same. That’s how it should be: the Church, Parliament and especially the monarchy are more than just institutions. They are instruments of historical continuity, binding together our past, present and future.

Hence they are conservative institutions by definition, the kind that, rather than disavowing and repudiating the past, try to preserve and foster everything worthy about it. Alas, both Parliament and our established Church are remiss in this vital aspect of their mission.

Both seem to be hellbent on undermining, corrupting or even destroying every formative tradition of the nation. That leaves only Her Majesty as the sentinel of Britain’s soul, and one has to admire her for doing her best within a constitution that encourages her to do nothing, but do it well.

Nothing, that is, that can in any way affect the affairs of the realm. She is the only person in Britain who can’t even say publicly what she thinks about anything of importance.

Hence we know that Her Majesty likes horses and corgis, but what does she think about the economy? Education? Medical care? Her prime ministers? Nato? Transsexuality? Female bishops?

I can only guess. However, even though I don’t know what the Queen thinks, I know and admire what she does.

Perhaps admiration isn’t a strong enough word. Awe may be more appropriate, for I’m always awestruck by those who perform deeds I wouldn’t be able to manage in a month of Platinum Jubilee Sundays.

Priestly service at the altar of God is perhaps the only approximation of the Queen’s mission. Self-abnegation for the sake of something greater than oneself, offering one’s whole life as a conduit of transcendence, submitting one’s own self to a greater good – that’s what a priest’s job is. And the Queen’s.

Both derive their remit and inspiration from God, and by all accounts the Queen sees her work in precisely such terms. She is known to be a sincere Christian, which so few of her subject are – and considerably fewer than there were at the beginning of her reign.

As their numbers declined, the gap between the Queen and her realm grew. A Christian monarch dedicating every breathing moment to service and sacrifice is desperately at odds with our world. Her subjects are generous in giving Her Majesty their love, but stingy in emulating her and everything she personifies.

They are more likely to misunderstand or even mock everything the Queen stands for, while professing, often sincerely, love for her personally. This dichotomy comes across, unintentionally, in many of the effusive tributes paid to the Queen.

I’ll mention only three, all from an article in The Times, which used to be a conservative paper but now has become an enunciator and promulgator of every modern perversion. Judge for yourself:  

“The Queen has always been a champion of multiculturalism. In her Golden Jubilee address to parliament she delighted in Britain’s ‘richly multicultural and multifaith society’, citing it as ‘a major development since 1952’.”

The Queen’s addresses to Parliament or the nation have little to do with her championship of anything. She merely lip-synchs the words uttered by her cabinet, led at the time of her Golden Jubilee by that revolting Tony Blair.

The reshuffling of our demographic pack has definitely been a major development, but it has been championed not by the Queen but by the ideological zeitgeist rendering our air toxic. It’s not the influx of other races as such that’s sheer poison, but the reasons for which it has been perpetrated, and the perpetrators’ motives.

Unlike America, Britain was never in her past a “richly multicultural and multifaith society”. She has been turned into one by those who loathe everything the Queen embodies and doubtless loves: Britain’s historical tradition, religion, morality, aesthetics, social dynamics. Millions of alien implants are used as siege weapons, designed to bring down the walls that have for millennia protected the nation’s essence.

Moving right along, “And what of the arts?… Within two decades [of the Queen’s accession], Britain had become universally admired for its musicians, actors and artists, many of whom were operating in a world of drugs and sexual liberation a world away from the occupant of Buckingham Palace.”

Not from all its occupants, alas. But I’m sure Her Majesty wouldn’t wish to claim credit, say, for the domination of our musical scene by the tattooed, drug-addled creatures whose music isn’t an art but an extension of erotic pagan cults and the pharmaceutical industry.

Britain used to be “universally admired” for Byrd, Gibbons, Dowland, Tallis, Purcell, Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Britten. Again, I don’t know what Her Majesty’s musical tastes are, but somehow I doubt she’d prefer Sex Pistols to any of the composers mentioned. The article’s author clearly does, so he doesn’t realise his tribute to the Queen is actually libellous.

And then: “In 1953 fewer than 20 per cent of British 16-year-olds were in school. Today more than 85 per cent attend. University admissions have risen exponentially. In 1950 about 17,000 students received their first degree, 14,000 of them men. Today there are more than half a million new undergraduates, most of them women. Learning is no longer the preserve of elbow-patched academics but has become a key part of British culture. Documentaries such as The Ascent of Man, Civilisation, and all things David Attenborough have been viewed by millions.”

That makes Britain a much better-educated country in the author’s eyes. Now, vulgarity comes in many guises, but one of them has to do with assessing education quantitatively and not qualitatively.

Most of those 85 per cent of today’s 16-year-olds who attend school will leave it unable even to read, write and add up properly. Yet most of those 1953 20 per cent left school educated to a standard not only unachieved, but unimaginable by most of today’s university undergraduates, whose number has indeed “risen exponentially”, but whose quality has declined at the same rate.

And, though I adore educated women, having been married to several of them, I, unlike the articles’ author, see the runaway feminisation of our higher education as a symptom of a serious disease, not a sign of rude health.

In general, what to any sensible person constitutes an educational catastrophe is to the author a great triumph. Again, I’m sure Her Majesty would refuse credit, if that’s the right word, for the triumph of what the likes of Tony Blair see as education.

But then she isn’t really of this world as much as she is an envoy from another one, of which the Times hack and his ilk know little, and one they probably hate. So it’s with the mixed feelings of sadness and affection that I congratulate the Queen on her glorious Jubilee.

Many happy returns, Your Majesty. Long may you reign over us for, when you no longer do, God only knows the abyss into which your realm will fall.