Britain Etc.

or funeral.

The largely deferential and respectful response to the jubilee was in contrast to the toxic politics of the time: social tensions were spilling into the streets, sparking belligerent challenge to the established order. It was a divisive time and Britain was a troubled and anxious place: when the Sex Pistols screamed that the country had no future there were many who feared they might be right. But, if anything, the strife of the 1970s and 80s saw the public take refuge in the reassuring familiarity and constancy of the Queen and royal ritual. Republicanism remained an intellectual fashion statement rather than a political force.

The historian Sir David Cannadine wrote that ‘kings may no longer rule by divine right; but the divine rites of kings continue to beguile and enchant.’ There had been an assumption that, as the British population became better educated, royal ritual would be dismissed as little more than primitive magic, conjuring tricks to distract from the iniquities of hereditary privilege and the class system. It didn’t happen.

In the 1990s, the Queen faced a different challenge: a confident and expanding media profiting from the consumerism of the age. Celebrity culture, popular fascination with fame and fortune, saw the telephoto lenses trained upon the Royal Family, unconstrained by traditional protocol or deference. Blurred images of human frailty brought questions about the legitimacy of monarchy into sharp focus: what proved to be a long-running soap opera of disintegrating marriages and bitter public recrimination did not square with the ‘ideal family’.

There was much public discussion about whether the monarchy provided value for money — a pocket-book calculation of income and expenditure that led to debate about the tax affairs and perks of the Queen and her family. Consultancies wrote detailed analyses of the Royal Family as a brand, equating the ‘authenticity’ and ‘saliency’ of the Crown with that of Toilet Duck. Thomas Paine would have been delighted.

The death of Diana, Princess of Wales, was the tragic climax of this chapter. At the time, I recall, editors were thrown by the paradox of the extraordinary public response. On the one hand, the country appeared to be turning on the Queen for her perceived failure to emote. On the other, the outpouring of sentiment and devotion in the days running up to the funeral suggested a profound need to embrace royal ritual and hold tradition close. Commentators marvelled at the irrationality of the response. I remember standing at night among the banks of flowers laid outside Kensington Palace, a thousand candles glowing as crowds of silent mourners walked slowly by. It was a spiritual scene. The public believed in the magic.

There was a moment in those frantic days when pollsters suggested support for the monarchy had fallen from 72 per cent to 66 per cent — hardly a constitutional crisis. In fact, the pomp and solemnity of the occasion played to its strengths. From that moment to this, the Crown has seen its place in national life consolidated and its popularity deepen.

Sitting in my edit suite twenty years ago, it dawned on me what had troubled me about that meeting with the Queen of Denmark. Her polished replies to my questions, the rehearsed arguments and sound bites were exemplary. It was a brilliantly staged public relations exercise in which a ‘spokesperson’ for European monarchy had put forward the corporate line. And that was the problem. There was no magic in Tallinn that day. The cobbles were just cobbles.

R is for Regions

Bubbling beneath the surface of England’s green and pleasant land is a thick soup of confusion, foaming with indignation and threatening at moments to erupt in volcanic anger: road signs have been ripped from the ground; whitewash has been splattered; civil disobedience campaigns staged; public officials unceremoniously ousted. It is a quiet fury borne of an ancient conflict between personal identity and public administration. As one Member of Parliament recently described the situation for some of his constituents: ‘To them, it is a mystery where they actually live. That is an extraordinary thing.’

It was a Friday in the House of Commons, the day of the week when MPs are traditionally able to discuss matters that do not fall under the definition of mainstream politics. On this particular Friday in 2007 the issue was local government boundaries, a subject that might have led even the most avid watchers of the parliamentary TV channel to reach for the remote. If viewers had slipped off to sort out their sock drawer or polish the brass, they would have missed a wonderfully stirring debate that revealed something of the identity crisis afflicting the English personality.

‘One of the most tragic cases is in the west of my county where a small number of people find themselves, for administrative purposes, in Lancashire,’ an MP complained. ‘Can anyone imagine anything worse for a Yorkshireman than being told that he now lives in Lancashire?’ Well, no. Another Yorkshire voice spoke up. ‘I represent the beautiful East Riding,’ he told the House. ‘For a time, that area was told, against its will, that it was no longer the East Riding… but part of Humberside!’ ‘There was local civil disobedience,’ a man from Bridlington reminded everyone. ‘Signs were not just whitewashed over but physically removed by Yorkshiremen who regretted having that name attached to the county that they loved,’ the representative from Scarborough explained. ‘It is said that one can always tell a Yorkshireman, but one cannot tell him much. Telling a Yorkshireman that he lived in Cleveland or Humberside did not go down well.’

It wasn’t just a re-run of the Wars of the Roses. Members from all over England were roused from the green benches of the House of Commons to explain how history and geography were being disrespected. The natives were restless. ‘There is confusion about exactly where Cleethorpes is,’ one Lincolnshire MP complained. A political opponent sympathised, revealing that some of his constituents ‘think that they live in Dorset. They do not know that they live in Somerset.’ The situation in Essex was, apparently, just as baffling. Proud residents were said to be deeply offended by misplaced county signs. An accusatory finger was pointed at ‘those who sit in Whitehall’, at the administrators who think they know better than ordinary folk and ‘suddenly decide to rename things’.

It is an argument that has been running since the Romans first divided Britain into regions, trying to impose some kind of order on the warring tribes that squabbled over territory. They built walls, laid roads and drew maps, but locals regarded them as bossy European bureaucrats. The Roman historian Tacitus recorded one native moaning at how ‘a single king once ruled us; now two are set over us; a legate to tyrannise over our lives, a procurator to tyrannise over our property.’

When the legions departed, the neatly defined civitates quickly frayed as rivalries resurfaced. The arrival of Angles, Saxons and Jutes, formidable warriors from Germany, intensified the struggle and added to the general confusion. As the immigrants fought each other over territory, the older Celtic tribes were absorbed or restricted to the margins and classed as aliens in their own land. The Anglo-Saxon word for foreign was Waelisc and foreign territory was Wealas. Thus the Brythonic (British) Celts were Welsh and lived in Wales. Those who occupied the south-western peninsula (cern in Celtic or cornu in Latin) lived in Cornwall — the foreign land on England’s horn. The Pictish and Gaelic Celts of Scotland and Ireland — Tacitus described them with their ‘red hair and large limbs’ — were too belligerent for even the Romans to manage and so the extremities of the British Isles were excluded from the partitioning of England in the Dark Ages. Left to their own devices, they wrote their own story.

Public administration is a struggle between the tidiness of maps and the fuzziness of real life. History books often describe Anglo-Saxon England neatly divided into seven kingdoms: Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Sussex and Wessex. But for centuries after the Romans left, the regions were disputed territories, their boundaries shifting and twisting as battles raged. In the end, bloody territorial skirmishing between the kingdoms proved an irrelevance in the face of a far greater external threat: the arrival of the Vikings.

It was 8 June AD 793 when Norsemen destroyed the abbey on the island of Lindisfarne, Northumbria’s Holy Island, an attack that shook Britain in much the same way as Pearl Harbour affected America more than a thousand years later. ‘Never before has such an atrocity been seen,’ a Northumbrian scholar observed. After seventy years and innumerable raids, the Danes mounted a full-scale invasion. Within a decade the heptarchy was no more: their royal families scattered or dead; their property destroyed. Only the kingdom of Wessex held firm, from where King Alfred began assembling an army of his own.

England’s destiny was decided in early May AD 878, upon blood-soaked turf close to a settlement called Ethandun. Alfred was victorious and upon that grim battlefield England was born. But where is Ethandun? It wouldn’t be England if there wasn’t a dispute as to which county has the honour. Ethandun, or Edington as it