How Queen Elizabeth represented a selfless generation - Bill Carmichael

Perhaps, like me, you are a true Elizabethan, born during her 70-year reign on the throne, and she is the only monarch you have ever known.

Or maybe you are old enough to remember the reign of her father, George VI, or the short controversial reign of her uncle, Edward VIII, or even of her grandfather, George V, although in these cases it was all a very long time ago, and you would have to be at least in your late 80s to have any reliable recollection.

Either way, the reign of Elizabeth is pretty much all most of us have ever known, and perhaps because of that we somehow convinced ourselves that she was immortal?

How else can one explain the sense of profound, earth shuddering shock that many of us have felt over the past week. Even died-in-the-wool republican friends of mine have admitted to a searing sense of loss over the death of the Queen – or ‘our’ Queen, as one socialist firebrand put it to me.

My own reaction caught me by surprise. Like our Prime Minister, Liz Truss, I experienced a brief, youthful flirtation with republicanism, but also like her, my views have changed, and over the years I have become a firm admirer of our late monarch.

I kept reminding myself that the alternative to Queen Elizabeth was a President Blair or a President Cameron, and I shuddered at the thought.

And as a young reporter I covered many a Royal visit, including, I think, two involving the Queen. But I never spoke to her; still less knew her in any meaningful sense.

She was very much an enigmatic figure who, out of a sense of duty, kept her own feelings very much close to her chest. I doubt many people outside of her close family and confidants “knew” her well at all, and we certainly had little idea of her political views.

But her death hit me hard in a way that went beyond simple sadness. I was sad about the deaths of Shane Warne, Barry Cryer, Bernard Cribbins, and Olivia Newton-John, all people I admired, and all of whom died in 2022.

But this was nothing like the visceral, overpowering sense of grief I felt at the news of Her Majesty’s death.

Why is this? One reason is a very personal one. My father was born four years before Elizabeth, and my mother was born a year after. In wartime my dad served in the Royal Navy and my teenaged mother cowered under the kitchen table as the Luftwaffe’s bombs exploded in the streets around her. Both, sadly, have long since died.

Elizabeth, who of course served in uniform in the war, was for me a symbol of that heroic generation that defeated the Nazis and helped liberate millions of people in Europe from those evil twin tyrannies of fascism and communism.

For my parents’ generation, who lived through a period of privation and poverty that is simply unimaginable today, the phrase “Keep Calm and Carry On” meant far more than a slogan on a T-shirt or a tea mug. We owe them immense gratitude for their sacrifices and we will never see their like again.

But there is something else about the late Queen I admired immensely. Our society is characterised by extreme narcissism. Everything is always about us. We are the ME! ME! ME! generation. Every thought has to be immediately expressed, every feeling validated, every emotion has to be indulged in.

In sharp contrast, Her Majesty demonstrated a level of steely self-restraint that was astonishing to behold. Whatever her life was about, it was not about her.

Her guiding principle, undoubtedly inspired by her strong Christian faith, was that we as God’s children have obligations to other people that demand the suppression of our own needs and feelings. Sometimes other people must come first. It is not always about us.

That sense of Christian service and duty to others guided the Queen throughout her long life and long reign.

In my mind’s eye I imagine Her Majesty, bowing before a two-bar electric fire, working her way diligently through the official papers in her red box. In the morning she will have a frugal breakfast from cereal in a Tupperware box before meeting with the Prime Minister, where she will dazzle with her grasp of detail and wise counsel.

As Paddington Bear told her at the Platinum Jubilee celebration just a few months ago: “Ma’am … Thank you, for everything.”