Her Majesty (3 page)

‘Ireland was fantastic,’ recalls Prince William. ‘We all wanted it to go smoothly because it was such a big deal.’ Even on honeymoon in the Seychelles, the new Duke of Cambridge – and new Colonel of the Irish Guards – was tracking events in Dublin closely. ‘I was keeping a careful watch on the internet, hearing the odd snippet and seeing the photographs. I know a lot of Irish people and so many of them were so excited about the visit that I knew it would go well.’

The wedding would turn out to be one of the most watched events in global television history, a cracking blend of state pageantry and family occasion which would produce an eternal collage of classic moments – from the balcony kiss to the Aston Martin departure to a jubilant off-duty verger filmed cartwheeling down the Abbey aisle.

It was widely interpreted as a ‘shot in the arm’ for the monarchy, an
event which would somehow lead the institution towards the ‘modern world’. In fact, the monarchy needed no such introduction. Behind the scenes, it had long since undergone a broader internal revolution, including a shift in management culture away from the gentleman amateur to unisex professionalism. The result is a Royal Household which has changed from top to bottom.

Not only are a third of senior staff now women but the chambermaid of yesteryear (now a ‘housekeeping assistant’) is sometimes a he, can also double up as a footman and is more likely than not to have a degree. One recent housekeeping assistant arrived with a 2:1 in physics from Prince William’s old university, St Andrews. Among the current crop of footmen is a graduate in aeronautical engineering from one of Britain’s top universities. ‘You probably have enough expertise in here to assemble a nuclear bomb,’ observes one member of the Household, surveying the staff serving at a Palace reception. Indeed, by any set of modern diversity criteria, the Royal Household can now compete easily with most of corporate Britain.

The Duke of York is quick to point out that this accelerated pace of royal change has been driven by external factors. ‘That’s a function of society, not necessarily a function of the Palace,’ says the Queen’s second son and fourth in line to the throne. ‘Fifty years ago it was not remotely possible or sensible to fly to the United States or the Middle East and come back in a day. And the great advantage was it took time for communication to happen, which allowed thinking time. Now, people communicate instantaneously.’ But having spent ten years as the Special Representative for UK Trade and Investment (a post he has now relinquished), he has observed plenty of change management in practice. And the Duke acknowledges that the monarchy is going to have to adapt even more rapidly in the future. ‘That need to restructure or to change is more frequent because of the change of pace of life.’

History has known no monarch like the Queen. She has travelled farther and met more foreign leaders than all her predecessors put together. If one works on the basis that she has met 150 new people every day of her adult life (a low estimate since she can do the same in one walkabout and three hundred people at a single reception), then the Queen has personally met almost four million people – the entire population of New Zealand, say. Since presenting her first decoration in 1952, she has personally held six hundred investitures at which almost 100,000 individuals have received an honour, a chat and a handshake.
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The history of the British Monarchy can be said to fall very roughly into four phases. From the ancient Britons to James II, monarchs ruled largely as they pleased (with a few cack-handed exceptions, notably Charles I). There followed 150 years of constitutional adjustment. The balance of power shifted from the monarchy to Parliament while England and Scotland merged to make Great Britain and then, with Ireland, to create the United Kingdom. Then came the third phase – the age of Empire – from Victoria to George VI. Britain and its monarchy had never enjoyed such prosperity and influence, controlling or administering a quarter of the earth’s surface and population. With huge industrial advances, however, came industrial warfare. It was the age of global conflicts. There were revolutions abroad and political upheavals at home, not least universal suffrage and Irish independence. At the very moment that Britain was adjusting to a lesser role in the new world order, with its Empire evolving into the new Commonwealth, George VI died. Thus began the fourth phase of monarchy – the post-imperial media age. And only one sovereign has been through it.

The Queen has not had to lead her country through all-out war, as her father did, but she has had to come to terms with two fundamental changes. No British monarch has seen more of a demographic shift on their watch. Nor has any previous royal generation been monitored by twenty-four-hour television and an omnipresent mass media.

When the Queen came to the throne, Britain was a monocultural nation. Between 1945 and 1958, the country underwent its greatest religious revival since the mid-nineteenth century, clothed in its now forgotten ‘Sunday best’. Following half a century of immigration from the Commonwealth and elsewhere, nearly five million Britons – 8 per cent of the population – are from non-white backgrounds (and the number of people attending a Church of England service in any given week is now down to around one million). This transformation into a multicultural nation has overlapped precisely with the reign of the Queen. And she has not simply observed this seismic social change. She has unquestionably been part of the process. As Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, points out, her role has been critical: ‘She’s demonstrated the possibility of stability in rapidly changing circumstances. It’s a “Don’t panic” message.’

The Commonwealth, which numbered eight countries when the Queen came to the throne, now numbers fifty-four independent nations. Many are former colonies built on slavery and exploitation. And yet they not only enjoy active membership of this old imperial club: despite being fiercely independent nations, they have also chosen to retain the Queen
as their head of state. To many strands of modern thinking, it seems bizarre that the formerly oppressed should embrace the former oppressor so warmly. That, undoubtedly, is due in no small part to the Queen herself. No monarch has engaged with so many different faiths or visited so many different places of worship. Yet, the Queen has (quietly) been one of the most diligent Supreme Governors in the Church of England’s modern history. There is no contradiction in any of this. It is her devotion to the Commonwealth which endears her to so many minority communities in Britain. And it is her devotion to the Church of England which endears her to so many of Britain’s minority faiths as they, like her, deal with an increasingly secular world. She is, thus, emblematic of both Old Britain and New Britain. Might historians perhaps one day look back on this as her greatest achievement?

Or might they argue that it has been her ability to steer the monarchy through the turbulence generated by the modern media? At the start of the reign, public support was a given. Buckingham Palace could operate a semi-Trappist press office with a ‘no comment’ default mode because the function and role of the monarchy was accepted and seldom questioned. Huge changes in public and media attitudes to authority have changed all that. The subsequent transformation in royal public relations has eclipsed anything seen in any previous reign. That public support now has to be justified and seen to be earned. Some historians, among them Ben Pimlott and Sarah Bradford, have dated this change of mindset back to 1969, the year of the first modern royal documentary. It could, equally, be argued that the monarchy learned this lesson at the time of the Abdication. Regardless, it is well understood today. ‘Whether you call it deference or respect, it has to be found. It doesn’t come solely from position,’ says Lord Peel, the current Lord Chamberlain and the most senior official in today’s Royal Household. ‘You have an advantage if you have the position of Monarch or Prince of Wales. But you have to carry out your role in a way that people respect. It doesn’t just happen. It has to be earned.’

No British politician – not even Churchill – has maintained the consistent level of popularity enjoyed by the Queen. And on the occasions that the needle on the popularity gauge has flickered, it has not been because she has done something. It has been because she has
not
done something. Complacency, as she well knows, is the greatest threat. She has not earned the esteem and affection of her people by standing still. She has done it by changing almost everything while leaving one crucial element untouched: herself. As one of her closest confidants puts it: ‘Everything’s changed except the headscarf.’

Former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, believes that two factors have planted the monarchy where it is today. ‘The first is the Queen’s almost imperceptible modernisation of the institution in a way which has been very canny. Whilst yielding up very little of the monarchy’s mystique, she has made it come to be seen as a much more grounded part of national life. The second thing is a maturing of public attitudes.’ He believes that the former ‘liberal elite’ who felt that the monarchy had no place in a modern country now see it as an asset. ‘People have looked at their political institutions and thought: “Well, we want to elect our government but if the choice is a president that doesn’t have any of that mystique and those roots in our tradition and history, then, frankly, we’d prefer to stick with the monarchy.”’

But people will only think that way as long as the monarchy continues with this ‘imperceptible’ change. Sometimes, it has been a case of adapting to events and playing catch-up with the wider world. Sometimes, there has been quiet but radical reform of the monarchy from within. Something else has happened during this reign, though. The monarchy has also undergone a deliberate rethink of what it is actually
for
.

Since the late nineteenth century, the standard handbook of constitutional monarchy has been the set of royal rights and obligations defined by the Victorian political thinker Walter Bagehot in his work
The English Constitution
. It was Bagehot who decreed that the Monarch must ‘sign her own death-warrant if the two Houses unanimously send it up to her’ and distilled the Sovereign’s powers into ‘three rights’ – the right to be consulted, the right to encourage and the right to warn. This is the job specification which has been drummed into successive royal generations. The Queen herself grew up learning it from both her father and her tutor, Henry Marten.
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But, in recent years, an additional aspect has quietly been added to the job description.

‘During the nineties, we looked at everything,’ says a former Private Secretary. ‘We needed to find out where we should be going. We could always see great public affection in, say, Manchester, but we weren’t connecting nationally. We had to ask: “What the hell are we supposed to be doing?”’ The answer, in very simple terms, was articulated by another political thinker whose best known observations on the state of modern politics have been through the medium of television comedy. In his role as co-creator of
Yes, Minister
and
Yes, Prime Minister
, Sir Antony Jay has
not merely entertained but has helped shape modern thinking on the dynamic between elected politicians and unelected servants of the state. Although best known as a comedy writer, he has written extensively on the science of business (his
Management and Machiavelli
, first published in 1967, remains on the syllabus at Harvard Business School). He is also the writer of two of the most important royal documentaries ever made. In 1969, he wrote the script for
Royal Family
, the first film in history to show the Windsors at home and in private. To many British and Commonwealth viewers, the sight of a Royal Family barbecue or the Queen buying an ice cream for Prince Edward remains as vivid in the mind as the other broadcasting sensation of that summer – the moon landings. It was Jay who also co-wrote the script for the 1992 film,
Elizabeth R
. Most viewers will remember the intimate footage of the Queen with her grandchildren at Balmoral, of Ronald Reagan hunting for decaffeinated coffee on the Royal Yacht and the full grandeur of the state visit by an emotional Lech Walesa. Better still, some of the commentary was provided by the Queen herself.

Jay also wrote a book to go with
Elizabeth R
. By his own admission, most people were more interested in the photographs than the words. But the text had a profound impact at Buckingham Palace. One former Private Secretary describes it as ‘the best monograph on the monarchy of our times’. In it, Jay breaks down the Queen’s constitutional role into ‘formal official functions’ – signing legislation and so on – and a list of fourteen ‘informal official services’ from ‘continuity’ to ‘focus of allegiance’. He also suggests ten principal qualities which the public have come to expect of the Monarch – including ‘political impartiality’ and ‘attendance to duty’. He combines them all to define a new dual role for the modern Monarch. The Queen is head of state, of course, with all the rights and constraints of the sort ordained by Bagehot. But Jay also gives her a new title – head of the nation. It is an equally important role but one with a much more personal dimension. Unlike the head of state role, which is clearly defined and happens automatically – appointing prime ministers, receiving state visitors, etc. – the head of the nation duties are down to each individual monarch. ‘They can be done well, or adequately, or badly, or not done at all,’ writes Jay. ‘They are the ones concerned with behaviour, values and standards; the ones which earn the respect, loyalty and pride of the people. If the Sovereign becomes just another occupant of a high office of state with no more relevance to people’s daily lives and inner feelings than the Lord Chief Justice, then that crucial link between nation and state will be seriously weakened and will perhaps break.’

This new job description struck an instant chord at the Palace. ‘It was the mid-nineties and we were constantly questioning ourselves about everything,’ says a very senior official, now retired. ‘This made sense. We had just never thought of the monarchy like that.’ And so the Queen and her advisers quietly annexed this new ‘head of the nation’ title and added it to that of ‘head of state’. As they sought to move the monarchy forwards from the unhappy rows about money and marriages which dominated the early nineties, here was a simple two-pronged answer to the question: what is the monarchy for? It was a definition which has since helped to shape the entire way the Palace goes about its business. It also chimed with the resurgence of what the historian Frank Prochaska has called the ‘Welfare Monarchy’ with the Royal Family at the forefront of the voluntary sector.