A lifetime of service ...and still the Queen reigns supreme
THE Queen is in the 68th year of her reign. She has weathered tumultuous social change, the evaporation of the Empire, the disappearance of deference and the collapse in churchgoing.
She has, over the decades, seen off six Popes, 12 US Presidents and – at least as of this morning – 13 Prime Ministers.
Our Sovereign, then, is unlikely to be daunted by the impudent calls this week from Green MSP Andy Wightman and one or two other obscurities for her ‘resignation’ in the wake of the UK Government’s mauling at the hands of the Supreme Court.
Such silliness shows not only scant grasp of its written judgment but the part of our Queen in the constitution.
In theory, Her Majesty could indeed ‘disband the army; she could dismiss all the officers... she could sell off all our ships-of-war and all our naval stores; she could make a peace by the sacrifice of Cornwall and begin a war for the conquest of Brittany’, panted Victorian constitutionalist Walter Bagehot.
‘She could make every citizen in the United Kingdom, male or female, a peer; she could make every parish in the United Kingdom a “University”; she could dismiss most of the civil servants, and she could pardon all offenders.’
In reality, such arbitrary monarchy vanished with the Stuarts. We have had since 1688 limited, constitutional monarchy, each King or Queen subtly less powerful than the last.
None has dared withhold the Royal Assent since Queen Anne and the hissy fits of Queen Victoria would be unthinkable today. Edward VII was firmly sat on when he demanded changes to his first King’s speech; his grandson forced to quit the throne rather than foist upon us a wife wholly unacceptable as queen.
ELIZABETH II has, in fact, only three rights as monarch: the right to be consulted by her Prime Minister, the right to encourage certain courses of action, and the right to warn against others.
And decades hence, once her official biographer has seen the journal she has kept daily all her adult life, we may finally know what she really thought about Suez, the 1984 miners’ strike or the prorogation controversy of September 2019 – though one would not bet on it, such is her discretion.
Even her honours – with but four exceptions: the Order of the Garter, the Order of the Thistle, the Order of Merit, and the Royal Victorian Order – are not in her personal gift. In all matters of state she is formally ‘advised’ by her Prime Minister – advice that she must obey.
This, over the years, has seen her forbidden to attend the 1971 Commonwealth conference, by Edward Heath, forced in 1978 to receive Romanian tyrant Nicolae Ceauşescu on a state visit and, in 1994, effectively commanded to bestow a knighthood on Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe.
All these were, in hindsight, grievous mistakes – but those of her ministers, not her. In one respect the Queen’s personal authority has been seriously eroded. When a Prime Minister resigned, between general elections, she had early in the reign real discretion in appointing his successor (though after, of course, close consultation with party grandees).
That was not a problem in 1955, when Anthony Eden was a shoo-in, but there was some murmuring in 1957 when Harold Macmillan was asked to kiss hands, not R A Butler, and real controversy when Butler was again pipped, in 1964, by the Earl of Home – who was not even an MP.
The Queen’s one blunder in that instance was to act on the advice of the outgoing Macmillan, forgetting that once a PM has tendered his resignation he has no right formally to advise her on anything.
It has since been laid down that a new Prime Minister must be elected by his party – though, as recent events suggest, the franchise really should be confined to its MPs.
Otherwise, the Queen in nearly seven decades has barely put a foot wrong: most agree her only serious mistake was her tardiness in visiting Aberfan, after the October 1966 disaster.
Even that was probably born of caution. Unlike Margaret Thatcher, a notorious ambulance chaser, she is loath to rush to the scene of calamity because of all the local inconvenience it can cause.
Caution has been the signal hallmark of her reign – partly because she succeeded so young and because she has been haunted by the 1936 fate of Edward VIII.
She meets her PM, one to one, most Tuesday evenings, and always has him or her for one weekend at Balmoral. No one else is present, no minute is kept and we know tantalisingly little of those audiences – though the Palace last week made its anger plain when David Cameron spoke so indiscreetly about her alleged views on Scottish independence.
SHE got on better with some premiers than others. Heath and Thatcher were heavy going, though the Queen came greatly to respect the latter, and gave her the Order of Merit soon after her retirement.
Tony Blair, one gathers, confused her – ‘I think he’s in the wrong party’ – and, when he pushily offered the services of the Government for the Golden Jubilee, she replied dryly: ‘My Golden Jubilee, Mr Blair.’
Macmillan, Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan were particular favourites, though as the last once remarked: ‘What one gets is friendliness, not friendship.’ One does not get matey with Her Majesty.
She has her own ways of flagging up warning without actually giving an opinion. On occasion, appalled by some name on an honours list, the Queen has penned beside it simply, ‘I would like more information’. She detests undue effusion. Once she struck out a word in a speech. ‘I shall be pleased to be in Kingston upon Hull,’ she announced, ‘but I shall not be very pleased.’
That steely honesty underpinned what remains her most important broadcast – her live address to the nation on the eve of Diana’s funeral, after the most uphill week of the reign.
The Queen made plain she had ‘admired and respected’ her late daughter-in-law, and that ‘I for one believe there are lessons to be learned’ from the preceding days. But she did not pretend she had liked her.
Reinforcing it all is an earthed humility. This is a Queen so cost-conscious she is known to wander around her residences switching off unnecessary lights; who, when not on duty, happily dons skirts and cardigans that she has owned for decades; who, family apart, is closest not to government ministers or aristocratic acquaintances, but to such personal servants as Paul Whybrew and Angela Kelly.
Once a young woman had just been presented to Her Majesty at a garden party when, to her horror, her mobile began raucously to ring. ‘You’d better answer that,’ said the Queen, poker-faced. ‘It might be somebody important.’