Inside the mind of the Queen

We rarely know what our monarch is truly thinking, says Harry Mount – but she knows what we are

It’s not often that we hear the Queen speak her mind – but when Her Majesty is caught making an off-the-cuff remark by a reporter’s mic, what is most notable is how, almost without exception, she manages to capture the public mood.

It happened again this week. After she opened the Senedd in Cardiff on Thursday, Her Majesty was filmed in a private conversation with the Duchess of Cornwall and Elin Jones, the Senedd’s presiding officer, about Cop26, the climate change conference starting in Glasgow on October 31. Her irritation was clear.

“I’ve been hearing all about Cop,” she said. “Still don’t know who is coming – no idea. We only know about people who are not coming and it’s really irritating when they talk but they don’t do.”

There, caught off guard, the Queen, at the age of 95, encapsulated pretty much what we all think about politicians: they’re all talk and no action.

Because the Queen has never given an interview, we rarely get to know what she thinks

– she is the most famous, most mysterious enigma in the world. But when these little nuggets slip out, they are invariably spot on and utterly in tune with what we’re all thinking. There are no blunders; no rudeness; no swearing. Just pure common sense – delivered by the least common person on the planet.

The best-known example of her folk wisdom came just before the Scottish referendum in 2014. Speaking to well-wishers outside Crathie Kirk, near Balmoral, four days before the independence plebiscite, she said, “You have an important vote on Thursday.” She then warned Scots to think “very carefully about the future” before casting their votes.

The Queen has to be seen to be completely impartial when it comes to politics. But this was a perfect example of what you might call “Queenglish” – where she speaks in ostensibly uncontroversial, almost bland terms, but you can divine her intentions beneath the objective surface.

Buckingham Palace insiders said her Scottish comments were politically neutral, but those remarks seemed, very subtly, to back the “No” campaign.

The Queen’s simple language goes right to the heart of even the most complex questions that have bamboozled planet-brained experts.

In 2008, after the banking crash, she asked a professor from the London School of Economics: “Why did no one see it coming?” The professor, Luis Garicano, later reported that he had answered the Queen’s question, saying to her: “The reason the situation got out of hand is that those working at every point in the lending chain were eager to continue doing the job they were paid to do.”

With all due respect to Prof Garicano, the Queen’s simple question remains much more memorable than his rather complicated answer.

Because she is so completely in control of her public and private pronouncements, the Queen isn’t happy when others report on her conversations. Just after the Scottish referendum, David Cameron, then prime minister, ruffled a few royal feathers when he said to former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg that, on hearing the result, the Queen “purred down the line” to him.

Her Majesty would not have been happy, either, with the 2016 story told by Michael Gove – and denied by Nick Clegg – that the Queen had torn into the former deputy prime minister about the shortcomings of the European Union.

And, in 2012, the BBC apologised for a “breach of confidence” after special correspondent Frank Gardner told Radio 4’s Today programme that the Queen had privately told him she wasn’t impressed by the delay in arresting Abu Hamza, now imprisoned in the United States for terrorist offences. The Queen may not have liked the leak, but the vast majority of the British population would have shared her view.

A similar masterly approach to the public mood was on show in February this year. On a Zoom call to senior officers overseeing the Covid vaccine delivery across the UK, she gently said that people who refused the jab “ought to think about other people, rather than themselves”. She added that it was important that people were

“protected” by the vaccine. The Queen said that, in her case, the jab, was “very quick”, adding: “It didn’t hurt at all.”

Without bashing the anti-vaxxers and getting them into a lather of anti-monarchist anger, the Queen subtly laid out her position. Yet again, she used her soft power so delicately and effectively. And this at a time when her husband of more than 70 years was ill and only three months from dying.

She had a similar effect on the public approach to jabs in 1957, when she let it be known that eight-year-old Prince Charles and six-year-old Princess Anne had had the polio vaccine.

Of course, you would expect the Queen to hit the nail on the head when she’s making a prepared speech. And that’s what she did in April 2020, at the start of the first lockdown, when she borrowed from Dame Vera Lynn – who died weeks later, aged 103 – and said: “We will meet again.”

The Queen occupies such a huge space in the early memories of everyone in this country that just a few words can bring on an ocean of emotion. In that same April 2020 broadcast, she referred to “the very first broadcast I made, in 1940, helped by my sister. We, as children, spoke from here at Windsor to children who had been evacuated from their homes and sent away for their own safety.”

Listen to the 14-year-old Princess Elizabeth talking, in that first public broadcast, to her 10-year-old sister, Princess Margaret, and the tear ducts go into overdrive: “My sister is by my side and we are both going to say goodnight to you. Come on, Margaret. Goodnight, children. Goodnight – and good luck to you all.”

It’s hard to avoid another outpouring of emotion when you hear Princess Elizabeth’s words in 1947, on her 21st birthday, spoken in Cape Town, “I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.”

When the Queen does give speeches on political matters, she has to be super-diplomatic. She often delivers her deeply veiled opinions in the most surprising of places, too.

In 2019, at a particularly difficult moment in the Brexit negotiations, she said the country should find “common ground”, “never losing sight of the big picture”. She gave the speech not at Buckingham Palace or Windsor – but at the Sandringham Women’s Institute in West Newton Hall, King’s Lynn. Her Majesty has always known that less is more: for someone as grand as her, an understated venue like a village hall packs a greater punch than a palace or Parliament.

And underlying her whole approach are her manners – and a constant deference to her host. Thus her 1976 speech at the bicentennial celebrations

of American Independence in Philadelphia, when she said: “We lost the American colonies because we lacked the statesmanship to know the right time and the manner of yielding what is impossible to keep.”

And then, when the situation is right, the Queen also uses humour to say the perfect riposte. At a G7 meeting of world leaders in 1991 – in recently unearthed footage that went viral on social media earlier this year – Edward Heath, pompous former prime minister, could be seen showing off about how brave he was in going to Baghdad under Saddam Hussein. The Queen exclaimed with a laugh: “But you’re expendable!”

How right the Queen was then – as she has been for nearly seven decades on the throne.

Harry Mount is the author of How England Made the English (Penguin, £9.99)