20 The Sunday Times June 5, 2022COMMENT
Rod Liddle
I
enjoyed the Queen’s Silver Jubilee
immensely, shouting out horrible
things about our monarch on stage
with my punk band at a “Stuff the
Jubilee” gig in a pleasant suburb of
Middlesbrough. We were in a tent,
erected with great magnanimity by
the organisers slap bang in the
middle of the proper, official Silver
Jubilee celebration, with its stalls of
cakes and beer wagons and plates
bearing pictures of her Maj.
It helped, I suppose, that my mum
was one of those organisers, and
thought there would be no harm letting
mid-adolescent brats scream abuse for a
few hours. In Thailand we’d have been
shot. In Nunthorpe, though, we got a
nice plate of scones with clotted cream
after we’d finished mangling the
Heartbreakers’ Born to Lose and
demanded, unequivocally, the
overthrow of the privileged elite. Family
friends popped their heads in the tent
every so often, smiled in an encouraging
manner and then got the hell away from
the din, sharpish.
It may have been HM’s Silver Jubilee,
but 1977 was also the year of punk, even
if its impact on the charts was marginal.
It is often suggested that punk was a
left-wing phenomenon, but in truth it
was far from it — even if one or two of the
bands, such as the Clash, later
proclaimed their left-wing credentials
for the benefit of the very liberal hippy
music press. In truth, punk at its core
was energetically poujadist. It was lower-
middle-class kids who were tired of, or
bored with, the sclerotic institutions in
our country — the big record companies,
the civil service, the BBC, the aristocracy
and so on.
It was individualistic, not
communitarian. It had no great quarrel
with capitalism, only with capitalism
done badly. It saw Great Britain as
stagnating and it wanted change. It had
no time for the unions either — it was the
unions that boycotted the pressing of the
Sex Pistols’ second single, God Save the
Queen.The Queen represented continuity,
much as did Jim Callaghan’s hobbled
government. We didn’t want that and
nor did the newish leader of the
opposition, who was also lower middle
class, despised outdated institutions
such as the trade unions and the BBC,
and was for individualism. Yes, in many
aspects, Margaret Thatcher was a punk
rocker, though I doubt she was au fait
with the words of Anarchy in the UK and
only rarely gobbed on anyone while
pogoing.
Perhaps it was a simpler age. If the UK
was stagnating, it was a comfortable
stagnation, with gradually rising living
standards and, since Elizabeth’s
accession, peace in our time. Yes, we
had endured power cuts, the three-day
week, almost perpetual strikes and real,
proper, inflation. But the growing
affluence and the absence of real war, as
opposed to the Cold War, made us a
rather cosseted generation, one which
demanded change with a certainirresponsible petulance. The Queen
represented opposition to that change,
an intimation that the present would
forever endure.
This weekend’s celebrations are very
different. Never before have we craved
continuity quite as much as we do now,
faced with an array of existential threats
from which you can take your pick as to
which is the most pressing: newly
belligerent Russia, China’s quest for
world domination, radical Islam, climate
change, weird viruses.
Oh, and an influential if numerically
minuscule proportion of the population
that wishes to consign the history of our
country to the waste bin, or to throw it in
the river. We have presiding over us a
liberal elite that buys into this trashing of
our culture — in effect, an elite that
wishes to abolish itself, which is not
what elites usually aspire to do.
Nor, any more, does our Queen
represent continuity, but instead its
polar opposite. Absent for the first time
in 70 years from inspecting the troops,
absent from St Paul’s and only rarely
seen in public. One does not remotely
begrudge her a rest from these onerous
proceedings, of course, but merely notes
that her time is clearly passing.
In Australia and the Caribbean,
meanwhile, the mood is defiantly
republican. With the passing of this last,
great queen will surely come the passing
of the institution itself, unless it changes
beyond recognition and becomes the
sort of monarchy nobody takes any
notice of, like the one they have in the
Netherlands.
Under a lesser monarch our
disaffection with the royal institution —
and, as a corollary, with our own history
as a nation — might have spilt over long
before. But she ruled with a dignity, duty
and dexterity that precluded such an
eventuality.
I wish I’d remembered, while
standing on stage in that tent 45 years
ago, the words of an old hippy: “Don’t it
always seem to go that you don’t know
what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.”lThe broadcaster Dan Walker seems
a decent enough chap. But he has
betrayed a certain BBC mentality in
his comments about the corporation’s
copious coverage of the funeral of the
Duke of Edinburgh.
It was excessive, he said. Perhaps.
But he added: “You can’t force grief
upon a nation.” Well, no — and that was
broadly the view when I worked at the
BBC and we had to rehearse coverageof a royal death: nobody really cares
out there, they thought.
And yet they do, they care very
much. It could even be that they care
more about it than they do about a
Black Lives Matter protest or another
report saying we’re all going to burn
to a crisp because of global warming.
The licence payers are, in this regard,
quite reprehensible. They even turn
out in their millions for jubilees, Dan.Tory party at prayer
PHOTOBUBBLE: NICK NEWMANAs a teenage punk, I sneered at the
Queen. Sadly, the music is almost over
Now look here, God,
how about watering
down these Ten
Commandments?I was interested to see that passengers
at our ghastly airports have taken to
pretending to be disabled to
circumvent the appalling queues. This is
a sensible course of action, but you
must choose the right disability.
It is no use just limping a bit — nobody
swallows that any more and you almost
always forget which leg you’re meant to
be limping on. Nor is pretending to be
not quite right in the head. Nobody who
has spent six hours at Manchester
airport remains entirely right in the head.
No, you need props to provide
authenticity — a crutch (or better still a
wheelchair), or dark glasses and a white
stick, or perhaps an oxygen cylinder. An
easier course of action is to affix
yourself to a disabled person and
pretend you are their carer.
I hope this has been helpful.Never before
have we
craved
continuity
quite as
much as we
do nowFlying? First, buy
a wheelchair...More syntactic imbecilities, then. My
wife was asked for her full name and the
first line of her address by some
customer service Gradgrind and when
she obliged was rewarded with “Thank
you! That’s amazing!” Well, that’s my
wife for you — able to stun the world
with incredible feats of memory.
When asked similar questions I’ve
had the response “brilliant” quite often,
and even a “fantastic” or two — but
“amazing” takes it to a whole new level
of facile effusion.
And one from my good friend of this
parish, Mr D Lawson, who rightly
bemoans the growing popularity of the
idiotic and tautologous term
“pre-planned”. Can’t be bleedin’ post-
planned, can it?Brilliant! Herself
remembers name