Queen Elizabeth was a friend to the world

After 70 years on the British throne, Queen Elizabeth II has died at the age of 96.

It is fitting that her last public engagement, only a day before her death, was the most important kind a British monarch must partake in.

On Wednesday, she was pictured in the living room at Balmoral Castle in Scotland, shaking hands with Liz Truss and confirming her as the new British Prime Minister, following the resignation of Boris Johnson. It is a ceremony that is at the heart of Britain's constitutional life. The country's governance would not work without it.

It might seem strange that the UK's two most senior politicians, in the middle of all the urgent challenges that Britain is currently going through, would have to travel to the other side of the country to meet the monarch. But the need for this speaks to the complex recipe that makes Britain's unwritten constitutional arrangements work.

One of the last photos of Queen Elizabeth II, taken at Balmoral Castle in Scotland. AFP

It is an arrangement built on huge responsibility, good faith and trust, and while it works now, it took a great deal of history to get there. Today, Britain can be proud of its constitutional monarchy, which has been been the foundation of its democratic politics for so long.

It must also pay a debt of gratitude to the personal sacrifice required to make the process work, embodied perfectly by Queen Elizabeth.

A very special type of person is needed to fulfil the immense vocation that is being a modern British monarch. It combines politics, diplomacy, national identity and even religion. It is important to remember that the many millions of worshippers who follow the Church of England, the original church of the global Anglican communion, have lost their supreme head.

Those who carry out the role effectively win worldwide recognition and respect. But Queen Elizabeth represented something even more extraordinary. Her role, by definition, was grandiose and stately, but in the years after her coronation she quickly became a personally relatable figure for many people, at home and abroad.

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• Landfill gas is composed of 50 per cent methane

• Methane is 28 times more harmful than Co2 in terms of global warming

• 11 million total tonnes of waste are being generated annually in Abu Dhabi

• 18,000 tonnes per year of hazardous and medical waste is produced in Abu Dhabi emirate per year

• 20,000 litres of cooking oil produced in Abu Dhabi’s cafeterias and restaurants every day is thrown away

• 50 per cent of Abu Dhabi’s waste is from construction and demolition

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Conflict, drought, famine

Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the famine range from 400,000 to 1 million, according to a document prepared for the UK House of Lords in 2024.
It has been claimed that the policies of the Ethiopian government, which took control after deposing Emperor Haile Selassie in a military-led revolution in 1974, contributed to the scale of the famine.
Dr Miriam Bradley, senior lecturer in humanitarian studies at the University of Manchester, has argued that, by the early 1980s, “several government policies combined to cause, rather than prevent, a famine which lasted from 1983 to 1985. Mengistu’s government imposed Stalinist-model agricultural policies involving forced collectivisation and villagisation [relocation of communities into planned villages].
The West became aware of the catastrophe through a series of BBC News reports by journalist Michael Buerk in October 1984 describing a “biblical famine” and containing graphic images of thousands of people, including children, facing starvation.

Band Aid

Bob Geldof, singer with the Irish rock group The Boomtown Rats, formed Band Aid in response to the horrific images shown in the news broadcasts.
With Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, he wrote the hit charity single Do They Know it’s Christmas in December 1984, featuring a string of high-profile musicians.
Following the single’s success, the idea to stage a rock concert evolved.
Live Aid was a series of simultaneous concerts that took place at Wembley Stadium in London, John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, the US, and at various other venues across the world.
The combined event was broadcast to an estimated worldwide audience of 1.5 billion.

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