Royal reason
Michael Vestey
henever I argue the constitutional, spiritual and symbolic importance of the monarchy with a republican I can almost guarantee in advance that he or she has no grasp of the significance of these qualities; nor can they apply them to their own place in the scheme of things. Usually, they seem obsessed by the hereditary principle which blinds them to all else, Why in this day and age, they say, should there be people who inherit their position over us? Time to get rid of it and modernise.
Failing to penetrate this barrier to understanding I find myself wearily falling back on the 'Do you want to see President Kinnock or President Thatcher in Buckingham Palace instead?' line to which they at least pause but not for long. They're impervious to the importance of having a Head of State untainted by grubby politics. It is right, though, that the republican view should be heard in any survey of the Queen's 50-year reign as it is a perfectly valid argument, though not one I share. Republicans certainly get an airing in Anthony Howard's six-part series on the Queen, Fifty Years with the Firm on Radio Four (Mondays), fair-minded, balanced programmes full of interest and authority as one would expect from this presenter.
The first programme tackled her accession in February 1952 after the death of her father, King George VI, and the atmosphere at the time, deferential, respectful. Nicholas Soames said he thought that his grandfather Winston Churchill, then 77, and the Queen's first prime minister, saw himself as Melbourne to Victoria or Burghley to Elizabeth I. With morale still low in the postwar period, much was made of a new Elizabethan age with the new Queen a reincarnation of the first Elizabeth. Sarah Bradford, author of a biography of the present Queen, agreed with Howard that this was a fantasy and the Queen hadn't thought like this.
She did realise, however, that she had taken on an almost priestly role, as Howard put it, that would last her for life. As she reminded her domestic chaplain and Dean of Windsor when he told her he was retiring prematurely to nurse his sick wife, 'That's all right for you, I can't.' Attitudes to the monarchy changed in some quarters when Lord Altrincham, later John Grigg when he renounced his peerage, made some mild criticisms, referring to the 'tweedy ambience' of the institution and those who served it. and was blacklisted by the BBC. After giving an interview to ITN, a royalist stepped forward and slapped him in the face.
Grigg thought the royal household was unrepresentative and though many of her courtiers were enraged some privately agreed. According to Grigg in this programme. within 48 hours of the controversy, Martin Charteris, then the Queen's assistant private secretary, arranged to meet Grigg at a mutual friend's house for dinner. Charteris said immediately, 'This is the best thing that's happened to Buckingham Palace in my time.'
In part two this week, entitled The Magic Circle, Howard examined the Royal Prerogative, the two residual powers the Queen has in appointing a prime minister and dissolving Parliament. These really seem to me to be theoretical, The Queen has always taken the advice of her ministers and doesn't just send for the person she favours. When Harold Macmillan resigned suddenly in 1963 the outgoing prime minister recommended Lord Home as his successor instead of Rab Butler. The historian Lord Blake said the Palace thought the easiest and least controversial solution was to consult Macmillan, though, as Lord Rees-Mogg argued, because the Queen's choice provoked a Cabinet revolt it proved that Macmillan had misled the Queen. The decision was wrong, he said, and it brought an end to the monarch's right to select the succession; thereafter, of course, Tory party leaders were elected by MPs and later party members as well.
Rees-Mogg thought the choice of prime minister does still exist. 'You can conceive of a situation in which ... supposing the three major parties all had exactly the same number of seats you would then have to make a judgment about which of the three party leaders had the best chance of securing a reasonably durable majority in the House of Commons. That would no doubt really be settled by negotiations between the parties but the Prerogative would still be there.'
In future programmes Howard and his producer Mark Savage will cover other aspects of the Queen's reign: the impact of TV on the monarchy, the tensions of the Thatcher period, and the crisis facing the Palace over the death of the Princess of Wales. Although I have not heard the latter I dare say there will be those accusing the royal family of being cold and unfeeling in their initial response. Some of us, though, were more shocked by what seemed to me to be the almost unhinged public displays of grief.
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