If contemporary Britain were a movie, it would be The Long Goodbye, parts 2 and 3. Everything about it now seems awkwardly and painfully valedictory.
The Queen is edging visibly towards the end of her reign; her prime minister is 90 per cent gone. Elizabeth II and Boris Johnson embody, in their very different ways, the same sense of a polity that is on its way out but reluctant to shuffle off into the night. Drinking-up time has expired but still a kind of Britain lingers, having no home to go to.
Part one of The Long Goodbye is, of course, the epic evacuation of empire, a movie of which the first frame was shot in Dublin Castle a century ago and the last frame 25 years ago at end of this month, when the Union flag was lowered at Government House in Hong Kong.
As that flag came down, a lone bagpiper played Afore Ye Go. Its poignant lyric – “the music’s almost done” – is apt enough, so long as we remember that “almost” contains a “not quite yet”.
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The music may be done but its dying note lingers weirdly in the air, trapped in an echo chamber, unable to expire.
Britain is still in an Afore They Go time. Its old ruling order, pitifully reduced and fundamentally unserious though it is, can still do an awful lot of harm before it sails off into the sunset.
Part two of The Long Goodbye is set in the departure lounge of dynastic succession, where the cries of Long Live the Queen have an unmistakable undertone of The Queen is (Almost) Dead.
Monarchy may be largely symbolic, but the symbolism is potent. Elizabeth, through the sheer longevity of her reign, forms both an institutional and a human bridge to the imperial past.
Imperial wars
When she was crowned in 1952, Britain had lost India to independence, but it still had 70 colonies, protectorates and mandates. It was fighting imperial wars in Kenya and Egypt. Now, the empire is essentially reduced to the sheep farmers of the Falkland Islands.
Elizabeth’s historic function, perhaps, was as a political analgesic. She eased the pain of loss by sustaining an ideal of unflustered continuity. In her, the state of British greatness being “not yet dead” had a dignified and seemingly placid existence, in which the first two words numbed the emotional force of the third.
But now her “not yet dead” has become all too literal – less symbolic embodiment, more real, aged body.
Has there ever been a stranger image of sovereignty than that of the gilded royal carriage passing through London last Sunday with a hologram of the queen’s younger self beaming out through the window, and the crowds waving at this lifeless avatar – a ghost in the machinery of state?
(The weirdness was accentuated because this procession of a sacred image for the adoration of the worshippers is so very Catholic – a peculiar place for the head of the Church of England to have ended up.)
Here, the soundtrack is not Afore Ye Go but a more anxious After Ye Go. What comes next is a monarchy stripped of that sense of rootedness in the imperial past that Elizabeth radiates. The crown may well survive but its ability to encompass and contain an idea of Britishness will, after her passing, be much diminished.
Part three of The Long Goodbye was screened on Monday evening, when almost 150 of Boris Johnson’s own MPs formally declared him unfit for office. He joined the ranks of the not-yet-dead, a prime minister without honour, without authority, without a shred of credibility.
They might as well follow the example of the Queen and parade a hologram of Johnson through the town, his big blond mug leering in 3-D from the window of a hearse while the populace pelts it harmlessly with leftovers from the street parties.
Old decency
Here, too, the ability of one figure to embody a state is uncanny. While Her Majesty personifies the relics of old decency (let’s not talk about the old indecencies of empire), Johnson’s shambling frame contains within it the state of the Brexit project he fronted so effectively: politically and imaginatively moribund yet obtrusively undead.
It is increasingly obvious that Brexit was not a new dawn of Britishness but a futile rage against the dying of its light. It is the swansong of English exceptionalism, a last gasp of the imperial delusion in which being treated merely as a normal European country was an unbearable insult.
There is, as Johnny Rotten snarled during the royal jubilee of 1977, no future in England’s dreaming. It is a past that has been disinterred and reanimated. This necromancy has a kind of magic – until it becomes clear that Lazarus still smells of the grave.
The cliche that comes to mind more and more is the flogging of a dead horse. Johnson and his courtiers will keep flaying the poor nag with the whip of the Northern Ireland protocol. But it won’t go.
Yet what modern British history shows is that the Long Goodbye can extend itself further than anyone imagines. Infinite valediction seems to be the characteristic mode of postwar Britishness.
The real national anthem should perhaps be Ron Moody’s star turn in the musical Oliver: “So long, fare thee well/ Pip, pip, cheerio!/ But be back soon.” If the charge of excessive nostalgia seems unjust to the English, it may be only because you can’t miss that which refuses to go.
Johnson’s personal lap of dishonour will surely be a short one. But his eventual exit will not resolve the crisis of the British state – a crisis he exploited and exacerbated but did not cause.
Rationally, resolution would seem to lie only in the alternatives of radical reform (the creation, in effect, of a new and much more democratic federal state) or the break-up of the UK.
Paranoid
It may not be too late for the first of these options – but the Labour leader Kier Starmer is so paranoid about being dubbed unpatriotic by the Tory press (who will do it anyway) that he seems terrified of constitutional reform.
The second option, a dissolution of the Union, is a live possibility. (And watch Welsh national sentiment rise as the country takes its place among the nations of the earth at the forthcoming World Cup.) But breaking-up is also, as the sage Paul Anka put it, extremely hard to do.
Perhaps, then, the medium-term future of Britishness is just one of excruciatingly extended leave-taking, a polity halfway down the stairs but unwilling or unable to open the front door. It will be like the end of Waiting for Godot where Gogo asks “Shall we go?” and Didi replies “Yes, let’s go.” The stage direction is: They do not move.