The Diamond Queen

by Andrew Marr

  What lessons does her success have for her son? Modesty is one. Her view of her role has been that she is a symbol, and that symbols are better off keeping mostly quiet. After the first excitement of her Coronation she was never the centre of a frenzy of national optimism, so she was never in the firing line during a spasm of national self-loathing. If this is a strangely passive record of achievement, one only has to think of what trouble an activist, opinionated monarch might have got into during the 1960s, or the Thatcher years, or when New Labour was going to war in the Middle East.

  It goes further. The Queen’s style of monarchy has buried much of a sense of self, as we understand that today. Almost everyone who reads this book has been brought up, explicitly or not, to believe that personal development, ‘being oneself’ in the most vivid way possible, is the highest human good. To develop one’s talents, to get on, to be promoted, to end richer than when you started, or at least wiser – we are told that these are what give human lives meaning. Not for the Queen. Socially, there was nowhere further to go. Her life has its meaning through vocation or calling. Not so long ago, many other people defined themselves by their role. If you were a shoemaker, that was your meaning and identity. You looked like a cobbler, dressed like a cobbler and were happy to be known as cobbler. You were, in essence, what you did. Well, she still is what she does. There is only a little space (though an interesting space) between Queen Elizabeth II and the woman who lives her life.

  With her heir, the Prince of Wales, it is very different. He has had to carve out a life, a role, for himself. Prince Charles is a puzzle, and one suspects he would agree. Well-meaning, shrewd, ambitious to do good, he is also a more prickly and self-conscious person than his mother. This may be a problem when he becomes King. We have become used to self-abnegation in our monarch. Prince Charles, already summoning ministers to see him, and firing off letters to government departments, is not big on self-abnegation. Indeed, around him there is a new theory of monarchy quietly being discussed. It goes like this. The sovereign’s role is to be the non-executive chairman of the national company. The chairman ought therefore to challenge, balance and make up for the deficiencies of the rest of the board – those short-termist, pesky, and often incompetent elected politicians. If Parliament brings itself into contempt by expenses or other scandals; if ministers dodge difficult long-term problems; if the public has lost its allegiance to the old political ideologies – why then, a modern monarch must step forward and help.

  Over the past sixty years, as we have seen, the Queen has taken a much more cautious attitude. As a ‘non-exec’ she has been thoughtful, hard-working, psychologically shrewd and able to offer politicians a great store of memories about the business of state. She is not the real board, but she is listened to, and provides continuity, in the way that a veteran chairman and one-time founder of a global company might be listened to. The more the ‘board’, the party-political parliamentary government, is in disrepair, or struggling, the more attentive the listening is. Why does she sit for hours each day, patiently reading her red boxes? It is a question of credibility. If she is to be a good head of state, she must know what is going on, just as a non-executive chairman must have read the paperwork before a board meeting.

  She is in a long-term role. She thinks back to wartime Britain and forward to a Britain of the 2040s when her grandson will reign. The ceremonies the public notice most are the irregular ones, the marriages and jubilees, but the one that matters most is the complicated constitutional pantomime of the State Opening of Parliament in which the Queen represents the continuing state and therefore also the people who did not vote for the party in power, who loathe the prime minister of the day, or who perhaps did not vote at all. She represents the years and generations before today’s government and the prospect of governments to come – a state that lasts far longer than any electoral cycle and whose interests, like its people’s interests, last longer than a mere government. This is a truth rarely discussed, but as we have seen, it has had its practical side. Ministers express astonishment and wary pleasure at how much the Queen has thought about their dilemmas. Though she takes no decisions she can be a provoker of second thoughts and a catalyst for deeper thinking.

  She responds to the mood of the times. When the banking crisis hit, and the country faced a period of public austerity, the Queen cut the cost of monarchy by £3.3 million, froze salaries and slashed her travel bill. The Royal Flight, despite its name, is mostly used for military purposes and sometimes for conveying ministers around. The future of the Royal Train, which allows the Queen to stay overnight during visits around Britain, and offers rare security, is now in serious doubt; the Queen has already been seen taking an ordinary train seat to get to Sandringham for her Christmas break. When Prince William and Kate Middleton, now the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, made their first visits abroad, to Canada and the United States, they took a fraction of the staff that used to be thought necessary. Average salaries at Buckingham Palace are lower than in other royal establishments.

  What she has never done is to take the lead on a subject, express her own thinking forcibly, or campaign, even on issues closest to her heart. Ministers may guess her anguish about Commonwealth crises, military cutbacks, countryside legislation, or attempts to reduce royal budgets. But there has not been a single example of her intervening or protesting. The same could not be said of her son. He shares his father’s interests in environmental issues, from population growth to genetically modified crops, wildlife to the future of rainforests. The Duke of Edinburgh has strong views but has been very careful about expressing them – mostly as rhetorical questions at private meetings. Prince Charles is more public and more emotive, though he also uses a formidable network of private funding (including from Arab monarchs) and contacts to push his projects. We know about his strong views on architecture, community, science and agriculture. It is a commonly held view that he must repress these views once he becomes King. Speaking out would be a risk, not just for the obvious reason of entering political and rough-and-tumble debate, but because the monarch is supposed to represent the whole community – scientists, radical architects and business people too.

  The Queen has been able to cast her net of goodwill very widely. Parts of this role Charles would find easy, and indeed already performs. The Queen has supported the unsung heroines of the health service and the voluntary groups, the successful companies, the well-run towns. The media, in general (so goes the royal thinking), exists to point fingers and criticize: the monarchy must try to correct that balance when it can and celebrate all the un-newsy things that go right. Why does she endlessly visit small towns, industrial estates, colleges and relatively minor firms? Because nobody else does; and as cheerer-upper, that is her job. Her son is a hard worker too, and well practised at feigning interest, week after week, when out and about.

  Yet if monarchy has influence, Prince Charles would ask, should it not be used for good? Traditional from her scarf to her Wellington boots, the Queen might agree and gently suggest she has been readier to change than her image suggests. To stay the same, it is necessary to change. Charles is said to have a plan for his first six months as King. The kind of things he might look at include the honours system. Is it any longer appropriate to invest good citizens with the Membership or Order of a defunct British Empire? Are the ancient orders of chivalry really cutting the mustard with the British public any more? Are there now a few too many members of the official royal family? We do not know his opinions on these questions but we can be sure he has opinions, and that he would want to make a mark. As he ages, friends observe, he grows more like the father who once seemed his opposite. The Duke of Edinburgh, says one who knows them both, is a poetic, sensitive man who has spent his life going to huge lengths trying to hide it, while the Prince of Wales is a tough, cutthroat, rather ruthless man who goes to great lengths to hide that, hence the caricature of an agonized cuff-fiddler.

  However he resolves these dilemmas,
the eventual passing of the Queen will be one of the greatest tests for the Windsor dynasty so far. Outside Britain, there is a sense that other countries of which she is head of state may then want to shift to native presidencies. John Howard, who led the pro-monarchy campaign in Australia in 1999 and subsequently became prime minister, said during the Queen’s tour there in 2006 that though he thought his country would keep her as head of state, after her reign ‘I do not know’. In Canada, republican feeling is on the rise and the moment of a change on the throne is often cited as an appropriate one. Something similar has been said in Barbados. Even the Queen’s role as Head of the Commonwealth, which she has guarded jealously, does not pass automatically to her heir. It has no constitutional standing and is in the gift of the political leaders of the Commonwealth nations at the time. It may well be that none of this leads to a break of any kind. But it probably will.

  Inside the United Kingdom, there are other changes which now seem obvious and which surely cannot be resisted for long. An immediate one is the Coronation Oath, which at the moment requires the new sovereign to do his utmost to maintain ‘the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law’ and the ‘doctrine, worship, discipline and government’ of the Church of England. Though the proud royal title of Defender of the Faith is an intellectual absurdity, granted by the Pope to Henry VIII before and not after he broke with Rome, it has been taken to mean defence of Protestant Christianity in its Anglican and Presbyterian forms. And under the 1701 Act of Settlement, indeed, Roman Catholics (persons ‘who shall profess the popish religion’) are barred from ascending the throne. In a study of this the legal scholar Robert Blackburn has amusingly listed some of the ‘lost monarchs’ Britain might have had had it not been for this disqualification: they include King Henry IX, Queen Amalia and Queen Yolanda, who is described as ‘an exiled countess and family beauty’.

  Prince Charles has publicly said he wants to be a ‘Defender of Faith’ in general and not simply one faith. With his sympathy for Islam and other non-Christian faiths, it is hard to see how he could tolerate the current Coronation Oath or the continuing bar on Catholics. Such changes might seem minor, gnats after the camel-sized mouthfuls caused by divorce. They would matter, though. First, the ban on Catholics is simply offensive to a strong and important part of the British people. Second, unpicking the Oath would immediately place a question mark against the continued status of the Anglican Communion as a state church. This has hardly been a good recruitment issue for Anglicanism, which is in severe decline. The business of prime minister and officials busying themselves (however remotely) in the appointment of bishops seems increasingly odd not just to bystanders but the church itself. And in a multi-faith Britain, should the high priests of any one religion be particularly privileged? Again, these are matters almost certain to be revisited after the Queen’s reign. A bigger question is whether the monarchy can continue to catch the imagination. If Prince Charles is alive and willing, he will be crowned as an elderly king. If he then reigns for a long time, even Prince William will be a middle-aged figure by the time the throne is his.

  Prince Charles has pushed the boundaries of what Royals are supposed to do. He has raised an astonishing amount of money for good causes such as helping preserve rainforests and giving young people a new start. Almost all of this work is done away from the limelight because of his despair about the likely effect of media exposure. Millions of people share his environmental and culturally conservative views, and they are poorly reflected in the ordinary, democratic politics of modern Britain. Here, as in most developed countries, the primacy of economic growth, attended by free-market economics and scientific optimism, overshadows all other debate. It is therefore naïve to claim he keeps ‘out of politics’. He is a political man, whose political vision just happens most of the time to be rather wider than the current debates at Westminster. As we have seen, he irritated Downing Street during Lady Thatcher’s time with comments about a two-tier Britain, and did the same again when Tony Blair was prime minister, and the Prince came out strongly for the cause of ‘the Countryside’, which had become a euphemism for foxhunting. More important than either was his decision to show his disapproval of Chinese behaviour in Tibet by boycotting official visits by the Chinese president.

  So here is a man of strong views and considerable energy, albeit not the greatest organizer, who has raised important questions about religion, the environment and human rights, and who has tried to use his unusual position to bring together politicians, business people and campaigners to change things for the better. Thanks to the coalition government headed by David Cameron, the Prince has his wish for much greater financial independence, and possibly greater monarchical wealth, too. He could be, as King, in a remarkably strong position. The problem is that he cannot be a campaigner, in any meaningful way, and also be the above-it-all head of state. As King, his job would not only be to receive a Chinese president but to do his very best to make the man or woman feel genuinely welcome. As King, when his ministers brought him planned legislation involving, say, wind farms which would blight a part of the landscape loved by sportsmen, he would be required to smile graciously and sign. As King, if his government agreed a deal with a South American nation, which meant a further destruction of some invaluable ecosystem, or wanted him to unveil the super-modernistic design for a new museum in Abu Dhabi, he could say nothing at all.

  Could the man who is now Charles, Prince of Wales, stomach being the man who would be King Charles III, or George VII? If a hereditary monarchy means anything, it cannot break its own rules, so the odds are heavily that he will succeed. Prince Charles long ago distanced himself, physically and emotionally, from the Queen’s court. His succession would be followed by a dramatic clearing-out of the current Buckingham Palace staff and the arrival of his own team. One of the more dramatic ideas that has been discussed is for the Royal family in his reign to leave Buckingham Palace entirely, leaving it as a kind of grand official government hotel and centre for events. The King would base himself not in London, but at Windsor Castle. Whether this happens or not, Charles has a strong desire for his reign to be different, and to make his own way as monarch, just as he has in his current life. This is natural, but if it excludes the hard-learned lessons and iron self-discipline of the Queen’s reign, it is dangerous too. Assuming he lives longer than his mother – and he has at times wondered aloud if he will – then Prince Charles will become a very interesting king.

  Whenever one mentions the word ‘abdication’ at Buckingham Palace, faces wince and mouths tighten. ‘I don’t suppose the Queen has ever entertained the thought,’ comes the reply. Or: ‘She doesn’t know what the word means.’ Or, harking back to Uncle David, ‘The Queen’s view is that you couldn’t have two abdications in one lifetime.’ It is not quite true that the Queen has not entertained the thought. She has discussed abdication privately with loyal and senior figures, though she has gone on to declare against it. For her, if it can possibly be done, the job really is for life. Yet as we have seen, the Queen is a pragmatist. More and more of her work now will be passed over to her son, and to her grandsons too. She will travel less. As Prince Philip grows very old, she wants to be with him as much as possible. He has retired from some of his jobs. He has said he wants more time to relax and feels his memory is not what it was. For both, the formal duties are becoming a little more tiring all the time. Should the Queen be unable to carry on in great old age – a more common problem these days – there is a Regency Act, which some profess ‘perfectly serviceable’ and others say ‘needs revisiting’, to allow Prince Charles to dissolve Parliament, give royal assent to bills and read out Queen’s speeches. One source says of abdication, ‘I wouldn’t actually rule it out, at the end of the day. If she got to a point where she was very old, and very tired, it could come to be the sensible view. A lot depends on the public.’

  It always has. So far, the British public’s view of the Diamond Queen is sparklingly, crystal, clear. The
longer she reigns, in good fettle and spirits, the better for what remains, despite everything, her lucky country.

  Notes

  Part One – Dynasty is Destiny

  1. Kenneth Rose, King George V, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1983, p. 167.

  2. James Pope-Hennessy, Queen Mary, George Allen and Unwin, 1959, pp. 480–1.

  3. Harold Nicolson, King George V, Constable, 1952.

  4. Frank Prochaska, The Republic of Britain, Allen Lane, 2000.

  5. Rose, King George V, see chapter 6.

  6. Pope-Hennessy, Queen Mary, p. 518.

  7. Prochaska, Republic of Britain.

  8. John Wheeler-Bennett, King George VI, Macmillan, 1958, p. 145.

  9. Nigel Nicolson (ed.), The Harold Nicolson Diaries: 1907–1963, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004, entry for 17 August 1949.

  10. Pope-Hennessy, Queen Mary, p. 494.