Queen Elizabeth II
You may have noted that I was due to come back to the newsletter last week, and I didn't. For that, apologies, it's been a very busy time, not least with the arrangements for me to leave the Civil Service and start in the private sector in November. I have spent the best part of 20 years in the Civil Service so it's a big change for me, and it's in light of this personal change that I thought I'd share some of my thoughts on the Queen, the public and grief.
Many obituaries have said that most of us knew little about the Queen. Although she's met hundreds of thousands of people in Britain and around the world, few had experienced more than a couple of polite words. She was a not a woman who expressed political opinions in public, something that the Civil Service code has given me experience of since we too are not allowed to express political opinions in public. For us, it's so we can serve the government of our time. For her, it's so those political views do not push away that part of the public who would disagree with her. She wanted to serve her people as best she could. As a public servant I have the utmost respect that she's done so successfully for 70 years.
This lack of personal knowledge of the Queen has allowed us to have a certain relationship with her, not dissimilar from the relationship one has to a therapist. In the therapy room, a therapist shares little to nothing of their life. This allows the subject to project feelings and emotions onto the therapist, and explore those emotions in a safe space. Something similar has happened with the Queen and people have projected a lot of their own personal feelings onto the Queen herself and her family.
This can show itself in a lot of ways. One we're seeing at the moment is a country of many people deeply moved at her departure. Some of this is about the Queen herself, of course, but a lot is people remembering the death of their grandmother, or mother and grieving the end of that relationship. The Queen was on TV when we gathered with our families each year at Christmas. At moments when we were worried about our families, most recently during the pandemic, she had a message for us, and therefore she was wound into all those events and stories.
As such, for those who do not have the Queen in that position in their lives, they're seeing what appears to be an outpouring of grief out of proportion to the role the Queen could possibly have had. They're right, but as I've outlined above, what we're seeing here is something much more nuanced and complex. Even if you disagree with them about our constitution, the Royal Family or the Queen, I think we need to understand that what you're seeing is the expression of a deeper set of feelings than you might be able to imagine. Personally, I think that sympathy rather than judgement is in order.
This, of course, works the other way as well. Many people do not have the Queen in that position in their lives. They may have deeply-held Republican views, they may have a personal dislike of the Royal Family. They may never have projected any emotions onto the Queen. Or they may have projected a much more complex collections of emotions. Maybe their relationship with their mother or grandmother was complicated or non-existent. Whatever the reason that people feel detached from the common feelings of loss and grief, those we disagree with also need understanding and sympathy rather than judgement.
Personally, I never 'met' the Queen. I attended a few events she was also at, so I've seen her from a distance a few times. These moments were not life-changing for me. That said, there's a sense as a Civil Servant that your Queen is also, ultimately, the boss. She's not in charge - the ministers make the decisions - but she's the figurehead we see at the top of the organisation. For many Civil Servants her relentless devotion to public service has been an inspiration. We all chose our jobs, she did not, and she has done that job with no public complaint, and unstinting devotion, for 70 years. She did her job from palaces and castles, but I know I wouldn't have swapped places.
Finally, there is a lot of protocol that will be enacted over the coming weeks. It's been planned for a long time, and once upon a time I played a tiny role updating a previous version of these arrangements. Much of this will seem strange, stilted or outdated. There's a truth to this. However, tradition is a comfort many of us turn to when times are difficult. Knowing, in our grief, there is an order - a model - that we need to follow makes dealing with that grief easier. I remember when my mother died, the structure of what was expected from her funeral, and expressing her wishes, was a comfort. Some of those traditions wouldn't have held up to the bright light of rationality, but that's not the point. There isn't much that feels rational about grief. Traditions, whether they be the huge funeral of a head of state or the small funeral of a deeply loved mother, contain our grief, and give it an order. They put a death into the wider context of history and allow us to feel emotions that seem too large to express and contain.
These rituals often seem odd and inexplicable, and often that's the point. We do unusual things when someone dies, and we do them only when someone dies. Over our lives this allows us to connect these rituals together and understand death at some deeper level than they would if no traditions were followed at all. These odd traditions come to us after decades, centuries, millennia of human experience. They are tried and tested. They work.