She’s the human link to Britain’s finest hour. No wonder the Eurosceptic press find her irresistible and are desperate to prove that she’s on their sidePerhaps you recall the fabled words of the unnamed US officer in the Vietnam war who ruefully said of the state American forces had just razed to the ground,“We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” The line lives on, a permanent reminder of how a mission pursued with blind zeal can end up defeating its own purpose, and choking to death the very thing it claims to appreciate.
This week’s Sun front page claiming “Queen backs Brexit” may lack comparably tragic grandeur,but the same self-defeating logic hovers over it. Whoever was behind the story was clearly as devoted to rescuing Britain from the clutches of Brussels as that anonymous US army major was committed to wresting the village of Ben Tre from the Vietcong. Its a secure assumption that the source was motivated by the Brexiteers’ devout hope that Britain can be restored to its pre-1973 shape, when sovereignty lingered exclusively in the ether between Buckingham Palace and the Palace of Westminster – “the crown in parliament” is the conventional formulation – and nowhere near Brussels.
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Source: theguardian.com