April 3, 2002	Wednesday	Muharram 19,1423

LONDON: The British royal family lurched from crisis to crisis in the last decade, and the death of the popular Queen Mother has given new urgency to the debate on whether the monarchy can survive for much longer.

Republicans, careful not to sound too gleeful at the news on Saturday that the defiant matriarch had passed away, suggested that this was the beginning of the end for the royal House of Windsor.

Others countered that the death of the 101-year-old “Queen Mum”, who won over her subjects by staying in London during the German blitzkrieg of the 1940s, may actually help the buffeted House of Windsor by allowing it to modernize at last.

“It’s the end of an era,” Jon Temple of Republic, an independent lobby group campaigning for an elected head of state in Britain, said on Tuesday. “With hindsight it may turn out that it was the Queen Mother who was holding the whole show together rather than her daughter. I think we’re looking at probably five to 10 years (left for the monarchy),” he said.

Anthony Holden, writing in the Observer weekly, agreed: “Not since the 1870s has there been such a whiff of republicanism in the air, and the passing of the Queen Mother will do nothing to dispel it. Quite the reverse.” Even the right-leaning Daily Mail dared pose the question “What comes next? There is a sore need for someone to emerge in the coming years with that extraordinary ability to combine majesty, approachability and joie de vivre.”

Queen Elizabeth II, the 75-year-old monarch, commands broad respect in the country for steering her family through the tragedies and troubles of the last decade.

Some have argued that while the Queen Mother’s longevity helped the House of Windsor ride out its deepest crisis, her traditional views on marriage and divorce were in fact preventing the family from modernising. “The values of 1936 which the Queen Mother so bravely embodied, and which she insisted on maintaining, would destroy the monarchy in the 21st century,” wrote A.N. Wilson in the Evening Standard.

The first tests of the royal family’s popularity in the new era come soon — first at the Queen Mother’s funeral on April 9, and two months later at the Golden Jubilee celebrations marking 50 years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign.—Reuters