WHow could this life be but to end in a stoic act of service to the nation? The 96-year-old Queen, who ascended the throne when Winston Churchill, who was born in 1874, sat down in Downing Street for the second time, pulled herself together with her usual devotion to attend the audience for the official appointment of Liz Truss, born in 1975, one of the most important constitutional To carry out tasks of the monarchy – entrusting the prime minister with forming a government – for the fifteenth and final time. On her 21st birthday, as a princess, in a speech broadcast worldwide from Cape Town, she vowed to devote her entire life, be it long or short, to the service of “our great imperial family” “to which we all belong”. Just before her death, Elizabeth II once again demonstrated in a magnificent way how seriously she meant it. God knows it’s not an easy inheritance that she bequeathed to her son.
The fact that she spoke of the imperial family in her speech on the occasion of her coming of age in April 1947 – almost five years before she succeeded her father – indicates the distance to today. At the time, India was still part of the British Empire, whose legacy is now so hotly debated by culture warriors. When she was crowned in June 1953, the title of Emperor of India that her father had held was obsolete. Significantly, just this week, at the same time as the transfer of power in Downing Street just completed, it was announced that the world’s largest democracy had pushed the country of its former colonial masters from fifth to sixth place in the ranking of the strongest economic powers in the last quarter of 2021.