Richard Nye
A big decision looms. Time for another letter to Her Majesty says columnist Richard Nye
Dear Ma'am,
Me again. I wrote to you last October, remember, when you became our longest reigning monarch. Just to pass on my personal felicitations. No, you didn’t reply, but that’s fine. You’re a busy lady, I know, and not exactly getting any younger.
Which, of course, is the reason for my present communication: your triumphant completion of nine glorious decades. Sorry to turn up again like a bad old English penny, but there is something you need to know before the official celebrations commence.
It’s about your present. Apologies, but I won’t be able to get it to you on time. You see, it doesn’t become available until the last week of June. Moreover, I’m not in a position to acquire it for you all on my own – might need to get about 20 million others to come in with me, and a lot of them are going to need some persuading. But we’re working on it.
The thing is – and this is really going to throw you, Ma’am – you were probably under the impression that you had this proposed gift already. Do you remember your coronation, when you solemnly swore to govern your people, execute justice and mercy, defend the Protestant faith, be nice to corgis and so forth? Remember how they put a crown on your head, and how you went to the altar behind the Sword of State?
No doubt you assumed that all that made you undisputed Sovereign, subject only to God. Which indeed it did. The trouble is, Ma’am, it’s all changed. I know that life is tough for you working great-grandmothers, so I don’t blame you for missing this, but the fact is that your kingdom has been taken away.
They’d been building up to this for decades, but it all came to a head in 1992 with the Treaty on European Union – the Maastricht Treaty, to you and me – which officially made you a citizen of the Union and subject to the European Court of Justice.
Now, I know that 1992 was a bad time for you – your annus horribilis, you called it. The kids were really playing up, with all their affairs and divorces, and then your house went and caught light – the weekend place at Windsor that you love so much.
So I do understand how a trifling matter like losing a kingdom might initially have slipped through the cracks. Nor do I imagine that you’ll be doing anything bad enough to have you up before the European beak – unless, of course, you plan to reclaim Calais (with or without its migrants) or relaunch the Hundred Years’ War.
Still, it’s the principle of the thing. The governance of this realm has been settled for centuries and there is no mandate for any of your parliaments to give such hard-won sovereignty away.
So, if you can bear to wait until June 23 – and provided that enough of your people agree to chip in – here, returned at last to its rightful keeper, is your present: the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Happy birthday, Ma’am.
