Her Majesty (62 page)

Chester Racecourse, Britain’s oldest, has drawn a huge midweek crowd yet there isn’t a horse to be seen. The Royal Welsh Regiment is just back from Afghanistan and its Colonel-in-Chief is here to meet the troops and their loved ones at a homecoming parade. At times, the emotion spills over in the grandstands as the families watch their men and women receiving campaign medals and marching past the Queen. At the age of nineteen, Fusilier Shaun Stocker has only just made it here today. Two months earlier a hidden bomb cost him his legs and most of his sight as well as other injuries. It was so bad that he needed a special plane home. He is in a wheelchair and a little dazed, having only emerged from hospital two days earlier, his arms still peppered with plasters from all the intravenous drips. He had refused to miss this day of all days.

The grandstands burst into applause as the Queen presents all the wounded men with their medals. ‘We never thought we’d see this day. It’s made him determined to get better,’ says Stocker’s mother, Jenny, afterwards. She and the Queen are showing a good deal more composure than some here today. For hundreds of families, this is scene they feared
they might never see. Some are still in tears as everyone meets up for a big regimental family lunch. Anne and Royston Williams are here to welcome two sons who have been serving in Afghanistan together. ‘I can honestly say this is one of the best days of my life,’ says Anne. Her mother, Myra, can’t say anything as her eyes well up and the tissues come out again.

The mood is upbeat but not triumphal. Everyone is conscious that a man is missing. Fusilier Jonathan Burgess never made it home, killed in a gun battle in April 2010. His parents are here, along with his fiancée. She has now given birth to the baby girl Burgess never saw, although they found a well-thumbed photograph of the hospital scan in his breast pocket. The family will be in the Queen’s marquee for lunch. Before that, there’s a big open-air reception where the Queen meets Fusilier Aaron Gray, twenty-two, who has postponed an operation on his injured shoulder until the following morning in order to meet his Colonel-in-Chief. Regimental Sergeant Major Wayne Roberts has even deferred promotion until after today. He should be Captain Roberts by now and doing something else but that would have meant missing the Queen. There’s an added bonus. His four-year-old daughter has been chosen to present a bouquet to the Queen. ‘I spent two and a half years as RSM and to miss out on this at the end – well, I wasn’t having that. I’ve spent twenty-four years in the army so when you actually meet her, it’s massive.’

Just the day before, the Queen had been presenting the George Cross to one fearless bomb disposal expert and a posthumous George Medal to the family of another. She is well aware of the situation on the front line and the stresses which Service life creates at home. The familial bond with the Forces permeates the entire Household culture. It’s not just a question of employing a few equerries and orderlies plucked from the Services. It’s the way in which Forces charities enjoy the run of the Palace Ballroom or the use of the garden party marquees when there are gaps in the diary. It’s the shrugging of shoulders when the Palace reception for the Victoria Cross and George Cross Association descends into cheerful chaos because several of them are stuck on a coach and delayed by a student demonstration. The Queen has other engagements and the time slot for the official photograph has long passed. If they were part of an official delegation, this lack of punctuality would go down very badly. It might even be a diplomatic incident. But not with these guests. The Queen is happy to be kept waiting by her old soldiers. ‘Usually, our events are masterpieces of choreography and fine-tuning,’ chuckles the Master of the Household, looking at his watch. ‘I prefer to call this one “jazz”.’

Prince William, like his father before him, has had spells with all three
Services. He believes that his military training has given him invaluable coaching for the job which lies ahead: ‘It’s a very good way of understanding the position and what it takes. You know, these guys do the most incredible things the whole time. And what better place to realise pressure and stress than serving in the Forces and taking that experience with you?’

As with the monarchy, so he believes that the Forces are an innate part of the national character. ‘They link to the heart of what it is to be British. I think they are essential for any country to be proud of itself, for any country to have any identity,’ says a man who joined the army as a cavalry officer, went to sea in a Type 23 frigate and now flies a rescue helicopter with the Royal Air Force. ‘They are setting an example.’

It helps to explain why the Monarch always celebrates her birthday not with a cake but with a military parade. The Queen’s official birthday is Britain’s national day, marked as such in government and diplomatic missions around the world. Other nations might have fireworks or festivals. Holland, for example, has Queen’s Day, with parties, concerts and flowers. In the United Kingdom, people converge on the Mall and Horse Guards Parade to watch a drill display by the Household Division -Trooping the Colour. The crowds then gather around the Palace to watch the entire Royal Family observe an RAF flypast. But it’s not martial or nationalistic or remotely odd. A random survey of the crowd suggests that half are from overseas. Chuck Hatcher, a theatre engineer from Ohio, loves the pageantry and the uniforms – ‘best costumes in the world’. Sherri Whitehead, a political researcher from Vancouver, British Columbia, is here for the second time – ‘she’s our monarch, too’. This is simply how the world expects to see our Queen: dressed in hat and gloves and leading her family out on to the most famous balcony in the world while men in bearskins stand to attention below her. It is not merely for the benefit of the tourism industry. It is a statement that the monarchy is a team effort, not a solo performance. It is a reminder of the future.

And the future needs no reminding that the past will be quite an act to follow. Already the oldest and furthest travelled monarch in British history, the Queen overtook George III’s fifty-nine years on the throne in May 2011 and will surpass Queen Victoria’s sixty-three-year all-time reigning record in September 2015. The Queen will probably not even acknowledge the moment (she does not believe in being competitive with the ancestors), but the rest of the world will be more excited. In Britain, which will also be marking the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt and the 200th of Waterloo in the year 2015, the sense of occasion will be unstoppable.

Within royal circles, though, there is now a whispered concern that the more the Queen goes on crashing through the record books, the greater the perception that she is somehow irreplaceable. This, inevitably, grows harder on the man who will do the replacing. Asked if the Commonwealth would have survived in its current state without the Queen, a very senior former courtier replies: ‘Probably not. But one should not say that too often because it’s dangerous from the point of view of the next generation.’

The Queen is not the only record-breaker. Prince Charles is now the oldest Prince of Wales in history. And he has not wasted his years as heir apparent. In the same way that the Queen has quietly redefined the nature of her unconstitutional role, so the Prince has done the same. His wellknown interventions on almost anything relating to the human condition have earned him criticism. But no Prince of Wales has made an equivalent mark on national and international life, in every field from education to urban regeneration. There has never been a more accomplished king-in-waiting. Unlike his predecessors, his entire life has been a case of doing rather than waiting. At his investiture in 1969, no powers were bestowed on him. But after four decades of public duties, he believes that he has identified one. He calls it his ‘convening power’ – his capacity to get people round a table. ‘It’s a very interesting role he’s carved out. In my view it
is
the role,’ says Tony Blair. ‘It’s got two aspects. The first is he’s able to take an aerial global view of certain trends which, in his case, has marked him out as thinking ahead of his time.’ He cites the environment and interfaith dialogue as examples. ‘The second is that I found he was a transmitter of messages, particularly with, say, the farming community and the Armed Forces. He picked up things in a different way from a politician. I never objected. I was not merely happy with it. I thought it was entirely within his entitlement to do so.’

Some of the Prince’s critics argue that he has a butterfly mind and flits from one cause to another. Others argue that he gets
too
involved, that he is a meddler who has veered into unconstitutional territory. They cite his opposition to genetically modified food, for example, or his personal involvement in the planning dispute over the redevelopment of London’s Chelsea Barracks. In his recently published diaries, Tony Blair’s former Press Secretary, Alastair Campbell, alleges that the Prince overstepped the mark on politically sensitive issues like hunting and the foot and mouth epidemic of 2001. He even writes that Blair had to have a ‘hard talk’ with the Prince to urge restraint. But were these episodes constitutionally questionable or were they, in fact, just the usual passionate princely interventions? After all, it was Blair who said in 2007: ‘All this
stuff written about Charles interfering with government or getting political . I never found him the slightest bit like that at all.’ Certainly, any suggestion of inappropriate constitutional conduct infuriates another former Prime Minister. ‘I would see Prince Charles several times a year,’ says Sir John Major. ‘He’d express views, well-informed views, but he did not lobby, nor did he behave in any way that could be criticised. He has a good social conscience and I’d much rather have an heir to the throne who took an interest in the lives of others, than one who showed no interest at all. I actually think the criticism of him on that front is grotesque.’

Such criticism, familiar to Princes of Wales through the ages, has diminished in recent years. The Prince’s reputation as a passionate champion of both the fashionable and the unfashionable – from rainforests to the Prayer Book Society – is comfortably entrenched in the public consciousness. His staff describe him as a ‘charitable entrepreneur’. The core network of twenty trusts and foundations (eighteen of which he created himself) is now Britain’s most extensive multi-cause charitable network, raising £120 million a year. He is a conscientious patron or president of another four hundred charities besides. Clarence House has never been busier. Over the last few years, the Duchess of Cornwall has quietly taken up a carefully chosen cross section of organisations which have quickly become very fond of their patron. Despite a lifetime’s record of never giving an interview, the Duchess has emerged as an impressive public speaker, calmly standing before a conference or a Clarence House reception to deliver a detailed appraisal of the latest work of the National Osteoporosis Society or the Literacy Trust. In 2011, she gamely delivered the address at the annual awards of the London Press Club, applauding freedom of expression while observing that, in her own case, ‘no news is good news’.

But how will the Prince of Wales adapt to the constraints of Kingship? Just before his sixtieth birthday in 2008, the author asked him if he would still be able to champion his favourite themes from the throne. ‘I don’t know. Probably not in the same way,’ he replied. ‘But I like to think perhaps that, after this, eventually people might realise that some of the things I have been trying to do are not all that mad – and that I might still have some convening power that could be put to use.’

The Prince will certainly not be able to mount a campaign like the one which suddenly hit Sir Malcolm Rifkind during his days as Defence Secretary. No sooner had Rifkind announced plans to merge a lot of regimental bands than a funny thing happened. ‘I suddenly started getting very similar letters from various Colonels-in-Chief including the Prince
of Wales, the Queen Mother, Princess Margaret, the Duke of Gloucester, Princess Alexandra – almost everyone, in fact, except the Queen herself. I thought: “This is extraordinary.”’ Although he persisted with his plan, he remained puzzled by such a concerted assault. Two years later, all was revealed when Jonathan Dimbleby’s authorised biography of the Prince appeared. ‘It was all there!’ Rifkind laughs. ‘He was a trade union leader and he’d got all his family to write to me.’

While Prince Charles will have to be less outspoken as monarch, those demanding that he should become a carbon copy of the Queen miss the point. As she has shown more than anyone, strong monarchy is about well-judged adaptation, not being or doing exactly the same as before. And no one can have given it more thought than the man himself. ‘Prince Charles will be extremely good at it,’ says a very senior courtier. ‘He’s just going to be different. That’s the way it is and the way it should be.’

It is striking how little we know of his plans for the monarchy. His aspiration to be a ‘defender of faiths’ – revealed on television in 1994 – is much-quoted but the remark is now almost twenty years old and we have heard very little on that front since. According to the Archbishop of Canterbury, it would hardly represent a break with the status quo. The Queen, he argues, has been doing much the same for years. ‘I think that was a bit of a misunderstanding,’ says Dr Williams. ‘I don’t think the Prince was saying: “I don’t want to be Defender of the Faith.” He was saying, “I would see my role as defender of faiths,” keeping the umbrella inclusive.’

The Prince doesn’t like to discuss his plans for two reasons. First, there is no need for him to have any big ‘plans’ at all. This is an institution which stands for continuity. It does not ‘do’ instant makeovers. Second, whatever ideas the Prince may have, it would be both bad taste and disrespectful towards the Queen to air them in her lifetime. ‘They’re discussed over dinner parties rather than round table meetings,’ says a long-serving courtier. ‘No minutes are taken. No decisions are reached. But opinions are aired.’ There is no itching for the levers of power, no impatience to do things differently. Nor, for that matter, is the Queen inclined to leave instructions for the future. She has been closely involved in her own funeral arrangements (all royal funeral plans are reviewed and, to an extent, rehearsed on a semi-regular basis) but it is said that she does not wish to be informed about any Coronation plans.