Having a right royal time watching that jubilee

 

I spent a long weekend watching Queen Elizabeth II’s platinum jubilee celebrations on TV, or the telly as the British call it.

It strikes me that they’ve run out of precious metals for naming a jubilee year, at least until a Malaysian scientist discovers a new precious (though toxic) metal, by which time the queen can have a Bosskumium Jubilee if she wishes.

Her platinum jubilee celebrations seemed massive, joyous and very heartfelt. Even so, a survey showed that 54% of the British population had no interest in the occasion whatsoever. They might be the majority, but since when has a silent majority ever won against a loud minority? After all, look at Malaysian politics.

Queen Elizabeth apparently suffered through 14 UK prime ministers during her reign, with the chances of the number reaching 15 growing greater by the day.

The Malaysian constitution solved that problem by rotating our head of state, the Yang di-Pertuan Agong, every five years among the various royal houses.

For a few decades it seemed unnecessary, as the prime minister never changed, but lately that system has proven its value when we had a few prime ministers every year.

Many Britons organised street parties to celebrate the queen’s jubilee. It’s the British version of the open house celebrations we have in Malaysia. Over there, you don’t have to invite your neighbours into your house – just meet them in the street. Perhaps we can adopt some of the ideas and have open street celebrations instead?

Creativity with pomp

The celebrations mixed amazingly creative spectacles with pomp and circumstance, as only the British know how. With the world watching, they pulled out all the stops and proved that, if you choose the best and not just hand out contracts to your cousin, great things can happen.

While the ceremonies must have been very expensive, the bump to the country’s economy, and the bump to the nation’s morale, make them worth the while. In times of toil and trouble, it’s nice to hear a happy story that is almost a fairy tale.

I’m not exactly a big fan of the British monarchy, and find some of the celebrations and hyperbole anachronistic, even nauseating. Many things that the British did under her rule, and in earlier times under her predecessors, were dark and cruel, and some of the overtones are present even to this day.

But I must say there’s a lot to admire about Queen Elizabeth personally. She sees her role as monarch as a sacred duty that must be fulfilled, at all costs, day in and day out, for as long as she can. Now, already in her nineties, her frailties have become more pronounced, and she’s missing more events now, even at her own jubilee celebrations.

A matter of class

One occasion she did not miss was to mourn the death of her husband Prince Phillip. Everybody remembers the haunting image of her sitting alone on the church pew, grieving but observing the tight Covid lockdown rules, just as so many of her subjects had to do.

That is a much classier act than the behaviour of her ministers, including the prime minister himself, who was out partying the night before.

We don’t see that sense of responsibility much any more when we look around nowadays. In the early days of our nation, we did have royals, such as Tunku Abdul Rahman, our first prime minister, who was a politician, but also showed the same sense of duty and noblesse oblige as you see in the Queen.

But our country has changed. Nowadays, even semi-literate local heroes who have won a few elections (or maybe not even that) can get titles and positions and start behaving like kings and queens of the world.

As revered as Queen Elizabeth is, she’s only human, and while she’s led a life beyond reproach, her progeny have shown that they’re only too human, and how! Some have been regular tabloid fodder with their various shenanigans, some silly and some downright vile, such that at times you wonder if the monarchy itself would survive the scandals.

But survived it did, with reports of its impending demise being highly exaggerated. The British monarchy is truly one of the world’s great dynasties, even if now they’re pale shadows and mere relics of earlier glory days. But you can’t deny they had an impact on a huge swathe of the world.

Battered but unbowed

Unlike the British, we skipped our own civil wars between royalists and republicans, between one religious sect and another, and between nations and regions.

Instead, we got to take the best part of their outcomes – democracy, constitutional monarchy, separation of powers etc, and build them into our own system of government.

They left us the English language too, which gave us a leg up in our earlier days after independence, but that legacy seems to be under sustained severe attack, and it, too, may become history before long.

The British political system, although much older than ours, seems to be holding up quite well, unlike our own. Their respect for laws, whether written or not, seems to be alive and well, and their systems of checks and balances seem to prevent the bad from totally having their own way.

I’d imagine that a motorcade carrying the queen would unhesitatingly stop to let an ambulance go by. A nation that practically invented the class system is still able to show more respect to others than our own supposedly “classless” one.

No, we are not classless – we just have no class.

Royalty galore

Where we seem to be one up over the UK is that we have more royals than they do! Many of our states have their own royal houses, with some states having more than one royal house. I can’t think of another country with as many royals as ours.

We’re also smack dab in the middle of a region in which there is an absolute monarch (Brunei), a democracy with a very influential king (Thailand), another with a trace of royalty (Indonesia, with its many surviving royal families), and one with a very republican outlook (the Philippines).

Perhaps the Philippines do have royalty still, given the number of Datukships issued by various royals from their remote corners. Then we also have Singapore, a republic certainly but one with many sultans and rajahs from its own large Indian diaspora.

The UK’s platinum jubilee celebrations over four of what the Brits call “bank holidays” also coincided with celebrations for our own King’s birthday. While our celebrations were more official and formal, they also gave us a long weekend, and the jam on the highways that Friday was of legendary proportions.

I guess the benefits of having a monarchy, constitutional or otherwise, is that wherever you are, you have holidays because of them.

I’ll happily take that, being the loyal subject that I am. - FMT

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.