Sian Berry at last night’s meeting

GREEN councillor Sian Berry read text from Alan Bennett to the council chamber as she paid tribute to the Queen.

She was speaking as Camden Council held a special all-member meeting last night (Monday) in which councillors, aldermen, members of the public and Town Hall staff paid tribute to the Queen.

Here is what Cllr Berry said:

I know that this is bringing back feelings for all of us from the personal loss of loved ones, and we all need to console and care for each other a little bit more right now. Queen Elizabeth served for over 70 years as the living symbol and face of our country to the world.

She often made us look better, shinier, and friendlier than we often have been and are. Like the majority of people alive today.

I’ve only ever known a world with Elizabeth II as the face of our country and it feels like a profound moment of change today.

Seeing the new King Charles with his strictly laid out and really quite punishing schedule of ceremonies and visits under huge scrutiny and pressure, I have felt real compassion for his grief and humanity as I think many of us have. I wouldn’t mind admitting I shed a tear for him this week.

I never met the late Queen. I saw her in real life only once in the distance at Paddington Station – at the big ceremony for the opening of the Elizabeth Line which she was clearly delighted about.

I know that some of you here have met her properly and you will tell your stories, but the job she worked so hard at meant that none of us were supposed to know what she really thought about anything, except through little symbols and brooches into which we we read far too much.

I’m pleased that our motion highlights as its first item the visit the late Queen made to Camden to open Swiss Cottage library, because I thought I would finish by reading a few imagined thoughts of Queen Elizabeth from this sweet little satire by long-term Camden resident Alan Bennett, which starts with the Queen visiting a mobile council library, and has an ending we now know for sure was pure fiction.

But this little bit, I would like it if it was true if it was her real thoughts, and it’s on the subject of the pleasure of reading:

To someone with a background of the Queen, though, pleasure had always taken second place to duty. If she felt that she had a duty to read, then she could set about it with a clear conscience, with the pleasure there was incidental. But why did it take possession of her now?

The appeal of reading she thought lay in its indifference. There was something lofty about literature – books did not care who was reading them, or whether one read them or not.

All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth. Letters, a republic. Actually, she had heard this phrase the ‘republic of letters’ used before at graduation ceremonies and honorary degrees and the like without knowing quite what it meant.

At that time, talk of a republic of any sort, she thought mildly insulting and, in her actual presence, tactless to say the least. It was only now she understood what it meant. Books did not differ, all readers were equal. And this took her back to the beginning of her life.

As a girl, one of her greatest thrills had been on VE night, when she and her sister had slipped out of the gates and mingled unrecognised with the crowds. There was something of that she felt to reading. It was anonymous, It was shared it was common, and she who had led a life apart now felt found that she craved it.

Here in these pages and between these covers, she could go unrecognised.

* Cllr Berry was reading from  The Uncommon Reader, by Alan Bennett