by Penny Junor
‘I take it upon myself to express the immense debt of gratitude we owe to you all. I salute you and thank you on behalf of our whole nation.’
She praised the work of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which looks after the graves of more than 22,000 Commonwealth servicemen who died fighting in Normandy. The sacrifice of those who died or who were wounded ‘must never be forgotten’, she said. Neither should ‘the courage and fortitude and the dogged determination of the hundreds of thousands of servicemen who landed on the beaches on that day and then fought their way inland in the face of determined opposition’. And she quoted her father from his broadcast sixty years before.
It was stirring, emotional stuff, fuelled by a fly-past of the Battle of Britain memorial flight – the Lancaster, Spitfire, Hurricane and DC 3 Dakota – the Red Arrows with their vapour trails of red, white and blue; while on the ground cheers for ‘Her Majesty’ and the mournful lament of bagpipes, the bugles and drums of the Royal Irish Regiment band and the King’s Division Band sent tingles down more than a few heroic spines.
At moments such as this, there is no question about what the monarchy is for; the pride on the faces of those old soldiers, their pleasure that the sacrifices they had made in their youth and their bravery all those years ago were being recognized and appreciated by their Queen on behalf of their country said it all. They hadn’t fought for the Prime Minister or for a political party or ideology. They had fought for their King and country and to preserve the freedom and way of life for which their fathers before them had fought. And those fathers and mothers, grandparents, wives and children who lived through five years of fear, of rationing, bereavement and hardship while Britain was at war understood what monarchy was all about, too. When the King and Queen visited their bombed-out houses and offered comfort and concern for their loss they felt they were not alone.
Before her appearance at Arromanches, the Queen had laid a wreath at Courseulles-sur-Mer to commemorate Canada’s role in the Normandy landings, she had reviewed a Guard of Honour, attended a service of commemoration in the Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery in Bayeux alongside President Chirac of France and had lunch with heads of state; she met and talked to veterans at every stop. Most members of the Royal Family were involved in some sort of activity over that weekend. The Prince of Wales was in various towns along the Normandy coast, laying wreaths, unveiling statues, meeting veterans from the Parachute Regiment, the Royal Navy, Royal Marines and Army Air Corps and, finally, opening a British Garden of Remembrance in Caen, created as a tribute to the fifteen British and Allied divisions which fought in the eighty-day battle for Normandy between June and August 1944 to try to bring the war to an end. The Earl of Wessex, the Duke of Kent and the Duke of Gloucester were all in Normandy, while the Princess Royal was in Canada visiting the regiments there of which she is Colonel-in-Chief. And for all those old soldiers, sailors and airmen recognition from a member of the Royal Family – whichever member of the Royal Family – has a very special significance which no politician could ever match.
Mercifully there has been no comparable threat to national security since the Second World War. There has been terrorist activity of a terrifying nature, civil war in Northern Ireland and wars in the Balkans and Iraq in which British forces have been engaged. Those wars have come into our living rooms via vivid, graphic images on our television screens and because of that we know more about the horrors of war and terror than we ever did before, but civilians in London, Sheffield and Coventry and all the other cities that suffered the devastation of Hitler’s bombs have not feared for their safety here in Britain. There has been no common enemy that has brought us together and generations of Britons have no memory of there ever having been one. No memory of needing a figurehead to hold the nation together in the way that the King and Queen did during the Second World War. When those veterans and their contemporaries die, there will be fewer people who unquestioningly accept the value of the monarchy.
Prolonged peace brought all sorts of changes, not just to the automatic acceptance of monarchy. Society has changed out of all recognition in the last sixty years. The values that once underpinned our lives have shifted. Hierarchy and deference have largely gone, and so has respect. We stick two fingers up to authority; we think traditional British institutions like Parliament, the police, the BBC and the Church of England are sleazy and corrupt; we swear, blaspheme and trample all over people, their property and their sensibilities. Our democracy is so secure, and politicians so discredited, that we have lost interest in politics. We believe in nothing, care about nothing and prepare for nothing, expecting the state to nanny us when things go wrong and technology to answer our prayers. We live vicariously through the media – newspapers, television and the internet – and through the lives of two-bit celebrities. And our young binge-drink and do drugs – mug old ladies if they have to, to get them – have iPods and mobile phones glued to their ears and £200 trainers on their feet; and see no point in anything.
Where in all of this (which, of course, I exaggerate) does the monarchy fit? The answer, I believe, is in being a fixture in this morass. The Queen is approaching eighty and has been there, her face on our money, our stamps and in the media, for most if not all of most people’s lives. She has got older and greyer in that time and her face is lined – and occasionally she nods off on the final day of an exhausting foreign state visit – but her values, her routine, even her hats, have scarcely changed in all that time. And when our world crumbles, as it does in times of national horror like Lockerbie, Dunblane or 9/11, we seem to need a figurehead to put their arms around us, metaphorically, and direct and articulate our emotion.
In April 1966, the small coal-mining community of Aberfan in South Wales was struck by disaster when a slag heap collapsed and engulfed the village school, killing 146, most of them children and all from the vicinity. The Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, hurried there immediately, as did Lord Snowdon, then married to Princess Margaret, who surprised the Prime Minister by his emotion. As he wrote in his diary, ‘Instead of inspecting the site, [he] had made it his job to visit bereaved relatives … sitting holding the hands of a distraught father, sitting with the head of a mother on his shoulder for half an hour in silence.’ The Queen issued an immediate statement of sorrow, but, despite continuous prompting from her advisers, didn’t visit Aberfan for six days on the grounds that her presence would cause a distraction from the rescue work. It was a plausible excuse, but a mistake. The people of Aberfan wanted their Queen, and when she did arrive the healing effect, by all accounts, was palpable. She stayed for two and a half hours, and had told the police not to keep people back. Everywhere she went she was surrounded by silent groups of villagers, dressed in black. A little girl presented her with a bunch of flowers with a card that read, ‘From the remaining children of Aberfan’. ‘As a mother,’ she said to bereaved parents, ‘I am trying to understand what your feelings must be. I am sorry I can give you nothing at present except sympathy.’
‘There were tears in her eyes as she talked to us,’ said one woman. ‘She really feels this very deeply. After all, she is the mother of four children. We had four too and now we have only two.’ After placing a wreath at the cemetery where eighty-one children had been buried, she and the Duke of Edinburgh had tea in the home of a couple who had lost seven relatives in the disaster. ‘She was very upset,’ said her hostess. ‘She was the most charming person I have ever met in my entire life. Really down to earth.’
The indiscriminate shooting of six-year-old schoolchildren in the small Scottish town of Dunblane on 13 March 1996 was another local tragedy that transfixed the nation in horror, and where a royal visit – the Queen and the Princess Royal visited the families, poignantly, on Mothering Sunday – not only helped the healing process but in some way helped express the nation’s sympathy; the Queen and her daughter’s obvious distress mirrored the distress of the nation.
The dreadful event had started to unfold just as the
first lesson of the morning was about to begin. A lone forty-three-year-old gunman, armed with four guns and 743 rounds of ammunition, walked into the gymnasium of Dunblane Primary School and, without uttering a word, fired rapidly and continuously at children and staff alike. He killed sixteen pupils and their form mistress and wounded many more, before killing himself. It had all the ingredients of every parent’s worst nightmare, and, like Aberfan, ripped apart a small community. A great media debate about guns ensued, which resulted in a Firearms Bill being rushed through Parliament that led to a total ban on handguns. Given that there were 160,000 handguns in the country, most of them owned by perfectly sane and law-abiding members of shooting clubs, the ban caused huge controversy.
Speaking on Radio 5 Live ten months after the tragedy, as the Firearms Bill was going through the House of Lords, the Duke of Edinburgh, in his inimitable way, caused outrage by stating rather bluntly what seemed to many to be glaringly obvious: that banning otherwise legal handguns would do nothing to stop guns falling into the hands of criminals. ‘I can’t believe that members of shooting clubs are any more dangerous than members of a squash club or a golf club or anything else,’ he said.
I mean, they are perfectly reasonable people, like the great majority of the population in this country. If a cricketer, for instance, suddenly decided to go into a school and batter a lot of people to death with a cricket bat, which he could do very easily – I mean, are you going to ban cricket bats? I sympathize desperately with the people who are bereaved at Dunblane, but I’m not altogether convinced that it’s the best system to somehow shift the blame on to a very large and peaceable part of the community in trying to make yourself feel better. This transfer of blame on to the sport shooters, I think, is a little unreasonable. I can understand the fury and unhappiness. But these are sensible people who belong to these clubs.
The gun lobby applauded him for his courage in speaking out but he won no friends in Dunblane, or among the gun-law reformers, and played straight into the hands of republican MPs. Alex Salmond, leader of the Scottish National Party, said he should keep out of it; his comments were ‘crass, insensitive and typically Prince Philip’. Tony Banks, Labour MP, said that ‘as ever, the Duke of Edinburgh has got it wrong … This man is insensitive, selfish and ham-fisted. A prolonged period of silence on his part would be much appreciated.’ And Alan Williams, a Labour colleague, concurred: ‘I think it is very ill-advised of the Prince at this delicate stage in the fortunes of the monarchy to come blundering in on an issue on which most members of the public, as well as most MPs, would disagree with him. He has done his cause no good, nor the reputation of the monarchy.’
This was a highly political issue, and, technically, Messrs Salmond, Banks and Williams were absolutely right; the Royal Family should not get involved in politics, but I have to confess to a sneaking admiration for Prince Philip. He is not the monarch with a constitutional obligation to remain above politics – the Queen is and she does so, religiously. He is an intelligent man, better informed than most, who finds it incredibly frustrating to have to bite his tongue when every other man in every pub in the land is able to sound off about controversial issues that have divided the country.
At the same time, it is a perfect demonstration of why the monarch has to be above politics. The Queen represents the entire nation, whatever their colour, creed or politics, whatever their status or situation, whatever their age. She is a unifying force within the country, the glue that keeps us all together, and that is her great strength. She belongs to everyone, no one voted for her – and no one gave their vote to someone else. If she expressed an opinion that could be claimed by a political party, she would immediately alienate a section of the population and that would be divisive; and so she doesn’t. She is utterly inscrutable. And in my view, provided she remains neutral, her husband lobbing the odd grenade merely opens up the debate and adds to the gaiety of nations. And as it happens he was quite right. There are now more illegal handguns in the hands of criminals in Britain than ever before and gun crime has gone up. According to Home Office figures, in 1996, the year of the Dunblane tragedy, there were 3347 firearms offences in England and Wales involving handguns. In 2002–03 there were 5549.
There are many more examples of tragedies over the years where the Queen has played an important role in representing the nation to itself. None more so in recent times, perhaps, than the shocking, horrifying events of 9/11 which we saw unfold on our television screens. Played over and over again on that unforgettable day in September 2001, we saw the two hijacked airliners plough into the Twin Towers and smoke billowing into the sky as the buildings collapsed like cards taking thousands of office workers with them. The Queen had watched it herself, she said, in ‘total shock’ and ‘growing disbelief’.
‘These are dark and harrowing times for families and friends of those who are missing or who suffered in the attack, many of you here today,’ she said in a message to the memorial service for British victims held in New York. ‘My thoughts and prayers are with you all now and in the difficult days ahead. But nothing that can be said can begin to take away the anguish and pain of these moments; grief is the price we pay for love.’
A separate service was held in London at St Paul’s Cathedral, for which she and members of the family were out in force. She had been at Balmoral when the tragedy occurred and remembered all too well the last time tragedy had struck during her summer holiday. She immediately sent a personal message of sympathy to President George Bush, while Malcolm Ross, the master of all matters ceremonial at the Palace, pondered the problem of how to affect a two-minute silence – the obvious way to mark Britain’s solidarity with America – during the Changing of the Guard. His solution, to play both the American and the British national anthems, with a two-minute silence in between, and American music as the guards marched down the Mall, worked a treat. Spectators outside the Palace that day, many of them Americans, wept as they heard the familiar tunes.
TWENTY-TWO
Coming to Grief
On 31 August 1997, the night Diana’s car smashed in a tunnel in Paris, the Queen’s reactions had been less popular. Her life has always been a juggling act between the private and the public roles – that is the nature of monarchy; the one merges into the other in a way that it does for no other human being in any other position in the land. And on that Sunday morning, as she woke up to the fact that her two vulnerable young grandsons had just lost their mother in the most violent and unnatural of circumstances, she allowed the private to override the responsibilities of the public. She closed her ears to what her advisers were saying; she chose to deal with her personal, family grief rather than the grief of the nation. The fact that this was her son’s ex-wife and not a gymnasium full of six-year-olds in a primary school of which she had never heard, obscured the picture. And the nation was angry and confused. People may have said and thought they wanted some display of grief from the Queen because she was Diana’s former mother-in-law – the one that Diana had always said was so cold and indifferent. But that wasn’t it; what they were really missing was the figurehead who could direct and focus their heightened, uncontrolled and rather frightening emotions. They needed the Queen in the same way that those families in the East End had needed her mother and father, fifty-seven years before, when the Luftwaffe was destroying their homes and killing their loved ones.
And so they congregated around Buckingham Palace, where people have always congregated in times of national mourning or celebration; none more so than on 8 May 1945 when the war in Europe was over and the King, Queen and Princesses, accompanied by Winston Churchill, came out on to the balcony again and again to the roar of cheering crowds in the Mall below. Fifty years later the Queen, the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret were there again to celebrate the anniversary and, despite the lapse of time, tens of thousands of people came to watch and to cheer. The building, as familiar to most Britons as the Queen herself, has been the focus for national identity
for generations. There was, of course, a link between Diana and Buckingham Palace; but as she was divorced from the Prince, the logical place to have gone and to have laid flowers and tokens was Kensington Palace, the house where she had lived. Millions of flowers were left there, certainly, but they were feet deep outside the gates of Buckingham Palace too and that was where hundreds of people were standing around waiting for some sort of lead from their monarch.
When the Queen finally returned to London, and on the evening before the funeral spoke about Diana, live on television, only the second time she had broadcast to the nation other than at Christmas time (the first being during the Gulf War in 1991), the crisis very quickly passed.
Since last Sunday’s dreadful news we have seen throughout Britain and around the world, an overwhelming expression of sadness at Diana’s death.
We have all being trying in our different ways to cope. It is not easy to express a sense of loss, since the initial shock is often succeeded by a mixture of other feelings: disbelief, incomprehension, anger – and concern for all who remain.
We have all felt those emotions in these last few days. So what I say to you now, as your Queen and as a grandmother, I say from my heart.
First, I want to pay tribute to Diana myself. She was an exceptional and gifted human being. In good times and bad, she never lost her capacity to smile and laugh, nor to inspire others with her warmth and kindness.
I admired and respected her – for her energy and commitment to others, and especially for her devotion to her two boys.
This week at Balmoral, we have all been trying to help William and Harry come to terms with the devastating loss that they and the rest of us have suffered.
