A Silent Observation

Greetings America.

I am speaking to you from London, England, where I bring you news of a NON-EVENT. Something DIDN'T happen here yesterday and I want to tell you about it.

Plenty IS happening of course - and none of it's good. Our government is in trouble. It has just become the longest-surviviving Labour administration in British history, but it's not doing well in the opinion polls. Our prime minister, Tony Blair, is undoubtedly more popular on your side of the water than he is on ours - which may explain why he is taking his summer vacation in Barbados. Our most famous soccer player - David Beckham - has decided to abandon England to play in Spain. The England cricket team - and cricket is still our national summer sport - has just been humiliated by South Africa. And at the height of the holiday season our largest airport was engulfed in chaos because of an incomprehensible industrial dispute.

We need cheering up - and normally, as a nation, on this particular day, 5 August, we are cheered up - by happy front page photographs of a wonderful old lady. Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother was born in August 1900 and, for as long as most of us can remember, there was a party in the street outside her London home- she waved at us - and we cheered at her. That's all that happened. But it was a national event. And yesterday it didn't happen.

The Queen Mother died last year - and now we don't have anyone to cheer anymore. The Queen Mum was a phenomenon - tiny, charming, rich, old, not particularly glamorous but hugely loved. Roll together Barbara Bush, Bob Hope, Eleanor Roosevelt and Martin Luther King and you get the picture. But why was she so popular? I think I know.

In 1923 - that's eighty years ago - she became engaged to a young English prince who would one day be king. Shortly after her engagement, a journalist knocked on her front door and asked for an interview. She gave the interview. The King was not amused. "We don't talk to those filthy rags of newspapers", he said. And for the next eight decades - through her life as a princess, a queen and a queen mother - Elizabeth never spoke to a journalist again. Not once. The less she said, the more we loved her. There's a lesson in there somewhere.
By Gyles Brandreth