‘She is a small woman with a globally familiar face, a hundred­carat smile - when she chooses to turn it on - and a thousand years of history at her back. She reigns in a world which has mostly left monarchy behind, yet the result of her reign is that two-thirds of British people assume their monarchy will still be here in a century’s time. She is wry and knowing, but she feels a calling. All this is serious. She can brim with dry observations but she seems empty of cynicism. She is not a natural public speaker.
But there she is, in May 2011 and dressed in emerald green, arriving for her first visit to the Republic of Ireland. Aged eighty­five, she makes one of the most politically significant speeches of her life. “It is a sad and regrettable reality that through our history our islands have experienced more than their fair share of heartache, turbulence and loss. These events have touched many of us personally ... To all those who have suffered as a consequence of a troubled past I extend my sincere thoughts and deep sympathy.” This is a highly emotional trip. (…). Nobody else from Britain could have made such a visit of high-profile reconciliation, covered by more than a thousand journalists and reported all round the world. No British politician has been around for long enough, or been personally touched so closely, or could claim to speak for Britain itself. Ireland’s President Mary McAleese speaks for her people warmly and well, the first Northerner and the second woman to serve in the job. But no Briton other than the Queen could speak in that way for the British.
There she is again, just a few days later, welcoming President Barack Obama to stay at Buckingham Palace. In the gusty sunshine overlooking the lawn there is picture-postcard pomp - a guard of Household Cavalry, marching soldiers, bagpipes, national anthems, the reverberations of artillery salutes. On the eve of his visit, speaking in Washington, Obama had gone out of his way to praise the Queen in lavish if not entirely politically accurate terms as “the best of England”. His earlier visit had gone spectacularly well. Even so, this is a relationship which is also, in a gentler and more personal way, about friendship and reconciliation.
For when Obama first became US president there had been unease in London. Here was a man who seemed cool about the (exaggerated) “special relationship” with Britain. He had no personal ties - or rather, just one, which was unhappy and about which he had written himself. His grandfather had been arrested, imprisoned and tortured in Kenya. The early years of the Queen’s reign had been marked by a brutal war against the nationalist Mau Mau there. Obama is a supremely professional politician, very unlikely to allow personal history to influence his decision-making, but the unease was there. Once the pomp was over the Queen did her level best to make him and his wife Michelle feel especially welcome, showing the couple to their bedroom.
As head of state, Queen Elizabeth is the living symbol of nations, above all that of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland - though another fifteen besides, including Australia, Canada, New Zealand and smaller countries, down to Tuvalu. She is not like most other constitutional monarchs. The British state has no single written constitution nor any founding document. About a third of the Dutch constitution, by contrast, explains what the Dutch monarch’s duties are. Spain's king is part of one of Europe’s oldest and grandest royal houses, the Bourbons; but his job is strictly limited in the careful prose of the Spanish constitution.
The British Queen’s authority is more like a quiet growl from ancient days, still quietly thrumming and mysterious. She stands for the state - indeed, in some ways, at least in theory, she is the state. She is the living representative of the power-structure that struggles to protect and sustain some 62 million people, and another 72 million in her other “realms”.
She is not the symbol of the people. How could she or anyone represent the teeming millions of different ethnic groups and religions, of every political view, shape, bias and age? Her enthusiasm for the Commonwealth of nations, which is not the private passion of many British politicians, has made her more interested in the lives of the new black and Asian Britons than one might expect. Receptions at Buckingham Palace are generally more socially and ethnically mixed than they are at Downing Street, or in the City. She is at her most relaxed and smiling with young people, nervous people and unflashy people. Watching her at official occasions, it is clear that the chores are the grand dinners and speeches.
Yet, like it or not, she is the symbol of the authority which drives the state servants and laws - the elections, armies, judges and treaties which together make modern life possible. For sixty years she has appeared to open her Parliament, to remember her nation’s war dead, to review her troops or to attend services of her Church. “Britain” cannot go to the Republic of Ireland to finally heal a political breach that goes back to the Irish struggle for independence in the 1920s - but the Queen can. “Britain” cannot welcome a pope or a president. She can.
She has great authority and no power. She is a brightly dressed and punctual paradox. She is the ruler who does not rule her subjects but who serves them. The ancient meaning of kingship has been flipped; part of the purpose of this book is to explain how, and why, that has been done. Modern constitutional monarchy does not mean subjection, the hand pressed down on an unruly nation. Instead it offers aversion of freedom. For the Crown is not the government. There is a small, essential space between them. It would be rude to say that ministers are squatters in the state - for governments come from parliaments which are elected, the ultimate bastions of our liberty. Nevertheless, ministers are lodgers in the state. They are welcome for a while, but have no freehold rights. The Queen stands for continuity. This is a dull word, but when asked what the Queen is really about, “continuity” is the word used most often by other members of the royal family, by prime ministers, archbishops and senior civil servants. What do they mean? Not simply the continued existence of the country or the state. It is true that the state is a living and valuable presence before and after any one government. People look back to the past and imagine a future that outlives them: monarchy takes a real family and makes it the rather blatant symbol of that existential fact. So a constitutional monarchy claims to represent the interests of the people before they elected this government, and after it has gone. It remembers. It looks ahead, far beyond the next election.
The distinction between state and government is an essential foundation of liberty. In Britain a pantomime of ritual has grown up to express it. At the annual State Opening of Parliament, once in a year, the Queen reads out her prime minister’s words, ventriloquizing for her government. She speaks with deliberate lack of emphasis or emotion: nobody must be able to hear her own feelings break through. A junior minister is taken hostage at Buckingham Palace to guarantee her safety and underline the separation of politics and state. When she leaves Westminster, he is released (after a decent drink) and normal politics resumes. The state and the government have come together, touched hands, and gone their separate ways. Other countries have a similar distinction, expressing it through written documents or powerless elected presidents; the British have long preferred a person.
This is the job. In practice it is a little harder than it looks. When the most important foreign leaders arrive for a state visit, the Queen greets them in the country’s name with a smile and a gloved handshake and small-talk, again deliberately designed never to offend. She offers house-room and pays kind attention to people she may privately regard as abominable or merely hideous bores. Guests at Buckingham Palace or at Windsor will be guided around by the Queen in person. She will have checked the rooms first herself, trying to make sure suitable books are left by the bed, that the flowers look good, and that everything is welcoming. At the grand dinners she will have overseen the food, flowers and place-settings: will everybody be satisfied with where they are seated, and get on with the people put beside them?
When the guests arrive and the conversation starts she has to remember to dodge anything that might cause her ministers a headache. One former foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, has watched her do it: “She’s got quite an elaborate technique. When a visiting head of state, or whatever it is, begins to talk politics, begins to explain what's happening in his country, she says, “That’s very interesting Mr President ... and I’m sure the foreign secretary would very much like to discuss that with you.” And so you’re shunted. The points change, and you’re shunted onto a different line.” Others talk about how she uses polite silence to deflect trouble; and it is very noticeable that when you ask people about their conversations with the Queen, they bubble about her wit and insight - and then tell you exactly (and only) what they said to her. Clever.
She knows almost every state secret of the past sixty years. Every day she works her way through state papers, sent in red boxes to her desk. Gus O’Donnell again: “We give the Queen the minutes of cabinet, for instance, so she’s up to date on the discussions, the decisions that have been made. She gets a lot of material about what the government’s actually doing, in her red boxes.” The Queen is very interested in issues involving the constitution - Sir Gus singles out current controversies about Britain’s switch to fixed-term parliaments and the future of the House of Lords - and anything to do with Britain's military.
She works hard too, to support the civil service, who, like her, have to be neutral but get very little applause from the public or press. In public, in her Christmas broadcasts and many speeches, she generally takes great care to stay on the safe ground of general expressions of goodwill, although at Christmas she often touches on issues of the day. For decade after decade she has dodged traps that could have led the monarchy into serious danger. She has made mistakes, of course. She is only human. But she has managed this dance of discretion so adroitly that many people have concluded that she is herself almost without character - neutral, passive, even bland.
She is not. She is capable of sharp asides, has a long memory, shrewd judgement and is a wicked mimic. She has been very frank about her children’s scrapes. She has closely observed and dryly described the oddities of foreign leaders and famous politicians. She has done it sitting playing patience during the evening at Balmoral, or with her legs tucked up under her on a sofa on the Royal Yacht, a glass of something cheerful in hand, or walking on beaches and hillsides. In private she has hugged and laughed; and been sharp with bores, dawdlers and slow eaters. Though she does not like confrontation, and has often sub-contracted that out to her husband, she has strong views about people. It is just that her job means she has to hide all this. Other people, celebrities and actors, are paid to have a “personality”. She is required to downplay hers.
The Queen is also “the fount of honours”. She bestows medals, crosses, knighthoods and ribbons, mostly (but not always) on the advice of politicians, to those who are worthy (and sometimes not so worthy). Each one requires conversation, eye-contact, briefing and time. She has so far bestowed 404,500 honours and awards, and personally held more than 610 Investitures (the grand honour-giving ceremonies) since becoming Queen in 1952.
Then there are the services: the Queen is Head of the Armed Forces. It is to the Queen that new soldiers, airmen and sailors pledge allegiance, and in whose name they fight and die. She has a special relationship with some regiments - her first official job was as a colonel-in-chief - and a general one with all. This means many more visits and ceremonies. She is also a patron of huge numbers of charities. They too lobby and plead for her time, often to encourage fundraising. From time to time the royal family settles down together to try to organize their charitable work. After the death of her mother and sister, the family sat down at Sandringham around a card-table and shared out the work they would have to take on. They discovered some charities had rather too many Royals associated with them, and others none at all; so some switching-around was agreed.
Beginning to feel tired? What about Abroad? The Queen never forgets that she is Head of the Commonwealth, a title invented in 1949 to allow the newly independent republican India to keep its association with Britain. This involves her in a huge amount of travel, in addition to visiting her other realms and the diplomatic and trade-boosting visits her government tells her each year she must make. In the Foreign Office they draw up their wish list for state visits and other visits, arguing about which trading partner has priority over which, and which leader would be particularly gratified if the Queen arrived. And then another negotiation about her diary begins.
Beyond all this, the Queen has run the monarchy as a national adhesive, making constant visits around the country to be seen, to greet and to thank people who are mostly ignored by the London power-brokers and commercial grandees. She holds parties, lunches and charity gatherings at Buckingham Palace and Edinburgh’s Palace of Holyroodhouse to thank or bring together other lists of good-doers, civic worthies and business strivers. At special themed receptions she honours all sorts of disparate groups - they might be Australians in Britain, or young people in the performing arts, or campaigners for the handicapped, or the emergency services. These events are meticulously planned. The Queen hangs over the lists of who may be invited, and why. She plans the evenings and the choreography, and manages to remember at least many of the names. Only by watching the delight of elderly volunteers whom nobody else had thought to make much of or struggling young musicians, can one understand the quiet power of this mostly unreported monarchical campaign.
Andrew Marr (1959) studied English at the University of Cambridge. Since then he had a long career in political journalism. He described his career, together with his view on journalism, in My Trade (2004). From 2000 to 2005 Andrew Marr was BBC’s political editor. He has written and presented TV documentaries on history, science and politics. During the writing of the book, and up to present day, he presents weekly Andrew Marr Show, on BBC1.