BOOKS

Not always happy and glorious

David Sexton

THE QUEEN: A BIOGRAPHY OF ELIZABETH II by Ben Pimlott HalperCollins, £20, pp. 651 The Mouse in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland would have found an appropri- ate use for this thick book. After the Duck, the Dodo, the Lory, the Eaglet and the others have all fallen into the pool of tears, he offers to dry them out:

`Ahem!' said the Mouse with an important air. 'Are you all ready? This is the driest thing I know. Silence all round, if you please! William the Conqueror, whose cause was favoured by the Pope, was soon submitted to by the English, who wanted leaders, and had been of late much accustomed to usurpation and conquest. Edwin and Morcar, the earls of Mercia and Northumbria, declared for him; and even Stigand, the patriotic archbish- op of Canterbury, found it advisable to go with Edgar Atheling to meet William and offer him the crown. William's conduct at first was moderate. But the insolence of the Normans ...

Ben Pimlott has delivered a full and apparently highly reliable account of the life and times of the Queen, in so far as they are currently researchable, without a spark of life. If biography is, as Johnson proposed, an act of the imagination that places us for a time in the condition of him whose for- tune we contemplate; so that we feel, while the deception lasts, whatever motions would be excited by the same good or evil happen- ing to ourselves, then this is no biography at all. Pimlott seems not to have attempted to imagine what he himself calls 'the human drama of a life so exceptionally privileged and excep- tionally constrained'. It's a book with a hole in the centre.

It is true that.the Queen herself has striv- en to keep her real beliefs, thoughts and feelings off the record. But for a biogra- pher to accept such constraints so absolute- ly seems, at this stage in the proceedings, to be carrying deference too far. Or maybe the book has just been miscategorised by its publishers. It is actually a work of con- stitutional history which also describes the activities of the Queen, since she has been the monarch in the period in question.

The major events of the Queen's life and times are not unfamiliar, many of us having noticed them as we went along. However, here they all are again, earnestly put together to make a thorough history book that could be relied upon by somebody utterly fresh to the subject, just rescued after many years on a desert island per- haps.

So there's Crawfie and joining the crowds on VE Day, Tree Tops and the Coronation, Princess Margaret and Group Captain Peter Townsend, the rows about John Grigg's article and That Was The Week That Was, the Investiture of the Prince of Wales, Tony Berm and the stamps, the slitty eyes and Donald Fagan...

Pimlott produces no revelations. For the years up to 1952, he has used the Royal Archives, and then the Public Record Office for the period up to the mid-Sixties. For more recent events, he frequently quotes 'a leading courtier' or a 'friend', footnoted as 'confidential interviews'. These remarks are often snappier than any of his other material and have not all been heard before. 'According to one of his friends', Diana told Prince Charles: 'You will never be King, I shall destroy you.'

`According to one close source', the Queen wrote to the Prince and Princess urging early divorce in incontrovertible terms because she had learnt that 'bulimics rewrite history in 24 hours'. As for Fergie, `A close friend of the Queen refers to her as "muck".'

If few of the facts are fresh, there are nonetheless some distinctive interpreta- tions of them. Pimlott is most interested by the points at which the Queen has been able to influence events — or, at least, con- stitutionally could have done so but did not. She could, for example, have made it possible for Princess Margaret to marry Townsend.

If it is difficult to see how the Queen could have intervened to allow her sister to become Mrs Townsend and remain fully royal, it would have been neither improper nor unconstitutional for her to have let it be known that, unadvised, she would have accepted the marriage. Instead, she gave no whisper of a hint, one way or the other. Her private opinion remains a matter for specula- tion.

When Eden resigned in 1957, she could have exercised her prerogative in choosing his successor, instead of 'taking advice' `making herself vulnerable to the charge not of exercising an arbitrary judgment but of allowing the Monarchy to become the pawn of a Conservative faction'.

Having presented this as a definite mis- take, Pimlott argues even more firmly that in 1963 she was artfully duped by Macmil- lan, from his hospital bed, into choosing Home, not Butler. It was 'the biggest politi- cal misjudgment of her reign,' Pimlott claims. Given the undemocratic way the Conservative Party was then run, could she have resisted Macmillan? Pimlott believes

SO: It was precisely an occasion when the royal prerogative might have been taken out of mothballs and used in a decisive manner, without inviting complaint from a party which traditionally defended its use.

He is hardly less interested in constitu- tional ambiguities opened up by the Queen's role as head of the Common- wealth, He seems almost regretful that there were not more complications over the actions of the Governor-General of Grenada, Sir Paul Scoon, when he invited American troops in, in 1983.

Some expert opinion held that although Scoon was not obliged constitutionally to seek the Queen's permission before exercis- ing his residual powers in her name, it was incumbent on him to inform her of his inten- tion to request an intervention, and his fail- ure to do so could be held to render the request constitutionally invalid.

Even Stigand, the patriotic archbishop of Canterbury, found it advisable to go with Edgar Atheling to meet William.

Pimlott also keenly raises the question of whether the Queen's own political views have been reliably identified at any point. She may have been opposed to the Suez operation, he thinks, although that opposi- tion may have been expressed only by her- saying to Eden 'something like: "Are you sure you are being wise?" ' In the Eighties, there were repeated reports that she was a good deal wetter than Mrs Thatcher, but again one of the main pieces of evidence is laughable. Allegedly, she said to Kinnock over dinner: 'The people of Govan have got nothing. I know because I have sailed Britannia there.' It's a wonderful line, any- way.

Ben Pimlott's previous biographies, of Dalton and Wilson, have given him a high reputation as a stylist. On the evidence of The Queen, it is puzzling.

He is quite a friend to clichés: 'It broke a spell' (the Abdication); 'there was a sense of treading on eggshells' (after the Abdica- tion); 'there is always a sense of the gold- fish bowl' (in Royal upbringing); 'spotlights were shone into the murkiest corners to see what could be unearthed' (by the tabloids).

His own flights are oddly creaky and for- mal. In the VE Day festivities,

the crowd was huge, good-natured and appreciative — its evident pleasure marred only by the entertainer, Cliff Richard, who, for some reason, had been employed to lead the singing of a pop song called 'Congratula- tions' of which only he seemed to know the words.

He calls republicanism 'the dreaded word' when every Wallace Arnold reader knows it should be 'dread word'.

The closing chapters are the most unsatisfactory part of The Queen. Pimlott disdainfully condemns the cruelty of the tabloid attacks on the royal family, despite admitting that 'the antics of the younger royals' have provoked them. The awkward truth is that the tabloids and the Sunday Times got it right. At least he acknowledges Andrew Morton's Diana: Her True Story to be 'a moral classic'.

Pimlott merely concedes: 'At 70, Eliza- beth was not a triumphant Queen.' Vague- ly, he adds:

It was difficult to point to major achieve- ments; yet it was equally hard to think of many mistakes. She continued to do what was expected of her — not much more, but certainly no less.

He does not grapple in any determined way with the chief assessment that now needs to be made of the Queen's reign. Never mind Rab Butler's disappointments: is she responsible for the disasters that have visited her children? Sarah Bradford headed her chapter on the subject, in her livelier biography published a few months ago, with a quote from yet another anony- mous courtier, which put it concisely: 'If the Queen had spent as much time over the mating of her children as she does on her horses all this might not have hap- pened.' But that's no dry subject.

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