For seven decades, she bore intimate witness to the shifting of power around the globe. Coming to the throne in the distant era of Stalin’s Russia, Elizabeth II reigned through wars cold and hot and through sweeping economic change. She presided over Britain’s retreat from empire and its emergence as a modern networked power, but also its struggle to forge a post-Brexit identity and the beginning of a painful reckoning with colonialism. With her goes a unique institutional memory, a reservoir of insights shared with 15 prime ministers.
The relationship between constitutional monarch and elected politician is an odd one – part bowing-and-scraping deference, part curious intimacy. Tony Blair said she was the one person to whom he spoke freely, knowing it wouldn’t leak, and the Queen herself once described her function as “a sort of sponge”, soaking up confidences. But it also, she added, occasionally involved offering governments a different point of view: ‘perhaps they hadn’t seen it from that angle’. She was a mistress of soft power, knowing when to project full regal majesty and when to play kindly grandmother, and a unique diplomatic resource. At times she could make Britain’s case to a foreign head of state better than any elected politician. (Contrast Emmanuel Macron’s spiky relationship with Liz Truss and the genuine warmth of the French president’s tribute to the Queen.) Never party political, she was nonetheless core to the body politic, and her relationships with successive prime ministers help tell a story of what Britain has become.
