A still point in a changing world
We will not see her like again. As the nation enters a ten-day period of national mourning, the detailed, long-term planning for Operation London Bridge smoothly meshes together. With all this going on at the national stage, the local and personal impact of our longest-serving monarch continues to reverberate in hearts and memories in all four corners of the land.
It was noted that she had visited more than a hundred countries during her unprecedented seven-decade reign, a fixture of international relations and lynchpin of the Commonwealth. Her innate sense of devotion to duty and concern kept her diary full of appointments, large and small, in every corner of the United Kingdom including the Orkney Isles – previously untouched by modern monarchy.
There wouldn’t be enough space to attempt to list the total number of visits, trips and interventions in each county, major city, town, village and hamlet. Each occasion would have been unique, each abundant with cherished memories, from the stress and strain of behind-the-scenes preparations that go into the months and weeks leading up to a particular royal visit, culminating in great public joy. Often the unassuming, casual word or gesture from the Queen could serve to calm nerves and dissipate tension of civic dignitaries and ordinary members of the public alike.
In what Bagehot termed the ‘dignified’ attributes of the monarchy, in matters such as the bestowal and award of honours to loyal and dedicated servants of local government at all levels, the Queen reinforced the notion of selfless duty to others. Through the pomp and circumstance of visits arranged by a cast list of innumerable lord lieutenants in every county and region of England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, the places she visited and experienced over the course of her reign and the people who populated her realm changed drastically in her own Elizabethan age.
The ’efficient’ function of the monarch is to advise, warn and encourage her Prime Minister. Acceding to the throne unexpectedly early in 1952, her reign began in the early days of a welfare state which her first Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, was extending in the early days of the post-war consensus. She ended her reign, committed to duty despite frailty, accepting as Prime Minister Liz Truss who was born a full century after her first.
In matters of devolution to Scotland and Wales, and despite the need to remain detached the Queen was able to stress in the late 1970s the importance to her of maintaining the union, which to her was part of what she saw as her sacred mission. A less discreet prime minister David Cameron divulged the Queen to have ‘purred’ over the defeat of the 2014 independence referendum.
The 1969 report arising from Royal Commission on Local Government in England, undertaken under the chairmanship of Lord Redcliffe-Maud, which proposed a rationalisation of English local government outside London into 61 unitaries (three metropolitan) arranged within eight regional provinces – still reads to some as unfinished business from the days of Wilson and Heath.
A criticism frequently levelled at the time of Thatcher’s poll tax was that a dustman would pay as much as the Duke of Edinburgh for local charges. One legacy of this era was that the Queen paid council tax on all four of her properties, Balmoral, Buckingham Palace, Sandringham and Windsor Castle – paying £2,300 a year at Band H at the latter, less than the £4,153 for a comparative property in nearby Reading.
As Bagehot also noted, a function of the monarchy is to disguise the underlying changes taking place in society and government. Between this seven-decade span, the nation she ruled modernised in line with inevitable technological progress and its population expanded in size and diversity. The class-riven age of deference gave way, as it had to, to a revolution in social mores and attitudes in work and play.
But Queen Elizabeth II remained, steadfastly, the still point in a turning world. As Philip Larkin remarked in a poem written for the occasion of her Silver Jubilee in 1977:
‘In times when nothing stood/ But worsened, or grew strange,
There was one constant good: She did not change.’
Jonathan Werran is chief executive, Localis