It was a special day. Despite the rain one million people lined the Thames to cheer the Queen at the Diamond Jubilee River pageant held in her honour….and less than a hundred of sour faced anti monarchists waved a collection of agitprop banners.
The figures tell us all we need to know – this was a day when, for once, the silent majority seized the agenda from the self proclaimed “cultural elite” who are usually telling us what we should be doing/thinking via their media pulpits.
If the emotional resonance of the spectacle tightened the throat yesterday, it was surely this unaffected pride of the people in their Queen and their straightforward but no less deep love of their country that really brought tears to the eye.
This is because there is such an enormous, latent, pent-up feeling of patriotism — that most decent and inspiring of emotions which, in our degraded public discourse, has now become all but forbidden to express for fear of being damned as a racist or xenophobe.
Patriotism is thus sneered at by the kind of people who unfortunately tend to dominate our culture and who lose no opportunity to be sour and mean-spirited about the monarchy and the people it so invaluably serves.
OK Melanie Phillips overgushed a little at the close of her piece but the core premise is rock solid – and backed up, surprisingly, in a confessional from the grand panjandrum of the BBC commentariat Jeremy Paxman himself..
So here’s a toast to our flag and our Queen and a remembrance of the second verse of our National Anthem, rarely sung today but which nevertheless probably echoes the feelings of most ordinary folk in our country.
O Lord our God arise
Scatter her enemies
And make them fall
Confound their politics
Frustrate their knavish tricks
On Thee our hopes we fix
God save us all
Amen to that, say I….
