The passing of Queen Elizabeth II one year ago today marked the end of an era, as the world bid farewell to the last head of state to have served in uniform during the Second World War, and who at the time of her accession governed an empire that still stretched from South America to Singapore.

In her first televised Christmas broadcast to that empire as Queen in 1957, she paid tribute to the old era in terms remarkably appropriate to our own times, warning against thoughtless, change-obsessed activists all too keen to dispose of timeless values and traditions.

“That it is possible for some of you to see me today is just another example of the speed at which things are changing all around us,” she said – television still being fairly novel, even in black and white.

“Because of these changes I am not surprised that many people feel lost and unable to decide what to hold on to and what to discard. How to take advantage of the new life without losing the best of the old,” she continued.

“But it is not the new inventions which are the difficulty. The trouble is caused by unthinking people who carelessly throw away ageless ideals as if they were old and outworn machinery.

“They would have religion thrown aside, morality in personal and public life made meaningless, honesty counted as foolishness and self-interest set up in place of self-restraint.”

It is a sign of how rapidly society has changed that the Queen, by constitutional convention a politically neutral figure, was able to speak publicly in such terms towards the beginning of her 70-year reign.

By the time she passed away last year, such a speech would have been unthinkable: Pride parades, mass migration, state-sponsored multiculturalism, and gender ideology had long supplanted the “ageless ideals” of Christianity and patriotism she espoused in 1957.

But perhaps, with the United Kingdom, the United States, and the European Union all facing turning-point elections next year, her message is more relevant now than ever.