For once, politicians started the hagiography and the media followed, not the other way around.
Queen Elizabeth II was “one of the greatest leaders the world has even known”, said Liz Truss, as she led tributes to the late sovereign in the Commons. John McFall, speaker of the House of Lords, said that he “greatly admired her thoroughly modern approach to communications. She thrived in the television and radio era from the very outset of her reign, and did more than any other monarch to open up the royal family to embrace the outside world”: quite a verdict on a woman who never gave a media interview, and never knowingly expressed a public opinion on anything,other than her love of horses and dogs. Lindsey Hoyle, the Commons speaker, even said that the Queen’s funeral would be “the most important event the world will ever see”.
When Elizabeth acceded to the throne in 1952, opined Harriet Harman, “she stepped up, as a 25-year-old married woman with two children, to take her place at the head of this nation and play a huge role on the world stage. What determination and courage that must have taken. The Prime Ministers she dealt with were mostly men, and mostly twice her age.” Harman spoke of the late Queen as if she was a hard-pressed single mother in her Peckham constituency, not a monarch.
Almost everyone has described the Queen’s 70-year reign as a uniquely difficult burden, bravely borne. But many women of her generation have had far worse burdens, some of them enduring for seven decades or more. Caring for a disabled child, or living with a chronic health problem of their own. Miserable and inescapable marriages. Childhood traumas that lingered well into old age. In most cases these afflictions would have been borne without a range of palaces to move between, and without a sovereign grant.
Continue reading
After the dam breaks, a flood of analysis and recrimination. More than ten days on from Labour’s catastrophic defeat in the general election, the pain is still raw, and many in the party don’t seem to have realised the enormity of what has happened.
I am writing this as Members of Parliament are gathered in Westminster, on the first Saturday since the Falklands conflict of 1982, for yet another “make or break” day of reckoning on Brexit. MPs have just voted narrowly to pass Oliver Letwin’s amendment, delaying a decision on Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal and compelling him to request an extension of Article 50.
News that the redeveloped London Bridge station 
Holocaust denial at Labour party meetings. Jewish members being called “dirty Zionists”, or worse. Party staffers being made to sign Non-Disclosure Agreements to stop them speaking out against the lack of action against the culprits. Interventions by Jeremy Corbyn’s office, and the party’s general secretary Jennie Formby, to change the composition of disciplinary panels, apparently to thwart them from expelling those found to have been anti-semitic. The appointment of Thomas Gardiner as head of the party’s disputes unit, who downgraded sanctions against several anti-semites from expulsions to suspension, or from suspensions to warnings. 
Alex Grant 