What Cameron said about the Queen and Brexit

THOSE who confidently place the Queen squarely on a particular side of a polarising issue like Brexit are being short-sighted.

They neglect the quiet pragmatism of someone who has remained steadfastly neutral for longer than the vast majority of human beings have been alive, someone who really has seen it all before.

In any discussion of the Queen’s long reign, the same question is always asked: ‘What’s she really like?’

It is to her great credit that, in her tenth decade, the question is still unanswered.

David Cameron, who resigned as Prime Minister following Britain’s decision to leave the european Union, still believes that, for the Queen, the greater challenge was not Brexit, but Brentry — when Britain was determined to join the european economic Community (eeC) in the Sixties and Seventies, to the dismay of the Commonwealth realms.

‘That would have been much harder,’ says Cameron. It was under edward Heath’s Tory government that Britain finally joined at the start of 1973.

Classified Palace and Foreign Office documents show that the New Zealand government was so cross about Britain’s flirtation with europe that it failed to issue an invitation to the Queen when she was already due to visit Australia in 1963.

The Palace was reduced to dropping ‘a hint’ to the Kiwi prime minister before she was finally asked.

even then, the reception proved so flat in some places that the Foreign Office ordered ‘urgent’ despatches from British diplomats in the region.

The British High Commissioner to New Zealand, Francis Cumming-Bruce, reported gravely that ‘the timing of the visit, coming as it did so shortly after the great debate on Britain joining the eeC, significantly affected its psychological impact.’ The Queen herself was reported to be ‘drawn and very tired’.

Today, europe might continue to divide Britain bitterly.

No longer, though, does it drive a wedge between Britain and the Commonwealth, which must be a source of considerable relief to the Head of the Commonwealth.

The former Prime Minister of New Zealand, Sir John Key, believes that the Queen has played a crucial part in the way that people in his country have come to terms with a difficult moment in post-war relations with the old ‘mother country’.

‘They can understand that Britain was doing what’s best for Britain at the time,’ he says, adding that it was the monarch who prevented a deeper rift between New Zealand and the UK. ‘The Queen has been the one consistent voice — and the glue.’

So what are the Queen’s own views on europe? David Cameron says that the Queen remained steadfastly noncommittal when he discussed his negotiations with the eU.

‘I explained to her every week where we’d got to. She was very sympathetic. I never got the impression that she had a very strong view,’ he says.

Caution, he believes, would be the default position for the whole Royal Family. ‘My sense is that they are risk-averse. I don’t think they were ever Heathite euroenthusiasts, as it were, because it had been a painful choice,’ he says.

‘That is the point about europe. It has always been a painful choice.’