The New Elizabethans

Hello. Please welcome Jim Lawrence to the Dystopian Fuchsia 'team' with his first article...


The New Elizabethans – An Alternative List

You are almost certainly aware – it’s been shoved down our throats since last year, after all – that our glorious unelected head of state, Queen Elizabeth II, will be enjoying (yes, she does occasionally crack a smile) her sixtieth year on the throne in 2012. To commemorate this exciting fact Radio 4 will be selecting a panel next month whose task it will be to compile a list of the sixty living Britons who have most influenced our national life. Just as the first Queen Elizabeth ruled over a Golden Age that ushered in the Early Modern Period, an era of cultural and political ferment not seen in Europe for generations, so it is said that our Elizabeth has overseen a time of greatness, of innovation in the arts and sciences, of profound changes in mores and social habits, a symbolic Mother of the Nation at whose ever-flowing teat we grateful subjects imbibe comfort and unity.

Well, I think the picture is not so clear. I tend to the Rotten theory of post-war British society – that it’s the fascist regime that made you a moron. (Not you of course, gentle reader.) And so, in that spirit of splenetic, contrarian, dangerously close to misanthropic disgust with this low dishonest decade or six, I offer you my own list of sixty luminaries who, in my view, have done their best to make Britain what it is today. And never before in the field of human TV watching, sport obsessing, flag waving, bovine conformity has so much contempt been owed to so few by so many.

1. Katie Price
2. Everyone who has ever been in Hollyoaks
3. The Saatchi brothers
4. The Beckhams
5. Ann Atkins
6. Peter Bazalgette
7. Lord Tebbit of Chingford
8. Wayne Rooney
9. Peaches Geldof
10. The inventor of Thought for the Day
11. Joe Pasquale
12. Neil & Christine Hamilton
13. Abi Titmus
14. Simon Cowell
15. The Chuckle Brothers
16. Garry Bushell
17. Chris Moyles
18. Cheryl Cole
 19. Danny Dyer
20. Fred Goodwin
21. Kelvin Mackenzie
22. Louise Mensch
23. Boris Johnson
24. Ant & Dec
25. Adam Boulting
26. Pete Waterman
27. Peter Hitchens
28. Russell Brand
29. Phil & Kirsty
30. Peter Andre
31. Everybody who works for Talk Sport
32. Sir Digby Jones
33. Lord Sugar
34. Jimmy Carr
35. Rebekah Brooks
36. Richard Littlejohn
37. Melanie Phillips
38. Kay Burley
39. Andrew Neil
40. Commissioners of BBC1 sitcoms
41. Trevor Kavanagh
42. Janet Street-Porter
43. Michael Portillo
44. Clarkson, May & Hammond
45. Vernon Kay & Tess Daly
46. Lord Prescott
47. Keith Lemon
48. Nick Clegg
49. All royal correspondents and entertainment ‘journalists’
50. The National Lottery Commission
51. Lord Mandelson
52. Sir Phillip Green
53. Andy Coulson
54. Lord Rothermere
55. Migration Watch
56. The Confederation of British Industries
57. The Adam Smith Institute
58. Everyone involved with Loose Women
59. Quentin Letts
60. And finally the two towering figures who most neatly epitomise and did so much to create the spirit of this vicious and shallow age: Baroness Thatcher of Kestevan and Anthony Charles Lynton Blair.

Text by Jim Lawrence, image by Ian Hewett