Would I die for king and country, or merely exercise my right to chuckle at it?
I don’t even celebrate St George’s Day, although I do remember it was the birthday of William Shakespeare, who wrote a lot about British kings. It does appear that to be a patriot means acceptance of monarchy, offering no criticism and, dangerously, either fawning over lovely Wills and his lovely wife or brushing aside any racism or worse.
The American comedian Conan O’Brien accepted the Mark Twain Prize for Humor this year and quoted the writer’s view on patriotism, to which I am drawn: ‘loyalty to the Nation all the time, loyalty to the Government when it deserves it’. Without listing Britain’s faults and various current inquiries into its people’s criminal negligence, we should be able to have a grown-up and sensible discussion about, for instance, the Royal Family or the government, who enact laws which are given royal assent.
As of 1215, thanks to Magna Carta, the monarch is not above the law, although he cannot be arrested for breaking it; whenever a criminal case is brought, it is always Rex versus, which is perhaps why Prince Harry’s recent court battles have been so crucial; this man, who could still one day be King, has followed his great-great-uncle Edward VIII in marrying an American woman and moving abroad.
Handily, and in a rather old-fashioned manner, British subjects are told to treat Harry unkindly via his wife, Meghan Sussex, who is far less lovely than his lovely wife Catherine, Princess of Wales. I was nine when Diana was killed in a car crash, but I thought the week-long mourning period was excessive; this month, on the coveted Friday night comedy slot at 6.30pm, Radio 4 aired this joke as part of the News In Haikus spot on The Naked Week: ‘Charles and Camilla/ 20 years! “More like forty-/five,” says Diana’.
Private Eye writer and the show’s host Andrew Hunter Murray noted it would be the show’s ‘last ever episode,’ but he must know that part of being patriotic is to indulge in good-natured badinage about the Royal Family, which is a soap opera that has run longer than Emmerdale, Coronation Street and Eastenders put together; almost a millennium longer, in fact.
What with new characters, babies, castles up in smoke, divorces, rogues and the fact that the monarch has the nation’s attention for nine minutes every Christmas Day, the Royals are characters and avatars rather than real people. You can visit their palaces, buy shortbread tins and, in any given week, watch TV dramas like The Crown, musicals like Six and sitcoms like The Windsors; the last of these was created by two blokes named George and Bert, which seem like pseudonyms given that King George VI was known as Bertie to his family.
Among the cast are Harry Enfield, who gives a good impression of King Charles, and Hugh Skinner as the now Prince of Wales; the latter’s CV includes a role as a soldier in the wartime drama The Wipers Times, co-written by Private Eye editor Ian Hislop. The magazine has a Court Circular column which refers to the King as Brian – as in, ‘he’s not the Messiah…’ – and formerly referred to his mum as Brenda. They had probably prepared the cover of their Coronation issue – Man In Hat Sits On Chair – back in the 1960s.
There’s satire, and there’s agitprop. In the last 40 years, songwriter Billy Bragg aka the Bard of Barking, has grown into a national treasure. He wrote A New England, which was more about love than country, and also the lost gem Take Down the Union Jack, which I taped off the radio in the early 2000s. It was from his album England, Half English, and noted that Britain is ‘really not that great…doesn’t even have a patron saint, just an economic union that’s past its sell-by date’. Discuss!
Bragg also wrote a book called The Progressive Patriot in the aftermath of the London Bombings of July 7 2005. In it, he suggested ways people on the left of the political spectrum could counteract the shouting and caterwauling of those on the right. He selects figures both musical (Bob Dylan, Paul Simon) and literary (George Orwell, Rudyard Kipling), while dropping in on historical moments in English history: Magna Carta, the Civil War and, of course, the war against Hitler.
Reviewing it for the Guardian, Decca Aitkenhead complains of ‘sub-GCSE level’ history and incoherence. Nonetheless, she does quote Bragg’s words on ‘developing a narrative’ about Englishness, perhaps looking at how Scotland and Wales see their place in this still United Kingdom; from my five years in Edinburgh, which is one of the more cosmopolitan places in the nation, I could tell Scots were proud of Rabbie Burns, the rugby team, folksongs and, clichéd though it is, whiskey, which they call the Water of Life.
I really did try to get into Sunder Katwala’s 2023 book How to be a Patriot, but it read like a think-tank study of nationalism and ‘inclusive patriotism’, with chunks of memoir thrown in. With talk of ‘shared rituals’ and the monarchy, which plenty of people want to abolish, the book just felt didactic rather than encouraging, dry rather than stirring, in opposition to those Billy Bragg songs. Katwala is good on demolishing Enoch Powell’s arguments, and how they were formed in the first place, and he has a go at tackling various topical issues within the culture which I summarise as Statues & Symbols.
And so to the 80th anniversary, technically the Oak anniversary, of Victory in Europe. When I was 12, I read the war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon; the former thought it ‘dulce et decorum’ to die for your country, a sentiment that was made still more stark when, at 14, I visited the trenches and battlefields where millions fought. Then there’s the celebrated football match on Christmas Day between German and English forces, and the football tournaments involving Prisoners of War at the Ruhleben camp.
In the next fortnight, I implore you to spot where people question or affirm their patriotism, using what The Sun newspaper call ‘our boys’ as cover; the tabloid papers biennially try to turn the men’s England football team into a regiment of the King’s armed forces. The Daily Telegraph used to be the newspaper for retired colonels and commanders, but with that audience shrinking they have pivoted to battles about Statues & Symbols, usually the wedge issues that exercise Fr Farage.
I imagine Private Eye will also be scanning the papers to find the most jingoistic, illogical and plain stupid thing said, done or predicted about the commemoration of an event which, in 2025, overshadows the 80 years that came after it. Last year’s winner came when Rishi Sunak, who was Prime Minister and is still MP for Richmond and Northallerton in Posh Yorkshire, left the D-Day commemoration early to give an interview to ITV; Fr Farage accused him of not being patriotic enough and not understanding ‘our culture’.
Whether Farage was referring to his class, race or heritage, it showed that one way to win votes was to play the Patriot card. And what channel does he present programmes on? The one with the Union flag in its logo. If only the King could do something about it.