No One Performed Britishness Better Than Her Majesty

There’s an episode of—please bear with me here—the children’s animated television series Peppa Pig in which Peppa, the fearless porcine queen of toddler hearts everywhere, meets another queen, one who lives in a palace and wears a crown, and might be, one of Peppa’s friends suggests, “the boss of all the world.” At first encounter, this queen sits on a throne, knitting; she speaks in clipped, commanding tones. In a later episode, she commandeers a bus to take Peppa and friends on a tour of London. (The trip features rain, historical facts, and a Mission Impossible–style stunt sequence vaulting the bus over Tower Bridge.) “If the Queen asks you to do something, you must do it,” the narrator says.

[Read: The queen of the world]

Is this soft power at work, harmless entertainment, or as colonizers.) Our health service is in shreds. Our energy supply is in crisis. Our child-care industry is breaking down. Our workers are striking; our food banks are empty; our unelected prime minister, facing all these existential issues and more, seems doggedly bent on cutting taxes rather than investing in the kind of basic infrastructure that might allow people in Britain to have their heart attacks tended to, their homes heated, their children fed.