A lot has been written about this photo, taken on the day the #Queen met Boris Johnson to receive his resignation and Liz Truss to invite her to form a government.
I think it is one of the most remarkable political photos I have ever seen. I try to explain why in a 𧡠β
First let me lay my cards on the table: I am a soft Monarchist by inclination. It is clearly not a system you would design if weβre creating a modern constitution from scratch.
After all, it seems pretty intellectually indefensible to decide the Head of State based on a genetic lottery, the results of battles fought centuries ago and the outcome of assorted historic succession crises.
But the system we have (and also π³π± π³π΄ π©π° π§πͺ etc) works pretty well. A case could be made that constitutional monarchy might be a less good system of government than constitutional presidency in the current age of populism, but I might write about that another day...
Ultimately, my thought is if you were making a list of problems and defects in the British constitution and system of government, monarchy would be nowhere near the top of it.
So back to the photo of the ER2.
In my 1st year as an UG at university, like a lot of student studying history or politics, I did a course in the theories of the state taught by the very patient @DrDavidRundle. I also taught political theory when doing my PhD at @rhulpir.
Of all the thinkers I studied / taught, the one who has most stayed with me is Thomas Hobbes.
Hobbes is the greatest English political theorist, but his central insight is often misunderstood. He is often accussed of being an authoritarian or even proto-Fascist.
His argument seems to justify unlimited state authority. There is certainly an ongoing debate about Hobbes preferred form of state.
But that debate is secondary to his core belief which is that to have a peaceful life we have to submit *to some kind of shared authority*.
Hobbes arrives at the idea the Leviathan, a supreme authority, to which the citizens of a state subjugate their personal autonomy.
The Leviathan takes decisions on their behalf, ending the pre-political state of nature, which would otherwise be a "war of all against all".
The Queen wasnβt what we tend to imagine when we think of a Hobbesian Leviathan. She was not an early modern warlord nor did she claim Divine Right. Even her formal constitutional powers are largely (if not entirely) symbolic.
But that is, once again, not quite the point.
She was, and remained until her death, the physical embodiment of British state power. Indeed, she wielded that power on the day the photograph was taken, dismissing a PM and inviting another to form a government.
Everything that the state did - the Executive, the judiciary, the military - technically emanated from her. In a Hobbesian sense then, she remained very much a sovereign, a British Leviathan.
And that is why this photo is powerful and moving. It is the disjunction between a very frail, clearly very ill old women on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the power of the constitutional function that she clearly still saw as her duty.
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Nick Anstead
@NickAnstead
Assoc Prof working on political communication & political ideas @MediaLSE. Also 𧡠nickanstead.
