Ian Warden | UK PM Liz Truss anti-monarchy video shining example of people becoming conservative with age

In recent days of course, Liz Truss, now 47 and a dutiful old monarchist, dutifully went to Balmoral to genuflect before Her (now late and mourned) Majesty so as to be officially sworn in as the 56th prime minister of the United Kingdom.

In the 1994 video Liz Truss, rousing the rabble at a Liberal Democrats' occasion (for she was once a young and idealistic Liberal Democrat before age withered and fossilised her into becoming a Conservative) is so very passionate about wanting the monarchy abolished one half expects her to call for her audience to march on the palace, now, and to throw the accursed royalfFamily into the Thames.

Challenged today about her 1994 speech and the ideas in it Liz Truss likes to say that it is to her great credit that her mind is so open to change.

But of course what her change of heart and mind illustrates is probably not how extraordinarily intellectually nimble and honest her extraordinary mind is. What it probably illustrates is simply the much-researched phenomenon of how so many of us, perhaps most of us, drift deeper and deeper into conservatism as we age.

Truss's change of heart is a little tragic because in a sense it is always very sad to see youthful idealism, especially our own, trickle away down the gurgler of time. There's no youthful stupidity in her 1994 speech. Her rages in it against the monarchy are all rational, in their way, and express what millions of honest, equality-loving people feel in their hearts and bones.

"Everybody in Britain should have the chance to be a somebody, [so it's wrong that] only one family can provide the head of state," young Truss seethes.

"We do not believe that people should be born to rule," the idealistic youngster fumes, gnashing her teenage teeth.

Prompted by this I've done a little revisiting of the copious research done to explain why we ideologically fossilise as we age. There is a useful round-up of this research in an online-available piece Do we really become more bigoted with age? Science suggests yes. One recurring idea among researchers is that these personality changes as we age reflect an ever increasing need, as timidity sets in, for a kind of closure, expressed as a desire to minimise uncertainty and ambiguity.

Young people by contrast (unless they are Young Liberals) find uncertainty and ambiguity, of the kind that would follow from abolishing the monarchy, quite titillating.

Liz Truss and I have very little in common but in this monarchy matter I find us sharing the same hymnbook.

Both of us have known a hot, seething rage against the monarchy change over time into a mellow acceptance of the monarchy as a good thing. But I dare say her pro-monarchy feelings are powerful and heartfelt whereas mine are mostly whimsical.

My own view, arrived at in discerning old age after decades of seething that Australia should have its own head of state, is that I was wrong and that we should remain a monarchy because of the colour and movement, the pomp and absurdity, the quaintness this funny foreign royal family contributes to our otherwise drab and quaintness-poor lives.

For example, did you see reports of how by ancient tradition the Queen's beekeeper has been to the hives on the royal estates to attach black ribbons to them, to tell the bees that the Queen is dead and that her successor is their new master? There is a useless loveliness about such a tradition, and we all need more loveliness in our lives. Will an Australian president have presidential bees of folkloric, traditional significance? Alas, no.

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I'm sure an Australian republic headed by safe, dull presidents would work as efficiently as the very best of precision clockwork.

But at my time of life my greatest expectation of governments and systems of government is that in their absurdity they should entertain and amuse and sometimes even excite. So for example one has to be a dull and insensitive fossil not to be looking forward to the spectacular orgy of Charles III's coronation. While doing my reading on this becoming-conservative-with-age subject I've come across one researcher's finding that older adults with conservative/reactionary beliefs tend to be more outspoken and argumentative in the afternoons.

This suggests to the researcher that given the deterioration of the brain that comes with aging older people, even if they generally feel it best to keep their ideas to themselves, find their ability to control their thoughts weakening throughout the day.

Mature-age readers, do you notice this phenomenon in yourselves?

What if the most reactionary letters to the editor of The Canberra Times (for example those that seethe about beggars on the street, wanting the government to kick them into getting jobs) are all written in the afternoons?

To assist research into this phenomenon perhaps Letters to the Editor might require not only the author's name but also the time of day on which the author dipped the quill into the inkwell.

And is it only because your aged columnist (76) always writes these columns early in the mornings that they are so famously mild-mannered, temperate and sensible?