The Queen was an important reminder of a less cynical age

Shortly before I started at my secondary school, the Queen came to visit. She left an enduring mark on the place — partly because of the plaque to commemorate the new building that she opened, and partly because the school was deep-cleaned ahead of her visit.

Five years later, when I left, you could still see the clear line on the floor dividing the history department (which the Queen’s tour took her through, and therefore had been scrubbed, steamed and polished within an inch of its life) and the geography and religious studies departments, which had been ignored in the monarchical tour and had not, therefore, been scrubbed up.

It was heavily rumoured among pupils that this was a source of considerable anger to the head of religious studies, though I’m not sure this was ever fully confirmed. But perhaps it should have been more angering to New Labour. I went to the kind of inner London school that New Labour ministers absolutely loved visiting — a multiracial comprehensive that had in the early Nineties been a notorious failure, but by the turn of the century was churning out lawyers, teachers and financial services workers at a prodigious rate. Tony Blair visited at the peak of his popularity, yet only the Queen merited a deep clean.

In a way, my school’s unfortunate religious studies classroom mirrored the UK and indeed the world: a visit by the Queen is worth getting out the dustpan and brush for, but a box-fresh prime minister can make do.

The tributes that have poured in from across the world are in part about her longevity in post and the way she conducted herself as monarch. In a world in constant flux, she embodied a graceful stability. But she was also the last survivor of an era in which, broadly speaking, people quite liked their leaders.

In the US, swing voters were still numerous enough in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s to hand lopsided electoral victories to Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and sufficiently non-tribal to discard Nixon and the Republicans following Watergate. Facing what he rightly describes as a threat to American democracy, Joe Biden enjoys at best lukewarm support from an all-too-small slice of Americans.

When Blair visited my secondary school, he enjoyed a 20-point approval rating. David Cameron, the next opposition leader to take his party into office, was lucky if his approval ratings flickered into the low single digits as prime minister.

Today, Labour’s Keir Starmer, who may well be the first leader of His Majesty’s opposition to enter Downing Street, is better rated than the incumbent, the Conservative Liz Truss, but still languishes with a net approval rating of minus 20.

The same story plays out across much of the world. Canada’s Justin Trudeau delivered a polished and moving tribute to the Queen, and has won three general elections on the bounce. But he has not won the popular vote since 2015 and has remained prime minister in large part because of the failure of the Conservatives to produce a compelling or attractive alternative.

French president Emmanuel Macron has astutely used his tributes to the Queen to pour affection on the UK, even while the political relationship between his government and that of Truss is in poor repair. But he, too, is far from popular.

Although King Charles III enjoys a positive approval rating, it is some way short of the one enjoyed by his mother. There is a real risk that the Queen’s death marks the end of an age in which at least some global figures were well liked, and our definitive entry into an altogether coarser and more cynical era.

The reason the Queen visited my secondary school — and why so many ministers did — wasn’t because they were bored on an afternoon in east London and needed to fill the time. It was because both the Queen and her ministers recognised that the creation of an excellent state school is, in itself, a worthy national endeavour and one worth celebrating.

Something important is lost when a country lacks any figures who are both widely recognised and generally liked. A nation — and indeed a global community — has to be a collective endeavour to succeed, whether we are eliminating disease, preventing a nuclear exchange or tackling climate change. And a degree of shared affection and understanding is necessary if such an undertaking is to be successful.

The UK’s new king is likeable in part because he feels less remote. A school friend once told me, entirely seriously, that Camilla, the Queen Consort, was a lot like his grandmother because they had both been divorced. But I suspect the main reason many Britons are keen to embrace King Charles is that we know that we will lose something quite important if there is no one in public life whom almost everybody finds at least tolerable.

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