Can it be three years since I queued almost all night to see the late Queen Elizabeth lying in state? It is. I hope I shall never forget that heartsore evening of mixed feelings, the kind and friendly people, the beautiful autumn light over the Thames in flood, fading into a soft darkness as we trudged for miles.
And then the deep silence as I finally entered Westminster Hall, footsore and genuinely reverent, filed past the catafalque and stepped out into the darkness of the new age, with one glance over my shoulder at the rapidly receding past.
It had not really sunk in, even then. I had been in Strasbourg in France when the news came and was surprisingly moved by the response of the French, who are, if anything, more monarchist than we are.
The tricolour over the city hall sank to half-mast. The mighty bell of the cathedral boomed out 96 times, once for each year of her life, loud enough to be heard in Germany across the Rhine.
It took the Queen’s actual funeral, and above all the moment when the sceptre, orb and crown were lifted from her coffin, to bring it home. A little shudder went through me – a shudder of knowledge that something good had gone out of the world and that something else, grey, dank and small, had taken its place.
The coffin of Queen Elizabeth II is carried out of Westminster Abbey after her funeral in 2022
This is little or nothing to do with the people involved. I am a hard political monarchist, not a sentimental royalist. I rejoice in the way the awful James II was chased out of the country and have never felt an ounce of sympathy for the petulant Edward VIII. Good riddance. I am as uninterested in the personal lives of the Royal Family as they are uninterested in mine.
But Elizabeth II, simply by continuing to live for so long, had kept something alive in the country, something that had existed when she was crowned but had been under determined attack for most of the years since then. As long as she lived, a benevolent spell kept the small-minded, sour future at bay. A little trace of chivalry, of justice, of honour, had lingered around the streets and squares of the capital. And now it was dispersing, fading, breaking, leaving us under a new, more worldly dispensation. As I walked very slowly homewards after the lying-in-state, Tennyson’s lines:
‘How thin and clear,
And thinner, clearer, farther going!
O, sweet and far from cliff and scar
The horns of Elfland faintly blowing’
came to mind. I have often heard people say, in the last few months, they feel the country has become rudderless since the Queen’s death. I think that is about right.
A strange silence on Trump’s gunman
The unspeakable murder of Charles Kirk reminded me of how little we still know about the attempted assassination of Kirk’s friend Donald Trump in July 2024.
I assumed we would eventually learn everything we needed to know about Thomas Crooks, who was shot dead at the scene.
I suspected he was, like most such killers, crazy, probably thanks to marijuana. But I know from experience that most big news organisations are either not interested in such stuff or actively suppress it.
Can anyone direct me to the origin of a claim reported back then that Crooks ‘had lived with his grandparents for a time before moving on after they caught him using drugs and told him off’?
Thomas Crooks shot at Donald Trump during a pre-election rally in Pennsylvania last year
Why I’m nostalgic for the Cold War
A few unconventional thoughts about Russia and Poland, after Russian drones entered Polish airspace and lots of silly people predicted a Third World War.
A much bigger and riskier event took place in the sea off Poland in 2022, when persons unknown blew up the concrete-sheathed undersea Moscow-owned Nord Stream gas pipeline between Russia and Germany.
The man who is now Poland’s Foreign Minister, former Bullingdon Club member Radek Sikorski, drew the same conclusions as every other informed person in the world. He tweeted exultantly: ‘Thank you, USA!’
But alas for the very anti-Putin Radek, his words were seized on by the Kremlin propaganda machine. Far too late, he deleted the tweet. Perhaps his American wife told him off. The US government has been denying ever since that it had anything to do with these explosions, just as Russia is denying that it deliberately sent drones into Polish airspace. I do enjoy a good denial.
But I invite you to wonder what would happen if Russia’s decrepit navy managed to blow up an American oil pipeline in, say, the Gulf of Mexico, even if the Kremlin then denied it was them.
Poland hated the pipeline because they saw it as an alliance between Germany and Russia, something they quite understandably fear. There is more than one Big Bad Wolf in the forests of Europe, as Poland has good reason to know.
A couple of weeks ago, on the exact spot in Gdansk where Germany started the Second World War, Poland’s fiercely nationalist new president Karol Nawrocki called on Berlin to pay reparations for its brutal invasion of Poland in 1939.
The whole of Europe is scarred by resentments and memories of this sort. Modern statesmen seem strangely ready to revive them. I am increasingly nostalgic for the Cold War.
