benjames.org.uk

9th April 2002

MUM'S THE WORLD

HRH The Queen Mother

Imperiously, she loomed over the silent throngs at Aintree Racecourse, electric blue and commanding. A remarkable sight to see the image of one woman affecting so many and being so ubiquitous in media and mind. London, Liverpool and Llanelli were daubed with the Queen Mum like Tripoli might be covered with those proud, dictatorial murals of Colonel Gaddafi. Aintree’s big screen was like the telescreen of George Orwell’s worst nightmares: Big Mother is watching you.

Well, her self-appointed lieutenants were. Simon Heffer was apoplectic in the Daily Mail at a mere three-and-a-half hours of Mum on BBC1 on Easter Saturday which featured the sartorial disrespect of Peter Sissons, perhaps connecting that tie’s burgundy to Sissons’ intimation that Old Liz had liked a drop to drink in her time. You half-expected Heffer’s next rabid sentence to tell you roll up your Mail and beat the respect out of your telly, before turning its spiky print on yourself. Soon, local bobbies could sidle up to you and go “there’s not a lot of mourning go on ‘ere then, is there?”

Because, let’s face it, we weren’t all in tears when the lady passed on to the great Palace in the sky. Despite being “everybody’s grandmother” (more sweeping than the British Olympic Curling Team), I shamefully admit that I only felt the passing acknowledgement of death and mortality that I generally do when someone well-known but not known well dies. I’m obviously an unfeeling bastard and just not British.

For this was a patriotic festival, and failing to respect a royal who reached her century is just not cricket. 200,000 people filed past the coffin in Westminster Hall, 1 million lined the route from Westminster Abbey to Windsor Castle. They waved their flags, chucked their flowers and probably talked about how things were not like they used to be. She was history, and people felt they were seeing history.

Yet while she was lying in state in cavernous, opulent surroundings, various Israelis and Palestinians were lying in a state on the bloodstained streets of Jenin and Bethlehem. It was rather like the telling juxtaposition back in 1997 of the deaths of Diana (Princess of Wales, if you remember) and Mother Teresa of Calcutta. The latter – an Albanian nun who, from poverty, had devoted her life to alleviating just that in some of the most desperate cess-pits of human existence – was a mere footnote in the news bulletins, shoved aside by another outing for that footage of leggy Di in her khaki shorts wandering concernedly through the minefields of Angola.

Of course, it was fabulous that both her and the Queen Mum used their celebrity to highlight some of the most important issues facing the world today. But it must be remembered that they were both in the wealthy position to be able to do that. There are probably people just as, if not more, personally equipped to lead such campaigns in Oxfam / Cafod / hospital fundraising committees up and down the nation, but unfortunately they have to also spend a substantial part of the day earning a fiver an hour, looking after elderly relatives and cooking the dinner.

There is nothing wrong with people feeling sad for the passing of QE Too – the Guild of Political Satirists and bookmakers everywhere are probably feeling very empty right now, and we should respect that. But don’t get incensed if you come across someone not in floods for the old bird. Let’s not turn grief into a stipulation, let’s not commodify it, dictating it as necessary at given occasions for given people – for that would be a crying shame.