She starts with the Royal National Lifeboat Institution’s Tower Station, the busiest in Britain. The small floating base below Waterloo Bridge has had three thousand ‘call-outs’ and saved 183 lives in the last eight years. Today, it is low in the water, weighed down with all the staff, the fundraisers and the top brass who have descended from elsewhere. No one wants to miss the R in RNLI.
A Palace press officer informs the media that the Queen will be wearing a Stewart Parvin red rusted tweed coat and a Rachel Trevor-Morgan hat. It’s raining when she arrives. She has no umbrella but does not appear to mind. She meets the duty crew and watches video footage of a disturbed man jumping off Westminster Bridge three months earlier. She shudders as he lands in the water but the crew have him out again within seconds.
As she makes her way around, it is clear that what interests her most is not the mechanics of lifesaving but the voluntary dimension to the entire operation. She talks to Roger Cohen, fifty-four, who commutes from Sussex to do shifts here every few weeks. Gary Pittaway, forty-four, mans a lifeboat when he is not doing his day job with the Metropolitan Police. The Queen learns that one of her own officials, Major General Keith Cima, Governor of the Tower of London no less, is also a volunteer here. He may be a major general at the Tower but down here he is expected to make the tea like everyone else. He is not here today. It is later explained that he has ample opportunity to meet the Queen in his other life and is letting others take his place on this occasion.
It’s a warts-and-all tour. The Queen is even shown the changing rooms. She stands in the rain for a photograph but there’s so little space that the photographer has to climb into a boat and move offshore in order to squeeze everyone inside the shot. ‘Thanks very much,’ she says almost jauntily and heads off to Aldgate Tube station. There she meets the staff who handle six million commuters a year. Some were on duty the July day a suicide bomber killed seven people here in 2005. They present her with a Tube sign for a non-existent station called ‘Buckingham Palace’.
And so to lunch. It could scarcely be a more different affair from that sunny fiesta of quasi-imperial effusion in 1954. Back then, the Lord Mayor wore robes over his velvet Court suit. Today’s Lord Mayor, Nick Anstee, is in a lounge suit with only a small chain of office to denote his position. Some City grandees are said to be miffed that they have not been invited to a royal lunch attended by bus drivers and secretaries. There will be no Mansion House silverware or portraits, either. The lunch is on the thirty-ninth floor, the top tier of one of the City’s most modern buildings, the glass-fronted ‘Gherkin’. At the very top, there is a final flight of stairs up to pre-lunch drinks on the observation deck where a hundred guests are sipping champagne. It’s one of the best views in London but no one is admiring the scenery. All eyes are on the stairwell. A hush descends as the top of that Rachel Trevor-Morgan hat rises into view.
A lunch of salmon terrine, loin of lamb and bread and butter pudding is being cooked by young chefs from the Hoxton Apprentice, a restaurant which turns the long-term unemployed into catering professionals. Until recently, many of these cooks had no skills and no prospects. Head chef Leon Seraphin, twenty-nine, had been homeless when Hoxton turned his world around. He ended up working at White’s Club where he served both Prince William and David Cameron – ‘nice chap, salads only’ – before returning to Hoxton. He cannot wait to get home and tell his family that he has cooked for the Sovereign. Upstairs, Hoxton’s founder, Gordon da Silva, chats to the Queen and is astonished when she mentions that two of his apprentices have worked at the Palace. He knew that – but didn’t expect that she would.
At lunch, the Queen sits at a round table of ten who include two train drivers and an administrative assistant from Tower Bridge. In 1954, the Queen dined on a raised platform. Today she is on ‘Table 3’. She has the head of London Underground on her right and the Lord Mayor on her left. He delivers a short speech at the end in which he thanks the Queen and praises the ‘indispensable’ work of the City’s service workers. There is no smoking, no port and no brandy. There is no band or entertainment, for that matter, and no one is wearing white gloves either. The Queen thanks the cooking team and leaves for her next engagement at Tower Bridge. In 1954, it raised its two one-thousand-ton arms to their full height as HMY Britannia sailed through with the Queen and Churchill on board. Today, staff have already been told not to open the bridge in her honour. She has seen it all before, thanks very much, and does not want to disrupt the traffic. As she leaves the Gherkin, she is greeted by the first decent crowd of the day. Word has spread among City workers that the Queen is having lunch in their midst. Several hundred are waiting to see her leave and, in the finest traditions of the City, they all get a bonus – because the Queen leaves twice. The Lord Mayor sees her safely into her State Bentley, the four-ton flagship of the royal fleet. And then nothing happens. The car will not start. There is an awkward pause that must seem a toe-curling eternity for the Lord Mayor and the Queen’s chauffeur. And then she gets out of the car. With certain heads of state, there would be panic stations, much yelling into electronic cuffs, a public inquiry and high-level redundancies. But the Queen seems to be rather amused. ‘So much for new technology,’ she says in mock despair to the Lord Mayor and cheerfully climbs into the ‘back-up’, a police Range Rover. And off she goes in a convoy of two cars and one police outrider – the sort of modest motorcade which might be laid on for, say, a middle-ranking trade minister from the European Union.
What is she thinking as she hitches a ride in a borrowed car through the City? A stranger comparing the bugle-parping newsreel coverage of 1954’s royal progress through the Square Mile with today’s modest events would conclude that the monarchy had endured a catastrophic decline during the intervening decades. From global adulation to a conked-out car? What a comedown for a sovereign who could once precipitate the greatest voluntary assembly of people ever seen in whichever country she chose to set foot.
There will, though, be no complaints from the Queen today. Nor will there by any grumbles from her family or her advisers. She has led her country for so long – far longer than any Western leader since her great-great-grandmother – that she knows that it is not a numbers game. She is well aware that loyalty and affection are not solely measured by the depth of a crowd or the viscosity of a formal welcome.
Fifties Britain was another world. As the figurehead of a nation in desperate need of revitalisation and reassurance after an exhausting battle for survival, she could hardly fail in those early days. The true mark of her success is that, six decades later, she remains, by a considerable margin, the most popular figure in British public life.
It has not been a simple case of good fortune or of reacting to events as they unfold. There has been a game plan running through this entire reign. And it is one which continues to serve the Queen well according to the second in line to the throne (or, as he puts it, ‘the young bloke coming through’).
‘She’s so dedicated and really determined to finish everything she started,’ says Prince William. ‘She’ll want to hand over knowing she’s done everything she possibly could to help and that she’s got no regrets and no unfinished business; that she’s done everything she can for the country and that she’s not let anyone down – she minds an awful lot about that.’
Having inherited an Edwardian (some would say Victorian) institution in 1952, she has not merely kept it going. She has put it through the most vigorous reforms of modern times. She has managed to remain simultaneously regal, popular, inclusive and relevant in a twenty-first-century world. She sits at the head of a hereditary institution often associated with rigid tradition. Its critics might even call it an anachronistic pantomime. Yet that same institution is busier and more dynamic than ever, with more going on around the Queen the older she becomes. It’s not merely about developing a royal presence on Facebook or Twitter. Internal records show that, between 2005 and 2010, the amount of hospitality at Buckingham Palace actually rose b
y 50 per cent. Shortly after her eighty-fifth birthday in 2011, the Queen was presiding over three of the most exciting but demanding royal events of the twenty-first century within the space of a remarkable month – Prince William’s wedding, that state visit to Ireland and only the second state visit to Britain by an American president.
‘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.*
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 y
ou 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.
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