I never met Elizabeth II. That’s something I regret. I’ve been close to her: in 2005 I sat in the Royal Gallery to watch the State Opening of Parliament, and the Queen walked right past me on her way to give her speech in the House of Lords, so she was perhaps only five feet away. I bowed, as was protocol, and it was a profound moment for me, as it was proximity to the woman who had ruled over my country for (by then) more than half a century, and for whom I had a vast well of emotional and personal respect and loyalty.
I say that I wish I’d met her, but I fear that I’d have been terribly starstruck and uneasy. She was famous for being able to put people at their ease and make conversation—it was part of her job—but I’m bad with new people at the best of times and would have been wracked by nerves and more than usually tongue-tied. So perhaps it is better than I never achieved my dream, and we never had that face-to-face encounter.
There is much I would have enjoyed about a more relaxed conversation. She must have had an inexhaustible wealth of stories, some of which I’d heard at second-hand from the more outrageously name-dropping of my friends, and she knew so much about the world, about politics and about the royal family, of course, which has always fascinated me. She was also reputedly an excellent mimic, and it’s only now that I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that I will never hear her impersonation of the late Dr Ian Paisley. I imagine she had fun with that one.
One of the most common reactions to the death of Elizabeth has been that people took her somewhat for granted, that she was simply a fixture in the public world and few knew any different. My mother, born in 1949, had no recollection of there being a king, and my stepfather, three years older, could recall George VI’s death being announced to his class at primary school but not much more than that.
There were tiny tracings which pursued me. When I was growing up in the 1980s, you would still occasionally find pre-decimal coins in your change with the profile of King George on them: shilling pieces functioned as 5p coins and two-shilling bits were accepted instead of 10p. Eventually these too dropped out of circulation. And there were (are) postboxes too: I would see the red pillars with all sorts of royal ciphers on them—the one on the street I live on now bears Victoria’s VR—and I still get a little frisson of excitement at seeing one of the few 1936 boxes with the E VIII R monogram (there’s one in Bangor, County Down, I can attest).
I also grew up with the hazily benign presence of the Queen Mother, who had been George VI’s wife. She was into her eighties by the time I was even dimly aware of her, and she almost never spoke in public, so she was this caricature of a dotty old lady, helped by Spitting Image’s portrayal of her with Steve Nallon providing an impersonation of Beryl Reid (who would have been a great Queen Mum). It didn’t really occur to me that having a Queen Mother was not usual, that it was an unusual position in the royal family, but she served as a reminder that there had been a monarch before Elizabeth. And, of course, she lived until 2002, extraordinary longevity.
Over my 45 years, I watched Elizabeth go from a late middle-aged woman—I can still recall when she would ride at Trooping the Colour, side-saddle on her black mare Burmese—to grandmother and then an increasingly old woman. She aged but somehow seemed ageless. Partly this was her extraordinary good health and stamina. It was really only in the last 10 or 15 years that she made any concessions to age, giving up long-haul air travel, then sometimes handing over events to other members of the Firm, and even in the last few years, as she became less mobile, her vitality could make you forget her age. She seemed to sail into her 90s almost as if the chronological numbers meant nothing, and she stood next to people decades younger yet seemed more active and alive.
I’m a romantic but I’m not a fool. I knew that the day would come when her energy would run out. Although she’d lived a reasonably healthy life, especially compared to her chain-smoking father, no-one can outrun the Grim Reaper forever. Inevitably there were scares and rumours, but they were always unfounded, and Elizabeth would recover from each setback, and go on with her duties, and suddenly her eventual absence seemed once again a distant prospect.
The death of her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, in April 2021 was a milestone. We knew, and she confirmed it, that he had been the anchor of her life. They had been married for more than 70 years, and it had in the beginning undoubtedly been a love match. The young Princess Elizabeth had been dazzled by the dashing young emigré Greek prince, and they went on to form a solid, indissoluble partnership which, despite his occasional chafing, allowed her to carry out her unique role with support and love. There was a common belief that his death would shake her badly and she might not survive long after, as is anecdotally often the case with long-married couples. Seeing her sitting alone and masked at his funeral was heartbreaking.
Finally her time came to an end on—one must mark this date—8 September 2022. The superlatives crowded in: she was the longest reigning and oldest British monarch, the longest-serving head of state in the world and was creeping up on Louis XIV for the title of longest-reigning monarch in history. Each was an important achievement, but they compounded into a more nebulous but generalised idea that she was a ruler of effectively unprecedented longevity.
That sense was heightened by the pace and extent of progress over her reign. Try to think about the UK in 1952, when she ascended the throne. Rationing was still in force. The National Health Service was only five years old, still a real novelty. Homosexuality and abortion were very much illegal, the death sentence was still regularly, if not frequently, imposed for murder, and most of the institutions of power—the House of Commons, the House of Lords, the civil service, the City of London—were still overwhelmingly if not exclusively male. Northern Ireland was only 30 years old as a devolved state, it had its own predominantly Protestant government and most people in the rest of the UK barely gave it or its politics a thought.
Television was still a new medium, and sets were a luxury. There were about 350,000 households with a television set, showing one channel, the BBC, though perhaps fittingly it would be Elizabeth’s coronation in the summer of 1953 which revolutionised the popular approach to television and acted as a huge spur to wider ownership.
Even describing it conjures up a forgotten, alien and almost unimaginable world at the space of 70 years. We take the internet for granted now, we don’t blink at the idea that a small device in our pocket can give us access to literally the whole of human knowledge. Medicine is advanced beyond our comprehension in many ways, with cancer edging closer towards a controllable illness. It remains, however, one of the biggest killers, along with dementia, while in 1952 the biggest killer was usually some kind of heart disease.
These astonishing, worlds-apart comparisons drive home how long Elizabeth was our queen. She saw the first man and woman travel to space and the first men on the moon, she saw the UK become a nuclear power and the Soviet Union detonate its first hydrogen bomb. The British Empire melted away during her reign, not always but often peaceably, the Commonwealth grew as—for idealists—a kind of surrogate for Britain’s lost imperial power. Communism collapsed in Eastern Europe and apartheid was dismantled in South Africa. Jim Crow was finally swept away in the southern states of the US (though prejudice remained and remains). The world of 2022 is impossible to compare with that of 1952.
That longevity, that seemingly eternal presence, makes Elizabeth’s death a shock for most of us. Simply put, what has happened is unfamiliar to most people: the death of a monarch and the accession of a new king. We are still coming to terms with the small details which will alter: senior barristers are now King’s Counsels and there is a King’s Bench Division of the High Court; legal cases will be brought in the name of “Rex” rather than “Regina”. There will be new stamps and new currency with the image of Charles III on them. On official occasions we will now sing God Save The King.
It is more profound than that for me. I have always been a monarchist. I can make a logical case, that an office above party politics does a good job of providing stability and continuity, that our delicately balanced constitution—uncodified but not unwritten—may be theoretically flawed but has proved resilient and flexible. But for me, it has always been a belief system as well as a reasoned argument. I believe we should have a monarchy because we have one and it has worked and it is how we are governed.
I accept readily that this is a romantic attachment. But we cannot always be logical all the time. I imagine that if I became convinced that our monarchy was a corrosive force at the centre of our body politic, I would overcome my emotional attachment and support an alternative. It has not yet. That being so, I can indulge my romantic streak—I have always been a cavalier rather than a roundhead—and attach myself to the monarchy for strange, mystical reasons. I am, after all, a Tory, defined by Enoch Powell as someone who believes that institutions are wiser than the people who operate them, and I tend to think that change must always bear the burden of proof.
Why I am attached to the pomp and protocol I cannot say. It is true that I loved dressing up as a child, and was deliriously happy when, as an associate serjeant at arms in the House of Commons, by workwear was 18th-century court dress with a swallow-tailed coat, knee breeches and stockings. I was attached to the pre-1997 House of Lords, dominated by hereditary peers, and I value (but not uncritically) the honours system, though I think my “browsing of the catalogue” will likely go forever unfulfilled. (If anyone in a position of power is reading, I have at great length come to the conclusion that, as an English-born Scotsman, I would rather take the Thistle rather than the Garter if offered a senior order of chivalry.)
I also think that the Victorian constitutionalist Walter Bagehot understood Britain well. In analysing the polity which operated around him, he shrewdly say an inherent duality, a compromise, a lack of rigorous theoretical exactness.
We must not let in daylight upon magic. The Sovereign has, under a constitutional monarchy such as ours, three rights—the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, the right to warn. It is an inevitable defect, that bureaucrats will care more for routine than for results.
What he was saying was it works. And for me, perhaps for many, it works because of the pageantry in which it is swathed, not in spite of that. There has been much chatter recently that the British constitution relies on what Peter Hennessy calls the “good chaps” school of governance, and fingers are pointed at Boris Johnson as the prime minister who has pushed our norms beyond their limits and thrown everything into disarray. I’m not so sure. I regard the constitution as elastic, and I sense that it will begin the come back into shape.
The monarch is at the top of this constitutional tree. And the figure of the king must therefore be in some ways a slightly mystical, almost sacramental leader. He exercises his limited powers because it is a system that works, more or less, but he also does so, for some of us, because he is the king. Call it usage, precedent, tradition: I am more than willing not only to accept but to bow to the will of the monarch as properly chosen (according to our laws of succession) in a way which I cannot logically explain.
Monarchists will revere Elizabeth and use her as an example of why the monarchy works. That is to argue from the best case: she conducted herself with flawless judgement and precision, never putting a foot wrong. Not every monarch will get it right, and the character of the new sovereign suggests he may not be as unerring as his mother. But that is not quite the point.
All of this means that while I am shocked by the eventual departure from this life of Queen Elizabeth because I have known no other, and I will miss her particular character, her warmth, good sense and unfailing dedication to duty. But I feel a particular loss because my monarch is dead: the ruler whom I respected but also revered and regarded as someone with whom I had a sacral relationship.
I don’t expect everyone to feel the same. I have tried to set out a more objective assessment of the late queen in City AM; but this is more personal. This is an apologia, perhaps, but it is also a kind of “Elizabeth and Me”. I have seen the workings of the British constitution from the very centre: I have created the physical copies of laws which are debated in Parliament and I have seen the way our legislature works. I am not starry-eyed or uncritical, and I could list flaws and faults which should be mended at considerable length. I have often done so.
But today, I have experienced an emotional trauma, not to be too melodramatic about it. My sovereign has died and I must now pledge my allegiance to another. That is a cause for sadness, but it is also a demonstration of durability. That the crown would pass seamlessly from Elizabeth to her successor was not always a certainty over the last 30 years, yet here we are. It has broken my heart, but here is the proof of the pudding: the Queen is dead, long live the King.
Well said.
I am a year younger (or less) than your mother and just remember seeing the remnants of the street decorations for the coronation. I don't remember her father on the throne.
I am deeply moved by My Queen's passing. I will need time to recover and will come to London for her funeral. Go to a well-deserved rest Ma'am.
God save the King