My guess is that the Queen has little time for nostalgia. Of course she will hope the sun shines on the street parties and the heavens don’t rain on the parades. As a Christian who venerates her coronation vows, she will also cherish the thanksgiving service at St Paul’s Cathedral. But if she were entirely free, she would assuredly prefer to be quietly at home in Windsor or Sandringham with her dogs, her horses and, perhaps, her private reflections on her 70 years on the throne.
In 1952, bosses wore bowlers, and workers tugged forelocks. Women knew their place, divorce was rare, abortion was illegal, and being homosexual was criminal. Boarding houses posted signs saying “No Irish” or “No Blacks” and almost everyone professed to be Christian. The rich took foreign holidays while the rest shivered on British beaches. Pennies were put in phone boxes, schoolboys delivered the daily paper, and there was only one television channel. It was a very different world.
So far from showing nostalgia for that past, the Queen has embraced the radical changes of the last seven decades, fully aware that the future of the monarchy has always been at stake. In the early years of her reign, she was only glimpsed, waving like a regal mannequin from a gilded coach or her Rolls Royce. She cut countless ribbons, cracked champagne on the hulls of numerous ships, opened roads, schools and hospitals, endured dreary speeches without ever falling asleep, and smiled her way through it all without ever looking bored. But that was not enough. Later, when it was said that she was too remote, out of reach and perhaps out of touch, she pioneered those royal walkabouts when adoring devotees waved flags and little girls clutched bouquets. She exchanged a kindly word or two and was clearly touched by the unfeigned affection.
Yet she always kept a distance, not aloof but separate, very obviously not “one of us”. That was part of “the magic”. Even when she responded to the media clamour for yet more, she only allowed the cameras fleeting glimpses behind the royal veil. This has served her well. Now, with so many national institutions falling into disrepute, she has remained calmly above the fray, reassuringly stoical in the face of every passing blizzard. In 1952 she inherited a crumbling empire. Seventy years on, she presides over a rudderless nation casting around for a post-Brexit role in the world.
We have no idea what she thinks about that slow decline. We do know that she has a deep commitment to the British constitution. Her faith in the rule of law and the supremacy of a democratically elected parliament, within which the monarchy has its unique raison d’être, has always been unswerving. Mindful that it was for those values that men and women died in the Second World War, she revered her first prime minister, Sir Winston Churchill. Now she is on her fourteenth.
She will be only too aware of how Boris Johnson has conducted himself in this role: that, during a self-inflicted political crisis over Brexit, he invoked her signature to suspend parliament unlawfully; that he has since threatened to tear up an international treaty with the EU which he himself negotiated; and that he plans to defy the Geneva Convention by deporting refugees to Rwanda who have been granted asylum here.
Nor will she forget that while Churchill once declared that, in war, “the truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies”, Johnson deploys just such a bodyguard, not to protect precious truths, but to save his partygate premiership. I cannot imagine that she looks forward to their weekly audience with anything but a shudder. If so, she will never tell us. She will remain as discreet about him as she was to all his predecessors.
The Queen has reigned through multiple national and international crises. She has also endured her fair share of personal pain — the disgrace of her second son, the defection of her grandson, and, above all, the loss of her beloved husband. She has borne it all with rare stoicism. A trusted courtier once asked her: “Ma’am, is there anything that ever keeps you awake at night?” She replied: “I get up in the morning, I do my best during the day, I go to bed and I go to sleep.”
Under her guidance, the monarchy has weathered the slings and arrows and, so the polls tell us, is as popular now as it was when she came to the throne. Quite an achievement.
