Her Majesty (6 page)

For all the occasional problems, the years since 2002 fall into the ‘contented’ category, culminating in the marriage of Prince William to Catherine Middleton before a global audience thought to rival – or exceed – an Olympiad. On a personal level, the Queen must have been equally thrilled to see the marriage of her eldest granddaughter, Zara Phillips, and the christening of her first great-grandchild, Savannah Phillips.

It has all served as a splendid prelude to an extraordinary celebration which has only happened once before – in 1897. It will be supervised by a passionately royalist Prime Minister who camped in the Mall to watch the 1981 Royal Wedding – ‘I was in the best place, just where the Mall meets the statue outside Buckingham Palace’ – and David Cameron has no doubts that the country will be doing much the same to mark the Queen’s sixtieth anniversary on the throne: ‘The Diamond Jubilee will be much bigger than anyone expects.’

This jubilee is an event which allows us to stand back and see the nineties in context rather than as the prism through which this reign has often been assessed. The jubilee helps us to reflect on the happiest and most miserable periods of the reign and to see that the euphoria of the mid-fifties was no more sustainable than the seemingly endless run of disasters a generation later. Instead, we can assess the success of this reign by the state of the institution sixty years on. If we take the Queen’s full title – Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and of Her other Realms and Territories, Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith – then there are unquestionably cracks and fissures in the institutions which she leads. The Church of England is divided over gay clergy, women bishops and overtures from the Vatican. The United Kingdom is less united than at any stage since Irish independence with four legislatures beavering away in London, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast. Great Britain, the original 1707 Anglo-Scottish partnership, is less entwined than at any stage since the Act of Union (to the point that English period dramas like
Downton Abbey
are now deemed unsuitable for Scottish television audiences). In the 2011 elections it was the separatist Scottish National Party which won an outright majority in the Scottish Parliament. The Commonwealth is larger than ever yet increasingly flabby
and inconsequential as it seeks a twenty-first-century role for itself. Of all the Queen’s responsibilities, her ‘other Realms and Territories’ might have been the likeliest area for dissent. But, despite periodic grumbling and a handful of failed plebiscites, republicanism is an occasional issue in occasional areas rather than a constant grievance. Few expect a country like Australia to retain the Crown in the long term. Yet, when offered an opportunity to replace the monarchy in 1999, the people voted to retain the Crown by a margin which surprised everyone. Even among ardent republicans there is a strong personal affection for the Queen. And when much of Australia sat up into the night, gripped by the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge in April 2011 – with that country’s republican Prime Minister in the Westminster Abbey congregation – it was abundantly clear that the issue is, for now, a non-starter.

So, sixty years on, we find the constitutional garden in an untidy but not an unruly state. But there is an important point to be made here. There is virtually nothing that the Queen could have done to alter any of these situations. Indeed, all that can be stated with any degree of certainty is that things would be worse if it were not for her. That is certainly the objective view from overseas.

‘The Commonwealth would certainly not exist in its present form without her,’ says President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives. Born in 1967, this Liverpool University graduate is one of the world’s youngest heads of state and the first elected leader of an Islamic archipelago republic which could disappear if sea temperatures rise by just a few degrees (he famously held the world’s first sub-aqua Cabinet meeting in 2009 to highlight the problem). A one-time political prisoner who supplanted a dictatorship with a vigorous democracy, Nasheed is a canny, hard-headed politician. And he is not being sentimental when he says that his country, like many other former colonies and protectorates, can feel rather proprietorial about our Queen. ‘She’s our Queen as well, in a way. In our minds, she’s not necessarily just English. She doesn’t really have a nationality,’ Nasheed explains. ‘She is very different from British monarchs in the past because she’s the first monarch to have engaged the world, not as an imperial ruler but someone who is out there to look after us in a sense.’ He is equally enthusiastic about the Prince of Wales, both as a future monarch and future Head of the Commonwealth.

In Britain, it is certainly worthy of note that, even at its lowest ebb, the modern monarchy has not encountered anything resembling a coherent opposition. There has always been a republican lobby of some sort and it is possible – indeed, probable – that, given a personal choice, a majority of Labour MPs would prefer an elected head of state. In the
fifties and sixties, republicans tended to rally around symbols – the Queen’s head on stamps, Scotland’s sacred Stone of Scone beneath the Coronation Chair and so on.

Today, they prefer to focus on cost and lifestyle. The most visible manifestation of contemporary British republican thought is a pressure group called Republic which includes a small number of MPs, celebrities and public figures. A frequent complaint among its supporters is the absence of public debate on the issue but, in recent years, its public profile has risen considerably. Its efforts to present a constructive intellectual case for constitutional reform do not always chime with the class-war rhetoric of some of its supporters, but it offers some original perspectives. Contrary to the sour-grapes stance usually adopted by anti-monarchist groups at the first flutter of bunting, Republic’s leader issued a statement welcoming Prince William’s wedding on the grounds that it would kick-start fresh debate on the role of the Crown. On the wedding day itself, the organisation even staged a rather forlorn ‘Not The Royal Wedding’ party in London’s Red Lion Square. But it has its work cut out. The sense of national exhilaration as the new Duke and Duchess of Cambridge walked out into the world on that April morning was ample proof of that.

‘People were worried about what was going to happen during those difficult times in the nineties,’ says Sir John Major, Prime Minister for much of that period. ‘But there’s a difference between the often grudging reception which parts of the media and the republican fringe give the Royal Family and the deep, instinctive roots that you find when you go around the country. The monarchy has re-established itself in a quite astonishing way. Its value is incalculable. It gives us a unique identity. And that is maximised by the Queen because she has been there for so long. I find it impossible to contemplate a Britain without a monarchy. I simply cannot picture it.’ He has noticed something else, too: ‘It’s regarded, these days, with much less awe and much more affection.’

His old foe and successor agrees. Indeed, Tony Blair believes support for the monarchy is arguably now stronger than ever: ‘Whereas those who supported the monarchy in times gone past did so out of a very deferential respect for the institution, nowadays it’s a far more rational, sustainable calculation that, all things considered, it’s better for the country.’ David Cameron puts it more starkly: ‘There’s no republican debate in this country.’ Jack Straw, a former Labour Cabinet Minister and a critic of the monarchy in the early nineties, agrees.

Certainly, the old republican argument that monarchy, equality and progress are somehow incompatible is wearing thin. The 2011 United Nations Human Development Index assesses 170 countries according to
fundamental living standards. Of the top ten, seven are constitutional monarchies and the Queen reigns over three of them – Australia (second), New Zealand (third) and Canada, (eighth). In top spot is the kingdom of Norway.

In Britain, a clear majority of people support the status quo. ‘The polls are always about 80 per cent in favour of the monarchy to various degrees,’ explains Sir Antony Jay. ‘And you have to remember that the fervour of the 20 per cent who are anti-monarchy has nothing like the intensity of feeling which exists among the keenest members of the 80 per cent.’ The Palace’s own private polling, as ever, puts the figure at a steady 70 per cent in favour with 15–20 per cent against and the rest undecided. Regardless, it’s a level of support beyond the dreams of politicians. As David Cameron puts it: ‘We’d all love a bit of that!’

But the Queen, the Prince of Wales and their advisers are acutely aware that republicans don’t usually produce republics. The greatest threat to the monarchy is itself. As the Duke of Edinburgh himself has sagely observed: ‘Most of the monarchies in Europe were really destroyed by their greatest and most ardent supporters. It was the most reactionary people who tried to hold on to something without letting it develop and change.’ The Queen is not immune to criticism from the most fervent royalists who, from time to time, believe that she is not acting in her own best interests – by failing to block some fresh transfer of powers to the European Union, perhaps, or acquiescing in the loss of the Crown or the ‘royal’ prefix from the letterhead of a public institution. She is certainly not oblivious to these concerns. If they are filling her post bag, no one will hide them from her.

But, standing back once more, it is her capacity to promote consensus which is a hallmark of her reign. ‘She is a great non-executive,’ says a very senior courtier. ‘We find it in families with aunts and uncles and godparents. They are the non-execs who provide the support, wisdom and guidance on the sidelines while the parents fight it out in hand-to-hand conflict with the children. The Queen is playing that role at the heart of our constitution.’

As for the monarchy itself, it is now in robust health. We see an institution that is secure, solvent, confident and active. And she stands at the head of a Royal Household which is no longer dominated by a particular old school or regimental tie. Indeed, if there is one obvious ‘old-boy network’ at work inside the Palace today, it consists of alumni of the University of West London. Previously Thames Valley University (and West London Polytechnic before that), it now runs the Palace’s very own Butler Diploma course and has educated far more members of staff than, say, Eton or Oxford. And they are not all boys either.

Presiding over all this is a sovereign whose level of experience has no equal among modern heads of state. In the mid-fifties, some talked excitedly of a ‘New Elizabethan Age’. Amid the austerity and the bomb craters, it seemed naively optimistic. Perhaps, though, future generations, will talk of ‘New Elizabethans’. Sir John Major certainly thinks so. ‘The phrase trips happily off the tongue!’ he argues. ‘And we have seen nothing like it, except for Victoria. When historians look back in five hundred years, they won’t find more than a handful of monarchs who will have served as long as our Queen.’

Yet the span of her reign is now so vast that those ‘New Elizabethans’ will actually straddle three centuries. The term may be too broad to serve as any sort of useful social or historic categorisation. As a little girl, Princess Elizabeth talked kings and queens with George V who had himself sat on the knee of Lord Palmerston. Today, the Queen has a British Prime Minister younger than any of her own children. During that 1954 tour of Australia, she attended reunions of Boer War veterans in every state. In Sydney, she even met Harold Wearne, ninety-one, who had fought in the Sudan War of 1885. Today she pins decorations on soldiers who were in primary school at the start of the twenty-first century.

As Prince William acknowledges, you have to be approaching seventy to be able to recall any other face on the banknotes and postage stamps. Sir John Major concurs: ‘There are 6.8 billion people in the world, and over six billion of them have known nothing but the Queen as the British Monarch all their lives.’

It is precisely because of her long reign and the steady pace of her public duties that she is seen as someone whose world is shaped by tradition and convention. ‘As soon as she gets a new diary, her Private Secretary can more or less fill half of it up straight away just like her Private Secretary would have done in 1952,’ explains Ronald Allison, former Press Secretary to the Queen, pointing to the set-piece calendar of Easter Court at Windsor, Holyroodhouse every summer, the Cenotaph in November and so on. ‘So, in one sense, nothing has changed. And yet, everything has changed.’

Certainly, when we see the famous East Front of Buckingham Palace or the Round Tower of Windsor Castle or a corgi or a sentry box or a Christmas broadcast, we sense continuity, permanence, dependability. That’s the whole idea. What we don’t see is an institution which has had to adapt just as much as the world beyond. It has managed to do so without us noticing – ever changing yet never changing. And that is all down to the shrewd leadership of an innately conservative woman who has also proved to be the very model of a modern monarch.

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The Lord Mayor’s speech was restrained compared to Churchill’s Address of Welcome in the Commons two days earlier: ‘The gleaming episode of the Queen’s journey among her peoples, their joy in welcoming her … constitutes an event which stands forth without an equal in our records, and casts a light – clear, calm, gay and benignant upon the whole human scene.’

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The very first medal she presented during her reign was the Victoria Cross, awarded to Private William Speakman of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers. He fought off repeated enemy assaults with grenades, stones and even empty bottles during the Korean War.

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A senior master at Eton College, Marten regularly visited Windsor Castle during the Second World War to teach Princess Elizabeth about the constitutional duties that lay ahead. Despite his disconcerting habit of addressing a solitary Princess as ‘Gentlemen’, Sir Henry’s lessons were much appreciated. In 1945, he was knighted by George VI in front of the entire school.