Few tears, many smartphones. Henry Cooke reports from Buckingham Palace.
I thought she was going to make it.
My office in central London was not quite sure what to make of the news, released early on Thursday afternoon (or in the middle of the night in New Zealand), that Queen Elizabeth II was on “medical alert”. Some thought it must be over; others like me knew she would have the best healthcare in the world – surely this was the beginning of the end, the start of a long battle, not the end itself? The Queen had started her reign when Winston Churchill was prime minister, surely she wouldn’t slip away just 48 hours after inviting her 15th PM to form a government?
My workplace didn’t quite stop – we still had meetings, wrote emails, made phone calls. The commercial radio station we have on didn’t stop playing music or having ad breaks. The myth that we would all get a week of bank holidays if she did die was soon debunked. Rumours went everywhere – a particularly strong one stated we would get some kind of statement at around 5pm, but 5pm came and went. I figured if she had died already, there was no way it wouldn’t have leaked by this point.
But then the skies darkened and the rain started bucketing down. It started to feel a lot more real. About an hour later, minutes ahead of the BBC stream I was watching, the tweet came through confirming her death.
I opened the window to look up and down the Soho street where I work. The 70-year reign was over, but nothing seemed to have changed. People standing around outside pubs started gesturing at their phones, exclaiming, showing their phones to their friends, but otherwise continuing to have a good time.
It’s not every day you are in the centre of a monarchy when its longest reigning ruler dies, so I finished my work and headed down to Buckingham Palace, where crowds were gathering to see the official notice put out on the railing. The new king was not there – indeed from what I can tell the entire royal family was 800km north in Balmoral. But this was the natural place for Londoners to come to mourn.
Was it mourning? There wasn’t much crying. Maybe the tears will come later, unleashed by the ceremony of the funeral in a week or so. Then again, publicly crying is not particularly British – this isn’t some tinpot dictatorship where you need to show public fealty to the regime.
Instead, as I got closer to the palace I mostly saw people doing what all modern people do when interesting historic things happen – taking photos or videos on their smartphones. Piccadilly Circus had a huge wraparound image of the Queen already up, which people dutifully took selfies in front of.
In front of the palace itself people amassed on the Queen Victoria statue to get a good view of the palace, with the union jack at half-mast. The wind wasn’t really playing ball, so whenever it did pick up, tens of phones were raised in unison. One side of the Memorial Gardens was crowded by legions of TV journalists, all standing under identical white gazebos and well-separated from the public.
I couldn’t see anyone crying, although there were solemn faces. People stayed close to the gates, putting down bouquets of flowers and taking endless photos, leading one man to yell “once you’ve taken your 10 photos can you please move on?” Folks shared beers from the handy M&S. Instead of grief, many of the conversations I heard concerned logistics: Wasn’t it amazing how all the media had cut into everything? Wasn’t it wild how air traffic control was keeping the skies clear (I’m not sure if this one was true). Wasn’t it interesting how early King Charles had decided on his official name? I myself couldn’t help but think of politics: Tony Blair had cemented his prime ministership with his reaction to Princess Diana’s death, coining the phrase the “people’s princess”. Would this be a similar moment for Liz Truss?
One man started a rousing rendition of God Save The Queen, to much applause and a bit of eventual attention from the news cameras. He started again once he had finished, presumably for the benefit of the cameras, and got the same applause. Another man yelled “God Save The King!” to absolutely zero response. A separate man screamed the first line of God Save The Queen, and then complained “no takers for the second verse?” as no one joined him.
Away from London the country as a whole moved into a state of sustained ceremony. Long-planned strikes were cancelled. The idea of politics – at the picket line or in Westminster – shrunk away into insignificance, at least for a while.
The rain got heavier so I put on the BBC and started to walk home. Emotion struck me quite unexpectedly as the BBC played clips of Elizabeth as a child recording a message for children evacuated from London, then for lonely Brits during lockdown. I suppose it is the single unwavering purpose of the BBC to make you sad when the Queen dies, but it worked. Away from the crowds and flowers and selfie sticks I felt close to tears myself.
The lack of power Elizabeth II had was probably her institution’s greatest strength. It’s much easier to accept a hereditary monarchy when the power they hold is all on paper. No one blamed the Queen for the slow sense of decline that set in here after World War II, for the Suez Crisis, or for how high energy bills are. Instead she was vested with symbolic qualities above parliamentary politics: Humility, compassion, fantastic manners. The prime ministers who have served under her do appear to have valued her counsel – which is fair enough given she would have read more civil service papers than any other human alive after her first two or three prime ministers.
Of course this is not a service her 16 prime ministers in New Zealand got to make much use of. The idea of Jacinda Ardern asking the Queen’s representative in New Zealand for counsel is absurd, and she could hardly text her majesty. Some will use this moment to push for New Zealand to pull out of this system and embrace a republican future, but as ever I doubt our political class will ever really be bothered. It’s hard to defend our setup on a symbolic level, but on a logistical level it’s got serious advantages over the messy process of setting something else up.
The BBC worked its magic, but I didn’t quite cry. As I got further from the palace, London felt more and more normal. A homeless man outside Green Park station pleaded in increasingly agitated tones for help, and almost everyone kept on walking, eager to get out of the rain.
