As I write, Britain’s Parliament is speechifying about the recently deceased Queen Mother. It occurs to me that her death may in time come to symbolise a change in the style of British public life, and in particular an end to the extraordinary episode of generational/emotional warfare initiated by the death of Princess Diana. This untimely event, together with the memory of the unhappy life that preceded it and with the lamentations that followed it, provoked praise of a more theatrical style of public emotional deportment. Stoicism, dignity and emotional reticence in the face of loss was held up to bitter and strident ridicule, most especially in connection with the public demeanour of the Queen.
Emotionally I am a true son of my late father, or at any rate I try to be. In his capacity as a Posh Lawyer he met the Queen Mother a few times, and, in common with most men and women of his time and type, he adored her. Like the Queen Mum, my father was a stoic. Life was a pleasure to be enjoyed, if necessary an ordeal to be endured, and a duty to be done. Pains and pleasures were both keenly felt, but both to be kept in proportion, at arm’s length so to speak.
Being my father’s son, I miss the days when footballers would score goals and then nod in modestly happy acknowledgement, instead of (as now) being mobbed like victorious streetfighters. When Halle Berry embarked upon her emotionally incontinent Oscar acceptance speech not long ago (made all the more repulsive to me by the suspicion that she may have been deliberately exaggerating the emotional incontinence of it all) I switched off my television as if killing a nasty insect. Many of Princess Diana’s performances were like that, both in their emotional revelation and in the sense you got that it was all rather calculated.
Emotional style matters. Style provokes, constrains and conditions actions. Devotees of the Emotional Incontinence school of public deportment are liable to make rasher, more impulsive decisions. My father and the Queen Mum lived to be ninety and a hundred respectively, and made themselves thoroughly useful and appreciated throughout their lives. When their contemporaries and emotional confreres died young or otherwise came to grief, they mostly did this while winning a world war. Princess Di got herself killed, pointlessly, in her thirties, in a car crash.
