“For I was in the nude,
The old Queen disapproved,
But people laughed and asked
for autographs.“
– Pet Shop Boys, “Dreaming of the Queen”.
It is, we have always understood, an ineradicable quirk of British consciousness (or, more precisely) of English consciousness. The English suffer from recurring dreams in which a visit from the Queen is either imminent or underway and the dreamer is seized by anxiety. The best china is broken. The antimacassars are stained. He is inexplicably naked.
The Pet Shop Boys gave these anxieties a mischievous tweak in the song “Dreaming of the Queen”. The Queen’s disapprobation is swiftly dispensed with. People laugh and ask for autographs. The song unfolds into an allegory of AIDS deaths (“there were no more lovers left alive”) that manages to be both frivolous and moving, and leaves us with the gentle suggestion that our superficial anxieties, just as we might have suspected, have little value except insofar as they lead us to contemplate our deeper ones.
Strands of this song floated in my aural consciousness last week during the state visit by Queen Elizabeth II to Ireland. We had given way, it seemed, to neuroses of a kind not dissimilar to those mocked by Tennant and Lowe.
Discussions of these neuroses tended to open in apparently reasonable terms. Would the visit go “without a hitch”? Would demonstrations lurch into ugly confrontations? Would the Gardaí mishandle the security challenge? Would there be gaffes or faux pas? Such concerns are understandable, at least on the part of those–civil servants in the Departments of the Taoiseach and Foreign Affairs, senior members of the Garda, the Government, the President, and so on–who are paid, at least in part, to worry about such things. For the rest of us, depending on how closely we can bear to watch the current conduct of our national affairs, they are–surely?–matters of more or less mild interest.
Or so I had believed.
For our interest in the minutiae of the planning of the Queen’s visit, it appeared, was avid. While the “exact details of her itinerary”, it was patiently explained to us, would be kept secret “for security reasons” (an appeal to the authority of the State’s security agencies that seems never to require elaboration), certain tidbits were distributed to those who hungered. Most of these were either vague (the Queen’s visit would extend beyond Dublin), dull (the British Foreign Secretary would be among her entourage) or presumptuously sententious (“symbolic acts”, we were assured, would take place at sites of national importance, as though this symbolism could be assigned before we had even witnessed these “acts”).
Poor as they were, these morsels were the staple diet of our major newspapers and of RTÉ, our national broadcaster, in the weeks before the visit. Accompanying them in almost every serving was the sauce of controversy. “Controversy”, of course, is perniciously attractive to our media. The very mention of the word can lend to an otherwise drab story a nimbus of excitement and currency. “Controversy” allows stories to be presented in terms of conflict. Representatives from each “side” can be marshalled into studios or op-ed pages, and their exchanges can usually be relied on to exhibit some degree of unpleasantness or rancour before too long. Meanwhile we (we readers, we listeners, we gawking bystanders) can also be relied on to indulge our strong, primordial impulse to stop and have a look if there seems to be a fight breaking out.
To what extent this “controversy” existed before discussions of the Queen’s visit began to dominate our public discourse is open to debate. It is a characteristic of our intricately symbiotic connections with the media we consume that it is often difficult to discern causes and effects, to tell whether certain voices are loud because they carry the amplitude of true importance or because they have been magnified to a shriek by a feedback loop.
In any case, it may not matter. The “controversy”, we were told, was over the timeliness of the visit. On one side, it seemed, were those who opposed the visit on the grounds that it was Too Soon. Our historical grievances were either too profound or too recent for such a gesture of rapprochement to be countenanced. In some of its formulations, this argument was persuasive. It is difficult, for instance, to declare the struggle for civil rights in the North altogether over when the conclusions of an inquiry into collusion by the RUC in the murder of solicitor Rosemary Nelson are only now reaching us. In seems less tenable, though, to argue that a British monarch cannot be entertained in Dublin while Ireland remains partitioned. The Belfast Agreement of 1998, which was strongly endorsed by referendum all over the island, clearly prescribed the only circumstances in which partition may be reversed, circumstances that are unlikely to arise for at least a generation.
Opposing the Too Sooners, of whatever faction, were the advocates of Maturity. Our colonial suffering, this side maintained, was long over. Our two cultures were intertwined. Our economies were interdependent. We all had cousins in Camden Town. We were bonded by our shared obsession with the arrangement of Cheryl Cole’s hair. If the Too Soon argument tended to harden into fundamentalism, the Maturity counterargument seemed constantly on the verge of collapsing into empty circularity. Those who objected to the royal visit must “move on”. Why? Because we, as a nation, have Moved On.
Many in the Maturity camp seemed fixated, too, on the notion of decorum as a manifestation of national sophistication. We would behave decorously towards the Queen, they insisted, because that is what the citizens of mature countries do. To stint in any of the niceties of high national occasion would be to betray our collective callowness, in much the same way as failing to sit up straight in church. This substitution of obligatory obsequies for a meaningful concept of civic propriety is especially silly.
For one thing, those who ended up meeting the Queen were a largely self-selecting group. Anyone who felt that an awkward half-curtsey and a minute or two of strained prattle might rupture their composure simply wouldn’t bother turning up. But the deeper misapprehension is of the significance of politeness and social ceremony in themselves. That these things are unusually prominent in British life has been well rehearsed, and excites both admiration and alienated distaste. But the British have had a very long time to sit around in country estates deciding upon the right way to cut a banana with a fork. Even without pointing out that many of these country estates were built with the proceeds of colonial enterprise, it seems obviously deluded to conflate courtliness with virtues of any kind.
Tedium aside, there are two principal objections to the debate, and to the spurious dichotomy from which so much coverage of the Queen’s visit was spun out. The first is that it was almost entirely irrelevant. By the time it took place, the visit had been decided upon by the Irish and British governments. Our President had issued a formal invitation. No one was waiting to see if we, collectively, were “okay with it” and nothing, short of full-scale rioting, was likely to prevent it. Because state visits, of course, are affairs of state. States move towards them and orchestrate them in accordance with the slowly converging currents of their national interests. For all their pomp and the emotions they incite, they are something states simply have to attend to, in more or less the same way that individuals have to remember to return invitations to dinner parties. Indeed, the diplomatic calculus involved is hardly all that different.
If we seemed to forget this, we may be assured that Queen Elizabeth II did not. A veteran of over five decades of state visits, she has placed thousands of wreaths at thousands of memorials and implacably endured so many displays of national styles of dance that she probably wishes there were a mermaid kingdom she could one day call on. She performs these functions because she believes it to be her duty. She is the nominal head of an enormous apparatus of state. She is also the personal owner of staggering wealth and property, much of which was accumulated by her royal forebears in a distinctly pre-democratic manner. In return for her immense wealth and privilege, she has to go and do a lot of standing around in chilly courtyards while people salute at her. That’s the gig.
The second objection to the debate and its coverage concerns its displacement of the serious. Let’s leave aside for now the obvious fact that events of genuine importance, events that should have had a much greater claim on both our attention and our emotions, continued to occur unabated in Libya, Sudan, Palestine, Syria and China, to name just a few. Roll calls of this kind can seem both trite and didactic, but sometimes the preponderance of distraction makes them unavoidable. The point, however, is that the quality of the coverage of the Queen’s state visit displaced even serious consideration of that very event.
And this idea of displacement is not just a metaphorical means of condemnation. It is an editorial reality. For every article in which someone celebrated, in ecstatic and entirely impressionistic terms, the “new phase of maturity” heralded by the royal visit, a judicious assessment of our complex and nuanced diplomatic relationship with Britain was sacrificed. For every incontinent denunciation of those “stuck in the past”, a clear-headed examination of how the British-Irish axis will influence our means of national financial recovery–if we should manage that–was spiked. These more serious pieces were probably never written, of course. They were probably never even commissioned. But this makes the displacement all the more complete.
The visit by Queen Elizabeth to Ireland was important, but it was important for pragmatic and prosaic reasons. It was important because it helps, in a modest way, to secure the continuing benefits of political normalisation in the North. It was important because an open and unsuspicious diplomatic relationship with Britain is strongly in our national interest. It was important because the public perception of a successful visit in Britain and elsewhere may boost our tourism market and help to dispel negative impressions that have persisted since the financial crisis began.
But it was not the culmination of any grand historical process, though the qualified success of the peace process was a necessary condition for it. To say otherwise is to slip into credulous teleology and hyperbole. And, of course, there was never anything to be quite so anxious about. The china was exquisite. The antimacassars were immaculate. We were not inexplicably naked.
And even if we had been, the Queen would still have been polite. “How interesting,” she would have remarked, maintaining eye contact all the while. “How very interesting.”
