Her Majesty by Robert Hardman Read Free Book Online Page B

saw the length of the queue to walk past Queen Elizabeth’s coffin in 2002, it spelt to me that the troubles were now passed,’ says a former Private Secretary. ‘In fact, it dumbfounded me. I was one of the school who thought that she was a wonderful old lady but she was nearly 102. Even I did not expect queues as far as Blackfriars.’ At one point, the line of mourners went even further, stretching from Westminster, across the Thames and eastwards towards the Tower of London. Informed that they faced a twenty-four-hour wait to file past the coffin, some simply shrugged and replied that they would wait.
    The Golden Jubilee tour finally began in the Cornish rain on 1 May 2002. The crowds were modest at the opening fixture in Falmouth but the reason became clear a few hours later when the Queen entered Truro. It transpired that most of the county had descended on the cathedral city. From Northern Ireland to New Zealand, it was a similar story all year. ‘The whole tone was looking forwards,’ says one of the senior architects of the jubilee. ‘It was about “her” thanking “us”.’ David Cameron, then the new Conservative MP for Witney, remembers the surge of affection. ‘People were wondering: “Is it going to be a big event? Not sure.” And suddenly there was this massive thrust and everyone got involved. In my constituency I went to several events and they were all brilliant and totally oversubscribed. Every village street party, every single barbecue suddenly had 25 per cent more people than they could cope with.’ The Golden Jubilee concerts – one classical, one pop – in the grounds ofBuckingham Palace were screened around the world and drew more than a million people to central London to listen outside and watch the fireworks. Concorde flew down the Mall. ‘God Save The Queen’ rang out on Brian May’s electric guitar from the Palace roof. Exactly ten years after the annus horribilis , the monarchy was back on track.
    For all the occasional problems, the years since 2002 fall into the ‘contented’ category, culminating in the marriage of Prince William to Catherine Middleton before a global audience thought to rival – or exceed – an Olympiad. On a personal level, the Queen must have been equally thrilled to see the marriage of her eldest granddaughter, Zara Phillips, and the christening of her first great-grandchild, Savannah Phillips.
    It has all served as a splendid prelude to an extraordinary celebration which has only happened once before – in 1897. It will be supervised by a passionately royalist Prime Minister who camped in the Mall to watch the 1981 Royal Wedding – ‘I was in the best place, just where the Mall meets the statue outside Buckingham Palace’ – and David Cameron has no doubts that the country will be doing much the same to mark the Queen’s sixtieth anniversary on the throne: ‘The Diamond Jubilee will be much bigger than anyone expects.’
    This jubilee is an event which allows us to stand back and see the nineties in context rather than as the prism through which this reign has often been assessed. The jubilee helps us to reflect on the happiest and most miserable periods of the reign and to see that the euphoria of the mid-fifties was no more sustainable than the seemingly endless run of disasters a generation later. Instead, we can assess the success of this reign by the state of the institution sixty years on. If we take the Queen’s full title – Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and of Her other Realms and Territories, Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith – then there are unquestionably cracks and fissures in the institutions which she leads. The Church of England is divided over gay clergy, women bishops and overtures from the Vatican. The United Kingdom is less united than at any stage since Irish independence with four legislatures beavering away in