COMMENT
There has never been a human being on the planet who met as many people as Queen Elizabeth. The number could be into the millions. Potentially tens of millions.
There are so many cockle-tickling facts about the late Queen. She liked tupperware. She ate little jam sandwiches every day. She would have a £5 note pressed with an iron that she would put in the plate at church every week. She binged Line of Duty. She insisted her hairdresser make her hair symmetrical so that no matter where you were standing her coif looked the same.
But now, the biggest secret of them all has come out, one she meticulously hid for 70 years. Being Queen? It’s a million times harder than it looks.
Just look at how spectacularly the wheels have fallen off since she went off to her just reward in 2022. Since King Charles acceded to the throne and starting using the royal “We”, Buckingham Palace has been the epicentre of a rolling series of crises, and fully blown PR disasters. They are really in their Britney 2007 era.
The Palace has fully entered basket-case territory with extra basket. Messes? There are Arctic oil spills drenching penguin colonies that have been cleaned up more easily.
Queen Elizabeth II held onto a huge secret
It might be quicker at this point to list the King’s bang up successes than his laundry list of woes. Umm … He released a line of Highgrove wallpaper. Knighted Sir David Beckham so he has someone to talk to about bees. And planted a topiary garden of 5000 yew trees and a maze of gravel paths at Sandringham.
The bigger point here is, what Charles’ rocky reign has proven is how much deftness and skill and nerve goes into sitting on the throne, something the late Queen kept as secretively under her hat as what was actually in her one of iconic Launer handbags.*
Queen Elizabeth II wearing Fortnum & Mason colours in 2012 with a Launer handbag on her arm.
Queen Elizabeth II wears a slim-fitting white lace dress to a garden party in Sydney in 1954. Her hat is of black tulle with three feathers.
Even leaving aside having to preside over a family so dysfunctional they could have their own Jerry Springer spin-off, the difficulty of the stateswoman, diplomatic part of the job has become clear.
Next week Charles and Queen Camilla will arrive in the US to ostensibly mark 250 years since those naughty Americans chucked all that tea in Boston harbour, staged a tax rebellion and sent George III a note saying, it’s not us, it’s you. The King will arrive at a time when the special relationship between Washington and London could not be looking shakier, making this a high-wire, no-net diplomatic test for His Majesty.
Queen Camilla and King Charles III in Windsor, England.
Yet the late Queen was routinely forced by her governments to personally and routinely navigate diplomatic minefields. It was at Number 10’s instigation she had to have Ugandan despot Idi Amin to dinner, a man had 300,000 opponents murdered and fed some of their corpses to crocodiles.
Ditto brutal Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu who killed and persecuted two million people – and who the Queen was forced to invite to stay at Buckingham Place in 1978. Never one did she push him in a pond despite the fact his name was vowel-y shorthand for the most violent human rights abuses imaginable.
Time and again she managed these visits, despite her personal disgust making her one of the 20th and 21st centuries’ most skilled – yet unhailed – diplomats.
For the vast majority of her reign, Her late Majesty walked into rooms full of men and yet as Queen Camilla points out in a new doco, she ‘carved her own role’ amidst such a sausage fest.
What I really love – Her late Majesty was not allowed to ever be political and these sorts of guest lists were dictated by Whitehall’s whims, but she had her own say in the most brilliant of ways.
Ugandan President Idi Amin at 16/10/73 news conference during visit to Damascus, Syria.
Romanian leader Nicolae Ceausescu.
In 2003 Crown Prince Abdullah, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, went to Balmoral for lunch; his nation famously having banned women from driving. The Crown Prince was offered a tour of the 50,000 acre estate and so Land Rovers were brought around and he got in – only to find the Queen behind the wheel. She proceeded to confidently zoom around the property, leaving him to implore her, via translator to slow down. There is no suggestion she listened to him.
When Ceaușescu stayed, she got her own back by only serving him really crap wine.
No human being has ever matched her soft power.
Consider Donald Trump, a man who only seems to respect the reflection he sees in the mirror and the McDonald’s takeaway menu – and yet the late Queen had him eating out of the palm of her hand. Here is a man who is trailed by an aide carrying the nuclear football and could wipe out an entire continent at the prod of a button and yet he would go positively gooey whenever he was around a diminutive nonagenarian who was never interested in hearing about the wonders of the McRib.
While King Charles is certainly proving adept at this great game, he is no match for his dear Mama.
He can’t even get his own sons under control and it took the biggest crisis to hit the monarchy in a century to get him to take serious action against his brother.
Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip host a dinner for King Khaled (centre) The Crown Prince and Prince Abdullah During Their Official Visit To Saudi Arabia in 1979.
For seven decades the late Queen, by and large, kept the show on the road, even in the face of divorces, shocking death, fire, and that one time Andrew and Fergie inveigled the rest of the royal family into chasing pop stars dressed as giant hams on the tele. (It was the ’80s. What more can I say.)
Under Queen Elizabeth, sure, the fortunes of the House of Windsor dipped and dived and rose and fell but it preserved, the crown choo choo largely staying on the tracks. And generally speaking, she made it look relatively straightforward. She never made it look fun or joyous or some deep spiritual calling but she kept things together, like an arildite-d, set-permed captain confidently holding a firm grip on the tiller.
Oh well played Ma’am. Well played.
Reflecting on her legacy, former prime minister Tony Blair has told a BBC documentary, “She was not ‘a’ Queen, but ‘the’ Queen. I don’t think we’ll see her like again.”
As much as I like him, Charles will probably only end up being ‘a’ King – but ‘the’? That single word sadly says everything about his reign.
*It contained good luck charms like miniature dogs and horses from her family, lipstick, mints, and a small mirror she would use to reapply her Elizabeth Arden lippie after dinner.
Daniela Elser is an editor and commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
