The British head of state

In one sense, a 96-year-old person passing away quietly surrounded by her family should be an entirely private matter.

Sad for sure, but in actuarial terms, it is a well-signposted occurrence.

The folk who calculate such things are very clear that once someone has reached their 90^th birthday, then it is an even money bet if they will last another 12 months.

That said, it is still heartbreak for the loved ones when it finally comes.

Of course, when the person is the hereditary head of state of the United Kingdom, then it is global news.

Especially in the countries that Britain invaded and plundered for centuries, like this one.

The British state has been waiting on London Bridge to fall for several years now.

That was the code for the death of Elizabeth Saxe-Coburg Gotha.

She didn’t ask to become the British head of state.

It was merely the circumstances of her birth and the abdication of her uncle.

When she was born in 1926, her grandfather was on the throne.

The British Empire was still in existence, but its days were numbered.

Ireland had been the first domino.

It was also the year of the General Strike when the working people of Britain pushed back against those who would impoverish them for profit.
Plus ça change.

Anytime the current constitutional arrangements are mentioned in the UK apropos the head of state, then the person of the Queen herself was deployed.

The argument would go that she was an exemplary individual who had devoted her life to public service etc.

Of course, whether she was a paragon or like her favourite son Andrew, rather beastly was beside the point.

Regardless of the personal qualities of the incumbent, the issues around the hereditary principle remained extant.

Anyone who is capable of joined-up thinking will be able to handle that dichotomy.

Apart from Nonce Andrew, the late Queen did not have her troubles to seek within her own family.

The death of Diana was a seminal moment for a generation of Brits in the 1990s.

For a while, the head of state was perceived by many to be the wicked mother-in-law of the “Queen of hearts”.

Of course, it was all bollox.

These are incredibly privileged people who have never personally paid a bill, let alone worried about one.

More recently, she lost one of her grandsons from “the firm”.

Something that did not surprise me at all.

Here’s mine from 2013 on the Harry fella.

His granny did one fine thing when, in 2011, at the Garden of Remembrance in Dublin, she bowed her head to honour our patriot dead.

These brave Volunteers fought against an army which had sworn an oath of loyalty to her grandfather.

Because of the heroism of the IRA in that era, these words blink to life in a polity with a written constitution and an elected head of state.

We still have the issues in the North East of the island to deal with, but that’s in hand.

Next up is the slobbering Dauphin Charles.

He could be a  poster child for consanguinity.

He is Charles the Third.

I assume he knows what happened to the first two with that Kingly handle.

Westminster MPs will now have to swear their oath of allegiance to him, including those who claim to want to leave the UK.

Personally, I think their commitment to secession is a bit, well, plastic…

What will ensue now in Britain is almost two weeks of officially sanctioned North Korean performance mourning on the TV screens.

The Grieving Olympics are now underway.

I suspect that there will be plenty of evidence in the coming days to counter the belief that post-Brexit Britain is a normal island.

The Daily Mail might already have won gold with this one.

Your humble correspondent looks at all of this with something approaching clinical detachment.

I’m in the position to elect my head of state.

That’s what happens in a republic.

Actually, I’m a bit of a fan of the current occupant of Áras an Uachtaráin.

When the deceased monarch first saw the light of day, her grandfather’s writ still covered one-quarter of the planet’s landmass.

When he had ascended the throne a century before that visit to Dublin, his writ ran in Dún na nGall, and his minions ruled over my kin down the country.

No more dear reader, no more.

By the time that baby Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor was in the world, the Washington Conference had ensured that Britain’s naval supremacy was soon to be a thing of the past.

At that time, they still had the biggest navy in the world.

Now they have HMS Sevco and some tugboats.

She was only on the throne herself for four years when President Eisenhower had to let the Brits know during the Suez Crisis that it was the USA who was in charge of the West.

Her seventy-year reign spanned a period in history where Britain declined inexorably on the global stage.

It is timing too contrived for a novel that Prime Minister Liz Truss was back at the lectern in Downing Street to speak about the death of the Monarch who had just installed her as the most recent occupant of Number Ten.

Here she is in her younger days.

For the avoidance of doubt, my take is that Ms Truss only ever truly believed in the sanctity of her own ambition. Nothing else mattered to her.

That, at least, is a constant for her.

If I  live to be as old as Elizabeth Saxe-Coburg Gotha, I will never understand that sociopathic level of ambition.

I think it was fitting that she breathed her last in Fair Caledonia, as the Scots did love to let her know how loyal they were to her.

There was always some top-class grovelling on show when she mingled with her Scottish subjects.

Planet Fitba was no exception.

At times like this, the Ibrox klanbase can resemble an end-of-the-world cult.

I’m sure it would be a sombre conclave of Unsurpassed Digity throughout the proceedings.

Jaysus…

As I stated at the start: this isn’t personal; it’s strictly business.

The British state still holds a part of this island, and while they do, they will not be simply neighbours in the same way as, say, France.

Consequently, we in Ireland need to be aware of their collective disorders, especially as this bowing and scraping contagion can be found in the Six Counties among the Bradaish community.

The idea that anyone can have any constitutional position based on an accident of birth is something that should not have survived the Enlightenment.

As for the unedifying spectacle of this celebrity feudalism, I cannot better that acerbic observation of the Irishman from Edinburgh.

Unlike the British Prime Minister, James Connolly really did oppose monarchies.