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Thank goodness for the Queen. In the gathering gloom, with our trust in so many sources of supposed authority eroded MPs, ministers, banks, regulators of banks, senior police officers, many more junior police officers, those in charge of BBC Radio 2, the staff of Channel 4, the Royal Mail, the RFU and the Football Association she seems to be just about the only person in the country who knows what she is doing. For this, she gets too little credit.
Many media outlets have recently named their persons of the year and, inevitably, Barack Obama was ubiquitous. Odes hymning his saintly arrival accompanied selections of moody pictures of the president-elect variously fiddling with his BlackBerry, smoking, wearing a hat and appearing preternaturally calm.
Of course, he deserves praise for the exemplary manner in which he won power and has handled the transition although soon comes the difficult bit of being president. But if Obama is international person of the year, can I suggest the Queen as Briton of the year?
Why this year in particular? Well, why not? It is long overdue. Our monarch is rarely mentioned in such a context because she is taken for granted as a feature of the national landscape. Only when she is gone and may that be many years hence will Britons realise the full importance of what was there.
The Queen embodies important ideas of community and duty: not community in the artificial sense promoted by government departments with the word in their title, but a web of relationships spanning the generations, of shared experience and duty to and respect for others. After the binge of a boom, and at the dawning of a new era of anxiety, there are lessons to learn from an octogenarian.
With Britain plummeting into recession, the Queen's annual message took on a special significance this year. Many of those watching and listening to her were facing an uncertain future, with the prospect of unemployment or even homelessness overshadowing the festive celebrations. In that context, her presence in the nation's living rooms as a totally non-partisan symbol of national unity was a source of reassurance.
Everybody knows the Queen cannot solve our problems, either at the personal level by paying off mortgages or nationally by redirecting economic policy; but as the embodiment of the community she is a force for national cohesion.
For a monarchist of my generation this has been the year in which a theoretical argument that has often been made in the Queen's favour was revealed to have a practical dimension. That our Head of State has lived through previous periods of hardship and can weigh properly the significance of our current troubles judging them grave but not worthy of blind panic is more than just a passing comfort. It provides continuity and, in a crisis such as a war or this current economic calamity, dignity and quiet determination are the bedrock of any recovery and eventual victory. If Barack Obama has one tenth of our Queen's calmness under fire, then the world is truly in luck.
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United Kingdom
