Saluting an empty train

The media coverage of the Queen's funeral added manufactured emotion to carefully scripted costume drama.

Previously:
1. Mourning sickness
2. QueueAnon

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I wondered for a moment whether it was in good taste to write critically about the coverage of the Queen’s funeral but then I read The Times Fashion Editor’s verdict (“Oh my, those uniforms . . .”) and MailOnline analysing the emotions of the dead monarch’s favourite pony (“…viewers claim the faithful pet even 'curtsied' as the cortège drove past”).

I saw journalists tweeting that it was “a big news day”, but it was the opposite; spectacle is not news. The events of the Queen’s funeral were planned for decades, a carefully constructed machinery for mourning that had at its heart not the woman who wore the crown but the idea of the Queen. News could have occurred during the events, but it didn’t; there was only the expected ceremony and a sprinkling of trivia.

The hours of broadcast coverage and the hundreds of pages of newspaper reports all rely upon the same lies: That the events represent hundreds of years of tradition, that Britain is uniquely good at pageantry, that there is a unified ‘national mood’ which has produced a ‘spontaneous outpouring of grief’, and that other countries 'envy’ this.

There is nothing “ancient” about the show we were treated to yesterday. In his classic 1986 essay, The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: The British Monarchy and the ‘Invention of Tradition’, David Cannadine explained:

At [George IV’s] funeral at Windsor, William IV talked constantly and walked out early. “We never saw so motley, so rude, so ill-managed a body of persons”, noted The Times in its description of the mourners.

William, for his part, loathed ceremonial and ostentation, and tried to dispense with his coronation altogether. Eventually, he allowed it to proceed, but it was so truncated that it became mockingly known as the ‘Half-Crownation’. His funeral was equally squalid… The ceremony was long and tedious and mourners loitered, laughed, gossiped and sniggered within sight of the coffin.

Nor was Victoria’s coronation any more impressive. It was completely unrehearsed; the clergy lost their place in the order of service; the choir was pitifully inadequate; the archbishop of Canterbury put the ring on a finger that was too big for it; and two of the trainbearers talked throughout the entire ceremony.

Albert’s funeral was almost a private affair at Windsor, as was the wedding of the Prince of Wales… Punch protested that the wedding should take place at Windsor — “an obscure Berkshire village, noted only for an old castle with no sanitary arrangements”. And once again the planning and organisation were woefully inadequate… Disraeli was obliged to sit on his wife’s lap.

Cannadine goes on to discuss how the image of the monarch as a national matriarch/ patriarch was only established around the deaths of Queen Victoria and Edward VII. He also identifies how the launch of the Daily Mail in 1896 began a shift in the press from “savage cartoons and editorials” attacking royalty to turning a blind eye, performing ‘respect’, and reporting breathlessly on ceremonies.

The ‘modern’ Daily Mail adheres to that tradition. Sarah Vine writes:

Since the announcement of the Queen’s passing almost two weeks ago, this country has been on a journey, some might say a pilgrimage, even. We have coalesced around her memory, rediscovered a sense of nationhood. We have united in grief, but also in love, respect and gratitude…

… Such a spontaneous outpouring of genuine emotion feels so deeply unexpected and special, particularly in these harsh, unforgiving times. I can’t think of any other single public figure, save perhaps the Pope, who could stir such depth of feeling.

There was nothing spontaneous about it. The lying in state — an innovation that was only introduced after the death of Edward VII — was designed to produce The Queue. It was not an accident but an advert, a deliberate piece of marketing for monarchy. ‘We’ have been told what we feel throughout the mourning period.

Ersatz emotion is easier for newspaper columnists and TV anchors to generate than honest reflections on events. Better to talk in sweeping terms of what ‘we’ all feel than to ask questions of the spectacle. Even genuine emotion is part of the mourning machine; it’s why details of who cried and when during the private burial have made their way into the newspapers; “palace sources” make sure that no tear is wasted.

Near the end of the BBC’s funeral coverage, Kirsty Young delivered a monologue that has received a lot of praise:

It’s often felt in recent days that a veil of sorrow has covered the nation, but the Queen’s funeral has surely exemplified her reign — she united us in one final act of togetherness, unifying the United Kingdom and the world beyond in respect, ceremony and significance. As a very young woman, she famously said, her whole life whether it be long or short would be devoted to our service.

Well, never was a person truer to their word. And today we have come together, many of us with tears in our eyes, but all of us with an abiding warmth in our hearts for all that she gave.

Just over three months ago the world, and a certain little bear, said ‘Thank you, for everything’ and The Queen looked as though she thoroughly enjoyed the occasion. We will, surely, be ever grateful to have had that final opportunity to celebrate with Her Majesty her remarkable and long reign.

If, as she once said, ‘grief is the price we pay for love,’ then the weight of our collective sorrow is a testament to the depth of affection in which she is held. She made history, she was history. Queen Elizabeth II is gone. But she will surely never be forgotten.”

It is greeting card sentiments dressed up in funeral clothes, generalisations tarted up as universal emotion. Even before Paddington — recently installed as boatman of the river Styx — was evoked, it was a series of tooth-rotting saccharine sentiments and platitudes; how did she serve us? What are we meant to be grateful for? ‘We’ just are; no further questions, no space for doubt.

The effect of the funeral pomp as propaganda is typified by the reaction of The Daily Telegraph’s Allison Pearson — Leni Riefenstahl with a Macbook — who writes:

For too long, we have thought that nothing in this country works any more. Boy, did this work. It is, we were glad to be reminded, what we still do best. Pageantry, precision, the click of spurs, the hypnotic death-beat of the drums, the crunch of synchronised boots, the flashes of scarlet and gold, fluttering plumes of swan feathers, heralds as colourful and intricately-patterned as playing cards, the skirl of the advancing pipers in formidable formation, the full-moon circles of naval caps when a hundred sailors’ heads were bowed.

“The hypnotic death-beat of the drums…” A mind paid to be more inquiring than Pearson might connect why “nothing in this country works any more” to the unearned wealth displayed in monarchic ceremonies and what those in power choose to ensure goes without a hitch. But that would be a mind less turned out by the “crunch of synchronised boots”.

The breathless reports of the parades make much of small details — attempting to read a pony’s mind or project emotions on unfortunate corgis destined for a life with Prince Andrew, fussing over feathers, hats and buttons — but a comment a friend made to me about soldiers and sailors having to march through horse manure stuck with me; it could be the UK’s motto: Onwards through the shit.

Even in the aftermath of the funeral, columnists and commentators are stretching to use it as a sign that the UK is not a nation in decline but one that other countries want to mimic. For The Daily Mail, Stephen Glover howled, “Look at all the leaders at today's funeral and try telling me we're the paltry little country our bien-pensant detractors would have us believe.”

In The Times, beneath a headline asserting that the funeral was “the grandest the world has ever seen” (days like this don’t require evidence), Ben McIntyre concludes:

[It] was about royalty and one woman’s achievement, but it was also about us. We were witnessing ourselves; and for a brief and no doubt transitory moment, we liked what we saw.

I could stare at the footage of those processions for a hundred hours and not see myself in them. I know that I am not alone. But the insistent ‘we’ of the coverage demands we think otherwise, drums so loudly that it’s hard to concentrate on the shaky history of these traditions or to stick firmly to the belief that the irrationality that comes with them is a sickness that curses the nation.

David Cannadine, now Professor Sir David Cannadine, was among the BBC’s talking heads during its funeral coverage; once a young critic analysing the performance, he’s now an actor in it. A knighthood often helps to ease that transition.

The newspapers’ brief love affair with the BBC — the reviews of its coverage are largely rapturous — won’t last until the end of the week, but the Queen’s death will leave us with a long tail of weirdness. Today, in The Times alone, Hugo Rifkind argues Labour can only win the next election if it goes all out on monarchism (To win, Labour must sing God Save the King) and Sara Tor writes a truly weird ‘what if…?’ column (If the Queen had been Muslim, the women would have washed her¹)

Strip away the unfounded claims, dodgy history, heightened rhetoric, and sugary emotionalism and the funeral seems like the special train put on to take mourners from Penzance to London — empty, expensive and destined not to reach its intended destination. 70 years from now, I’m sure a future Cannadine will reflect on the coverage and clearly see the artifice.

1. The headline of the online version has since been changed to ‘Queen’s funeral was moving whatever your faith’