Her Majesty Read online

  Since the late nineteenth century, the standard handbook of constitutional monarchy has been the set of royal rights and obligations defined by the Victorian political thinker Walter Bagehot in his work The English Constitution. It was Bagehot who decreed that the Monarch must ‘sign her own death-warrant if the two Houses unanimously send it up to her’ and distilled the Sovereign’s powers into ‘three rights’ – the right to be consulted, the right to encourage and the right to warn. This is the job specification which has been drummed into successive royal generations. The Queen herself grew up learning it from both her father and her tutor, Henry Marten.* But, in recent years, an additional aspect has quietly been added to the job description.

  ‘During the nineties, we looked at everything,’ says a former Private Secretary. ‘We needed to find out where we should be going. We could always see great public affection in, say, Manchester, but we weren’t connecting nationally. We had to ask: “What the hell are we supposed to be doing?”’ The answer, in very simple terms, was articulated by another political thinker whose best known observations on the state of modern politics have been through the medium of television comedy. In his role as co-creator of Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister, Sir Antony Jay has not merely entertained but has helped shape modern thinking on the dynamic between elected politicians and unelected servants of the state. Although best known as a comedy writer, he has written extensively on the science of business (his Management and Machiavelli, first published in 1967, remains on the syllabus at Harvard Business School). He is also the writer of two of the most important royal documentaries ever made. In 1969, he wrote the script for Royal Family, the first film in history to show the Windsors at home and in private. To many British and Commonwealth viewers, the sight of a Royal Family barbecue or the Queen buying an ice cream for Prince Edward remains as vivid in the mind as the other broadcasting sensation of that summer – the moon landings. It was Jay who also co-wrote the script for the 1992 film, Elizabeth R. Most viewers will remember the intimate footage of the Queen with her grandchildren at Balmoral, of Ronald Reagan hunting for decaffeinated coffee on the Royal Yacht and the full grandeur of the state visit by an emotional Lech Walesa. Better still, some of the commentary was provided by the Queen herself.

  Jay also wrote a book to go with Elizabeth R. By his own admission, most people were more interested in the photographs than the words. But the text had a profound impact at Buckingham Palace. One former Private Secretary describes it as ‘the best monograph on the monarchy of our times’. In it, Jay breaks down the Queen’s constitutional role into ‘formal official functions’ – signing legislation and so on – and a list of fourteen ‘informal official services’ from ‘continuity’ to ‘focus of allegiance’. He also suggests ten principal qualities which the public have come to expect of the Monarch – including ‘political impartiality’ and ‘attendance to duty’. He combines them all to define a new dual role for the modern Monarch. The Queen is head of state, of course, with all the rights and constraints of the sort ordained by Bagehot. But Jay also gives her a new title – head of the nation. It is an equally important role but one with a much more personal dimension. Unlike the head of state role, which is clearly defined and happens automatically – appointing prime ministers, receiving state visitors, etc. – the head of the nation duties are down to each individual monarch. ‘They can be done well, or adequately, or badly, or not done at all,’ writes Jay. ‘They are the ones concerned with behaviour, values and standards; the ones which earn the respect, loyalty and pride of the people. If the Sovereign becomes just another occupant of a high office of state with no more relevance to people’s daily lives and inner feelings than the Lord Chief Justice, then that crucial link between nation and state will be seriously weakened and will perhaps break.’

  This new job description struck an instant chord at the Palace. ‘It was the mid-nineties and we were constantly questioning ourselves about everything,’ says a very senior official, now retired. ‘This made sense. We had just never thought of the monarchy like that.’ And so the Queen and her advisers quietly annexed this new ‘head of the nation’ title and added it to that of ‘head of state’. As they sought to move the monarchy forwards from the unhappy rows about money and marriages which dominated the early nineties, here was a simple two-pronged answer to the question: what is the monarchy for? It was a definition which has since helped to shape the entire way the Palace goes about its business. It also chimed with the resurgence of what the historian Frank Prochaska has called the ‘Welfare Monarchy’ with the Royal Family at the forefront of the voluntary sector.

  To this day it is the sentiments of Jay rather than Bagehot which open the Palace’s official introduction to the ‘Role of the Sovereign’ on the Queen’s website: ‘The British Sovereign can be seen as having two roles: Head of State, and “Head of the Nation”.’ The latter is explained as follows: ‘The Sovereign acts as a focus for national identity, unity and pride; gives a sense of stability and continuity; officially recognises success and excellence; and supports the ideal of voluntary service.’ You won’t find any of that in the Coronation Oath or the history books. But the Queen takes her ‘Nation’ role just as seriously as, say, her Coronation vow to ‘preserve inviolable the settlement of the Church of England’.

  It is the ‘head of the nation’ role which requires the hard work and delicate judgement. Jay believes that the Queen has been a natural from the start. ‘Her success is rooted in face-to-face contact,’ he says. ‘It’s all about looking people in the eye, hand to hand. It’s a personal thing and she has been doing the legwork and laying foundation stones and planting trees and opening things and being seen like that for sixty years. And there is a ripple effect. Even if she only asks someone where they’re from or what they do, that person tells a hundred people. I think this face-to-face work – not just relying on the electronic media – is somewhere close to the heart of this tribal loyalty. You need to be seen.’ In 1964, a Harris poll revealed that 60 per cent of the population had actually seen a member of the Royal Family in the flesh. Cultural shifts, modern media, apathy and the impositions of modern security will have reduced that figure. But, after two decades of straw-polling by the author, it is still safe to say that it comfortably exceeds the number who have laid an eyeball on, say, their local MP.

  Monarchy has always been a long game. As the Duke of York, British trade ambassador for a decade, points out, it could not be any other way. ‘We are not interested in short-term issues. You can’t do anything in the short term. It’s all dependent on relationships. That’s what the Queen’s been doing for sixty years. The more you do it, the greater your experience, the greater the ability to lead, to change, to manage, to listen, to learn, and it’s that ability to impart that knowledge and experience that, I think you’ll find, every single member of the family is so grateful for.’

  Sir Antony Jay certainly does not see himself as a latter-day Walter Bagehot (whom he admires greatly) but simply as a student of human nature. He believes that the emotional power of monarchy is as strong as ever and that anyone who thinks it’s out of date in a twenty-first-century Britain is deluded. ‘It is entirely irrational to ignore the irrational,’ he says in the study of his pretty Somerset farmhouse. ‘Almost everything about government is rational – paying tax, legislation and so on. But there is this irrational area – the Church, ceremony, pageantry. Ritual is hugely important. We are not just a ritualistic country but a ritualistic species.’

  The former Cambridge scholar explains that he simply formed the idea of the Monarch’s parallel state/nation roles after long conversations with successive private secretaries to the Queen. ‘When we talk about a country we mean three things,’ he says. ‘There is the state – which is the overarching structure with a permanent identity. There is the government – which runs things, provides change, causes division and institutionalises conflict. Then there is the third element and it is the most neglected one �
� the nation. We all have social emotions. We need to feel part of something, we are tribal. I feel part of my school, of my university, of my regiment, even of the BBC – all things which involve shared experiences. People have died for that feeling, going over the top in the trenches because “you’re with your mates”. That is what being a nation is about. And that feeling of nationhood is harnessed to the state through the Royal Family’

  He points to the scenes of calm, unscripted unity following the death, in 2002, of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother as an example of that sense of nationhood. And he cites America’s Watergate scandal and the 2009 saga of British MPs’ expenses as good examples of the difference between a monarchy and a republic. In 2009, there was widespread fury when it was revealed how hundreds of MPs had been spending their allowances. Parliament’s reputation sunk to a post-war nadir. This sort of episode, Jay suggests, causes deeper convulsions in a republic where the government and the state are seen as one and the same. Watergate remains a good example.* Because the President was the head of state, the whole scandal was far more traumatic for the country than if he had only been head of the government. So, by having a constitutional monarchy, says Jay, a country like Britain is better placed to digest a political crisis. ‘We can have a terrible political scandal but not end up despising the state because it’s the monarchy, not the government, which links nation and state,’ he argues.

  David Cameron certainly believes that Britain’s abrasive political culture demands a substantial counterbalance. ‘You have to have symbols of national unity that bring the country together, particularly if you have an aggressive confrontational political system,’ says the Prime Minister. ‘The fact that you have such a unifying figure for the nation makes it [the monarchy] immensely strong. Because this bit of the constitution is accepted and works, changes of government don’t lead to constitutional crises or banking crises. We don’t question our constitution every time something goes wrong.’

  The Queen’s success is not simply down to staying power and shoe leather. It also owes much to canny judgements at crucial moments. Despite the rosy glow which colours any cursory sweep of this reign, the Queen has not enjoyed one long, easy, golden era punctuated by a dark spell during the nineties. Her sixty years on the throne have consisted of three episodes of sustained success and two periods of recurring difficulty. Almost two-thirds of her reign could be classified as ‘contented’. But more than a third – twenty-three years – could be described, to some extent, as ‘troubled’.

  As the news broke of the death of George VI on 6 February 1952, the world wished the new young Queen nothing but good luck. No change of monarch in recent history had been accompanied by such a combined sense of loss, goodwill and optimism. The reign of George V began with rumours of alcoholism and a criminal libel trial to quash charges of bigamy (a London-based French journalist, Edward Mylius, had accused the King of a secret marriage to an admiral’s daughter in Malta; Mylius got twelve months). The accession of Edward VIII was mired in uncertainty and led, in short order, to the unhappy accession of George VI. But there were no outstanding issues, no whispered doubts about the accession of Elizabeth II. The fact was that post-war Britain, drab, battered and still on rations, badly needed a tonic and a fresh sense of direction. To see the throne pass from an avuncular symbol of dogged wartime resistance to a glamorous young mother married to a man of action was richly symbolic. Had George VI been succeeded by a son, would the mood have been as sentimental? Perhaps – but probably not.

  Princess Margaret described the revivalist fervour of Coronation Britain as a ‘phoenix-time’ for the nation. ‘Everything was being raised from the ashes,’ she told the royal biographer Ben Pimlott. ‘There was this gorgeous-looking, lovely young lady, and nothing to stop anything getting better and better.’ The new reign was off to a breathtaking start. ‘The crowds were incredible,’ Prince Philip said years later, reflecting on the reactions during that 1954 world tour. ‘The adulation was extraordinary. You wouldn’t believe it.’ Perhaps it all started too well. The only way things could go from this euphoric peak was downhill.

  The first ‘golden period’ of the reign could be said to have come to an end at the Glorious Goodwood race meeting of 1956 where the Queen was presented with a proclamation requiring her signature (she did not, as legend has it, sign the thing on the haunches of a racehorse). It was a document calling out the Army Reserve. Britain’s disastrous intervention in the Suez Canal Zone had begun.* As the Suez crisis unfolded, Prince Philip embarked on a world tour in the Royal Yacht which attracted world attention for the wrong reasons after the wife of his equerry, Mike Parker, sought a divorce. Just a year earlier, Princess Margaret had abandoned plans to marry her late father’s equerry, Group Captain Peter Townsend, because he was a divorced man. Now, the resurgence of the toxic D-word so close to the throne ignited rumours in the foreign press and even prompted the Palace to issue a statement denying any ‘rift’ in the royal marriage. By now, however, the monarchy had more serious rumblings to contend with. Following Anthony Eden’s departure as Conservative Prime Minister at the start of 1957, it was left to the Queen to appoint a new one. These days, a ruling party would simply choose a new leader and the Queen would appoint that person as Prime Minister. Back then, she was expected to do the choosing, too. All sovereigns must stay above party politics. So, it was particularly disagreeable to be dragged into the internal politics of one particular party. Her solution was to ask an internal committee of Conservative grandees to sound out opinions in the party. The verdict was clear enough and the Queen duly summoned Harold Macmillan, an Old Etonian married to a Duke’s daughter, ahead of R. A. ‘Rab’ Butler, seen by many as the more meritocratic choice. The conclusion drawn by a section of the press and public was that the Queen had been party to some cosy aristocratic stitch-up.

  A few months later, the Coronation honeymoon was finally over. A small-circulation conservative magazine, the National and English Review, devoted a special issue to the future of the monarchy. This might have made little impact beyond its 4,500 regular readers but for an extraordinary critique of the Queen herself. The author was the magazine’s editor, Lord Altrincham, a liberal-minded young Tory peer. He attacked the ‘tweedy’ courtiers around the Queen and made unfavourable comparisons between George V’s ‘classless stamp’ on his reign and the Queen’s ‘debutante stamp’ on her own.

  What offended people across the social spectrum, however, was the sneering tone of his attack on the Queen herself – her voice, her way of speaking, her ‘priggish’ demeanour. Altrincham (who would later renounce his peerage to become plain John Grigg) was physically attacked in the street while some of his colleagues in the Lords advocated various medieval punishments. Yet his broader complaints about a detached and complacent Court struck a chord. Many years later he would even be congratulated in public by a former Private Secretary to the Queen for performing a useful service to the Crown. This was the era of Angry Young Men, the beginning of the ‘end of deference’. The old Establishment was finding its ways and values were no longer swallowed whole by a pliant media. By the early sixties, the government was becoming mired in sex and spy scandals, notably the Profumo affair.*

  The young guns of the new television age were now firing difficult questions at politicians instead of asking ministers if they had anything they ‘might like to say to the nation’. The monarchy was not unscathed. The Royal Family was fair game for the edgy new genre of television satire. Sir Antony Jay, who joined the BBC in 1955 and went on to work with rising stars like David Frost, remembers the mood well. ‘Just after Suez, there was the beginning of a whole new line of questioning. Suddenly, Eden was not a great figure. Suddenly there were crises. Our own feelings about things like Profumo were unmitigated glee. We were delighted to see the back of these useless, nineteenth-century-style aristocratic idiots. What we needed was the white heat of new technology and all that.’

  The early sixties brought great happiness for
the Queen and Prince Philip with the birth of Prince Andrew, in 1960, and Prince Edward, in 1964. But all the time there was the uncomfortable sense of old certainties being chipped away. In 1963, the Queen and her officials were genuinely shocked when she was booed at the theatre during the state visit of the King and Queen of Greece. The booing was aimed at the visitors, not the hostess, but such a scene would have been unthinkable ten years earlier. It was the Queen herself who was the target of jeering in Canada.

  As Britain edged closer to the future European Union at the expense of old Commonwealth allegiances, so royalist affection was dwindling overseas. The crowds on her 1963 tour of Australia were a fraction of the turnout in 1954.

  Following Macmillan’s resignation through ill health, there were fresh media accusations of royal intrigue when the Queen had to choose a new Conservative Prime Minister. Sir Alec Douglas-Home, a Scottish landowner and a friend of the Royal Family, was even grander and ‘tweedier’ than Macmillan. The process had been a shambles. Confined to a hospital bed, Macmillan had been advising the Queen on whom to choose as his successor even though he had already resigned and thus had no constitutional right to do so. But having been advised that Douglas-Home was the Conservative Party’s considered choice, the Queen had no choice but to summon him. The media, now more combative than ever, went on the attack. ‘You have to remember that we in our world were very anti-monarchy, anti-Establishment,’ recalls Jay. ‘We would do everything we could to be snide.’

  The anti-Establishment movement did not have long to wait. After the 1964 general election, the Queen had her first Labour Prime Minister. Harold Wilson would prove both sympathetic and respectful but some of his ministers were almost contemptuous in their dealings with the Palace. Richard Crossman, as Lord President of the Council, made a point of arriving five minutes late for Privy Council meetings in order to keep the Queen waiting. And all the time, the monarchy – staid, dependable, old-fashioned – appeared to be at odds with the iconoclastic spirit of the sixties. The vast majority of people were not agitating or attending pop festivals but simply getting on with their jobs and their lives. Even so, the monarchy was seen as rather dull. And, short of a revolution, the greatest threat to the throne has always been indifference.