Elton's Crooning, England's Dreaming

Abstract

Elton’s Crooning, England’s Dreaming Paul Gilroy (bio) My antipathy to the British monarchy and understanding of their power have been leavened over the years by heavy doses of The Sex Pistols’ “God Save The Queen”. I periodically commemorate that long-vanished undercurrent of resistance to the 1977 Royal Jubilee and, as the years go by, listen with greater and greater pleasure to Johnny Rotten’s joyfully nihilistic assault on the pathologies of England’s interminable dreaming. Formed by such irreverent popular forces, it’s hard not to see the death of princess Diana as a freak tide in the relentless cultural flow of national necropolitanism. Though our bright and shining leader Tony Blair, who plays the handsome prince in this sorry tale, has applied his ideological caress to the lips of the unconscious form of the princess, the spell of our chronic crisis has not been broken by this national tragedy. No matter how many times the word modern is repeated in the catechism of New Labour, the hopelessly morbid slumber of our decline remains deeper than ever. We have been lulled out of consciousness by the strange sickly sound of Elton crooning and the popular response to Diana’s loss puts us in the eighteenth rather than the twenty-first century. It seems cruelly absurd to argue that Britain has become new country overnight thanks to the gentle, wholesome force of what some people been calling “the floral revolution”. The sight of respected leftist and feminist commentators falling over themselves in a sentimental rapture has been especially depressing. They have tried to re-invent Diana so that she appears integral to the political projects of feminism and republicanism but this has been driven by the obligation to redeem their own records of dissent in the new circumstances represented by the Labour victory. Diana provided a welcome means to mark their journey from the margins back towards the core of cultural life. Her confused and confusing crowd of celebrants, worshippers and mourners had to be affirmed because it gave a belated repudiation to the idea that there was such a thing as society after all. Here was another Britain, decent, dignified and tear-stained. For many radicals, national grief was read as constitutionally opposed to the inhumane workings of market capitalism. Trivial theories of hegemony have sprouted. They saw the outpouring of that grief as opening a window onto novel democratic possibilities and, even more bizarrely, as compelling evidence of progress towards a specifically feminist, emotional maturity to which, in death Diana some how gave birth. It is safe, we are told, to be English nationalists now. A quiet carnival has re-decorated the ship of state: Laura Ashley pastels and chintz over knackered battleship grey. Make no mistake, the institution of the monarchy is if anything, in a stronger position now than it was before. Tony Blair has commandeered it and created a new wider platform for himself that made the saturnalia of Diana’s loss continuous with the brighter national moods of his presidential victory last May. These days, you can hear Labour hacks justifying existing levels of military spending on the grounds that our post-Diana army (re-equipped in flowery designer camouflage suits?) can be deployed to clear away land-mines. It is a measure of our desperate predicament to say that there is even a good side of this disaggregation of militarism. The mythical togetherness of the Blitz and the Battle of Britain are likely to be displaced by a new folk memory of communal belonging. Where did you stand to watch the coffin pass? Where did you place your poem, teddy-bear or posy? The death of the people’s Princess flushed out “the people” as a political and historical agent for the first time since our war with Argentina. It is therefore fruitful to compare the character of those patriotic moments, the first of which cemented the power of Mrs. Thatcher while the second has taken Prince Tony to heights of popularity that cannot be sustained. Another interesting story flickered briefly in the British press once the Diana’s blazing trail had begun to fade. It seems that Rupert Murdoch, unsure...