THE BRITAIN THAT DIED WITH HER

When the Queen Mother was born, writes Theodore Dalrymple,

Britain was a country of greatness and charm. Today it is irrevocably associated with boorishness and vulgarity

EVERY age likes to think itself the most sophisticated in history, and ours is no exception: but the Queen Mother grew up in an age whose understanding was, in some respects, more sophisticated than our own.

The king who reigned when she was a child was a glutton who took mistresses, but no one thought the worse of him for that, as they would now. He consumed vastly more than he produced, at least in any obvious sense, but then he was the king, whose worth to the nation was not to be expressed in double-entry book-keeping, with so many tourists attracted to London on one side of the ledger and so much expense for the Civil List on the other. Moreover, he was a figurehead, not a moral exemplar.

He was regal without solemnity, and the Queen Mother was too. No one imagined her a paragon of virtue, in the Imitation-ofChrist sense: she liked waspish remarks, and it was common knowledge that she drank more in a day than the College of Physicians would recommend in a fortnight (perhaps if she had taken its advice, she would have lived to 108). She always performed her duty in public, of course, and had her period of heroism during the war, when she appeared to share the sufferings of her people; but, in truth, she was not made for deprivation. And there is no point in having a royal family that dines forever off Spam; even prime ministers don't do that, though they may sometimes claim to.

It is hardly surprising that a life as long as hers should have been witness to many changes. (If she had lived from 1800 to 1902, instead of from 1900 to 2002, would she have seen fewer?) Not all these changes, particularly the material, were for the worse, of course: she had a hip replaced without danger or difficulty when she was 95, but when she was a child there was no useful treatment even for pneumonia, and, privileged as she was, her chances of dying in the first year of her life were at least six times those of the poorest child born today.

But other changes must have been less gratifying to her. She saw her country descend from the first to the second or even third rank of powers, with a prime minister who plays statesman the way children play doctors. Above all, she witnessed the complete collapse of national morale and pride in country. When she was born, patriotism was automatic and unthinking, and could lead both to philistinisrn and to moral blindness in dealings with other countries, but it also gave to the humblest subject a sense of pride and participation in something greater and grander than his own life.

She lived to see the day when the word British was practically an accusation in itself, or a term of abuse, a guarantee of poor quality at best and a synonym for the coarsest and cheapest vulgarity at worst. The British were never universally loved — nor were they universally lovable — but they were once acknowledged to have qualities as well as defects, and great accomplishments as well as faults. Their country, for all its shortcomings, had charms as well; but by the time of her death it had none, having become a theme park for social pathology and psychopathy. The British had become universally — and rightly — despised and detested for their boorishness and self-righteous, indeed evangelical, vulgarity. The football hooligan had completely replaced the gentleman as the archetypical Englishman.

The collapse in cultural confidence — that there was in British culture anything worth preserving — was no doubt the consequence of the collapse of power. A ruling class that might once have aspired to rule half the world now found itself scarcely in charge of a damp little island of secondary importance that was having difficulty in paying its way in the world. It therefore turned with the ferocity of disappointment on a culture that had first raised its hopes and expectations and then dashed them. Hell hath no fury like a would-be oligarch in reduced circumstances.

It was hardly surprising, therefore, that a gestalt switch took place, and conduct and qualities that were once unthinkingly accepted as good and desirable were subjected to mockery and derision. The gentleman — with his emotional restraint, good manners, sense of proportion and fair play — was now a fraud, a stuffed dummy, a figure of fun. Even his sense of duty was absurd, for what was there left to be dutiful towards? By the end of her life, the Queen Mother saw her own daughter publicly derided for having displayed the kind of iron self-control and devotion to duty that many British public servants would not be able to manage for half an hour, let alone for half a century.

Naturally, the class system was blamed for the collapse of power, though that collapse was surely made inevitable by the rise of other nations. It was overlooked that all modern societies are class societies; as was the fact that the supposedly rigid British class hierarchy had for some hundreds of years permitted more social mobility than in most other European countries. Moreover, the attraction that an upper class exerted on those below had a culturally refining effect on the whole of society. Yet it became an orthodoxy that the British class system was a manifestation of an opaque, closed and unfree society, worthy only of destruction.

The Queen Mother belonged to the last generation of the well-born that could accept its own social superiority without question and without guilt. That was part of the secret of her effortless grace. But she lived to see the day when royalty itself aspired to downward cultural mobility as a token of its democratic vocation: her great grand-daughter having her tongue pierced, like any child of a sink housing estate.

She also lived to see the day when behaviour that had once been considered bad — and actually is bad behaviour — became the mark of goodness of heart, indeed the only such mark possible. To appear drunk in public, to scream in the streets, to use obscene language in season and Out, were now considered a sign that one had finally overcome the ridiculous social inhibitions of the past, with all its false and repressive gentility, and thrown in one's lot with the great mass of mankind. We are all one big, happy, classless society now (except, of course, with regard to the amount of money we have). We all like the same things, dress the same way, express the same interests; and, of course, have the same rights. Oddly enough, the better life becomes, the more bitter we grow.

The British monarchy, which seemed as secure an institution as any in the world when the Queen Mother was growing up, was decidedly shaky by the end of her life, through little fault of its own, for it was caught up in an insoluble dilemma. On the one hand a royal family's raison d'être is to be different from all other families: it cannot be just the family next door that happens to wear crowns and a lot of regalia. On the other hand, in a demotic age such as ours, when plutocracy hides behind democratic sentiment, open social differences are less and less tolerated: he who is not like us is against us.

Thus the Queen is criticised for being too cold and aloof (dysfunctional, to use the world loved by psychotherapists) while her children, or some of them, are criticised for having feet of clay just like ours. The outlook is bad — at least for monarchists — because we can tolerate neither a monarch who is like us, nor one who is unlike us.

Only Princess Diana managed for a time to incarnate the unstable but necessary mixture of sameness and difference: that is to say, of glamour and banality. The Prime Minister, himself both the creator and beneficiary of Britain's bullyingly demotic climate, was perfectly right to call her the People's Princess, (How naively 1 had hoped never again to see the word 'people' capitalised after the fall of the Berlin Wall!) How perfectly his phrase caught the mood of individual self-worship in the absence of any higher aspiration than the enjoyment of vulgar and uncouth pleasures! Alas for Prince Charles — and fortunately for him also — he was not able to play Royal Beckham to Diana's Royal Posh.

The Queen Mother was not the People's Queen Mother, though many people loved her, for she was regal and good fun. Luckily she was too old to be bullied as the Queen was bullied after Diana's death, when the yellow press demanded that Her Majesty lie to the public, or express her grief like a paid mourner at a funeral. This disgusting episode will live in infamy, as being emblematic of the deep shallowness of our times. I am not sure the Queen Mother came from a better age, but it was certainly a more dignified one. God rest her soul.