When Scales bowed to Elizabeth II in a receiving line, the Queen said, “I expect you think I should be doing that to you.”
ELIZABETH II’S ELDEST son celebrated his sixtieth birthday in November 2008, making him the oldest Prince of Wales in history, passing King Edward VII, who was fifty-nine when he succeeded Queen Victoria on her death in 1901. Elizabeth II hosted a black-tie reception, orchestral concert, and dinner in Charles’s honor at Buckingham Palace on the eve of his birthday on the 14th. More noteworthy was the visit she and Philip made a day earlier to the headquarters of his signature charity, the Prince’s Trust, which since its founding in 1976 had helped more than a half million disadvantaged youths learn skills and find jobs.
Throughout his life Charles has craved the approval of his parents, and the Queen’s remarks that day represented a rare public expression of support for his philanthropic work with his twenty charities and as patron or president of 350 other organizations. “For Prince Philip and me there can be no greater pleasure or comfort than to know that into his care are safely entrusted the guiding principles of public service and duty to others,” the Queen said.
Charles overtook his sister, Anne’s, record as “hardest working royal,” with 560 official engagements in 2008. (She came close with 534.) His mother logged 417 visits in the U.K. and overseas that year—down only slightly from 440 in 2007. At age eighty-two—seventeen years past Britain’s mandatory retirement age at the time—she had no intention of slowing down. The previous December she had become the oldest-ever monarch when she passed Queen Victoria, who lived eighty-one years and 243 days.
She continued to carry out her duties as she had since her accession, serving as head of state—representing her government officially at home and abroad—as well as head of nation, connecting with people to reward their achievements and remain in touch. But while in the early years of her reign she presided over twenty-six investitures a year, that number was gradually pared to fifteen, with Prince Charles and Princess Anne splitting the rest.
“All her programs are done with great cleverness,” said Malcolm Ross, her former comptroller. “They have reduced the pace for her without it showing.” But whenever her advisers try to sneak something too obvious into her schedule to give her a rest, “she instantly spots it and asks why she is not doing more,” said a source close to the Palace household. “She doesn’t miss anything.”
Robin Janvrin, the Queen’s private secretary and leading advocate of modernizing, retired in 2007. Janvrin was replaced by forty-six-year-old Christopher Geidt, a like-minded veteran of the Foreign Office with degrees from King’s College London and Cambridge University. He made a smooth transition, setting the tone with brisk efficiency and easy humor.
The all-important Palace communications apparatus was now run by two women in their late thirties, both mothers of small children. Samantha Cohen, communications and press secretary to the Queen, had written for regional newspapers in her native Australia, and before joining the royal household had been head of communications for National Grid, the international electricity and gas company. Deputy press secretary Ailsa Anderson came out of regional newspapers in Essex to work in the civil service. She served as press officer for Conservative Nicholas Soames at the Ministry of Defence and for Labour politician Margaret Beckett when she served in Tony Blair’s cabinet. Bright, skillful, straightforward, and tough, Cohen and Anderson managed to protect the Queen’s private life while boldly projecting her image as a symbol of modernity.
Elizabeth II began responding more quickly to crises, and showing more emotion in public. She had her portrait done as a hologram. She chatted comfortably with pop singer Lady Gaga without flinching at the performer’s shiny red latex outfit, and cheerfully welcomed to Buckingham Palace fashion designer Zandra Rhodes, who sported a pink wig, and photographer David Bailey, who wore ratty jeans. When the world financial meltdown hit in the fall of 2008, the Queen made a trip to the London School of Economics. After listening to a presentation on the origin of the credit crisis, she asked the one essential question: “Why did no one see it coming?” “The general feeling is she is more approachable, human, empathetic, and in touch,” said a Palace official.
Although the Queen had received her first computer twenty-five years earlier from Ronald Reagan, she had lagged behind her husband in adapting to technology. Philip began writing letters on a computer in the 1980s and became an avid user of email and the Internet, especially while researching his speeches. Elizabeth II eventually took up cell phones to send text messages to her grandchildren, and computers to keep track of her horses. At the suggestion of Prince Andrew, she acquired an iPod in 2005. While firmly committed to paper and pen, she began exchanging emails with family members. Ten years after launching the royal website in 1997, the Queen got her own channel on YouTube in December 2007, with a million hits in the first week.
There was no better indicator of her embrace of the new than her visit to the London headquarters of Google in the fall of 2008. The dynamic young company honored Elizabeth II by incorporating her image and a crown into the “Google doodle” logo on its U.K. home page on the day of her visit. The Queen and Philip (“a great googler,” said one of the Queen’s senior advisers. “He is always googling, and sharing it with the Queen”) spent more than an hour in the company’s offices, meeting a predominantly youthful and casually dressed group of employees. “Just come back from jogging?” Philip inquired when he met marketing executive Matthew Trewhella, who was wearing a hooded top, chinos, and sneakers.
During her visit, Elizabeth II uploaded onto her Royal Channel a video of a reception at Buckingham Palace in 1968 for Olympic athletes, delicately guiding the mouse with her black-gloved right hand. When she and Philip were shown the famous “laughing baby” on YouTube, they caught the contagion and started to giggle. “Lovely little thing isn’t it?” she said to her husband. “Amazing a child would laugh like that.”
EVEN AS SHE kept her focus on the here and now, in various ways, publicly and privately, the Queen honored her late mother, whose memory she kept close. During a shooting weekend at Sandringham in January 2009, she lost an important link with the death of Emma, the last of the Queen Mother’s corgis. A visibly saddened Queen went around the room before dinner and gave the news to each of the guests as Philip tried to console her.
The following month the family and a throng of friends were out in force on the terrace below Carlton House to unveil a bronze statue more than nine feet tall of a faintly smiling Queen Mother in her Garter robes. She was portrayed at age fifty-one because the memorial stood below a bronze statue of George VI, also in Garter attire, at age fifty-six, the year of his death. “At long last my grandparents are reunited,” said Prince Charles after his mother had pulled a cord to remove the blue satin cover. The ?2 million memorial, paid for by the sale of coins commemorating Elizabeth II’s eightieth birthday, also featured two eleven-foot-long bronze friezes that captured the Queen Mother’s spirit by depicting her comforting homeless families in London’s East End during World War II, being applauded with one of her winning racehorses, and sitting with two of her corgis in the garden at the Castle of Mey.
Several months later the Queen turned up as a surprise guest at a fund-raising reception for the Castle of Mey Foundation. The Queen Mother’s favorite residence had been opened to the public in August 2002, and private funds helped maintain both castle and gardens. Elizabeth II was only scheduled to make a brief appearance at the Goring Hotel near Buckingham Palace. Instead, she spent ninety minutes circulating through the room and conversing with patrons and potential donors. One British businessman was so taken by his encounter that he later wrote a ?20,000 check to the foundation.
AN ADVANTAGE ELIZABETH II has had over all her prime ministers is her vast knowledge of the United Kingdom that she gathers in visits called “awaydays” to cities as well as tiny hamlets. “She knows every inch of this country in a way that no one else does,” said Charles Powell, who came to appreciate the Queen’s expertise when he worked as private secretary to Margaret Thatcher and John Major. “She spends so much time meeting people that she has an understanding of what other people’s lives are like in Britain. I think she understands what the normal human condition is.”
In March 2009 she visited Kingston upon Hull in East Yorkshire—described by
Palace advisers worked with Susan Cunliffe-Lister, the lord lieutenant of East Yorkshire, and other local officials to organize the itinerary for the four-hour awayday. When the Queen was younger, she would pack in as many as eight different stops, but now she did a maximum of four, ending with lunch. To help prepare the Queen,
