Mood:
mischieviousNow Playing: Candle in the Wind '97
Topic: News Views
… Incidentally, re Princess Diana and the Royal Family it amuses me the way they seem to be viewed by the foreign media:— almost as celebrities who don’t make films or records. Very modern Paris Hilton/Lindsay Lohan-type celebrities. Has Lindsay Lohan been in a film? Has anyone seen it?
Our Queen is our Head of State much as an old granny becomes head of a family Since the Queen Mum died a few years ago our Queen ticks both of these boxes. She is loved and respected by a vast proportion of the population in a way I’m not sure Republic-dwellers could fully understand.
An American President gets at most eight years. The former Irish President Mary Robinson (in a figurehead role more equivalent to that of our Queen) had a regal bearing but she only did the job for a few years.
Queen Elizabeth II has reigned since 1952 and was well known to the public of course (as Princess Elizabeth) all her life up to then. We have seen how a woman perhaps not the most naturally gifted with “star quality” and charisma has performed the duties to which she was born with rare dignity, escaping the kind of scandals in which practically every other member of her family became embroiled.
Diana was dangerous because while she was alive and popular she attracted public sympathies and support that might otherwise have been directed at Charles and the Queen. (Although there were signs that her popularity was perhaps just starting to falter when she died.)
The Queen is little interested in her popularity ratings and though her “star” might well be at an all-time high today, there have been periods in history when the Royals weren’t all that popular at all.
It is often said that in an ever more rapidly changing world the Queen provides Britons with a sense of constancy and stability.
Perhaps it’s a paradox that as we gradually enter a sci-fi-comes-real style of future, the Royal family are becoming more indispensable to us than they’ve ever been in this present “Constitutional” age…
