The Death of The Queen is The Culmination of The Extraordinary Trauma of The Last Few Years In Britain
--
Queen Elizabeth II, 1926–2022
It has now been confirmed.
Her Majesty The Queen died a few hours ago, thus paving the way for Charles to succeed her as King of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Her demise is the culmination of the great difficulties of the last few years which have been shaped by the schizophrenia of Brexit, the global pandemic and the death of Prince Phillip, the Duke of Edinburgh.
As people troop to Buckingham Palace, the general feeling and mood is one of the end of an era.
And I truly hope that today’s events will close the chapter of what’s been a truly difficult time for the inhabitants of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Nothing prepares you these sorts of things.
When we had the Scottish independence vote in 2014, it was the intervention of the Queen, which led to the preservation of the union.
I had always felt that had she repeated the trick in 2016 during the EU referendum in 2016, the mess of the last six years would not have happened.
It was said that her scepticism of the EU project was why we heard nothing from her.
By the time the world shut down due to the global pandemic, Her Majesty’s powers were already on the wane; her movements were already being curtailed for fear of contracting the once-in-a lifetime virus and it also didn’t help that her husband, Prince Phillip, The Duke of Edinburgh was also quite poorly.
His death 17 months ago didn’t come as a surprise to most observers.
It was the Queen that we all had our eyes on.
Anyone who’s read the umpteen articles that I have published in this space will have recognized the profound sense of foreboding that I had about what happened a few hours ago.
There was something which suggested that we were edging ever closer to what the French would call a fin de siecle.
It certainly felt that way when I listened to her Christmas day speech.
