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MOTHER KNOWS BEST
It is conventional to make fun of Her Majesty the Queen Mother. Horrible metropolitan commentators like to say that she has an imperfect grasp of modern life. There was once a rumour that she had never heard of McDonald's. Someone else — it may have been Craig Brown — recent- ly suggested that she had misconstrued the word 'supermarkets', thinking that these were 'soupy-markets', where poor people could buy cans of soup. It is true that there are some fragments of evidence in support of this view of the royal centenarian. She was once offered more chips with her lunch, and declared, as though being introduced to some culinary novelty, 'Oh, fried potatoes!' It is also true, in the words of one acid tongue, that she has never had to draw back her own bed- room curtains when she wakes in the morn- ing; she has never had to prepare a meal; and that she never travels anywhere with- out two maids and two footmen. She is also said to have broadly conservative opinions, and to raise her glass whenever Lady Thatcher's name is mentioned.
The question is: does that make her out of touch with the views of the masses? She has lived though the most extraordinary century since the beginning of civilisation. She has witnessed the end of empire, and tumultuous social changes, in which state spending, as a proportion of national wealth, has grown from less than 10 per cent to around 40 per cent. She has inge- niously projected a personality that shares the vices of the multitudes, from gin to rac- ing, and it is in large measure thanks to her charm that the institution of monarchy sur- vives. One would expect her to have a feel for politics, and how it really works; and, of course, she does.
The Queen Mother has been, on the whole, brilliantly discreet. There is only one occasion on which her conversation has been betrayed. This was exactly 10 years ago, and it happened in these pages. We do not return to the episode with any particu- lar pride, but only because her quoted remarks show a prescience which should now be recognised. In so far as anyone remembers the inter- view, it is because of her account of a poetry evening Osbert Sitwell arranged during the war for the education of the young princess- es, while they were at Windsor Castle. As she told her dinner companion, who, unbe- known to her, was also her interviewer, `Osbert was wonderful, as you would expect, and Edith, of course, but then we had this rather lugubrious man in a suit, and he read a poem . „ I think it was called "The Desert". And first the girls got the giggles and then I did and then even the King.'
Some people find it hilarious that the Queen Mother should so describe The Waste Land, and T.S. Eliot. Others may find it vaguely consoling. But anyone re- reading the interview will discover that it is her views on politics, not literature, which mark her out as a critic of rare gifts. This was in the days of the SDP, which had been founded by Roy Jenkins, who is, of course, the ideological godfather of Tony Blair and New Labour. This is what she said then: 'I dislike this new socialist party of Woy's [sic].' Host: 'They are called the Social Democrats, ma'am.' Queen Elizabeth: `Yes. Well, you don't change socialist just by leaving the -ist off the end. I say, it's a cheat to start something called the Social Party. I liked the good old Labour party. The best thing is a good old Tory govern- ment with a strong Labour opposition.'
At the risk of impertinence, let us ask ourselves what the Queen Mother didn't like about Woy's Social Party. It was that it was neither socialist nor conservative. It was neither one thing nor the other. It was an invertebrate thing, that tried too hard to please everyone, and ended up pleasing no one. And can anyone deny, looking at the hysterical agonies of today's Labour party, that the Queen Mother had a stunning insight into the problems of Roy's heir, Tony Blair?
As Philip Gould, Blair's favourite poll- ster, puts it in the memo released on Wednesday, 'We are disliked on the Left for being right-wing, and on the Right for being politically correct.' And in so far as Gould offers solutions, they are the kind of thing that one might expect — were another traitor to record her table-talk to emerge from Clarence House. Labour has not been sufficiently patriotic, says Gould, in his headless-chicken way. The party has not been in tune with Britain, or sufficiently pro-family. Would the Queen Mother disagree with any of that? On Wednesday all kinds of people turned up to march in her pageant. Among the hun- dreds of bodies represented were the Bed- fordshire and Hertfordshire Historical Churches Trust, the League for the Exchange of Commonwealth Teachers, and the Poultry Club of Great Britain, as well as a chapter of Hell's Angels.
You can laugh and say this is all frightful- ly quaint and Old Britain. But all the evi- dence we have suggests that after spending most of a century talking to such groups, the Queen Mother has just as much an insight into the faults of the modern Labour party as any spin doctor you could name.
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