SOME might argue that among a number of things Keir Starmer and Liz Truss may have in common is a youthful public disdain for the monarchy, now replaced by a forelock-tugging approach to it.  

The comparison doesn’t quite work because Starmer has tugged his forelock harder.

He tweeted nothing but royal inanities on his Twitter account from the day of the Queen’s death until her funeral, while millions continued to struggle with the cost-of-living crisis.

He even tried to ban Labour MPs from saying anything about the monarchy or anything else — although like many of Starmer’s diktats that didn’t work all that well.

On the weekend before the Queen’s funeral, while Starmer was still mourning, Truss was engaged in what the Observer dubbed “international funeral diplomacy,” holding discussions with world leaders present for the Westminster Abbey ceremony.

Traditionally the Tories have been the party of church and king.

That was certainly the worldview held by the yeomanry who cut down protesters for the vote at Peterloo in Manchester in 1819.

In 2022, as the historian David Edgerton has argued, the Tories are much less interested in the monarchy. Their key interest is in making profits for themselves and their friends on a global stage.

Starmer is moving to fill the gap. He ordered God Save the King to be sung at the start of the Labour Party conference.

There is no authorised version of this dirge, which dates back to the 18th century.

The current version has two verses which are anodyne enough. However, the version sung in the early 1800s had additional verses aimed at supporters of the French Revolution and the Scots. One can sense the appeal to Starmer.

Starmer ventured into history himself — not his specialist subject — when he argued that the death of the Queen marked the end of the second Elizabethan era of British history.

No doubt he did know that the original attribution of the term is to Winston Churchill who made it when the Queen took the throne in 1952.

Historically periods are named after the monarch — for example the Victorian age. That doesn’t mean that the monarch had much if anything to do with positive changes during their reign.

The death of Queen Elizabeth arguably marked the end of the long 20th century. She was on the throne for 70 years covering nearly half of the 20th century and beyond.

The historical concept of the long century is well known. The 19th century, for example, is often held to have ended with the outbreak of war in 1914.

The Financial Times has published some interesting statistical tables covering aspects of Elizabeth Windsor’s reign.  

Wages rose above inflation until the 2008 financial crash when they stopped doing so. More children were born outside of marriage than in by the end of her reign — a huge change on 1952.

Politically by tenure Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair dominated, with David Cameron and Harold Wilson next.

A lot more statistics are needed — union membership and strikes, car ownership, home ownership and so on, to begin to grasp a complete picture.

While Starmer wraps himself in the Union Jack, many of the advances of the Elizabeth Windsor era — a legal ban on race discrimination, legislation on equal pay for women, partial legalisation of abortion and homosexuality, were nothing whatsoever to do with the monarchy — but rather the 1964-70 Labour governments.

It is also worth recalling, which Starmer didn’t, that the Queen’s reign covered a period when Britain withdrew from its colonial empire but, as with Kenya in the 1950s, often bloodily so.