Lying in State

Watch the continuous live stream from Westminster Hall without commentary
via Sky News here.

In accordance with royal tradition, on Wednesday afternoon the coffin of Her Majesty the Queen, with the Imperial State Crown glittering on top, was brought from Buckingham Palace on a Royal Navy gun carriage to lie in state at Westminster Hall, erected by order of her ancestor, King William II, nearly a thousand years ago.  

The Queen was accompanied in the procession by a scarlet-coated guard of honor, followed on foot by the King, his brothers, sons, and other male relatives.  The Princess Royal walked next to her brother the King.  The rest of the royal ladies, including the Queen Consort and the Princess of Wales, were brought to the Hall by limousines via a different route.

After a short service of prayers by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Dean of Westminster Abbey (directly across the street from the Hall), and a couple of musical offerings by the Choir of the Chapel Royal, a guard of honor took up positions around the casket, beginning the first of many vigil shifts that will go on continuously until Monday morning, the day of her state funeral.  

The Royal Family having departed, the doors were opened to a miles-long queue of what used to be called Her Majesty's loyal subjects (a taboo word now) and others from the Commonwealth and around the world.  Hundreds of thousands are expected to pay their respects in the next several days. 

The procession:

 

The service:

 

The BBC provides a helpful guide to events during the period of lying in state.

Here follow tributes to Her late Majesty by the former Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom. 

Former Conservative Prime Minister (1990-1997) Sir John Major, a very fine man:

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Former Labour Prime Minister (1997-2007) Sir Tony Blair:

 

Former Conservative Prime Minister (2010-2016) David Cameron:

 

Former Labour Prime Minister (2007-2010) Gordon Brown:

 

Former Conservative Prime Minister (2019-2022) Boris Johnson brilliantly delineates the qualities that made Elizabeth II a great monarch:

 

And former Conservative Prime Minister (2016-2019) Theresa May has the last laugh:

 

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But Is It Fascism?

Johnson and Trump at the G7 meeting in Biarritz, 2019.
White House photo via Wikipedia.

George Monbiot compares the politics of Trump and Johnson to historical fascism in an opinion piece for the Guardian.  Excerpt:

Is the resurgence of fascism a real prospect, on either side of the Atlantic?

Fascism is a slippery, protean thing. As an ideology, it’s almost impossible to pin down: it has always been opportunistic and confused. It is easier to define as a political method. While its stated aims may vary wildly, the means by which it has sought to grab and build power are broadly consistent. But I think it’s fair to say that though the new politics have some strong similarities to fascism, they are not the same thing. They will develop in different ways and go by different names.

Trump’s politics and Johnson’s have some characteristics that were peculiar to fascism, such as their constant excitation and mobilisation of their base through polarisation, their culture wars, their promiscuous lying, their fabrication of enemies and their rhetoric of betrayal. But there are crucial differences. Far from valorising and courting young people, they appeal mostly to older voters. Neither relies on paramilitary terror, though Trump now tweets support for armed activists occupying state buildings and threatening peaceful protesters. It is not hard to see some American militias mutating into paramilitary enforcers if he wins a second term, or, for that matter, if he loses. Fortunately, we can see no such thing developing in the UK. Neither government seems interested in using warfare as a political tool.

Trump and Johnson preach scarcely regulated individualism: almost the opposite of the fascist doctrine of total subordination to the state. (Though in reality, both have sought to curtail the freedoms of outgroups.) Last century’s fascism thrived on economic collapse and mass unemployment. We are nowhere near the conditions of the Great Depression, though both countries now face a major slump in which millions could lose their jobs and homes.

Not all the differences are reassuring. Micro-targeting on social media, peer-to-peer texting and now the possibility of deepfake videos allow today’s politicians to confuse and misdirect people, to bombard us with lies and conspiracy theories, to destroy trust and create alternative realities more quickly and effectively than any tools 20th-century dictators had at their disposal. In the EU referendum campaign, in the 2016 US election, and in the campaign that brought Jair Bolsonaro to power in Brazil, we see the roots of a new form of political indoctrination and authoritarianism, without clear precedents.

It is hard to predict how this might evolve. It’s unlikely to lead to thousands of helmeted stormtroopers assembling in public squares, not least because the new technologies render such crude methods unnecessary in gaining social control. As Trump seeks re-election, and Johnson prepares us for a likely no deal, we can expect them to use these tools in ways that dictators could only have dreamed of. Their manipulations will expose longstanding failures in our political systems that successive governments have done nothing to address.

Though it has characteristics in common, this isn’t fascism. It is something else, something we have not yet named. But we should fear it and resist it as if it were.

What I Say: I get Monbiot's point. But nevertheless, beware of an October Surprise - a suddenly trumped-up war, or the Washington equivalent of the Reichstag fire.

That British Show

Doubtless I am not alone amongst my truckbuddies in having spent the last three weeks breathlessly watching every twist and turn of the plot in this soap-opera-to-end-all-soap-operas, studying every nuance of detail, and gasping as one after another leading character gets killed off in the most unlikely ways.

But now, in what may be the season finale before the summer hiatus, we learn that "Brexit means Brexit" after all, and the new matriarch of the clan has set to work with pail and swab, busily mopping up the blood in the dimly-lit corridors and claiming the head seat in the boardroom, promising a "better Britain" - mais oui, what else could anyone promise at this point?

But every good soap must end the season with a shockeroo, and this one is no exception to the rule: guess who has been resurrected from the political graveyard and propelled straightaway into the third-highest post in the land? Why, good old Boris, that's who! Silly-willy-nilly-all-stuffed-with-fluff Boris.  You know, you can't ever really kill off a popular character like that, no matter how annoying or devious.  Whenever the plot starts to drag a little, they have to be revived in one ingenious way or another to keep the audience hooked.

Yes, Boris to the Foreign Office - ah, those Brits with their inscrutable humor! This plot has more dead bodies and red herrings than any country-house whodunit. I'm sure somewhere Shakespeare is chuckling softly to himself and saying, "'Zounds, why didn't I think of that?"

The Telegraph summarizes today's episode in a nutshell, just in case you forgot to set your TiVo:




Of course as everyone knows, the US of A takes the palm for edge-of-your-seat thrillers. I just hope our own national drama doesn't turn out to be Nightmare on Pennsylvania Avenue. Oh please God, no.

Great Supine Protoplasmic Invertebrate Jellies!

My man Boris tells it like it is, as the London Assembly kicks him out of a meeting:



You go, buddy! He'll be Prime Minister one day, and a jolly good one too, I expect.