Queen

Her task – did she ever quite realise it? – was to preside over a country in decline; and not merely to preside over it, but to be the nation’s anaesthetic, creating the illusion that the nightmare was not happening. When she was born, at 17 Bruton Street, by Caesarean section, on 21 April 1926, Britain commanded the mightiest, richest empire in the history of the world. By the time she died, Britain had ceased even to be what Gore Vidal once called it, an American aircraft-carrier. It was simply a muddle of a place, which had lost most of its manufacturing industrial wealth, all its political influence in the

King Charles III began his first speech as monarch by recalling the pledge made by his mother on her 21st birthday in 1947. Speaking from Cape Town on the occasion of her 21st birthday, Princess Elizabeth declared ‘before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family’. She ended by saying: ‘God help me to make good my vow and God bless all of you who are willing to share in it.’ We know now that the Queen was given a long life during which the world, as it was when she was

How disappointing. Come Jubilee time and the Guardian can usually be relied upon to lead the way in publishing sour pieces moaning about ‘jingoism’, attacking the extravagance of a royal procession and trying to claim that the people who turn up to watch and join in with the celebrations are somehow outnumbered by people who would rather get rid of the royal family and live under a republic. At the time of the Queen’s Golden jubilee in 2002, Mary Riddell wrote of a ‘family that knows how to command a deference out of kilter with its popularity’, adding that ‘a third of the population wants a republic, a third couldn’t

As the Harry and Meghan carnival rumbles on, the Queen has found an unexpected source of support: Donald Trump. During an interview with Nigel Farage, Trump said of Meghan: ‘I’m not a fan of hers. I wasn’t from day one…she is trying do things that I think are very inappropriate.’ Meanwhile, he painted the Duke of Sussex as her plaything: ‘I think Harry’s been used and been used terribly. I think it’s ruined his relationship with his family, and it hurts the Queen…I think some day he will regret it.’ If Trump doesn’t like Harry and Meghan, there’s no doubting his affection for the Queen. He described her in the interview which

So, Prince Philip has died, at home in Windsor Castle, thank goodness, and the Queen could be near him at the end. That’s something to be grateful for. The other thing to be grateful for is a life well lived. More than a man has passed with Prince Philip. A culture, the sensibility of his time, a reticence about emotions, a sturdy willingness to put your best foot forward, has died with him. He was Phil the Greek for his contemporaries, with rather an interesting back story. But, for the generations that succeeded him, he epitomised a very British stoicism. More than a man has passed with Prince Philip For an

Amid the ongoing fallout from Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s explosive Oprah interview, Charlie Hebdo seems to have done the impossible: it has united Team Queen and Team Meghan in outrage against it. In response to Markle’s claims that she was pushed out of the royal family by racism, the fearless French satirical magazine published a front-page cartoon of the queen with her knee on Meghan’s neck. The cartoon is titled ‘Why Meghan quit the palace’, to which Markle answers in a speech bubble, ‘Because I couldn’t breathe any more’. It has united Team Queen and Team Meghan in outrage The depiction of the queen, complete with hairy legs and