Why I won’t click Facebook when down
backed by Sir William Heseltine, then the Queen’s private secretary, who describes Her Majesty’s unprecedented intervention as perhaps the “boldest political initiative of the decade”. Mrs Thatcher begrudgingly agreed to limited sanctions, averting a crisis.
This film has taught me that the Queen has far more room to manoeuvre abroad, as Head of the Commonwealth, than she enjoys at home, as Britain’s head of state. Here, at the State Opening of Parliament, words are, quite literally, put into her mouth. This is not the case when she speaks as Head of the Commonwealth. You can see it in her Christmas broadcasts, which by tradition are aimed at the Commonwealth and which she delivers without the advice of ministers.
In 1983, after a trip to South Asia, the Queen argued that the greatest problem facing the world was the “gap between rich and poor countries”. Philip Murphy, the historian who has written the most authoritative book on the relationship between the Queen and the Commonwealth, recounts how this sent the Right of the Conservative Party into a spasm of outrage. The Times apparently accused her of having fallen victim to an “insidious kind of global egalitarianism”.
That was 30 years into her reign, but she had exhibited this independent streak much earlier. In 1961, the Macmillan government was concerned about her planned trip to Ghana, fearing that political unrest there made the trip unsafe and that it might look like an endorsement of an increasingly authoritarian Kwame Nkrumah. The Queen, however, was adamant. Aware that Ghana’s first leader was flirting with
‘Her Majesty has been listener-in-chief, not talker-in-chief. She has won many friends’
the Communist bloc, she insisted on going, telling the prime minister she took her Commonwealth responsibilities very seriously.
The trip was a huge success. Newsreel of her dancing with the president was flashed around the world. Ghanaians loved it, though one commentator tells me she danced, well, like a “white woman”.
Next month will probably be the Queen’s last appearance at a Heads of Government meeting. The next one is unlikely to be in London, and we know that the Queen has cut back her long-haul travel.
Inevitably, the question of her legacy as Head of the Commonwealth has arisen. The only way to make that judgment is to understand the circumstances in which she has carried out the role. Imagine, for a minute, a more opinionated, more bumptious monarch. How would such a figure have dealt with that transition from Empire to Commonwealth? My view now is that that process might have been more unsettling, more acrimonious, were it not for the Queen’s approach.
She has been listener-in-chief, not talker-in-chief. She has won many friends, some more unlikely than others. Take Bob Hawke, Australia’s larger-than-life former prime minister, who campaigned, unsuccessfully, for his country to become a republic, thereby ditching the Queen as head of state.
When we met at his office, he said he had “almost unlimited respect” for the Queen. He is not alone. Others will inherit her crown, but I doubt if any will have the impact on the Commonwealth that she has had (and that’s assuming the job goes to the British monarch). That legacy is not just about longevity. By an accident of fate, she became monarch when her signature talents were needed.