Her crowning triumph has been to quash the menace of republicanism. But the biggest challenge ahead will be keeping the threat at bay
On the eve of Britain’s great Platinum Jubilee celebrations, a tribute... and a timely warning
ONE morning at the beginning of 1953, Sir Winston Churchill’s doctor, Lord Moran, found the veteran Prime Minister inspecting a photograph of Britain’s new sovereign. The Queen, then 26, had been on the throne for barely a year. She was all in white, and looked utterly radiant.
‘Lovely, inspiring,’ Churchill said thoughtfully. ‘All the film people in the world, if they had scoured the globe, could not have found anyone so suited to the part.’
He was, of course, completely right. Seventy years after her accession, the Queen’s star remains undimmed. No casting agency on Earth could have found somebody with such stamina, resilience and dedication to her role: a living symbol of patriotic duty.
How many other 96-year-olds would have made such an effort to attend the opening of the Elizabeth Line at Paddington Station this week, especially given the mobility issues that have largely kept her out of the public eye in recent months? But there she was, a little stooped, but as polite and patient as ever, the very picture of good grace.
In truth, the Queen must have unveiled thousands of plaques during the past 70
No one could have been better suited to the role of Queen
years. But not for a moment did she betray a hint of boredom.
For diehard republicans, all this must be utterly maddening. For despite the allegations about Prince Andrew’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, not to mention the bizarre and self-regarding outbursts from the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, enthusiastic republicanism remains the province of cranks and eccentrics, while the Queen herself is as popular as ever, and tens of millions of ordinary Britons are keenly looking forward to celebrating her Platinum Jubilee in just under two weeks’ time.
According to recent polls, more than eight out of ten people think she has done a good or very good job, while support for the monarchy outweighs republicanism by a crushing 61 per cent to 24 per cent. Paid-up members of the pressure group Republic could comfortably fit inside a League Two football stadium, which tells you all you need to know about their political significance.
But things could easily be different. In Spain, for example, the most recent poll puts republican support at almost 52 per cent, with monarchism at 44 per cent. The end of the House of Bourbon may not be inevitable, but it’s far more likely than the end of the House of Windsor.
The fact that republican sentiment is so much weaker here is no accident. Indeed, it’s a sign of the Queen’s political skill that we often underplay this, her greatest achievement, and never consider how different things might have been.
To return to that scene in 1953, Churchill, for one, knew the survival of the monarchy could never be taken for granted. In his own lifetime, he had seen one of Elizabeth’s cousins, Kaiser Wilhelm II, driven from the throne of Germany, and another, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, murdered beside his wife and children.
And Churchill himself had been intimately involved in the Abdication Crisis of 1936, when his friend Edward VIII gave up the throne to marry the American divorcée Wallis Simpson — a scandal that had shaken the monarchy to its foundations.
Churchill knew, in other words, just how fragile the bonds between sovereign and people could be. And as an experienced political communicator, he knew that with a single thoughtless word, the legacy of centuries might be undone, and Britain plunged into constitutional chaos.
As it turned out, Elizabeth II more than lived up to her first Prime Minister’s high hopes. She has played her hand superbly, never betraying the slightest hint of partisanship.
But it’s precisely because she’s been so good at it that we underestimate her deftness in steering the monarchy through the squalls and storms of seven decades — as well as the terrible dangers that may lie ahead when she vacates the stage.
Perhaps her greatest challenge was the transition from Empire to Commonwealth, which a less self-confident monarch might have considered a personal affront. Indeed, we rarely notice that Elizabeth II has actually lost the crown of more countries — from South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria to Fiji, Sri Lanka and Pakistan — than the 15 realms she currently rules.
In the early 1960s, when every few months seemed to bring down the flag in another former British colony, some commentators wondered whether the end of Empire might also mean the end of the royal institution.
Everything about the monarchy, warned the columnist Peregrine Worsthorne in 1959, would look ‘foolish and tacky when related to a second-class power on the decline’.
What, he wondered, would be ‘the point of maintaining a Queen-Empress without an empire to rule over?’
The Queen’s answer to this challenge was a masterstroke of political strategy. Abroad, she embraced the new
multiracial Commonwealth with apparently boundless enthusiasm, embodied by the famous images of her dancing with Kwame Nkrumah, president of newly independent Ghana, during her visit to Accra in 1961.
At home, she borrowed Queen Victoria’s tactic of putting her family at the forefront, even allowing BBC cameras to follow them in the 1969 documentary Royal Family.
At the time, BBC2’s controller David Attenborough — yes, that David Attenborough — warned that television was in danger of
‘killing the monarchy’. ‘The whole institution,’ he wrote, ‘depends on mystique and the tribal chief in his hut... If any member of the tribe ever sees inside the hut, then the whole system of the tribal chiefdom is damaged and the tribe eventually disintegrates.’
There was an element of truth in this, of course. But it was surely naïve to imagine, in an increasingly undeferential age, with cameraphones and social media just over the horizon, the tribal chief could simply remain in her hut with the door firmly closed.
And although the 1960s and 1970s were enormously turbulent years for Britain, with the economy in the doldrums, strikes in the headlines, inflation soaring towards 30 per cent and Northern Ireland torn apart by terrorist violence, the Queen’s balancing act proved astonishingly successful.
Back then, pollsters rarely bothered to ask about attitudes to the monarchy, since republicanism was so eccentric as to be politically non-existent. When the Queen celebrated her Silver Jubilee in 1977, there was no more enthusiastic onlooker than the Prime Minister, Labour’s Jim Callaghan.
Far-Left organisations tried to spread the slogans ‘Stuff the Jubilee’ and ‘Roll on the Red Republic’. But most republican events were a total washout. One rally attracted just eight people. Another, arranged on Blackheath by the Libertarian Communists, attracted a grand total of five people and was rained off.
The story was much the same at the Jubilees of 2002 and 2012. On both occasions, metropolitan, Left-leaning commentators confidently predicted that nobody would turn up. Nobody, they claimed, really liked the monarchy, and the British Republic was only a few years away.
The Golden Jubilee of 2002 came just five years after the hysterical backlash against the Queen’s reluctance to weep and wail publicly about the death of Diana. As the big day approached, The Guardian mocked the Palace’s supposedly ‘forlorn’ efforts to ignite public enthusiasm, sneering that the highlight of the festivities would be a ‘snooker and pool tournament in Plymouth’.
But what happened? A million people packed into the Mall for the Party at the Palace, while a further 200 million watched around the world. Memories of the Diana furore were comprehensively dispelled. And once again, republicanism was conspicuous by its total irrelevance.
It’s true, of course, that not everybody is a great fan of the monarchy. Recent polls suggest that roughly one in four people think Britain should have an elected head of state one day.
An enormous problem for republicans, though, is that it’s very hard to imagine either major party campaigning on an overtly republican platform, winning a General Election and staking its entire political capital on a referendum to abolish the monarchy.
The republicans’ other great problem is that, even if you look past the Queen’s herculean devotion to duty, the fact remains that the world’s best governed and most admirable societies are almost all monarchies.
The Scandinavian countries of Denmark, Sweden and Norway, which often lead international quality-of-life rankings, are monarchies. So are Belgium and the Netherlands — as are other highly successful and egalitarian countries such as Canada, New Zealand and Australia.
Not only, then, does monarchy stand for tradition, stability, duty and patriotism, it’s perfectly compatible with democracy, diversity, equality and the other abstract nouns beloved of republican enthusiasts. And if you doubt it, just head over to Oslo or Stockholm and have a look around.
In any case, what patriotic Briton would want a colourless non-entity in a grey suit, like the presidents of Germany? What sane person would envy the chaotic circus of U.S. presidential politics, or the grubby soap opera of the French presidency? Who would relish a British version of Donald Trump or Joe Biden, let alone Nicolas Sarkozy or Emmanuel Macron? Alas, the disease of republicanism will never be completely cured. There will always be idealists who believe quadrennial presidential elections will magically solve all Britain’s problems, just as there will always be intellectuals whose snobbery and self-loathing fuels their hatred of our institutions.
Disturbingly, a recent poll suggested only four out of ten 18- to 24-year-olds favour keeping the monarchy after the end of the Queen’s reign. Many will surely change their minds when they grow up. But some, I fear, will never see the light.
We underestimate the threat of republicanism, therefore, at our peril. And although the Queen will leave the institution in remarkably good shape, that doesn’t mean there won’t be storms ahead.
For my part, I think Prince Charles will be an excellent king. His enthusiasms for environmentalism and traditional architecture were ahead of their time, and the older he gets, the more comfortable he seems in his role as an ambassador for the nation.
But you would have to be blind to deny the House of Windsor has problems, from the dreadful Prince Andrew saga to the inevitable prospect of more attention-seeking outbursts from the Californian exiles.
So Charles must remember that a monarch is, above all, a politician, walking the most precarious
Who would relish having a British Biden?
Andrew and the Sussexes pose obvious issues
tightrope of all. He will have to weigh every glance, every syllable. He can’t afford to scribble any more of his ‘black spider memos’ to ministers, and he can’t allow himself to lose touch with public opinion. For if he does, the vultures of the bien-pensant Left won’t hesitate to pounce.
In the battle to preserve the institution of the monarchy, though, it would be wrong to focus exclusively on the strengths and weaknesses of a given sovereign. The real strengths of the Crown — as the bulwark of stability, the embodiment of duty and an unrivalled reminder of the bonds uniting past, present and future — lie in the institution, not in the individual.
In this, the year of the Queen’s Platinum, we monarchists ought to admit that we have had it easy. For 70 years, there has been little need for us to make the case for Britain’s most venerable institution, since our Queen has been such a splendid advertisement for it.
But in the years to come, the degenerate cranks and ideological extremists who favour a republic are likely to become ever more vociferous.
We should make no apology for cheering the Queen to the skies, and treating her republican critics with the derision they deserve.
In the campaign to preserve Britain’s most beloved institution, Elizabeth II has fought a splendid fight. But although it feels disloyal to admit it, even she must hang up her gloves one day.
When she does, those of us who cherish our monarchy will have a battle on our hands. But the menace of republicanism has been beaten before. We can, and we must, beat it again.