Cry God For Harry

Well, for the institution, at least,

All that “Cherie is the First Lady” business. Her refusal to curtsey, and her blanking of members of the Royal Family. The references to Tony Blair as “the Head of State”. His reference to “my” Armed Forces. The fact that, at one time, the Downing Street website even said that the Queen had weekly audiences with him, rather than the other way around. The dropping of the Royal Coat of Arms from the Treasury’s logo, and of “HM” from its official title. The Blairs’ hijacking of the 1997 State Opening of Parliament, of the death and funeral of Princess Diana, and attemptedly also of the funeral of the Queen Mother.

The proposal for a new national day as if none already existed, at least potentially. The endless definitions of Britishness in terms of abstract values not remotely peculiar to this or any other country. The 2007 Ministerial pamphlet that cited the likes of Sure Start as important symbols of Britishness but did not mention the monarchy. That year’s Prime Ministerial announcement to Parliament of the contents of the forthcoming Queen’s Speech. The fact that the 1997 Labour Manifesto felt any need to include the assurance that “we have no plans to replace the monarchy”, something that would have gone entirely without saying on any previous occasion.

And so much else besides.

Truly, there is nothing more frightfully New Labour than hostility towards the monarchy, as much as anything else this country’s tangible link to the West Indies, and to the Canada, Australia and New Zealand to which our white working class has so many close ties. New Labour’s characteristic anti-monarchism is New Labour’s characteristic racism and New Labour’s characteristic snobbery.

Harold Wilson (so hated by the Sixties Swingers who did not realise how lucky they were to have only him to hate) and Jim Callaghan had famously good relations with the Palace and the Queen. Whereas Margaret Thatcher, the Mother of New Labour and the heroine of the 68ers as they applied their unchanged social views to economics, had famously bad relations with the Palace and the Queen, calling Her Majesty “the sort of person who votes for the SDP”.

For anti-monarchism in Old Labour was, and is, a fringe oddity. It is held either on the semi-detached Hard Left or (in the case of Roy Hattersley) by those simply eccentric on this one issue. Old Labour spent something like half an hour on the question of the monarchy very early on in its history, resolved to leave things exactly as they were, and was staunchly monarchist ever thereafter, with the earldoms and the Garters at the top, and more MBEs than you could shake a stick at further down, to prove it.

Such were the people who gave this country the Welfare State, full employment and so forth, while keeping her out of the Vietnam War.

Compare and contrast...