Mr Deputy Speaker,
“Grief is the price we pay for love”,
as the Queen herself so memorably said. As I laid flowers outside Buckingham Palace this morning, I was struck by the scale of the grief felt at her passing, for as my hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough (Jane Hunt) said, the greater the love, the greater the grief.
In some ways, the Queen was an ordinary woman—a person like us. She loved dogs, marching about in wellies, horseracing, a gin and Dubonnet, a good wind-up and sporting the ultimate rainbow-hued wardrobe.
“If I wore beige, no one would know who I was”,
she is reported to have said. Like us she suffered grief, loss and family troubles, but she had to endure their being played out in the pages of the world’s press. She did so with great dignity. We felt we could relate to her and that we knew her. Even though many of us may never have met her, she held a special place in our hearts.
In many ways, of course, the Queen was also an extraordinary woman. There cannot be many who can pull off walking in a 1 kg crown, but also claim to know their way around a car engine, or who have let Brian May serenade them from the roof of their house. Few could have provided such stability and reassurance through seven decades of the greatest social, economic and technological change, adapting to that change without
letting it change her. Her reign saw the first man on the moon and the invention of the internet. When she ascended the throne, Great Britain had an empire; when she passed away, she was the head of a family of nations.
The Queen was the head of our national family. Constituents in Rushcliffe have told me that her loss feels personal, more perhaps than they imagined. Whatever our politics or creed, from the youngest to the oldest and from the most remote corners of our islands to the bustle and clatter of our biggest cities, the Queen bound us together—the thread through our national story. In triumph she was our anthem, and through trials our strength. Her courage and steadfastness were an example to us all. Who will ever forget her message to the nation at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, with her reassurance that we would meet again?
We meet here today to remember a woman who lit people’s faces with joy, a sovereign whose reign is one of the greatest in history and a public servant who gave her whole life to us—her people, her country and her Commonwealth—right until the very end.
9.29 pm