Queen Elizabeth dies

September 8, 2022 • 1:00 pm

Here’s the official news:

She was 96, and her last official act was to install Liz Truss as Britain’s new Prime Minister. I trust St. Peter won’t hold that against her.

You can read more about the death at nearly every website and social media site, as well as every television and radio station, so I will leave you to peruse.

73 thoughts on “Queen Elizabeth dies”

        2. Because without royalty, the only alternative is Trump, makes perfect sense.

          Of Course, monarchy has, at every turn, stymied the anti-democratic tendencies of UK govt.

          Let’s imagine a situation which a well-functioning constitutional monarchy might effectively deal with:

          The UK govt calls an advisory and entirely non-binding referendum, on a fundamental and critical issue, which will affect generations of UK citizens. UK ministers lie, knowingly and blatantly, to win the vote, but they never apologise, and are never censured in any way (though lying in public office is a criminal offence).

          Once the results are in, EVERYBODY in govt treats the referendum as definitive and legally binding. The govt creates an entirely false interpretation of the result, unilaterally declaring that the public insists on the most extreme and abrupt of departures from the EU. It then becomes apparent that the vote was won illegally (this is proved in court). This means that if the referendum result had originally been declared legally binding, it would immediately become annulled. Unfortunately, as the original act of parliament declared the referendum as advisory, another act of parliament would be required to change things. The referendum continues to be treated as fully legally binding, while officially remaining advisory. The UK PM tries all sorts of anti-democratic practices to prevent debate and scrutiny, e.g. proroguing parliament. Eventually, after mass protests, including millions attending marches, the govt forces the UK out of the EU in the harshest way possible. It then makes every attempt to break international law by falling back on agreements it only recently made.

          And imagine that in the ‘advisory’ referendum ONLY 25% of the UK population voted for leave, and leave won by a TINY margin.

          Do you reckon millennia of royalty would be of any use in preventing such egregious abuses of ‘democracy’? Hmmmm…….

          I’m British, and I agree with Ken here. I don’t need the rigmarole of dealing with this nonsense, and especially the UK media over the next few weeks. I think that is what Ken was referring to – he’s not suggesting we argue over our various national constitutional frameworks. Life’s too short.

          1. UK ministers lie, knowingly and blatantly, to win the vote

            Not true. The government at the time was mostly in favour of remaining.

            EVERYBODY in govt treats the referendum as definitive and legally binding.

            Not just the government. The opposition parties did the same, for the most part.

          2. I’m sorry, you’re simply wrong.

            UK ministers lie, knowingly and blatantly, to win the vote
            Not true. The government at the time was mostly in favour of remaining.

            Yes, the government at the time was mostly in favour of remaining. Which, incidentally, makes their abrupt and unanimous 180 degree change of heart even more morally disgraceful. However, that doesn’t in any way mean UK ministers didn’t lie; Boris Johnson and Michael Gove told many lies, all documented, in order to ‘win’ the vote. They, and their fellow political grifters continued with this mendacious behaviour for many months after the vote. Ministers did lie – not all of them – but those that mattered most lied egregiously and frequently.

            And this is neither relevant, nor tells the whole story. In fact it highlights how anti-democratic the whole thing was:

            EVERYBODY in govt treats the referendum as definitive and legally binding.
            Not just the government. The opposition parties did the same, for the most part.

            First of all, what I said about govt members is 100% true. The problem is that the majority of Tory MPs and ministers didn’t want to leave the EU, but they were forced to follow the govt’s line or face ostracism. This was demonstrated in the run up to the last election, when BJ callously forced moderate, dissenting MP’s from the party like a budget, pound-shop Stalin.

            Labour was the only other party that mattered, and its members were similarly controlled and coerced. Jeremy Corbyn held strong anti-EU views because of his extreme left-wing ideology. His opposition to EU controls on state-sponsorship of industry were primarily responsible for this. Those views were not in anyway representative of the party or the populace, but his vanity and ideological stubbornness blocked any possibility of preventing the Tory led coup.

          3. What would have been different if we simply had a symbolic president instead of the monarchy? If we had a presidency with clout instead of a symbolic institution then we run the risk of Trump like characters getting into office. Brexit and Trump were both populist movements. I’m told people get the government they deserve.

            The British monarchy is “mostly harmless”. As would be a symbolic presidency. Putin anyone?

          4. I don’t understand your reply.

            You raised the false dichotomy of monarchy versus Trump, Implying Trump wouldn’t happen in a monarchy. I disagreed, providing evidence that stupid, anti-democratic and populist decisions (like appointing Trump) are not only made in republics.

            You said Brexit and Trump were populist movements, but one happened in a republic, the other in a constitutional monarchy. This just underlines my point.

      2. Yes, you republics don`t have any rigmarole. How many vehicles in the average presidential cavalcade?

        1. As I mentioned above, I really don’t think he is advocating a competition between republicans and monarchists. It’s just a comment regarding the media and institutional cavalcade we will have to put up with in the UK.

  4. Liz Truss just referred to the King as “Charles III”. I wonder if that’s actually the name he’ll go by.

  5. i am completely not a monarchist and I am an Irish Republican and an atheist, but all respect to Queen Elizabeth – a good woman, may she rest in peace.

  8. “The King and The Queen Consort will remain at Balmoral…..” I know the transfer it happens instantly but it’s a bit jarring to see it written down so quickly. I guess the national anthem will revert to the previous version too – nobody under the age of 70 has sung that one

    1. My party trick is singing it to the tune of the Marseillaise! You need to do two verses but it works very well, especially the line “confound their politicks, frustrate their knavish tricks…”!

    2. Yes, my 83-year-old mother said to me today that she hadn’t sung “God Save the King” since she was 12. She remembers watching the coronation on TV.

      1. I recall that at school ( primary 1 ) all pupils recieved a Coronation Mug and pencil case.

    1. Yup, g*d alone knows where Boris Johnson has been lurking on holiday during the leadership race. I hope he washed his hands before he met Liz II at Balmoral the other day!

      Meanwhile, our youngest is hoping for a day or two off school…!

  10. I wasn’t expecting to feel this sad. The monarchy is hard to justify as an institution, but she became queen 2 years before I was born, and it feels like a link with the past has gone. She seems to have been highly regarded in some unlikely places. I remember hearing Kenneth Kaunda, who had been imprisoned by the British, and became the first President of Zambia, talking about how much he valued and respected her advice. RIP.

    2. I always see England and France as like family. They fight but they defend one another too.

  12. I met the late Queen twice. She had a gift for making you feel that, for a moment or two, she was genuinely interested in you and why you were there.

    I must say, I am more upset than I thought I would be.

    1. Talk of meeting the Queen reminded me of a piece by the late, and IMO great, humourist Alan Coren. It opens: “The only time I lunched with the Queen, the first words she said to me were, ‘Have you any idea what a trial it is to own a golf course?”

      Later in the piece he discusses encounters with other members of the royal family:“It thus came as no surprise to me when, soon after, their son stopped doing Bluebottle impressions and began confiding in flora, leaving me with a conviction rendered all the more unshakeable by the Princess Royal, who when I invited her to a Punch lunch and apologised for limping on a swollen knee, said: ‘Yes, it’s been a ghastly year for equine VD. Did you know it can cause rheumatoid arthritis in jockeys? Everyone’s taking phenylbutazone.”

      I tend to share his attitude: ““They are a very odd lot, and they stand in a long and remarkably impressive line of highly peculiar figures of whom this country ought never to cease for one instant to be proud.”

    2. Dad was “presented” ( ?) to the queen twice I think. He’s still with us, but can’t remember anything – mum will doubtless be able to find a photo, although she had to settle for being presented to Phil the Greek herself (many years later).

  13. This quote sprang to mind on seeing the news:

    … At a point in the not-too-remote future [12 years as it turned out], the stout heart of Queen Elizabeth II will cease to beat. At that precise moment, her firstborn son will become head of state, head of the armed forces, and head of the Church of England. In strict constitutional terms, this ought not to matter much. The English monarchy, as has been said, reigns but does not rule. From the aesthetic point of view it will matter a bit, because the prospect of a morose bat-eared and chinless man, prematurely aged, and with the most abysmal taste in royal consorts, is a distinctly lowering one. …

    I’m sure most here can identify the author.

  15. JK Rowling tweeted her condolences – the usual mob showed up to say “You’re next” etc. ad infinitum…

    1. There is an odd phenomenon in certain U.S. circles, in which it became fashionable many years ago to reflexively diss or trash the band Nickelback. The genesis of the trend is a mystery to me, but I know that many, many “hip” people who have literally never heard music by Nickelback are more than willing to leap in and make them a punchline. (For the record, I’ve not heard the band’s music, and have never joined the “let’s mock Nickelback” trend).

      I’ve come to the conclusion that much the same has happened to J.K. Rowling. Once a darling of Millennials and others for her Harry Potter books (not a big fan, myself), a few “trans activists” decided to tar her with inaccurate or exaggerated “crimes.” Since then, a certain kind of person feels compelled to reflexively bash Rowling as a “bigot,” but when pressed, many cannot tell you **why** she should be considered one. When presented with the facts of her alleged “anti-trans” words—which are anything but—most still seem unable to get off the train.

      The human brain is a mess.

  16. She was cool – I grew up in Australia where she’s on the currency and NZ where she’s much more popular than Oz.
    I’m not a monarchist but she was OK. And waaay better than her homeopathy pushing son (sigh)
    D.A.
    NYC

  17. Sniff, sniff. Oh dear, what a pity, never mind.
    Hopefully King Big-Ears, Charlie-3, will make such a mess of the job that we’re a Republic by 2030.

    (For reference : I I met any of the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas hill walking no Lochnagar (+/- few km) I’d chew the hillwalking fat happily. Then as we both go back to reality, work to build their communal guillotine. After all, you wouldn’t want to be the first head in the basket, like Charlie I.

    1. It’s impossible to make a mess of the job. All you have to do is shake people’s hands and not say anything politically controversial ever. Charlie will be much improved by having to shut up about all the crank stuff he is or was into.

  18. A New York Times headline: “An Inscrutable Monarch, Endlessly Scrutinized Onstage and Onscreen.”

    It must gash the media that she was not scrutable, as it were, and that she was not inclined to answer any and every bloody impertinent and fatuous piffle question that popped into their collective mind. (Jaqueline Kennedy – espedially vis-a-vis that harpy Barbara Walters – comes to mind.)

    Another fatuous NY Times headline: “Queen Elizabeth II and the Shape of 20th-Century Power Dressing.” (At a U.S. Navy school years ago I remember an instructor referring to “power tanning.”)

    2. I believe the “power tanning” concept originated with the Zonker Harris character in Gary Trudeau’s Doonesbury strip.

  19. Would you have felt somehow cheated had Charles been born with “normal, average-sized” ears?

  20. I was such an Anglophile 60 years ago… Lovely time. But I changed and got more realistic and educated, but still some old fondness surfaces. Liz’s coronation was the first TV I ever saw at a neighbor’s place June 1953. Charles of course is an unmitigated disaster. Because he talks like “they” do, people think he is smart and royal. He has been and likely will be a disaster for science. [viz. Edzard Ernst, Charles: The Alternative Prince, an Unauthorized Biography (2022)] It really is FINALLY the time to end this embarassing monachy relic!

  21. My understanding is that the late queen was a fan (if that term can be applied to a royal) of the US evangelical huckster Billy Graham. I was always more partial to Prince Philip, the royal consort and Duke of Edinburgh. He was long president of BAFTA, the World Wildlife Fund, the Zoological Society of London, and the Council of Engineering Institutions, and he won my admiration as a result of this (unverifiable) story. At the ceremony to hand over sovereignty to an independent Kenya, Prince Philip supposedly leaned over to Jomo Kenyatta and cheerfully whispered: “you know old chap, you could still change your mind.”

  22. and her last official act was to install Liz Truss as Britain’s new Prime Minister. I trust St. Peter won’t hold that against her.

    St Peter may not. But you can bet for sure that those of us condemned to living under Truss will. And we won’t let King Big Ears or Queens Consort the First Adulterer forget it.

  23. Honestly I don’t normally give much thought to the Queen Of England. But seeing the news one thing that strikes me is that, when public life and public figures have grown ever more crass, it’s sad to see a well known paragon of class and civility leave the stage. The world is just a bit more coarse for it.

  24. My sense of her was that she had a great sense of duty, which is a much scarcer quality than it used to be.
    My prediction is that Charles is going to drive any remaining respect for the monarchy into the ground.

  25. Charles III has quite a legacy to live up to. Under his predecessor Charles II, England suffered the greatest maritime humiliation in its history: the Dutch navy sailed up the Thames, put a line on the Royal Navy’s flagship HMS Royal Charles, and towed it back to the Netherlands as a prize of war. And there was his earlier predecessor Charles I, who got into a tiff with Parliament and rather lost his head.

    1. King Charles may well behave differently from Prince Charles. And although he may live into his 90s like both his parents, I think unlike his mother he’d be inclined to abdicate if his health deteriorated. So we may get King William V sooner than we think.

    2. The Dutch only got as far as the Thames estuary – it was the river Medway that they sailed up, although Upnor Castle caused them some problems IIRC (although I grew up nearby, so perhaps we were fed local propaganda).

      1. Thanks, Jez. I looked at the map and now understand where where the Royal dockyard was located in the Medway estuary. The Medway raid is still a good story, and a neat bit of seamanship by the Dutch, but not as remarkable as it would have been had they actually sailed up the Thames. I wonder if the story elicits the merriment it deserves among schoolchildren in the Netherlands?

  26. She was a serious drinker.

    She takes a gin and Dubonnet before lunch, with a slice of lemon and a lot of ice. She will take wine with lunch and a dry Martini and a glass of champagne in the evening.”

    The online newspaper also goes on to say the Queen’s booze intake comes in at around six units (the standard used to measure alcohol portions in the UK) each day, which would technically make her a binge drinker according to government standards. Despite what the National Health Service might say though, you can’t deny that Queen E is still pretty peppy at the ripe young age of 91.

    https://www.tastingtable.com/694260/queen-elizabeth-drinks-cocktails-day/

  27. I realize that I’m biased, a product of my time and culture (late Boomer/early Gen X, USA), but I always find it astonishing that there are people who truly advocate for monarchy as a better system than republicanism or democracy. Even here!

    1. It’s not an alternative to democracy, it’s a form of democracy called a constitutional monarchy. It’s not a system anyone would devise from scratch, but an evolution of monarchy that allows it to be accommodated within a democratic polity. Both executive and non-executive presidencies have drawbacks, which is why monarchies still persist — i.e. not as a “good” option, but sometimes as a “least worst” one.

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