Warm, kind and full of humour... we loved her for it ANDREWMORTON
Royal biographer
EVER since entering public life, the Queen has made a quiet commitment to diversity, inclusion, change and hope.
In her first speech on her 21st birthday in 1947, she said she wanted to reach people “wherever they live, whatever race they come from, and whatever language they speak”.
She said that in South Africa, which was months away from becoming an apartheid regime.
And on the day of her coronation in 1953, she asked people of whatever religion to pray for her.
At first she struggled to find her voice in a world ruled by men where most women were second-class citizens.
But time and time again she broke royal protocol and defied convention.
She insisted that her Coronation was televised, despite objections from PM Winston Churchill.
Years before Diana was born and became known for shaking the hands of Aids patients, the Queen visited a leper colony in Nigeria.
In 1961, she was pictured dancing with Ghana’s president in the midst of the Cold War and while
America was still facing segregation.
She loved dancing and musicals and having a good time. It was the
Swinging Sixties and she wasn’t afraid of the public seeing that.
Her handling of Diana’s divorce and Charles’s remarriage set the tone for the thoroughly modern monarchy that was to come.
Faced with criticism in the aftermath of Diana’s death in 1997, she showed her ability to adapt with decency and decorum, sharing her own grief in an unprecedented address.
I noticed a shift in her attitude after the death of the Queen Mother in 2002.
She began to shake off the deeper conservatism of older royals to create a more relaxed monarchy.
In 2009, Michelle Obama famously broke protocol to give the Queen a hug but she didn’t mind. In fact, she enthusiastically reciprocated.
What would her grandparents have thought of her jumping out of a helicopter with James Bond and joking around with Paddington Bear?
It’s these smaller moments which built up a bigger picture of the Queen as warm, kind and full of humour that made the public love her more and more as the years went by.
It showed that behind the mask was a woman with twinkly eyes and a sense of the absurd.
In one of the most significant moments of her rule, she became the first British monarch to visit Ireland in 100 years in 2011.
That year she ended 300 years of succession law to allow women equal rights to the throne.
One of the best speeches ever made was her speech at the start of the pandemic in 2020.
Her 70 years on the throne gave her the wisdom and authority to reassure and calm the nation.
Her commitment to being modern while retaining a vital continuity in an ever-changing institution kept her holding this country together.