The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
As a teenage Lefty, I insulted the Queen. Now I adore her
How our remarkable monarch changed the mind of this ‘Public School Red’
Iwas locked up in the sanatorium when the Queen came to Rugby. She was visiting our school to open some new gates, so I wrote a piece urging her instead to open public schools to all, regardless of ability to pay. The article was picked up by a local “stringer” and I was soon – to my conceited delight – being “doorstepped” by the Daily Express. The other nationals took up the story: “Public School Red insults the Queen”. Frightened that Her Majesty would somehow be seen anywhere near the Lefty teenage AN, it was deemed wise to detain me until she had been driven back to London.
I still think public schools are morally dubious institutions, and, then as now, I have mixed views about the monarchy. But to borrow Sir Christopher Wren’s epitaph in St Paul’s: “If you want a monument – just look about!” And if you want a defence of monarchism, just look at Queen Elizabeth II.
“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.” The speech made by Princess Elizabeth on her 21st birthday turned out to be a prophecy. Not about the political shape of the world – the “Empire” of which she spoke in 1947 was already on the verge of dissolution – but about her life of service.
When she came into the world, in the house of her grandfather the Earl of Strathmore, at 17 Bruton Street, Mayfair, during the General Strike of 1926, there was every reason to suppose that her father, the Duke of York, would go on to live as a minor royal, retiring from the Navy, perhaps pursuing a life in the country. His two daughters, Elizabeth and Margaret Rose, might have grown up on the Sandringham estate, in relative obscurity.
Yet one of the fascinating things about little Lilibet’s relationship with her other grandfather, George V, is that the King Emperor already saw her as his heir. He had no confidence at all that “Uncle David” would ever be a king, certainly not a fit one, and he was absolutely right. He saw the natural succession as passing through “Bertie” (the future George VI) to Lilibet.
The Royal family deplored The Little Princesses, published in 1950 by former royal governess Marion Crawford. “Doing a Crawfie” – ie spilling the beans – was the ultimate sin. (They could have no idea, poor things, when Crawfie blabbed, just how indiscreet members of their own family would later be.)
What Crawfie revealed, however, was the truth which every week of Her Majesty’s life has witnessed: her quite extraordinary devotion to duty. Crawfie shows a child who was not pompous or self-important, but who had the idea that she had been mysteriously set apart for a purpose. Serious, though fun-loving, self-contained yet not selfish, the girl in The Little Princesses is instantly recognisable as the woman we still see today, and whose Platinum Jubilee we so joyfully celebrate.
It was with this in mind, decades ago, that I set myself the exercise of writing the life of Lilibet as a poem, ending with her accession in the Treetops Hotel in Nyeri, a hundred miles north of Nairobi. I published it anonymously, but gave copies to the Queen Mother, and to the Poet Laureate, John Betjeman. (Both told me they liked it, which was pleasing.) This year, rather than re-issue it, I have written a prose version, with the same title: Lilibet.
When I was a young man, an American socialite and journalist called Alastair Forbes, who liked hob-nobbing with royalty, and spreading malicious gossip about them, made an unforgettable remark to me. Unforgettable because he was not given to soppy comments, and nearly all his judgments of other people were cynical. When you are with the Queen, he told me, you know yourself, quite mysteriously, to be in the presence of Absolute Goodness.
The Queen has not set out to be interesting, or a personality, or a celebrity. My guess is that, even to those who spend most time in her company, and perhaps to them most of all, her character remains rather mysterious. A character in an Iris Murdoch novel remarks that the chief requirement of the good life is to live without any image of oneself, and the Queen seems to have done just that.
At this year’s State Opening of Parliament, we saw the ceremony without her. The Crown sat on a table upon a dais, and the Prince of Wales read the Queen’s Speech. We were reminded that only twice before has Her Majesty ever missed State Opening, on both occasions because she was heavily pregnant.
Twice in 70 years! Consider all the other rituals in which she has loyally taken part. The laying of the wreath at the Cenotaph. The Christmas broadcast. The Trooping of the Colour for her Birthday Parade; the Buckingham Palace garden parties; the ceaseless round of world tours; visits to the schools, factories and hospitals of Great Britain. We think of the times of calamity, such as Aberfan or Lockerbie. We think of the previous two jubilees. There has never been a moment when you felt her flagging.
Her great predecessor, Queen Victoria, took a very different attitude. After she was widowed, aged 42, she only took part in the ceremony of State Opening once – at the insistence of her favourite prime minister, Disraeli. And, of course, the fact that she had a favourite prime minister was no secret. The newspapers try to guess our queen’s favourite (some saying Harold Wilson or John Major) but the point is not so much that we do not know, as that she probably never allowed herself to think in this way.
I idolise Queen Victoria, but if a constitutional monarch in the 20th century had behaved as she did,
Great Britain would probably have become a republic. Our Queen’s death to self has been the most extraordinary political phenomenon of our age. Think of the American presidents, the African dictators, the European leaders, some of them tyrannical, who have come and gone in her lifetime. Yes, some of them might have been cleverer than she is (though I would not bet on that); some might have cut more of a dash. But they have all been egotists. Being a constitutional monarch, on the other hand, requires superhuman restraint.
For the system to work, the Head of State must stand back from political attitudinising. Only in two areas has the Queen exercised what she considered her duty to show a bias. In 2014 came her very mild intervention in the referendum on Scottish independence, expressing the hope that voters would consider carefully before casting their vote. And in her sturdy defence of the Commonwealth, and the alignment of the monarchy with Commonwealth leaders against Margaret Thatcher in 1986 over apartheid, she showed courage and faith.
Christianity is central to her view of the world and she could not, in conscience, have supported apartheid. Besides, there was her vow to serve “our great imperial family” which has morphed into one of the most extraordinary soft-power conglomerations on the planet.
Some members of the Commonwealth might opt to become republics. But they all want to remain part of the great family of nations. Her Majesty has been utterly devoted to this ideal, often in defiance of Tory politicians. One thinks of Harold Macmillan urging her not to visit the new country of Ghana and not to hobnob with Mr Nkrumah, the Communist president. Off flew the Queen to Ghana, and one of her first acts was not to make a self-aggrandizing speech, not to show off, but to take Nkrumah’s hands and shoulders, and whisk him round the dance floor. That was greatness.
She is a great woman, and as the Jubilee approaches, we all have the chance to acknowledge this in our own way. Mine was to rewrite Lilibet. Just as families dread the death of a parent who has been their lynch-pin, so Great Britain, uncertain of its own identity and place in the world, is collectively dreading the inevitable.
Already, when we saw the House of Lords empty of its throne earlier this month, and the Crown of State with no dutiful monarch wearing it, we felt the chill of the future.
I was locked up in the Rugby sanatorium until the Queen had gone back to London