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LONDON — The House of Commons chamber, an enviornment so typically famend for division, was united Friday in tribute to Britain’s longest-reigning monarch, the late Queen Elizabeth II, who died aged 96.
All wearing black, MPs rose for a minute’s silence earlier than Britain’s new Prime Minister Liz Truss opened two days of parliamentary tributes, hailing the queen as “one of the greatest leaders the world has ever known,” and the “rock on which modern Britain was built.”
“In an instant yesterday, our lives changed forever,” she stated of the queen’s demise, announced early Thursday night. “Today, we show the world that we do not fear what lies ahead.”
Acknowledging the “awesome responsibility” bearing upon King Charles III, who because the queen’s eldest baby, succeeds her as Britain’s head of state, Truss stated “we owe him our loyalty and devotion,” because the U.Ok. enters a “new Carolean age.” “The crown endures, our nation endures, and in that spirit, I say, god save the king,” she stated.
The lack of the queen “robs this country of its stillest point, its greatest comfort, at precisely the time we need those things most,” stated Keir Starmer, the chief of the Labour Party.
Amid an unsure interval for the U.Ok., “where our country feels caught between a past it cannot relive, and a future yet to be revealed,” Starmer urged MPs to “always remember one of the great lessons of our queen’s reign: That we are always better when we rise above the petty, the trivial, the day-to-day, to focus on the things that really matter, the things that unite us rather than those which divide us.”
In remarks that typified the cordiality of the specifically convened session, the usually combative Ian Blackford, the chief of the Scottish National Party, stated his ideas had been additionally with Britain’s new prime minister, who, simply three days after taking workplace, is “having to come to terms with the enormity of the loss of the head of state and show the leadership that is now required in her position.”
While somber, MPs’ contributions had been additionally typically humorous. Theresa May, the previous prime minister, recalled how her weekly viewers with the queen was the “one meeting I went to which I knew would not be briefed out to the media.” Describing her majesty as “the most remarkable person I have ever met,” May completed, “I doubt we will ever see her like again.”
Her successor in No. 10, Boris Johnson, hailed the queen as “Elizabeth the Great.” Referring to his last assembly together with her majesty on Monday this week, when he tendered his resignation as prime minister, Johnson stated she was “as radiant and as knowledgeable, and as fascinated by politics as ever I can remember, and as wise in her advice as anyone I know, if not wiser.”
Jeffrey Donaldson, the chief of the Democratic Unionist Party, hailed the queen’s go to to the Republic of Ireland in 2011 — the primary by a reigning British monarch for 100 years — as “groundbreaking” and a “cathartic moment in British-Irish relations.” “Your majesty, on an island riven by conflict and division, you were a bridgebuilder,” he stated.
Friday’s Commons session will run till 10 p.m., bar a quick suspension at 6 p.m. to permit MPs to take heed to King Charles III’s tackle to the nation.
MPs will then collect on Saturday at 1 p.m., when a small variety of senior MPs will take the oath to the king earlier than tributes proceed till late night. The House of Lords can also be holding tributes.
