The New York Times’s tasteless Queen op-ed

The Queen’s death has prompted an outpouring of mourning around the globe. But that sense of loss apparently doesn’t extend to the newsroom of the New York Times, where tragedy was inevitably greeted as an invitation for clickbait. Having previously hired the services of Russia Today’s Jonathan Pie to castigate Britain, the world’s worst newspaper has now blundered again, publishing an opinion piece on its homepage that most would regard as insensitive at best.

The piece was by Harvard academic Maya Jasanoff, titled ‘Mourn the Queen, Not Her Empire’ – a command which, er, scarcely needs saying given HM’s love of the Commonwealth. Indeed, on her watch, Britain shed its imperial possessions and became the most multicultural nation in Europe. But given that the newspaper relies on self-flagellating Brits to fund its doomsterism, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the NYT claims the Queen ‘put a stolid traditionalist front over decades of violent upheaval’ nor that they opted to plug the piece on social media with the following quote:

“We should not romanticize her era. The queen helped obscure a bloody history of decolonization whose proportions and legacies have yet to be adequately acknowledged.

The author cites various innocuous images of the Queen at Commonwealth summits, claiming that ‘what you would never know from the pictures is the violence that lies behind them’, even though, as she notes, the ‘white queen’ advocated ‘multifaith Commonwealth Day services in the 1960s and encouraged a tougher line on apartheid South Africa’.

Jasanoff clearly makes her sympathies known when she describes the ‘karmic’ assassination of Lord Mountbatten in 1979, which also included the murder of his blameless grandson and a member of the crew.

Along with some predictable swipes at the Queen – ‘her miles clocked and countries visited [were] totted up as if they’d been heroically attained on foot rather than by royal yacht’ – the NYT contributor inevitably brings it back, somehow, to Britain leaving the EU. For ‘xenophobia and racism have been rising, fuelled by the toxic politics of Brexit’. According to Jasanoff ‘the queen’s very longevity made it easier for outdated fantasies of a second Elizabethan age to persist’ with ‘Global Britain’ nothing more than ‘half-truths and imperial nostalgia.’ Plus ca change. It ends with the most tedious conclusion possible: it is, apparently, ‘well past time’ for the Order of the British Empire to be renamed and ‘royal pomp’ should be scaled back to make the monarchy ‘more like those of Scandinavia.’

All this poison, just hours after Her Majesty died. It leaves Mr S to ask the obvious question: what on earth is wrong with the New York Times?