Quality | 2009.11.18
Caught in a place of fantasy
I\'ve been going to state openings for decades, and they get weirder. Obviously the Queen is a little older each year, and today she seemed to have a sore throat, so her catchphrase, "my lords, pray be seated", was almost inaudibly whispered. But she\'s a trouper, that girl, and the show always goes on.
The whole thing has a dreamlike, phantasmagoric, fairytale quality. The setting is out of some impossible fantasy, all red and gold, shimmering candelabras, scarlet and ermine, the vast double throne magnificent, gold-encrusted, yet curiously theatrical. Perhaps they bought it from Ikea and painted it.
What is Alan Sugar ("you\'re furred") doing there? Why do the law lords sit lined up bottom to bottom? Lady Thatcher arrives, looking scary now, and you half expect her to hold out a rosy red apple to Snow White. Up in the gallery is the Speaker\'s beautiful wife, Sally, wearing a wiggly pink fascinator as if there had been an explosion in a bubblegum factory. The heralds and the pursuivants stand in a gaggle to one side. Their embroidered tabards are strangely flat and two-dimensional, so there\'s a temptation to shout, like Alice, "you\'re nothing but a pack of cards".
Familiar figures arrive for unfamiliar reasons. Harriet Harman is the lord privy seal. I caught a news item on the radio suggesting that Lord\'s cricket ground might sell its name to the highest bidder. But if Lord\'s, why not the lords? She could be the Investec privy seal. Next to her was the NatWest president of the council, or Peter Mandelson as we used to call him.
Then Her Majesty arrived and sat on the Habitat throne, her train flowing down the steps like a terrible accident in a Bloody Mary factory. The Commons arrived, having been summoned by Black Rod. They were led by Gordon Brown, in his popular role as Baron Hardup. Back in 1997 the newly elected MPs sounded like a football crowd arriving at the match. Now they are quieter, perhaps bored or fearful. Jack Straw, the Tetleys high chancellor of England, knelt before Her Maj, a position he has probably yearned to adopt since his days as a fiery head of the National Union of Students.
Then the speech, written as if with a shovel dipped in ink. A collection of wearisome cliches and clunking constructions bunged together as if by a blind brickie. "Ensuring individual entitlements"; "sustainable paths"; "introducing transparency in the workplace". They say that if 100 monkeys had 100 typewriters, they would, in time, produce the works of Shakespeare. This sounded as if 100 hippos had worked on it for 10 minutes. She reads it all out in a voice that goes beyond neutrality to a resonant distaste.
Mercifully the speech was short, though, it too, was dreamlike. The deficit would be halved by law. Antisocial behaviour and gang crime (or "geng crime" as the Queen called it) were for the old heave-ho. And the maddest dream of all: the government would "build trust" in parliament itself. Suddenly it was over, a fantasy Queen\'s speech full of fantasy legislation. "See you again in six months," said an attendant as we left, for the next government will have a new state opening, though Her Majesty might delegate.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/nov/19/caught-in-place-of-fantasy
