The Independent's Johann Hari has
a lot of things to say about the late Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon (better known as the "Queen Mother"), none of them complimentary:
By the time she died, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon was treating the British Treasury – our tax money – as her personal piggy bank, with her bills running way beyond the millions she was allotted every year. Even the ultra-Tory Chancellor Norman Lamont complained that "she far exceeds her Civil List and the Treasury gets very het up about it". She used the money to pay for 83 full-time staff, including four footmen, two pages, three chauffeurs (what do they do, split her into three parts for transportation?), a private secretary, an orderly, a housekeeper, five housemaids... the list goes on and on. She even insisted that it was a legitimate use of public funds to maintain a full-time "Ascot office", whose job was to do nothing but keep a register of members of the Royal Enclosure and send them entry vouchers.
And soaking the British taxpayer for her luxurious lifestyle isn't the worst of the dear old Queen Mum's shortcomings, not by a long shot. She was, according to Hari, a despicable bigot on many levels, from her obsession with "bloodlines" as an indicator of worthiness (which, to be granted, could be expected of an aristocrat of her time) to her fondness for the political far right (she, Hari claims, supported the appeasement of the Nazis because of her dislike for Jews, and the brutal white-supremacist government of Rhodesia, because she was "not fond of black folk"), and her well-documented contempt for the lower orders of society (in this case, lower being anything beneath the high aristocracy). Which doesn't stop the revisionist whitewash of her image, casting her as a symbol of Britain's grandeur and national pride.
The defenders of Elizabeth were left claiming that her drunken inactivity was itself an achievement. WF Deedes, the late Daily Telegraph columnist and editor, claimed: "In an increasingly earnest world, she teaches us all how to have fun, that life should not be all about learning, earning and resting. In a world where we have all become workaholics, there she is... grinning at racehorses. Bless her heart." He was in favour of the dole after all, provided it was worth £3m and went to one single aristocrat.
William Shawcross has won the favour of his fellow monarchists by taking this curdled life and presenting it as the best of British. It's the single most unpatriotic claim I've ever heard. If you don't think Britain can do better – far better – than this nasty leech and her stunted family, then you don't deserve to live in this Sceptred Isle.