Monday 19 September 2022 12:26 AM STEPHEN GLOVER: Try telling me we're the paltry little country our detractors ... trends now
So the day has come. A day of mourning and sadness. But also of hope.
It’s reckoned that about four billion people will tune into the Queen’s funeral. Tens of millions of Britons will watch the proceedings in Westminster Abbey, the procession, and the committal in Windsor.
The pomp and ceremony will move countless hearts. This is a State occasion, which will probably surpass in solemnity and magnificence Winston Churchill’s funeral in 1965. But it is also a Christian service for a deeply Christian monarch.
Who could have dreamt less than a fortnight ago that it would turn out like this? For it seems to me that in the days following Queen Elizabeth’s death one myth after another has been exploded.
Look instead at the tens of thousands who have waited for up to 20 hours to catch a fleeting glimpse of the Queen’s coffin in Westminster Hall. How often are such people taken account of by elites who have been adept at seizing hold of our national narrative?
Today the received wisdom that Britain is an entirely secular country will be challenged. Even people who don’t regard themselves as religious may feel themselves touched by the sacred and divine.
Honouring
The myth that people have no time for pageantry in a utilitarian age has also been confounded. The processions, music, uniforms and meticulous marching have helped to re-connect us to a largely forgotten past, and to revive our sense of nationhood.
How they must be gritting their teeth in the progressive fiefdoms of our land! There will be forlorn faces in parts of the BBC (though our State broadcaster has, almost despite itself, provided outstanding coverage), in many of our universities, at enlightened newspapers, and in Corbynista strongholds. It wasn’t meant to be like this.
Another commonplace trumpeted by our largely leftist intelligentsia is that post-imperial Britain is a small island, rendered even more irrelevant by the supposed idiocies of Brexit. That preconception has also been routed by the events of recent days.
Tens of millions of Britons will watch the proceedings in Westminster Abbey, the procession, and the committal in Windsor
Would four billion people — or whatever the number may be — interrupt their routines to watch the obsequies of the monarch of an insignificant country, however singular and long-lived she might have been? I don’t think so.
Look at the presidents, monarchs, prime ministers and emperors who have flown from all corners of the world for today’s funeral. Of course they are honouring the Queen, but they are also acknowledging the importance of the country over which she ruled.
I don’t want to sound vainglorious but I don’t believe the death of a distinguished monarch in any other European nation — and there are several — would attract so huge a throng of respectful leaders.
Another piece of accepted wisdom shoved down our throats is that the United Kingdom is inevitably fracturing. Here I shall be cautious since I certainly don’t believe that the Queen’s death has miraculously restored old bonds which Westminster, and other, politicians have done much to loosen.
But the mourning in all four nations of the Kingdom has been heartfelt. In Scotland, which is allegedly on an inexorable path to independence, the Queen’s death was felt quite as deeply as in England.
In most of Scotland, the Queen was evidently regarded as their sovereign, not an import from south of the border. This,
