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the first public event that made an impact on my childhood consciousness
was the death, 50 years ago this week, of King George VI. The headmaster
of my Catholic prep school in the North of England, a rather severe
Christian Brother who on other occasions had expressed firm Irish
nationalist views, came into our classroom around mid-morning and
asked us to stand up. He blinked once or twice, apparently holding
back tears, and then spoke in a unusually solemn tone.
"I have
very sad news to tell you," he warned. "It has just been
announced that the king is dead. Let us say the Lord's Prayer for
his soul and then remain standing for a minute's silence."
After the minute's
silence he told the assembled nine-year-olds that the George VI
had been a good king who had shared the privations of ordinary Londoner's
during the blitz, only bathing in the regulation number of inches
of water and making do with the meager rations of wartime. We all
knew these stories anyway, since our parents had told them to us
in their thrilling accounts of the Second World War. But they were
obscurely comforting — a tribute to a decent man who really
had put service to his people before all else.
We were then
released for an unexpected half-holiday. It was the only school
holiday in my recollection when we did not leave the school laughing,
joking, and skylarking about. As we walked home talking quietly,
the entire town seemed to be enveloped in an endless provincial
Sunday — low voices, no playing, parks being locked up, hymns
on the radio.
The sense of
personal loss, felt by my headmaster, and the atmosphere of quiet
mourning on the streets both arose from the fact that in 1952 the
British really felt themselves to be an extended family. Perhaps
they were "a family with the wrong members in control,"
as George Orwell had written in an early wartime pamphlet, but wartime
solidarity and postwar social change had reduced the force of that
objection. In the early '50s Britain was about as united as a nation
ever gets. And the king's death moved millions as if it were the
death of a close relation. His daughter Elizabeth had learned the
news a few hours before my schoolmates in a Kenya hotel. She flew
home in mourning and a queen.
Churchill,
prime minister again in his last government, met her at the airport
but was too overcome with emotion to speak. And she began her long
reign — a reign which, after months of mourning and the coronation
in June that year, was being hailed as the occasion of a New Elizabethan
Age. It is hard to capture in retrospect exactly what people meant
by that phrase; but it seemed to promise an end to the austerity
of the '40s (wartime rationing was still in force in 1952), the
birth of a new social glamour (Princess Margaret was the leader
of a raffish West End "set"), yet also the continuation
of a social unity based on the welfare state, redistributive public
spending, and Keynesian economics.
It was not,
of course, to be. For the first 30 or so years of that age the British
suffered a series of reverses, mounting an orderly retreat from
empire, seeing their slow-growing semi-socialist economy overtaken
by continental rivals, and being surprised by the upsurge of bitter
industrial and political conflict in the 1970s. Social democracy
had failed not only to deliver the material goods but even to retain
the intangible blessing of social harmony so evident at the king's
death.
By 1979 the
British were fed up with being poorer, weaker, and progressively
disrespected in the world. They rallied behind Margaret Thatcher
to defeat inflation, win the Falklands War, tame the labor unions,
help to defeat the Soviet Union, and much else. But these victories,
necessary and significant though they were, reversed only some of
the social ills afflicting the nation — and may have aggravated
others.
If Britain
is now the fourth-largest economy in the world and a significant
second-rank power militarily, it is also a more troubled one. Its
people are more equal but less united. It has been made ashamed
of its own history. It has lost its affection for its traditional
institutions and is now losing faith in its new post-war ones —
notably the expensive shambles that is its National Health Service.
And, so far at least, it is celebrating the queen's Jubilee without
any great enthusiasm.
It would hardly
be surprising if the woman who became queen amid the united national
mourning of 1952 did not quite suit the louder, cruder, and more-segregated
market of 2002. But throughout these years Elizabeth II has been
the one member of the royal family who has never put a foot wrong.
She has behaved as queen not only with unwavering attention to duty
but with a shrewd accommodation to changing public tastes —
even admitting openly to her family troubles in a speech that lamented
her own annus horribilis (brilliantly mistranslated by the
Sun as "One's Bum Year").
She possesses
very little political power — except in the hypothetical circumstances
of a constitutional crisis. And she is trusted then precisely because
she is the one person who has no interest other than the welfare
of the nation.
That is not
to say, of course, that she lacks private political views. Everybody
has them — and I should guesstimate her as somewhere between
the moderate foxhunting Tories and the welfare-minded Liberal Democrats
on the political spectrum. But her political impartiality is amply
demonstrated by the fact that the ten prime ministers who served
her — from Churchill to Blair but including Thatcher, Eden,
and Harold Wilson — all ended up liking and respecting her.
No one has persuasively accused her of pushing any kind of private
agenda.
Except on one
topic — the commonwealth. For it is an uncelebrated paradox
that as the British Empire declined into the commonwealth, the queen's
imperial power vastly increased. In 1952 she was the monarch of
the country that ran the empire; since then she has become the center
and symbol of a genuinely multiracial world body. It is something
in which she deeply believes — and that belief is reciprocated
by millions of people (unfortunately including some very unpleasant
dictators — but even they are sometimes persuaded to do the
right thing by royal hints).
Occasionally
prime ministers have found her support for commonwealth links to
be a hindrance to the pursuit of the purely British national interest.
In the long run, however, the commonwealth has undoubtedly helped
Britain box above its weight internationally — in the Falklands
War, for instance, nations from Sierra Leone to New Zealand rushed
forward to help with bases and the loan of destroyers. That would
not have happened if the commonwealth had not been maintained over
the years by frequent official tours and countless occasions for
small talk with tribal chieftains and district nurses.
To serve selflessly
for 50 years is no small claim on people's loyalties and affections.
If the British today are not celebrating Elizabeth's reign with
the full-throated enthusiasm of 1977, her silver jubilee, then that
may reflect a dissatisfaction that the British feel not with the
queen but with themselves. They have become richer in recent years,
but they have lost a sense of their own history and identity. The
queen, who symbolizes those things, is therefore a standing reproach
to them. We will know that they have begun to recover themselves
when they can cheer her in the streets without embarrassment.
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