TWENTY-ONE
Long Live the Queen
THE ONLY OTHER SOVEREIGN IN THE HISTORY OF THE BRITISH MONARCHY to spend sixty years on the throne was Queen Victoria. In 1897, during the six-mile carriage procession that was the high point of her Diamond Jubilee celebration, Victoria, then seventy-eight, was so overcome by the tumultuous reception that she wept openly. “How kind they are to me!” she said repeatedly. Too infirm to walk into St. Paul’s Cathedral, she sat outside in her carriage for a brief service of thanksgiving, surrounded by clergy and dignitaries as the choir sang a
Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee was arranged with some concessions to her eighty-six years. She won’t cover the forty thousand miles overseas that she logged during her Golden Jubilee travels, but her tours throughout England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland will cover ten regions. Members of the royal family will visit all fifteen of the Queen’s other realms as her representatives. The plan has many of the same elements—parades, concerts, luncheons, dinners, garden parties, religious services, themed events, and fireworks—to capture the affection and admiration that have grown stronger since the last jubilee. “Her reputation now is as high as at any time since the golden early years when everyone was intensely loyal to the new Queen, and Churchill was flat on his back with admiration,” said Margaret Thatcher’s senior adviser Charles Powell.
Her regional tours will begin in May of 2012 following Accession Day on February 6, always a time of quiet commemoration for the Queen. The apex of the public celebration spans four days of events on the first weekend in June that includes national holidays on Monday and Tuesday. The timing of the Summer Olympic Games six weeks later promises to extend the festive atmosphere, and to give Britain’s athletes added incentive to win for their Queen as well as their country.
With the exception of security and a special grant from the Treasury of ?1 million to cover costs such as additional staffing, funding for the jubilee has come from nongovernment sources, with broadcasters and private organizations underwriting concerts and other events. The Thames Diamond Jubilee Foundation organized and funded “the largest flotilla to be assembled on the river in modern times,” scheduled for Sunday, June 3. Featuring at least one thousand boats and covering seven and a half miles, the river pageant was designed to surpass the Silver Jubilee barge procession, which had only 140 vessels. At the head of the waterborne progress will be a special barge for the Queen and Prince Philip, modeled on an eighteenth-century royal galley and powered by oarsmen that London mayor Boris Johnson joked could be “oiled and manacled MPs.”
On Saturday she will celebrate by watching the Derby at Epsom, and Monday will feature a concert produced and financed by the BBC and attended by twelve thousand people chosen by lottery as they were a decade earlier. They will attend a garden party at Buckingham Palace, followed by the musical program, which will include selections from classical to popular. The Queen will again light a national beacon as others are lit around the United Kingdom and Commonwealth. The stage will have the Palace as its dramatic backdrop, stands will be built around the Victoria Memorial, and large video screens will be placed down the Mall.
On Tuesday the Queen will be honored at a service of thanksgiving at St. Paul’s Cathedral, and her carriage procession afterward will trace part of Queen Victoria’s route. None of the celebrations could be considered modest, nor will they be extravagant, in keeping with the Queen’s wishes to minimize the expenditure of public funds.
Planning for the jubilee began in 2009, which the Palace called its “ideas” year. The elements of the celebration were rolled out in a low-key fashion to tamp down expectations, as had been done for the 2002 festivities. The Queen’s advisers were mindful that opposition to the monarchy had dwindled considerably, and they were determined to keep it that way. “Republicanism isn’t even an esoteric political position in Britain these days,” wrote
Evidence of the monarchy’s strong emotional hold, not only over the British people but around the world, could be seen in the popularity of the Oscar-winning film
Intrigued by the response to the film, the Queen saw it in a private screening. “On the whole she quite liked it,” said Margaret Rhodes. “I’m glad she saw it. It’s always difficult to see your own parents depicted, but she wasn’t violently either pro or con. Obviously there were a few bits that were not characteristic, but she thought it was okay.”
A powerful source of the Queen’s success as sovereign has been her inscrutability and avoidance of controversy. With the exception of a few relatively inconsequential remarks over the years, her political views remained a matter of conjecture long after
ON TUESDAY, MAY 11, 2010, Elizabeth II greeted her twelfth prime minister, Conservative leader David Cameron. At age forty-three, he was the youngest politician to take that office since Lord Liverpool was appointed in 1812. Born in the fifteenth year of her reign, Cameron was also junior by three years to Prince Edward, the Queen’s youngest child. She had first glimpsed the future PM when he appeared at age eight with Edward in a school production of
Cameron made the time-honored trip to the Palace five days after the general election on Thursday, May 6, resulted in the first hung Parliament since 1974. The Tory party had won 306 seats, but it was twenty shy of the majority needed to govern. Labour tallied 258 seats, and the minority Liberal Democrats (the party created in 1988 when the Liberals merged with the Social Democratic Party) captured fifty-seven seats, placing their forty-three- year-old leader, Nick Clegg, in the role of power broker as he considered overtures from the two other parties. The Liberal Democrats were in many respects more in line with Labour, but Cameron moved more nimbly than Gordon Brown, offering terms for a deal that Labour couldn’t match.
At one point Brown’s chief negotiator, Peter Mandelson, sought advice from Private Secretary Christopher Geidt at the Palace, who said Brown had a “constitutional obligation, a duty, to remain in his post” until a new government could be formed. As the period of limbo extended through the weekend, Geidt made regular trips to 10 Downing Street to get briefings. “It was important for Geidt to be visible, and to show that he was very much there on behalf of the Queen,” recalled Brown’s press spokesman and Palace veteran Simon Lewis.
During his final encounter with Clegg on Tuesday, Brown said, “I can’t keep the Queen waiting. Make up your mind, Nick.” In the end, Clegg accepted what Cameron later described as “a big generous offer to have a coalition government” that included making the Liberal Democrat leader deputy prime minister. Still, the deal for the first two-party government since World War II was subject to ratification by Clegg’s party. When Cameron met with the Queen after Brown’s resignation, “I said I couldn’t be totally sure about what sort of government I was going to form,” he recalled. “I said that I hoped to form a coalition government but I might have to come back in the morning and tell her it was something rather different.”
Cameron was the first Old Etonian to become prime minister since Alec Douglas-Home left office in 1964. The new prime minister came from a wealthy family of bankers interlaced with aristocrats including the 7th Earl of
