Whereas in monarchy, the… the abstractīecomes personal, it becomes real, it becomes graspable.’ Why is the King proclaimed at St James’s Palace, Professor? And he’s off again. Unless of course Donald Trump is president’ – a tongue-flickering chuckle – ‘and then they’re interesting in the wrong sort of way. ‘It’s what Walter Bagehot, you know, in the great account of the British constitution, says: republics are boring. At times the BBC’s newsreaders struggled to keep bathos at arm’s length, as when Huw Edwards solemnly predicted that Prince Harry would arrive at Balmoral ‘in a Range Rover or something of that kind’, or when Jane Hill, looking out over Buckingham Palace, observed: ‘It is the symbol of the royal family, isn’t it, in this country?’ Yet for the most part Edwards, Hill and the rest did a fine job of guiding the nation through the disorientating moment when our figurehead was lost.Īll the same, it was a bracing delight to switch over to GB News and watch David Starkey – black tie, black pocket square with white polka dots, thick black-rimmed spectacles – pontificating at the speed of a royal racehorse. Indeed it is, which presented a near-impossible challenge, in those first hours of collective grief last Thursday evening, to anyone whose job is to keep talking no matter what. That’s so much better than talking, isn’t it?’
As relief washed over him, she remarked: ‘There. (‘Perhaps it was because she is the mother of the nation, and I had lost my own mother.’) The Queen opened a box of dog biscuits and invited Nott to help her feed the corgis. One touching story, often related over the last week, comes from the warzone surgeon David Nott, who when telling the Queen about his traumatic experiences in Aleppo felt himself starting to break down.
Of course Elizabeth II was deft in more everyday ways too. I can scarcely remember a more gripping hour of television When she wanted to bolster the No side in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, her intervention – commenting to a well-wisher outside church that ‘Well, I hope people will think very carefully about the future’ – was exactly calibrated to achieve a kind of decisive vagueness. When she toured the new towns of the 1950s (see image), waving at the crowds with their little Union Flags and taking tea with the young families on the just-built housing estates, she was giving her wordless blessing to the welfare state. But BBC1’s The Longest Reign: The Queen and Her People made a compelling case that Elizabeth II knew just how to tilt the balance. In all the tributes to Her late Majesty’s constancy, dignity, wisdom and devotion to duty, not enough has been said about her political cunning.
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