A CENTURY OF QUIET MAJESTY

If one were to stage a birthday party for a monarch who had the impertinence to die four years short of her century, the British establishment would doubtless rise to the occasion with all the solemnity of a Whitehall committee deciding on the colour of a new passport. Yet here we are, in the spring of 2026, celebrating what would have been the hundredth birthday of Queen Elizabeth II, and the national mood is less a firework display than a low, sardonic chuckle at the gods for arranging matters so inconveniently as to avoid her having to send a telegram to herself. The bunting is out, the television schedules are clogged with archive footage of her waving from Land Rovers, and the newspapers are full of those solemn editorials that manage to sound both reverent and slightly relieved she is not around to read them. One almost expects her to appear on the balcony of Buckingham Palace in spectral form, give that trademark half-smile of mild amusement, and remark, in the voice of a slightly disappointed headmistress, that really, one had hoped for better.

She was, of course, the last monarch who understood that the job was not to do things, but to be there while things were done. Born in 1926 into a world still recovering from one world war and about to plunge into another, she spent her girlhood learning the difference between duty and drama. By the time she ascended the throne in 1952, the British Empire had already begun its long, polite retreat into the history books; she simply refused to turn the retreat into a rout. Seventy years of it: the Suez fiasco, the Profumo scandal, the decolonisation that turned half the map from pink to various shades of embarrassed beige, the divorce of her own children, the death of Diana, the rise of the internet, and still she never once looked as though she might be enjoying herself too obviously. That was her genius. She made boredom into a constitutional art form. While prime ministers came and went like guests at a particularly tedious garden party—Thatcher with her handbag, Blair with his grin, Johnson with his hair—she remained the fixed point, the woman who could make a state banquet feel like tea with the vicar. Her contribution was not policy; it was presence. She held the monarchy together by the simple expedient of never appearing to notice that it was falling apart.

One thinks of her wartime service, driving an ambulance in the Auxiliary Territorial Service, getting her hands dirty with engine oil and refusing to make a fuss about it. Compare that with the modern royal who feels the need to lecture us on carbon footprints from the back of a private jet, and you begin to see the scale of the loss. Elizabeth understood that the Crown’s power lay in its invisibility. She never gave interviews, never wrote memoirs, never once suggested that her opinions on anything—from the weather to the Common Market—might be of the slightest interest to anyone except her corgis. The result was a reign that felt less like government than like weather: sometimes overcast, occasionally stormy, but always, reliably, there. She survived the abdication crisis of her uncle, the wartime Blitz, the swinging sixties, the punk seventies, Britpop, the Diana years, and the social media age without once appearing to break into a sweat. In an era when every minor celebrity feels obliged to “share their truth,” she kept hers to herself and thereby became the last public figure whose silence carried weight. The nation, in its perverse way, loved her for it. We grumbled about the cost of the Civil List, we mocked the hats, we speculated endlessly about what she really thought of Tony Blair’s shirt-sleeves or Boris Johnson’s bicycle, and all the while she simply got on with being Elizabeth the Unflappable. It was, in its quiet way, heroic.

Her contribution to the national character was subtler still. She embodied a particular kind of Britishness that has since been declared obsolete: the belief that one’s highest duty is to keep the show on the road without drawing attention to the fact that the road is crumbling. She presided over the transformation of Britain from imperial power to middling European archipelago without ever sounding like a mourner at the funeral. The Commonwealth, that improbable club of former colonies who somehow decided they quite liked the old lady in the hat, was her personal triumph. She kept it going by the same method she used on everything else: showing up, smiling faintly, and refusing to acknowledge the awkwardness. When she danced with Nkrumah or chatted with Mugabe or welcomed the latest batch of prime ministers to Balmoral, she did so with the air of a woman who had seen worse and was not about to let it spoil the scones. It was, one suspects, the last time the British monarchy felt remotely necessary to anyone outside its own press office.

And then, of course, came the succession. Poor Charles. One feels almost sorry for him, which is the most damning thing one can say about a king. He had waited longer than any heir in history—decades of patient, slightly petulant preparation, writing letters to ministers, talking to plants, and designing buildings that looked like the offspring of a Victorian prison and a municipal swimming pool. At last, in 2022, the throne was his. The nation held its breath, expecting the seamless continuation of the Elizabethan style. What it got instead was a man who appeared to believe that the job description had changed to “activist monarch with strong opinions on organic farming and the built environment.” Where his mother had mastered the art of dignified silence, Charles seemed determined to fill every available silence with speeches. The result has been four years of slightly embarrassed national wincing.

It is not that he lacks qualities. He is, by all accounts, a well-meaning fellow who genuinely cares about the environment, architecture, and the spiritual health of the nation. The trouble is that caring visibly is precisely what the monarchy was never meant to do. Elizabeth’s genius was to make the institution feel eternal and slightly dull; Charles’s misfortune is to make it feel contemporary and slightly embarrassing. One pictures him at state banquets, earnestly discussing biodiversity with some bemused head of state while the footmen try not to roll their eyes. The coronation, that glorious piece of medieval pageantry, somehow managed to look both expensive and slightly apologetic. The public, having grown used to seventy years of glacial continuity, now finds itself with a monarch who appears to be auditioning for the role of national therapist. The Camilla question, long since resolved in the only way such questions ever are in royal circles—by sheer persistence—still hovers like an awkward guest who refuses to leave the party. The less said about the tampon phone call and the various other youthful indiscretions the better; they were, after all, the sort of thing that happens to princes who have too much time and not enough discretion. But they have left their mark. Where Elizabeth was the embodiment of restraint, Charles sometimes feels like the embodiment of having tried rather a little too hard.

One watches the current royal operation with the same melancholy fascination one reserves for a vintage car that has been handed over to an enthusiastic amateur mechanic. The engine still runs, but the suspension is shot and the paintwork is starting to flake. The younger generation—William and Kate, Harry and whoever is currently advising him—appear to be doing their best to modernise the brand, which is precisely the problem. Monarchy does not modernise; it endures. Elizabeth understood this in her bones. Charles, for all his undoubted sincerity, appears to believe it can be improved. The result is a reign that feels less like a continuation than a slightly awkward sequel with patchy special effects. The polls, those blunt instruments of public sentiment, suggest the monarchy remains popular enough, but the affection is no longer automatic. It has to be earned, and earning it requires precisely the sort of effort Elizabeth never bothered with. She simply was.

So on this, her hundredth birthday—celebrated in her absence with all the sincerity a grateful nation can muster—we are left with the uncomfortable realisation that the golden age of the British monarchy may have ended not with a revolution but with a perfectly pleasant, slightly bumbling transition. Elizabeth II did not save the institution; she made it irrelevant in the best possible way. Charles III, bless him, seems determined to make it relevant again, which may yet prove its undoing. One can almost hear her, somewhere in the great beyond, giving that small, dry cough of disapproval and murmuring, “One does hope they’re not overdoing it.” In the end, that was always her greatest gift: the ability to make the rest of us feel, however briefly, that we were the ones who were overdoing it. 

Happy birthday, Ma’am. The country misses you more than it quite knows how to say.

AUTHENTICITY VS AUTOCRATS: IN APPRECTIATION OF THE ANGRY VIDEO GAME NERD

In the grand tradition of governments that have long since forgotten what it means to govern rather than to manage perceptions, the United Kingdom’s present administration has decided, with all the solemnity of a focus-grouped epiphany, to launch its very own central YouTube channel. This, we are told, will serve as the single source of truth—featuring not the grey-suited ministers who actually run the show, but paid influencers and “everyday people with real voices.” The aim, according to Sky News, is to reach those pesky voters who have wandered off the reservation of traditional media and fallen into the clutches of conspiracy theorists and keyboard warriors. One can almost hear the collective sigh of relief in Whitehall: at last, the plebs will be spoken to in the demotic tongue of the algorithm. Trendy and down wiv the kids, as the young people no longer say.

It is the sort of initiative that only an out-of-touch autocracy could devise while convincing itself it is being progressive. Here is the state, that lumbering, tax-funded behemoth, suddenly keen to cosplay as a content creator. Imagine it: civil servants in lanyards, briefed by consultants who charge more per hour than most families spend on groceries in a month, earnestly discussing “authentic engagement metrics” and “narrative resonance.” They will hire influencers—those glittering sprites of the attention economy—who will, one presumes, be carefully vetted to ensure their “real voices” do not stray too far from the departmental script. The channel will not, of course, be called the Ministry of Truth; that would be far too honest. Instead it will lurk behind some anodyne title like “UK Together” or “Real Voices, Real Britain,” the sort of branding that makes one long for the bluntness of Orwell. Control the information, as the wag on X put it, and you control the speech. And they said it was just a conspiracy theory. Ah, the delicious irony: yesterday’s paranoid fantasy is today’s government press release.

One cannot help but admire the sheer cheek of it. This is not communication; it is colonisation. The government, having watched its traditional platforms wither under the withering gaze of an electorate that prefers unscripted rants to polished soundbites, has decided the solution is to invade the very medium that exposed its shortcomings. It is as if the Vatican, alarmed by the success of TikTok theologians, had responded by commissioning a series of influencer cardinals to explain papal infallibility in bite-sized chunks with trending audio. The desperation is palpable. Labour under Keir Starmer has spent its time in office demonstrating that it can win an election but cannot, for the life of it, tell a story that anyone outside the Westminster bubble finds remotely compelling. Policies arrive not as grand visions but as focus-grouped press releases, each one more earnestly inoffensive than the last. So now they will try to be cool. They will be “relatable.” They will speak the language of the youth, or at least the language that consultants imagine the youth still speak. One pictures Starmer himself, that man of a thousand rehearsed expressions, attempting a cameo—perhaps a light-hearted skit about fiscal responsibility set to a viral sound. 

The mind recoils, and yet it will fail, as such ventures always do, for the simplest of reasons: it lacks authenticity. The phrase has become a cliché, I grant you, but only because it remains the one quality no amount of spin can manufacture. The government’s YouTube channel will be plastic in the way that a political smile is plastic—polished, symmetrical, and entirely without warmth. Its influencers will be chosen not for passion but for compliance. Its “everyday people” will be everyday in the way that a scripted vox pop is everyday: carefully diverse, impeccably on-message, and about as spontaneous as a tax return. Viewers, those cynical creatures who have spent years marinating in the unfiltered chaos of the actual internet, will smell the contrivance from the first frame. They will click away, muttering the modern equivalent of “bread and circuses”—except the bread is stale and the circuses are PowerPoint presentations.

How different, how gloriously, defiantly different, is the example set by James Rolfe, better known to the world as the Angry Video Game Nerd. This year marks twenty years since Rolfe launched his YouTube channel—first as the Angry Nintendo Nerd in 2006, later evolving into the full-throated AVGN we know and, if we are honest, occasionally wince at. Two decades of a man in a dirty white shirt and thick glasses sitting in what looks like a teenager’s bedroom, surrounded by cartridges and controllers, unleashing torrents of profanity at games that dared to disappoint him. The miracle is not that it has lasted; it is that it has never once felt like an act.

Rolfe is the genuine article, the platonic ideal of the authentic content creator in an age of synthetic personas. He did not set out to build an empire; he set out to vent. The rage is real—born not of market research but of a childhood spent loving games that frequently betrayed that love. When he screams at the E.T. cartridge or eviscerates some forgotten Nintendo disaster, there is no consultant in the background whispering about brand alignment. There is only the man, the game, and the unvarnished truth that most of us, deep down, recognise: some things are simply terrible, and pretending otherwise is for politicians and focus groups. Over twenty years he has resisted every temptation to soften, to rebrand, to chase the next trend. He has collaborated, yes—most notably with the equally irascible Mike Matei—but the core remains untouched. No sponsored segments hawking energy drinks. No sudden pivot to “positive content” for the algorithm. Just the Nerd, swearing at pixels, year after year, like a monk of the old school who refuses to update the liturgy for the streaming era.

It is impossible not to feel a surge of something like gratitude when one contemplates Rolfe’s career. In a world increasingly populated by avatars and AI-generated sincerity, here is a fellow who has remained stubbornly, gloriously himself. He has built an audience not by pandering but by refusing to pander. Millions have watched him not because he is “relatable” in the focus-group sense, but because he is real in the only sense that matters: he means what he says, even when what he says is unprintable. There is a lesson here for the mandarins of Whitehall, though one doubts they are capable of learning it. Authenticity cannot be commissioned. It cannot be briefed into existence by a cabinet minister keen to “show up where people are getting their news.” It is the product of obsession, of long nights spent alone with one’s craft, of a willingness to look ridiculous for the sake of something that feels true. Rolfe has never pretended to be anything other than a nerd with a grudge and a microphone. 

That, as it turns out, is enough, contrast this with Keir Starmer, the very model of the modern inauthentic. Here is a man who has spent his political life being whatever the moment requires: human rights lawyer, opposition leader, prime minister, and now, apparently, aspiring YouTube sensation. His every appearance feels like a performance in search of an audience that has already left the theatre. The suits are too well cut, the smiles too calibrated, the language too carefully triangulated between the focus groups of Islington and the red wall. He is plastic in the way that a museum exhibit of a politician is plastic—lifelike, yet somehow less alive than the waxwork. When his government announces a YouTube channel to counter “conspiracy theorists,” one cannot help but suspect the real target is anyone who notices the gap between promise and delivery. The channel will not persuade; it will only confirm what the public already senses: that this is a regime more interested in narrative control than in the messy, authentic business of governance.

So let us raise a glass—perhaps a slightly warm can of lager, in true AVGN spirit—to James Rolfe on his twentieth anniversary. May his rants continue, unfiltered and unrepentant. And let us watch, with the dry amusement of the connoisseur, as the government’s shiny new channel flops into irrelevance. For in the end, the internet remembers. It forgives many sins, but it never forgives the sin of being fake. The Angry Video Game Nerd has spent two decades proving that truth, however sweary, endures. The Ministry of Trendy Truths will learn the same lesson, only rather more quickly, and rather more humiliatingly. As Evelyn Waugh might have observed, with that characteristic blend of weariness and wit: the state, like the worst sort of dinner guest, has gatecrashed the party and is now trying to tell the jokes. The audience, one suspects, will be elsewhere—watching a man in a dirty shirt lose his mind at a Nintendo. And quite right too.

ANDY KERSHAW (1959 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

Andy Kershaw, the broadcaster who spent a career dragging the British listening public by the ear into the sonic badlands of Tuareg rock and Haitian meringue, has died at 66. Cancer, displaying the sort of grim efficiency Kershaw himself once reserved for a 45-minute Malian guitar solo, finally achieved what successive BBC controllers could not: it turned the volume down.

Born in Littleborough in 1959, the sort of Lancashire town that made Rochdale look like Monte Carlo, Kershaw arrived with the fixed expression of a man who had just discovered Bob Dylan and intended to make it everybody else’s problem. He began as Billy Bragg’s driver and roadie, a role that combined heavy lifting with light diplomacy, before blagging his way onto The Old Grey Whistle Test. By 1985 he was co-presenting Live Aid on television, looking for all the world like a sixth-former who had wandered into the wrong studio and decided to stay. For fifteen years on Radio 1 he played records so obscure that even the needle seemed embarrassed. Listeners who tuned in for a quick fix of chart pop were instead treated to the musical equivalent of a gap-year sermon on global injustice. He called it world music. Critics called it punishment.

Later he reinvented himself as a foreign correspondent, filing from Rwanda during the genocide and Haiti during one of its more optimistic coups. In 97 countries he proved that a man with no off-switch could still find places where the off-switch had never been invented. His autobiography, the similarly-titled "No Off Switch", was less memoir than public health warning. The turbulent personal life that followed—two children with Juliette Banner, a brief but memorable entanglement with Carol Vorderman, and a 2007 spell in prison for violating a restraining order—was handled with the same cheerful candour he once applied to Senegalese trip-hop. He never pretended to be easy company.

Sacked by Radio 1 in 2000 to make way for yet another dance programme, Kershaw returned sporadically, still evangelising, still impossible. In the end he outlasted most of his playlists. The world music he championed is now everywhere, which is to say it has become background noise. Kershaw himself was never background. He was the interference that made the signal worth hearing.