BY ALEX STORY
The men were gathered around the barbecue toying with red coals. A Down Syndrome boy slid the glass door and stepped into the garden.
He looked up and said as clearly as his disability allowed: “The Queen is dead”. A long silence followed.
He then added: “It’s ok because her son is now King”.
As he made his way back into the house, he left another period of intense stillness in his wake.
By the red embers and the light smoke, those who cared to look could discern the eyes of grown men welling up, their throats too tight to utter a sound.
It hit us like a thunderbolt: We never thought we would ever hear these words.
She was a constant in a turbulent world. Naturally dignified, she was our anchor in the rough seas of national and world affairs.
Few knew their country, be it in Great Britain or across the vast lands of Commonwealth Realms, without the Queen.
Over 86% of the population of the United Kingdom was either born or arrived in the country during her long reign.
She was part of us. As such, the sorrow, when she left was felt very personally by millions of us.
Her passing and the long mourning that ensued revealed a great deal about the reality of the Country.
It also blew apart, for keen observers, a handful of fragile but readily accepted perceptions.
Firstly, the people of the United Kingdom sincerely support the Monarchy. It is only during such events that, through their actions, their voices are truly heard. The appetite for a Republic is small.
This much was visible as the news spread of her passing, with people naturally gathering by the many Royal Palaces across the land to sing “God Save the Queen”.
The Proclamation of her son Charles as our King, on September 10th, was understood and accepted as natural.
Secondly, the United Kingdom is much more united than is often thought or wished.
The Queen knew, according to sources in charge of her security, towards the end of 2021 that she would probably not see the end of 2022.
Her fervent wish, it was said, was to die in Scotland. To keep the Islands together was her final act of devotion for the Kingdom.
A short while after she breathed her last, to the amazement of most in the mediatic world, Scots turned up in their hundreds of thousands to pay their last respects, waving Union flags and singing our national anthem.
The Scottish Nationalists, so present in our media, so aggressive in their hatred of the English and the Union, disappeared from view.
Their message of division and disunion was, for the mourning period and perhaps beyond, drowned by the facts on the ground.
Thirdly, the ancient machinery of the Monarchy purred like an old school Bentley. The Proclamation, the pageantry, the gigantic military operation, the Lying in State in which millions upon millions queued as free peoples to say their goodbyes, all pointed to a system deeply rooted in the popular psyche.
The roots of the Monarchy go very deep. In addition, survivability brings with it legitimacy.
Elizabeth II was the thirty-second great granddaughter of Alfred, King of England from 871 to 899 AD; King Charles III continues the line of the same. Legitimacy indeed.
However, while the passing of the Queen and the proclamation of a new King will be marked in the minds of many as one of the most memorable and beautiful events of the year 2022, the United Kingdom showed the world another, much less inspiring facet: her politics.
The year started with Boris Johnson and ended with Rishi Sunak. In the meantime, for 50 days, the briefest of moments – blink and you might have missed it – we had Elizabeth Truss, as fleeting in her position as her regal namesake was enduring.
In fact, we had five Governments since 2016, an average of one every 1.2 years, fast taking us to the Italian post war average of one every 1.1 years.
Having won by such a large margin in December 2019, psephologists were talking of the Johnsonian era. Boris would be our Prime Minister for a decade at least, they told us. How wrong they were.
From winning a majority in parliament greater than at any time since 1987 only three short years ago, the Conservative Party finds itself facing oblivion.
The removal of Boris Johnson in July 2022, however satisfying it might have felt to some, was not cost free.
To many, the principle of democracy itself was trampled underfoot for the sake of expediency.
Large numbers of people voted for Boris in 2019. They had wanted the opportunity to judge him via the ballot box at the forthcoming general election. They did not want small but powerful interest groups to decide for them.
So, by removing him from office, by hook or by crook, the message was sent out: the ballot box is all but meaningless. It was received loud and clear.
Worse from the perspective of the electorate, Boris and his party had done well enough in the May local elections of 2022 for The Economist, the British international weekly, to state that the result was “not enough for Labour to win the next general election”, adding “the Labour Party was finding it hard to build up real momentum with the electorate, despite “Partygate” and rising anxiety about the spiralling cost of living.”
Voters, in other words, and not for the first time, saw things through a very different lens than the experts in London.
In addition, Boris won a “vote of no-confidence” a few weeks later in June 2022. In other words, he lost neither the confidence of the Party nor that of the House.
By July though he was forced to resign. The grounds?
Chris Pincher, an MP with a long history of sexual harassment, drunkenly groped two men from the Cypriot delegation at the Carlton Club, a gentleman’s club a few hundred yards from Buckingham Palace. Having promoted him to Deputy Chief Whip, and joked “Pincher by name, pincher by nature”, Boris was felt to have lied about his knowledge of the sexually wayward MP.
On that basis, a small group of MPs, less than 15% of the Parliamentary Party, decided to act. The rules, which stated that he couldn’t be challenged for another year after winning a “Vote of No Confidence”, would be changed if he refused to jump on his sword, he was told.
Having played and won by the rules, he was, like the electorate, told they did not actually matter.
Having defenestrated the legitimate Prime Minister from the perspective of the electorate, Conservative Members of Parliament had to find an ersatz.
They went for Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss.
One was deemed competent; the other honest.
All the while, survey after survey showed Boris to be much more popular than both. Indeed, Boris was 286% (63-22) more popular with the membership than the “honest one” and over 357% (68-19) more so than “the competent one”, according to Opinium, a polling company, taking soundings during the last leg of the leadership campaign in August 2022.
After a long drawn-out leadership contest in which only the Conservative Party membership voted, mystifying the country in the process, the “honest one” won – however, against the majority of our most ambitious MPs’ wishes: They had actually wanted Rishi Sunak.
The scene was set for another Byzantine-style coup.
Indeed, Liz Truss stayed long enough in office to travel to Balmoral, shake the Queen’s hand on the 6th of September, return to London in time to see the whole country go into a long period of mourning, make one of two pronouncements, which, among other things, are said to have led to a run on the Pound Sterling.
Before she could resign in a dignified manner, she was thrown under the bus by her colleagues, who only a couple of weeks before had told the country that she was the one to take the United Kingdom forward.
After her resignation, calls for Boris to come back became louder.
Rishi Sunak, knowing that his chances of winning against Bojo in a two-horse membership vote was close to zero, threatened to make his erstwhile boss’ life a misery, if, Lazarus like, he deigned to make a Prime Ministerial comeback.
Boris demurred.
He went away to amuse the rest of the world, generating over £1 million in revenue in a few short weeks.
Rishi Sunak thus became Prime Minister – against the ballot box.
Britain has never seemed this politically directionless. This is reflected in polls: Labour is currently 26% up, looking solid on 45%. Rishi Sunak’s party is nearly half as popular as under Bojo, wallowing at 19% of support. The Conservative Party is standing over a precipice.
The reason? Sunak has no legitimacy.
By the end of October, Britain, for the first time in her long history, saw two Monarchs, three Prime Ministers and, dare we say it, four chancellors. All the while, our problems, from inflation and national debt to crime and immigration, grow worse daily.
While the Monarchy and its majesty showed us that our institutions are stronger than they often appear, our politicians seem hell bent on bringing the whole edifice down.
Our politics, in 2022, became recognisably Italian, with all that entails. The omens for 2023 and beyond are not good.
Alex Story is Head of Business Development at a City broker working with Hedge Funds and other financial institutions. He stood for parliament in 2005, 2010 and 2015. In 2016, he won the right to represent Yorkshire & the Humber in the European Parliament. He didn’t take the seat.