26 The Sunday Times June 5, 2022COMMENT
T
he celebrations marking the
Queen’s Platinum Jubilee will
draw to a close today with a spec-
tacular pageant in London and
tens of thousands of people up
and down the country dodging
showers at the many street par-
ties that have been organised.
This has been a joyous few days, a genuine
display of love, respect and goodwill
towards a monarch who has served her
country for three score years and ten. It is
not quite the end of an era, but it is a
moment in history never to be repeated.
The Queen’s obvious frailty has forced
her, to her regret, to miss some of the
events. She will not have minded too
much skipping the state opening of parlia-
ment last month but would have wanted
to be at Friday’s service of thanksgiving at
St Paul’s Cathedral and yesterday’s Epsom
Derby. Her frailty has added poignancy to
the occasion and increased the affection
in which she is held. She has become the
nation’s great-grandmother.
This was the right time for these cele-
brations. After a grim two years of lock-
downs, restrictions, mask-wearing and
hand sanitiser, as a result of a pandemic
that claimed and changed lives, we
needed an excuse to let our hair down.
The Platinum Jubilee, assuming today
goes well, has been more successful than
others. The Silver Jubilee in 1977 came in
the middle of a period of economic tur-
bulence, when the country had just been
bailed out by the International Monetary
Fund. God Save the Queen by the Sex
Pistols got more attention than the
national anthem.
At the time of the Golden Jubilee in
2002 the Queen and the royal family were
still recovering from the setbacks of the
1990s, including the fire at Windsor Castle
and the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.
The year 2002 was marred by the deaths
of Princess Margaret and the Queen
Mother within weeks of each other. Polls
showed that the public had hardened in
its attitude towards the monarchy and
was split on its future.
The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee ten years
ago was in many respects a warm-up for
the London Olympics that year, and she
received praise for her good-humoured
participation in that event. But the jubilee
itself is remembered for bad weather and
even worse BBC coverage.
This time has been different. The
events have been perfectly judged andsuperbly organised. There are a dozen
monarchies in Europe but none with the
same weight as the British monarchy, and
nobody does pomp, ceremony and fly-
pasts as well as we do. Anybody selling
holidays to foreign tourists will have had a
field day. The images of Britain sent
around the world have been priceless.
The country enjoyed the Platinum
Jubilee not just because we badly needed
a party but also because it provided a few
days of escapism. We were able to put to
one side the horrors of the brutal Russian
invasion of Ukraine, in which it is no
longer as clear as it was that heroic resist-
ance is winning the day. People may not
have been able to forget the cost-of-living
crisis and the alarming rise in food and
fuel poverty, but there has been some-
thing to take their minds off it.
Those concerns will return. There may
be one or two sore heads tomorrow, but
the bigger hangover is the return to what
for many people is a very difficult reality.
For the royal family there is also the
question of what comes next. Public opin-
ion appears to have moved beyond the
stage in which people were happy with
the Queen but unsure about whether they
wanted Prince Charles to succeed her.
There was talk for a time among members
of the public of breaking constitutional
convention and “skipping a generation”
to Prince William.
Such talk has gone, and, despite efforts
by the red-tops to build them up on the
thinnest of evidence, the jubilee has not
been dominated by new splits between
the Cambridges and the Sussexes. The
Duke and Duchess of Cambridge were
among the first to publicly congratulate
Harry and Meghan yesterday on the first
birthday of their daughter, Lilibet.
Nor, thanks to a convenient Covid-19
diagnosis, has the Duke of York diverted
attention away from the festivities. Boris
Johnson instead played the role of panto-
mime villain at St Paul’s.
That said, there are challenges ahead.
The Queen has been part of our lives for so
long that she is irreplaceable. The republi-
can drumbeat is growing louder across
large swathes of the Commonwealth, par-
ticularly the Caribbean and possibly Aus-
tralia, where a new, avowedly republican
government has just been elected.
We have rightly celebrated the Queen’s
dedication and sense of public duty. Her
successors may find it harder to win their
place in the nation’s hearts.The Platinum Jubilee was well organised
and delivered on schedule, but it looks the
exception. “Backlog Britain” is the reality
in other areas. Many families who had
been due to take long-awaited holidays
abroad this half-term had to cancel their
plans, if not because airlines had prom-
ised more flights than they could deliver
then because they could not renew their
passports in time.
People have been queueing outside
passport offices in desperation. Extra staff
have been drafted in. The Passport Office
insists there is no pandemic delay in proc-
essing. Rather, it is because five million of
us decided to delay renewals when
restrictions were in place. It is almost sug-
gesting we are to blame.
That is plainly not the case at the DVLA,
where more than 700,000 driving licence
applications are in the system. The DVLA
says this reflects a moratorium on medicalreferrals at the turn of the year, to allow
the NHS to focus on vaccines, and a 58-day
strike by the PCS union last year. Despite
this, the government plans to slash civil
service numbers.
Backlogs — also affecting HMRC, the
courts and many private sector providers
— are most acute in the NHS, as those who
have waited fruitlessly for a call to be
answered will attest. The government has
raised tax to deal with the problem, which
will get worse before it gets better. Num-
bers in England awaiting surgery and
other treatment hit a record 6.4 million at
the end of March; in Wales the health
watchdog says it could take seven years to
clear the backlog.
The British are good at queueing and
often resort to a good-humoured chorus
of: “Why are we waiting?” But we are wait-
ing too long for too many things. And
nobody should regard that as acceptable.Why are we waiting?
The Queen is well spoken. Indeed, if you
accept the proprietorial implication of the
expression “the Queen’s English”, she
couldn’t be anything else. Yet, as we
report today, her accent has changed
enormously in the 70 years of her reign.
In that respect she’s like the rest of us. If
she were to drop in on her Cockney sub-
jects today, they would no longer exclaim,
“Gorblimey, guvnor”, just as she would
no longer compliment them on their “vairnice hice”. The nation does not sound the
same as it did in the 1950s. It doesn’t look
the same or think the same either.
The Queen’s particular genius as a
monarch has been to change almost
imperceptibly, providing a reassuring illu-
sion of permanence as her country has
transformed around her. She has played
her part well, and we wish her a happy
jubilee: so far it has been, as she might
once have said, a jolly good show.The accent of Ma’am
ESTABLISHED 1822The best jubilee yet
Dominic Lawson
decision.” That now looks less impressive as a
historically based prescription than the
statement at the time by the French foreign
minister, Dominique de Villepin, warning that
if a war was started it would be immensely
difficult “to restore stability in a country and
region horribly affected by the intrusion of
force”. He added: “This message comes to you
from an old country, France, from an old
continent like mine, Europe, that has known
wars, occupation and barbarity.”
The point is that unlike Britain, France was
invaded by Nazi Germany. This country’s
“finest hour” was, for France, a tragedy. In the
occupation that followed, even Paris’s official
figures suggest that barely 1 per cent of the
population joined the resistance. To put it
mildly, the French have a more mixed
historical recollection of the 1939-1945 war.
Macron is echoing de Villepin in his constant
attempt to engage Putin in some sort of deal,
and has been criticised by Zelensky for doing
so: “Ukraine is not ready to sacrifice territory
and sovereignty. This is a waste of time.” In this
case it is not “les Anglo Saxons” who are the
invader. Russia has already attempted
“occupation” and inflicted “barbarity”:
grotesque war crimes, in fact, on a nation that
had not the slightest aggressive design on it
(any more than Poland did against either the
Soviet Union or Germany in 1939).
In this context, the mixed messages coming
out of Berlin — such as delaying promised
shipments of weapons to Ukraine on the
grounds that Germany doesn’t have enough for
its own defence — detract from its new
chancellor’s claim that it has abandoned its
previous assumptions about the reliability of
Putin’s Russia as a “partner”. But Putin had
played skilfully on Berlin’s enormous sense of
guilt for its invasion of Russia in 1941. The
German president, Walter Steinmeier, enraged
Kyiv by alluding to this anniversary last year,
when defending the Nord Stream 2 project to
send gas from Russia, in a new pipeline that
would bypass Ukraine: “For Germans there is
another dimension. This does not justify any
wrongdoing in Russian politics today, but we
must not lose sight of the bigger picture.”
By comparison with that, the UK, motivated
by its own distinct 1939-1945 experience, has
trod a more certain moral path. It is, however,
also vicarious. Unlike then, we are not risking a
single British life in defence of an invaded
eastern European nation. That may be wise.
But it is not a glorious chapter in our history:
only in Ukraine’s, if it can free itself.W
ill Europe ever escape from the
shadow of the Second World
War? There is no reason why it
should. The mass slaughter, the
extremes of genocidal depravity
— with the countervailing
heroism and moral clarity —
deserve no diminution through
mere passage of time.
Yet it is still striking how the policies of
European powers on Russia’s invasion of
Ukraine are so deeply and yet differently
influenced by their own experiences of
1939-1945. In the case of Russia itself, President
Putin has based the justification of his military
adventure not on its true purpose of re-
establishing a lost empire, but on a fictitious re-
creation of the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945:
that the Ukrainian state is under Nazi control,
dedicated to the destruction of Russian lives.
It feeds off the way Putin has concentrated
internal propaganda on recasting this period as
a story of Russia saving the world with minimal
help from allies; and cancelling the post-Soviet
honesty about, for example, Stalin’s massacre
of the Poles at Katyn, or the Nazi-Soviet pact of
1939, which carved up Poland between the two
dictators.
The Moscow Times’s Yevgenia Albats
reported recently that Russians in their
twenties appeared more unquestioning of the
Putin line than those in their forties she
interviewed, demonstrating how he has used
the education system to inculcate his historical
message (as I know from relatives with children
in Russia). I suppose today’s twentysomething
Britons are less influenced by our nation’s
1939-1945 experience than any before them.
Certainly there is not the tabloid mocking of
Germany, once a standby whenever the two
countries faced each other on the football field.
But still, perceptions of Britain’s fight for
survival as a sovereign and free power have
profoundly influenced our identification with
Ukraine. In the part of Sussex where I live, the
fields are festooned with the pale blue and
yellow flag of that country, often alongside our
own. It has definitely been part of the
government’s language. It was not surprising
that Boris Johnson, author of a biography of
Winston Churchill, declared to the Ukrainian
parliament: “When my country faced the
threat of invasion during the Second World
War, our parliament, like yours, continued to
meet throughout the conflict, and the British
people showed such unity and resolve that we
remember our time of greatest peril as ourfinest hour. This is Ukraine’s finest hour.” This
echoed President Zelensky’s own Churchill
reference, when in his address to the
Westminster parliament, he vowed to fight the
Russian invader “in the forests, in the fields, on
the shores and on the streets”.
The British army had been training
Ukrainian troops, in Operation Orbital, since
Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, so the
Conservative government can at least claim to
have been well ahead of the other western
European powers in (belatedly) recognising
the need to push back against an absolute
leader set on territorial expansion via force.
This, among other things, provoked Ben
Wallace’s remark to The Sunday Times a
fortnight before Putin launched his attack on
Kyiv: the defence secretary referred to the last
minute attempts to appease the Kremlin by
diplomatic initiatives as “a whiff of Munich in
the air from some in the West”. This was a
reference to the Munich deal negotiated by
Neville Chamberlain and Hitler, handing over
chunks of Czechoslavakia to Germany, in an
attempt to preserve “peace in Europe”.
George VI invited Chamberlain to join him
on the balcony of Buckingham Palace to
receive the cheers of the crowds, so popular
was the belief that this had rescued the
country, and the continent, from another war.
But it was not long before “appeasement”
became the dirtiest word in the language — and
remained so, however inappropriately,
whenever prime ministers spied a “new Hitler”
threatening our interests. In 1956, Anthony
Eden drew on these comparisons to justify the
invasion of Suez after President Nasser of Egypt
nationalised the canal.
Almost half a century later, Tony Blair
invoked the same argument to promote the
invasion of Iraq: “A majority of decent and
well-meaning people said there was no need to
confront Hitler and that those that did were
warmongers... they made the wrongC
onspicuous consumption has never
been less fashionable, and the
concept of buying stuff you don’t
really need just for the pleasure of
acquisition feels like it belongs to
another era. There is greater kudos in
reusing, recycling or repurposing
than in loudly splashing the cash on
shiny new things.
Even Love Island, previously a showcase for
the trashiest kind of disposable fashion, has
reinvented itself in this respect (one of its past
sponsors, the fast-fashion brand Missguided,
went into administration last week). This year
the reality television show is being sponsored
by eBay, with all the contestants wearing
second-hand clothes.
This is less a worthy gesture — though it is an
excellent one, I think — than a reflection of the
way young people increasingly shop, favouring
the “pre-loved” or vintage over cheap, landfill-
bound and made by children.
Added to the cost-of-living crisis and the
tightening of belts is the fact that even
people who live under rocks are aware that
wasting things, whether those things are
food, clothes or fitted kitchens, is a really bad
idea. Whereas ten years ago we might have
secretly admired excess, in an eye-rolling but
forgiving way, we’re now more likely to find it
slightly gross.
In the age of food banks, it has become
gauche to spend vast sums of money on
fripperies: we’re more likely to save our
admiration for people who manage to live
reasonably well on reasonably little. And
this is a big problem not only for luxury
brands but also for the publications that
celebrate them.
The excellent Saturday edition of the
Financial Times has a supplement that has, to
me at least, always had a problematic title — it’s
called How to Spend It. Or rather it was, for the
previous 28 years of its existence. As of last
week, it’s called HTSI, as though it were
desperately embarrassed by itself and had put
on an ingenious disguise.Unfortunately the disguise is akin to wearing
comedy glasses with a fake nose and bushy
eyebrows and talking in an unnaturally high
voice. It is not necessarily convincing. Also,
since HTSI hardly trips off the tongue, you have
to say “How to Spend It” to yourself to remind
yourself of what the initials are, which
hammers the words home to the point of
indelibility.
How to Spend It was always a tricky title. Its
cheerful vulgarity sat oddly with its refined
content. There was something self-
congratulatory about it, but it also implied an
almost poignant uselessness — “I have all this
money sitting about and I simply can’t think
what to spend it on” — that can’t have felt
flattering to the target reader.
Calling it HTSI doesn’t change any of that,
which seems like a wasted opportunity. In a
letter to subscribers announcing the new
name, the magazine’s editor, Jo Ellison, wrote
that “we have always encouraged readers to
interpret the ‘spend’ as less transactional in its
meaning”, which is disingenuous.
I am a long-time reader of HTSI and it is page
after page of insanely expensive things to buy,
or insanely expensive interiors to admire, or
insanely expensive places to visit. You go: “Oh,
that vase is nice”, and find it’s £2,000. Ellison
also notes that the title was supposed to be
ironic (hmm).
But anyway: “We have lived through two
years of a global health catastrophe. We are in
the midst of a cost of living crisis. We have beenpublishing issue after issue against the
backdrop of war in Ukraine,” she writes. “And
so we have evolved.”
I’m sorry to say that this made me burst out
laughing. Evolved? How? By making the S of
HTSI flexible, apparently. “We will also draw
on other ‘s’ words to illustrate the breadth of
things we do. This week’s cover story, which
could be called ‘How to style it’, is shot by Bibi
Borthwick and offers a fresh look at this
season’s menswear... Inside features offer
thoughts on how to savour it, how to sell it and
how to save it. There are thoughts on how to
see, serve and even swim it, too.”
Really — How to Swim It? Normally you get in
the water and sort of bob about, but OK. I can
help with How to Serve It too — you either put it
on a plate or whack it across the net. And
anyway, no one believes the magazine is really
called How to Swim or Serve or Sauce or Sew It.
It’s about rich people buying expensive things.
It is unchanged.
Here’s the thing: I love HTSI. I’ve never
bought a single thing from its pages, but I love
reading it. It is — or was — completely
unapologetic, and being completely
unapologetic about £2,000 vases is the only
way you can possibly go if they’re your
magazine’s raison d’être.
You have to say: “We exist to amuse the
1 per cent and the grockles who just like
looking at the pictures even if they can’t afford
anything.” You have to stand firm. There are
very rich people, and you are for them.
Someone has to be, after all, and since happily
HTSI usually has excellent taste, the poor
gormless ninnies who don’t know how to
spend their money can at least be assured of a
decent steer.
As a rule of life, it is a good idea never to
pretend to be something you’re not. Some
people are fortunate enough to be very rich or
very privileged or both. How to Spend It is their
magazine. It can put on a hessian sack and
hobble about calling itself serf if it likes, but it’s
fooling no one. It should rename itself How to
Own It.India Knight
A change of name for the FT’s wealth-worshipping magazine fools no one
How to spend it? As
gleefully as you can
Britain’s gung-ho attitude is deeply influenced by our 1939-45 experience
The disguise is akin
to comedy glasses
with a fake noseThe point is that,
unlike Britain,
France was invadedMemories of war sway
Europe’s view of Ukraine