Tory leader Gio Spinella: ‘Many of us have been surprised by depth of emotion we've felt'
Richard Osley reports in the Camden New Journal 'The leader of the Camden Conservatives said last night (Monday) that the Queen’s death in Scotland should serve as a final reminder of the ties that bind the union. He was speaking as Camden Council held a special all-member meeting last night (Monday) in which councillors, aldermen, members of the public and Town Hall staff paid tribute to the Queen.'
Here is what Cllr Spinella said:
“I will reflect on what her passing means to us. Anyone who has lost a parent or a partner, a child, a loved one, will know the feeling of helplessness, of being cast adrift from one of the central pillars of life.
The passing of a royal majesty is an unmooring from such a pillar for all of us in the United Kingdom, and in Camden especially. It is felt infinitely more deeply by the royal family, who have lost a mother, a grandmother, a great grandmother but felt by all of us in different degrees.
Many of us indeed have been surprised by the unexpected depth of emotion we’ve all felt at the passing that intellectually we knew was inevitable but for which I think most of us were not prepared emotionally for the passing of someone who, in my case at least and like most of the country, I never met but was around us always.
Her Majesty’s passing creates in all of us an echo of our own losses and one thing that anyone who has ever lost someone will know is how incredibly, even as your own world grinds to a halt, the rest of the world goes on.
Not so now quite rightly, as Queen Elizabeth’s farewell will be inevitably felt for years to come as a new royal seal, with the initials CR will replace ER on postboxes, street furniture, and wherever else there is a royal presence.
This loss is felt across the world and even the most fervent of republicans I would hope will share a moment to reflect on this most loyal of public servants.
Constitutional and political systems across the world often centre on one element: be it a document or an even. In the United States they centre it on their constitution. In France, they centre it on the 1789 Revolution. In the UK, we centre it on the monarchy, and for the lifespan of most of the people in this room, Elizabeth was the monarchy.
It doesn’t escape me, I think, that even in her passing, this first premier of our public servants, performed one last duty. By choosing to spend her last days in Balmoral her funeral cortege passed through Scotland, to be lain in state for a few days in St Giles of Central Edinburgh – as if to remind us all of the ties that bind the United Kingdom together even though today, there are those who would seek to tear that asunder.
The loss of this first and foremost of public servants, this monarch, is unlike many other losses. A loss shared, which is not to say that it’s a lost diminished, but it’s the last that we can all understand. As
Her Majesty once said ‘grief is the price you pay for love’. In gathering here today, we in Camden share our collective grief in our collective loss and in our love for her.
We do know that the institution she incarnated for 70 years has its successor and its continuity, which is for all of us a reassurance.
We will all send to his royal majesty King Charles III our most deeply felt sympathies and our loyalty and to the memory of her late Majesty – we her former subjects can send our vote of gratitude for her decades of service and our promise to continue in her work, and try to live up to the model of service that she has given us.”
