Sometimes one is tempted to let the world lapse once more into barbarism, to barricade one’s family inside one’s home and carry a gun whenever obliged to go out. That’s a little like how the first Covid lockdown felt. But is it so very wrong to harbour the slightest pang of nostalgia for those simpler, more innocent times?

There is perhaps something peculiarly British in the myth of the spirit of the Blitz, a legend which was invoked during the early days of the pandemic crisis: the magical quality of togetherness experienced by a community in isolation and under a shared threat. 

We experience comparable sensations when blizzards and storms limit our movements, just so long as that inconvenience doesn’t wreak any real long-term damage. We similarly seem to enjoy stocking our cupboards for Christmas as if the closure of shops for a day might prove as impactful as a nuclear apocalypse.

There is something reassuringly communal and at the same time insular in how the British approach such disasters and festivities. They are shared experiences which result in people coming together and then locking themselves away.

One such national holiday, a break from our daily humdrum lives, took place at the start of this month, as an early summer weekend was extended by an additional two days in order to mark the seventieth anniversary of the Queen of England’s accession to her throne. 

There were the live public-participation events of course, a plethora of civic activities and around sixteen thousand street parties and eighty-five thousand commemorative lunches, laden with patriotic bunting and saccharine sentiment, despite poor weather dampening the latter stages of the weekend’s festivities. 

Three and a half thousand jubilee beacons were lit across the UK. Thousands of loyal enthusiasts lined London's Mall from early on the Thursday morning, draped in union flags and wearing those cheap plastic bowler hats sold to tourists, resplendent in the old red, white and blue, awaiting the appearance of the entire family (less a pair of princes fallen from favour) on the Buckingham Palace balcony later that day. 

Yet the majority of households of course enjoyed most of the jubilee weekend, just as they experience Christmases, lockdowns and extreme weather events, secured in the safety and comfort of their own homes, vicariously and on TV.

Shortly before he delivered the sermon at the jubilee thanksgiving service, the Archbishop of York told the BBC that he was disappointed that the Queen was not well enough to attend the ceremony in person, but said that he was sure she would be ‘watching on the telly’. That was of course how most people experienced this outlandish jamboree.

It was a perfect storm of garish sentiment. In terms at least of its pure tatty tackiness, these celebrations often seemed enough to make us feel that all our Christmases had come at once. But not necessarily in a good way.

Indeed, it is difficult to imagine the levels of unmitigated poor taste that went into the creation of the series of spectacular events surrounding Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s platinum jubilee celebrations which unfolded over the past few weeks. It could hardly have been worse if they’d asked Donald Trump to orchestrate the proceedings.

In one especially inauspicious incident last month, five people were injured when a spectator stand collapsed during a rehearsal for a horseback military parade due to form part of the royal celebrations. Worse, however, was to come. Indeed, the murder of a well-known grime musician at a jubilee party in East London was perhaps the most unfortunate event of the festive weekend itself.

Marking seventy years of her reign, the Queen’s courtiers had seen fit to inflict upon the nation a concert called the Platinum Party at the Palace featuring a line-up of such musical greats as Ella Eyre, Jax Jones, Adam Lambert, Sigala and Celeste. It was unclear if anyone over the age of twenty was supposed to have heard of these acts. As one BBC reporter observed, they seemed to leave many in the crowd ‘mystified’.

Meanwhile, the presence of oversexed seventies superstar Rod Stewart and eighties heart-throbs Duran Duran did little to demonstrate that the organizers had tapped into the zeitgeist of the nation in the third decade of the twenty-first century. Sir Elton John deigned to dial in a pre-recorded video. At least Motown legend Diana Ross was there to headline the show, although, as more than thirteen million viewers watched from their homes, it remained unclear how she was connected to the supposedly emphatic Britishness of the event.

The show was kicked off by a curiously unfunny comic sketch in which the Queen played herself alongside Paddington Bear. Recalling Her Majesty’s cameo appearance with James Bond at the opening of the 2012 Olympic Games, one must admit that what it may have lacked in dignity it made up for in quaint and awkward incongruousness.

The Palace also staged what it called the Platinum Pageant, a gaudy event which told the story of Elizabeth’s time on the throne through the media of synchronized dance, circus, carnival, street theatre, giant puppets, busloads of celebrities, classic cars and military displays, phenomena which many decent sensible people would travel very great distances to avoid.

There was even an equestrian extravaganza in the grounds of Windsor Castle, which starred more than 500 horses and Tom Cruise. Hosted by British actor and comedian Omid Djalili, this ‘Gallop through History’ gala included the strange spectacle of that great thespian Dame Helen Mirren (best known for playing Elizabeth II in the film The Queen) dressing up as Queen Elizabeth I, the current incumbent’s illustrious and iconic sixteenth-century predecessor, to pay homage to the birthday girl.

Her Majesty herself spent much of the event looking profoundly uninterested and unimpressed. She was, after all, only there to see the horses.

Other televisual treats included the BBC’s Queen’s Jubilee Pudding, the climax to a national competition to design a dessert recipe to mark the anniversary. A lemon trifle won. There were also special editions of the antiques-focused shows Bargain Hunt and Repair Shop, and a documentary about the history of the crown jewels, narrated by a nice chap who reads the news. There were also a couple of documentary films which spliced together rare archive footage of her life and reign, one of which had been assembled, shortly before his death, by the man who directed the classic romantic comedy Notting Hill.

The popular soap opera EastEnders also showed its typically lugubrious cast of East London characters joining the revels at a platinum jubilee street party – a knees-up at which the heir apparent Prince Charles and his wife made cameo appearances as themselves.

During May, that royal couple had embarked upon a commemorative visit to Canada which proved only slightly less embarrassing than his son Prince William’s jubilee tour of the Caribbean with his wife Kate in March. While William’s visit had stirred up republican and anti-imperialist sentiments – especially when he’d said he was sorry for the history of slavery but had fallen short of apologizing for his country’s and his family’s role in it – Charles chose to lecture Canadians on their treatment of indigenous peoples, and at the same time similarly neglected to offer any apologies for Britain’s part in those atrocities. The national chief of Canada’s Assembly of First Nations called upon the prince to articulate such an apology, but her appeal fell upon deaf ears.

Back home in the UK, while the royals enjoyed their luxury holidays in the Americas, British headlines filled with fears of a shrinking domestic economy and consumer inflation reaching its highest levels for forty years. Meanwhile, one of the UK's biggest suppliers of domestic energy warned that forty per cent of its customers will be suffering fuel poverty by the autumn.

Last month, it was also announced that, following April’s steep rise, the national cap on energy prices would undergo a further massive hike later in the year. The UK’s cost-of-living crisis had become so severe that it resulted in the government’s introduction of an unprecedentedly generous emergency budget at the end May in a bid to mitigate its impacts (and to minimize the fallout of other political embarrassments). As the princes played, the world headed into an economic crisis which the boss of the International Monetary Fund described as the consequence of a ‘confluence of calamities’.

This increasingly disunited kingdom is, after all, a nation in a state of economic and moral meltdown. At the end of last month, the Prime Minister’s chief adviser on ethics and standards in public life – a man who had formerly served as Private Secretary to the Queen – threatened to resign if his boss failed to justify his conduct in relation to his administration’s breaches of its own lockdown rules, when they had engaged in a series of unlawful social gatherings, including carousing last Spring on the eve of Her Majesty’s husband’s funeral. Meanwhile, the Palace’s message to the nation has appeared perversely blind to these extraordinary crises and controversies: party on, it seems to be saying, party on down.

This situation has only intensified the sense, growing over the past decades, that the British royal family, mired in personal disputes and financial and sexual scandals, has lost touch with the reality of the lived experience of its subjects. It is both a shadow and a parody of its former self.

In his influential essay of 1935, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, the German aesthetic philosopher Walter Benjamin argued that cultural artifacts were denuded of their aura of original authenticity by such industrial and technological processes as printing and photography. The proliferation of postcards of the Mona Lisa, for instance, somehow strips Leonardo’s painting of its immaculate and almost spiritual mystique.

Today, Benjamin would have been appalled to witness how digital representations have become so divorced from the real that they have lost every last trace of genuineness, any memory of what they have lost and any regret for its loss. We have long since entered the realm of what the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard called the simulacrum. We inhabit a virtual copy of a copy of a copy (and so on, ad infinitum) of the material world.

A decade ago, to mark her Diamond Jubilee, the Queen of England bought four prints which had formed part of Andy Warhol’s 1985 Reigning Queens series. These are the only portraits of Elizabeth in the Royal Collection for which she had neither sat nor issued a commission. Their presence in her art collection emphasizes an acceptance of this distancing from the real, of the triumph of the simulacrum.

Warhol’s work famously represents the transformation of the original aura of the human individual (such as Elvis Presley or Marilyn Monroe) to the level of an industrially reproduced commodity (such as a can of soup). In this way, it echoes and enacts the anxieties raised by Walter Benjamin half a century earlier.

This year’s anniversary celebrations, in all their vulgar poor taste, have completed the metamorphosis of the British royal family into what Baudrillard would have described as a mere media spectacle, an illusion of historical presence, a conspicuously absent sovereign, a reigning monarch performing her part (pretending to be herself) in a pre-recorded conversation with a virtual Peruvian bear (who, of course, isn’t really there).

A few weeks ago, George W Bush gave a speech in which he sharply condemned what he called the ‘wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq’. The notoriously gaffe-prone former president then corrected himself: this had not been an extraordinary moment of self-awareness, unprecedented in the entire history of geopolitics; instead, Mr. Bush had meant to refer to the situation in Ukraine. This most ‘misunderestimated’ master of rhetorical accidents had outdone himself. The man who once observed, in the style of George Orwell’s Big Brother, that ‘when we talk about war, we're really talking about peace’, and who declared that America’s enemies ‘never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we’, has become a caricature of himself. In this sense at least, he has come close to turning into his own loathed successor Donald Trump, that living lampoon of leadership.

This is what it is like to live in a post-truth age. Nobody needs satirists anymore. The art of irony no longer exists, because the absurd flow of political events proves to be more ironic than any mortal mind might ever manage to construct or construe.

In 2019, Britain elected a clown to be its Prime Minister. Last week, members of his own party – more than forty per cent of his own MPs – tried to oust him through a vote of no confidence. They failed to do so, despite all the evidence that he had ‘presided over a culture of casual law-breaking’ (as one of those Tory rebels had put it). There was an absurd irrationality to this latest twist in the crazy saga of British politics, with a man renowned for his lack of integrity once more keeping the top job in government, to continue to drag his country’s reputation through the mire.

Meanwhile, this increasingly dysfunctional nation had marked its monarch’s record-breaking reign with a pudding made with Swiss sponge-cake and Italian biscuits, a concert headlined by an American singer and a horse show starring an American actor, a virtual dialogue with a fictional South American bear, a couple of TV programmes about antiques, a very ridiculous pageant, and the screening of montages of home movie footage which cast unnecessary and unflattering light on the private lives of her eccentric family. For this is England, a realm of kitsch kings and plastic heritage, a land on its last legs.

Thirty-five years ago, three of the Queen’s children, Princes Andrew and Edward and Princess Anne, took part in what proved to be a highly embarrassing slapstick gameshow broadcast on British and American television. Prince Charles, Princess Diana, Prince Harry and Prince Andrew since went on to give highly controversial TV interviews which significantly damaged the reputation of their family.

For more than half a century, the Queen has sought to maintain the mystical majesty of the monarchy by avoiding such exposure. It is only by retaining what the veteran journalist David Dimbleby recently described as her ‘extraordinary inscrutability’ that Elizabeth II has succeeded in sustaining the fairy tale of her family history and concealing the unedifying reality which lies behind the emperor’s new clothes.

It has been quite a while since she last let the veil slip. In 1969, she had agreed to participate in a documentary which offered an intimate portrait of her family life. At the time, the broadcaster David Attenborough warned that the film threatened to dispel the ‘mystique’ upon which the institution of royalty depended. It is reported that Elizabeth regretted her participation; it has not been broadcast since 1977, and (although it has been leaked online) formal access to the footage has been strictly limited.

The various media productions surrounding this latest jubilee have reversed that strategy, exposing to the unforgiving gaze of public scrutiny intimacies better preserved, and transforming the royals’ air of glamour and mystery into the ordinary and the tawdry. The family have become a set of commercial properties deployed for the promotion of patriotism, tourism and established power, an industrial corporation in the business of image-manufacturing which, aptly enough, likes to call itself ‘the firm’.

The mass media’s public commodification of the British royal family, and the resulting loss of its otherworldly quality, might be seen as a process of democratization, just as the general availability of printed posters of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa – and indeed the prevalence of printed copies of sacred texts – enriches and empowers their audiences. But, as Walter Benjamin and Andy Warhol recognized, it also cheapens the brand, revealing its magic as a common sleight-of-hand. The closer we get to the royals, the more mundane and uninteresting they seem. And that is most painfully obvious in the case of the unprepossessing and tedious heir to the English throne.

Prince Charles had stood in for the ninety-six-year-old Queen at the state opening of parliament last month, and took her place at a number of key events marking her platinum anniversary, including a thanksgiving service and a ceremonial military parade. As the BBC's royal correspondent Jonny Dymond pointed out, this jubilee weekend had marked the ‘unspoken transition’ of power from mother to son, the dullest lad on the block.

When, on the Saturday evening, the seventy-three-year-old prince referred to the monarch as his ‘mummy’, toes across the nation curled in a public outpouring of shared embarrassment. His accession to the throne, whenever it comes, will hardly represent the moment of moral regeneration which the country desperately needs.

And so, her noble subjects cry out, once more, “Long live the Queen!”. The alternative, after all, is truly depressing. Yet that woeful fate – to be lorded over by the king of cringe – sadly may be thrust upon us rather sooner than we might hope.