Politicians and political parties often have nothing useful to say but this rarely leaves them speechless. On the contrary, the expectation that something must be said typically results in pronouncements so anodyne they are designed to merely nod to meaning rather than reveal it. Some things are chiefly questions of form.
So I suppose one cheer may be raised in response to the Scottish Green Party’s response to the death of Prince Philip. Rather than treat the same lines of courtesy followed by every other organisation of its type, the Greens thought this a moment for a more bracing dose of honesty. “We recognise that the passing of the Duke of Edinburgh will be felt deeply by some across the country,” the party said, “and express our sympathies with his family, who join many others who have lost loved ones in this last year.”
Well, that’s one way of reading the room, guys. Even Sinn Fein — the party historically associated with an organisation that murdered Prince Philip’s uncle, Lord Mountbatten — did better than that. Extending her “sincere condolences”, Michelle O’Neill, Sinn Fein’s deputy leader, noted the “significant interventions” made by members of the royal family in assisting the “building of relationships between Britain and Ireland” before concluding: “To all those of a unionist tradition and of British identity — those who value and cherish the royal family — I wish to acknowledge the sense of loss felt.”
One does not always expect empathy from Sinn Fein but a large dollop of what we might call simple decency is the ability to sympathise with those whose views do not neatly match our own. One of the most unattractive features of British — or Scottish — republicanism is the manner in which its adherents evidently consider themselves better, more intelligent people than those who foolishly see some value in the monarchy or, even worse, those who can go years without thinking about the royal family at all.
But if nothing else, you might have expected the Scottish Greens to recall Prince Philip’s 35-year association with the World Wide Fund for Nature (formerly the World Wildlife Fund), first as president of the organisation’s British arm and then, from 1981 to 1996, as its international president. In that role, I suppose it is possible to think the duke has done more for environmental and ecological causes than any member of the Scottish Green Party.
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But the Greens’ statement is revealing nonetheless. For in its priggishness, its unearned sense of its own moral superiority, its sneering contempt for those so foolish as to take a different view from that held by Patrick Harvie and his chums, and its snivelling attempt to suggest the death of the Queen’s consort is of no greater import than the death of any other citizen, you see so many of the characteristics that make the Green party an unacquired political taste. Truly, they are the unco guid, so infatuated with their own self-righteousness that they have no need for any other form of intoxication.
The death of a 99-year-old man can neither be considered a shock or a surprise. Nor, this year of all years, is it tinged with even a modicum of tragedy. But the death of the Queen’s husband, a background presence in the lives of so many for so long, is not the same as any other death. It may not cut us to the bone but the sympathy felt for the monarch, alone now after 73 years of marriage, is both wider and deeper than sceptics or scoffers might imagine.
This is a minor premonition, then, of the earthquake that will strike the UK when the Queen herself dies. We know this will take place but the magnitude of that jolt to the system remains imponderable until such time as it happens. It will be a moment for national reflection; the end of one era and the beginning of another and all at once all things will seem possible.
The royal life is indeed an absurd one, a fact accepted and admitted by the Duke of Edinburgh himself. It is a strange amalgam of great privilege and extraordinary banality; a gilded prison from which its members are only liberated by an acceptance of their duty. That is an old-fashioned term, of course, and one which may sometimes deserve a certain measure of mockery but it is also, despite all, something which has some meaning.
For the point of royalty is, in the end, to serve simply by being. Like many other British institutions — the NHS, the BBC, the House of Lords — you might be unlikely to build it like this if you were starting from scratch but permanent things can have value even if they fail tests of logic or rationality. Because nations — which, like monarchy, are real things built upon an imaginary premise — require these points of reference, of communality, of glue.
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Which is one reason why so many countries that have dispensed with royalty then construct an ersatz replacement for the lost pomp and unity traditionally associated with the crown. Should you doubt this, consider not just the fate of Jackie Kennedy but the panegyrics delivered on the occasion of the death in 2018 of Barbara Bush, wife of one president and mother of another. The United States feels it necessary to create a role for the wife — or perhaps one day, the husband — of its head of state. This is no more logical than the monarchical principle and yet it persists nonetheless.
One day, perhaps, Scotland will choose a different path. Plenty of independence supporters certainly thirst for a Scottish republic. It is not difficult to imagine circumstances in which that might prove the popular option but, even then, it would represent a certain sundering of common bonds, a further rejection of the “social union” Alex Salmond once argued would easily survive even the great disruption of Scottish independence.
Whatever might be gained by a republic, something would also be lost and republicans keener on recruiting allies to their cause than sneering at those who think differently would have the self-awareness to recognise that. Or, at any rate, the better class of republican would know that a death in the royal family is a moment at which to show your class, not your cheapness.