Since she was a small girl, she has known her destiny. Though shy, she regards being Queen as a vocation, a calling which cannot be evaded
She is a small woman with a globally familiar face, a hundred-carat smile – when she chooses to turn it on – and 1,000 years of history at her back.
She reigns in a world which has mostly left monarchy behind, yet the result of her reign is that two-thirds of British people assume their monarchy will still be here in a century’s time.
She is wry and knowing but she feels a calling. She can brim with dry observations but she seems empty of cynicism. She is not a natural public speaker.
Try following her about for a few months, from trade-based missions overseas to visits to small towns and hospitals, and you will discover it is a surprisingly gruelling routine.
It includes grand ceremonial occasions and light-footed, fast-moving trips to meet soldiers, business people, volunteers and almost every other category one can imagine.
It eats up evenings and involves the patient reading of fat boxes of heavily serious paperwork, oozing from the government departments that work in her name.
In Whitehall, where they assess the most secret intelligence as it arrives, the Queen is simply ‘Reader No 1’.
It has been a life of turning up. But turning up is not to be underestimated. The Queen has a force-field aura that very few politicians manage to project. There is an atmospheric wobble of expectation, a slight but helpless jitter.
When she turns up, people find their heart-rate rising, however much they try to treat her as just another woman. Somehow, despite being everywhere – in news bulletins, on postage stamps and front pages – she has managed to remain mysterious.
After the rapids of family crisis and public controversy, British Royalty has become surprisingly popular around the world.
The Royal couple at a laser surgery demonstration at University College Hospital, London
She watched with great interest a recent film about her father’s struggle against his stutter and the man who helped him, the Australian Lionel Logue.
She remembers Logue very vividly. Her father was played by the actor Colin Firth. She herself was the subject of a blockbuster film, starring Helen Mirren.
Her illustrious ancestress Elizabeth I was portrayed by Judi Dench in a film about Shakespeare. Firth, Mirren and Dench all won Oscars, as one of the Queen’s children wryly notes.
She is not an actor. But the popularity of the monarchy owes a lot to the way she performs. Life has taken her around the world many times and introduced her to leaders of all kinds, from the heroic to the monstrous; and to seas of soapy faces; and to forests of wiggling hands.
Since she was a small girl, she has known her destiny. Though shy, she regards being Queen as a vocation, a calling which cannot be evaded.
She has borne four children, seen three of them divorced, has eight grandchildren and – take a bow, Savannah Phillips – one great-granddaughter. Like any 85-year-old she has been bereaved and suffered disappointment as well as enjoying success.
Yet she can be satisfied. She knows that her dynasty, unlike so many others, is almost certain to survive. Her heir and her heir’s heir are waiting. With her, and her kind of monarchy, most of her people are content.
On May 12 2011 she became the second longest-serving monarch in British history, having reigned for 21,645 days, beating George III’s record.
In September 2015, if she is still alive, she will outlast even Queen Victoria’s record too.
Her husband, now 90, still has the gimlet stare and suspicious bearing of a man’s man cast adrift in a world of progressives and wets. He could have scaled most ladders. He chose to spend his life as ‘Consort, liege and follower’.
The Duke’s life and the Queen’s life have been lived in lock-step, through an annual circle of ritual and tradition. The Queen’s mornings begin as they have for most of her life, with BBC radio news, Earl Grey tea, the Racing Post and the Daily Telegraph and, while having breakfast toast with her husband, enjoying the music of her personal bagpiper in the garden.
Princess Elizabeth as a second subaltern in the Auxilliary Territorial Service, 1945
Near her are the last truly dangerous members of the British monarchical system, the Queen’s dogs – four corgis and three dorgis (a dachshund/corgi cross).
A discreet, protective staff she calls by their first names come and go; a typed diary sheet of engagements is waiting; soon the first of the boxes of official papers, containing everything from minor appointments to alarming secret service reports, will arrive.
There may be a visit upstairs to the domain of Angela Kelly, her personal assistant and senior dresser, who has rooms off a narrow corridor just below the Buckingham Palace roof.
A genial and down-to-earth Liverpudlian, she is one of the people closest to the Queen, family apart. She works with huge bolts of cloth, dummies and scissors to create many of the Queen’s outfits.
In her office, the contents of the various official boxes have been sorted out by her Private Secretary and carried upstairs to be scrutinised.
She alone reads these; the Duke maintains a careful constitutional distance from some parts of her life, though he runs the estates and remains a very active nonagenarian, still often weaving through the London traffic at the wheel of his own, usefully anonymous taxi. She’s the longest-lived monarch in her country’s history.
Like anyone who has followed routines for so long, she hopes there’ll be a surprise today; just a small one. Now what? What will happen today?
At certain times of the year, of course, she will not be working. There are quiet family weekends and a long summer break, mostly at Balmoral in Scotland. But if you totted up the hours she puts in, the European health and safety people would itch to prosecute – well, who? There is the problem.
There is no trade union or employment contract for a Queen. The expectations of civil servants and politicians, tourists, presidents and the passing crowd are so great that her duties never end.
As head of state, Queen Elizabeth is the living symbol of nations, above all that of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland – though another 15 besides, including Australia, Canada, New Zealand and smaller countries, down to Tuvalu. She is not like most other constitutional monarchs. The British state has no single written constitution nor any founding document.
The Queen cradling Princess Anne in 1950
The British Queen’s authority is more like a quiet growl from ancient days, still quietly thrumming and mysterious.
She stands for the state – indeed, in some ways, at least in theory, she is the state. She is the living representative of the power s
tructure that struggles to protect and sustain some 62 million people, and another 72 million in her other ‘realms’.
She is not the symbol of the people. How could she or anyone represent the teeming millions of different ethnic groups and religions, of every political view, shape, bias and age?
Her enthusiasm for the Commonwealth of nations, which is not the private passion of many British politicians, has made her more interested in the lives of the new black and Asian Britons than one might expect.
Receptions at Buckingham Palace are generally more socially and ethnically mixed than they are at Downing Street or in the City.
She is at her most relaxed and smiling with young people, nervous people and unflashy people.
Watching her at official occasions, it’s clear that the chores are the grand dinners and speeches.
She is the symbol of the authority that drives the state servants and laws – the elections, armies, judges and treaties that together make modern life possible.
For 60 years she has appeared to open her Parliament, to remember her nation’s war dead, to review her troops or to attend services of her Church. She has great authority and no power.
She is a brightly dressed and punctual paradox: the ruler who does not rule her subjects but who serves them.
The Queen stands for continuity. This is a dull word, but when asked what the Queen is really about, ‘continuity’ is the word used most often by other members of the Royal Family, by prime ministers, archbishops and senior civil servants.
What do they mean? A constitutional monarchy claims to represent the interests of the people before they elected this government, and after it has gone. It remembers. It looks ahead, far beyond the next election.
The distinction between state and government is an essential foundation of liberty. In Britain a pantomime of ritual has grown up to express it. At the annual State Opening of Parliament, once in a year, the Queen reads out her prime minister’s words, ventriloquising for her government. She speaks with deliberate lack of emphasis or emotion: nobody must be able to hear her own feelings break through.
This is the job. In practice it is a little harder than it looks. When the most important foreign leaders arrive for a state visit, the Queen greets them in the country’s name with a smile and a gloved handshake and small-talk, again deliberately designed never to offend.
She offers house-room and pays kind attention to people she may privately regard as abominable or merely hideous bores. Guests at Buckingham Palace or at Windsor will be guided around by the Queen in person. She will have checked the rooms first herself, trying to make sure suitable books are left by the bed, that the flowers look good, and that everything is welcoming. At the grand dinners she will have overseen the food, flowers and place-settings.
When the guests arrive and the conversation starts she has to remember to dodge anything that might cause her ministers a headache.
The Royal Family at Balmoral, August 1972. The Queen's grandchildren have grown up in a less formal environment
Some talk about how she uses polite silence to deflect trouble; and it is very noticeable that when you ask people about their conversations with the Queen, they bubble about her wit and insight – and then tell you exactly (and only) what they said to her. Clever.
Much the same seems to happen in her weekly audiences with her prime ministers, of whom there have been a dozen to date. Though these meetings are completely private (no note-takers, no secretaries, no microphones), former premiers and civil servants talk about them as a kind of higher therapy, rather than a vivid exchange of views.
Sir Gus O’Donnell, a cabinet secretary who has worked with four prime ministers – Sir John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and now David Cameron – says: ‘They go out of their way not to miss it.
'It’s a safe space where prime ministers and sovereigns can get together, they can have those sorts of conversations, which I don’t think they can have with anybody else in the country… they come out of them better than they went in, let’s put it that way.’
She knows almost every state secret of the past 60 years.
In public, in her Christmas broadcasts and many speeches, she generally takes great care to stay on the safe ground of general expressions of good will, although at Christmas she often touches on issues of the day.
For decade after decade she has dodged traps that could have led the monarchy into serious danger. She has made mistakes, of course. She is only human. But she has managed this dance of discretion so adroitly that many people have concluded that she is herself almost without character – neutral, passive, even bland. She is not.
She is capable of sharp asides, has a long memory, shrewd judgement and is a wicked mimic. She has been very frank about her children’s scrapes.
She has closely observed and dryly described the oddities of foreign leaders and famous politicians.
She has done it sitting playing patience in the evening at Balmoral, or with her legs tucked up under her on a sofa on the Royal Yacht, a glass of something cheerful in hand, or walking on beaches and hillsides.
In private she has hugged and laughed; and been sharp with bores, dawdlers and slow eaters. It’s just that her job means she has to hide all this. Other people, celebrities and actors, are paid to have a ‘personality’. She is required to downplay hers.
This does not mean her life is dull.
‘We’re in the happiness business,’ whispers one of her ladies-in-waiting as the Queen heads for yet another line of shouting, waving children.
She can cheer people up simply by arriving, smiling, nodding and taking a posy or two. No one who has followed this now slightly stooping lady in her mid-eighties as she walks through small towns, foreign hotels, cathedrals and military barracks, casting sharp glances all around, and observed the grinning, pressing lines of people waiting for her, can doubt it.
But there is ‘the tough stuff ’ too – a huge amount of ceremonial, religious and social business to be dealt with, week in, week out.
The Queen adjusts her diadem (left) before a 2004 photoshoot with Chris Levine. The photographer took over 10,000 pictures of the Queen over two sittings, to create the first holographic image of the monarch; Angela Kelly (right), the Queen's senior dresser, adjusts an ermine-trimmed cloak
Levine arranges the complex lighting setup (left); the finished portrait (right). The work was commissioned by the island of Jersey to mark 800 years of allegiance to the crown
She is a woman of faith who stands atop the Anglican Church and is called Defender of the Faith and Supreme Governor of the Church of England. The Queen takes her role as the fount of Anglican respectability very seriously, addressing the General Synod and talking regularly to its leading figures.
She is also ‘the fount of honours’, bestowing medals, crosses, knighthoods and ribbons, mostly (but not always) on the advice of politicians, to those who are worthy (and sometimes not so worthy). Each one requires conversation, eye-contact, briefing and time.
Then there are the services: the Queen is Head of the Armed Forces. It is to the Queen that new soldiers, airmen and sailors pledge allegiance, and in whose name they fight and die. She is also a patron of huge numbers of charities. They too lobby and plead for her time, often to encourage fundraising.
From time to time the Royal Family settle down together to try to organise their charitable work. After the death of her mother and sister, the family sat down at Sandringham around a card table and shared out the work they would have to take on.
They discovered some charities had rather too many Royals associated with them, and others none at all; so some switching-around was agreed.
Beginning to feel tired? What about Abroad? The Queen never forgets that she is Head of the Commonwealth, a title invented in 1949 to allow the newly independent republican India to keep its association with Britain.
This involves her in a huge amount of travel, in addition to visiting her other realms and the diplomatic and trade-boosting visits her government tells her each year she must make.
These visits are not jaunts. They involve a lot of planning and travel, endless changes of dresses and hats and, above all, a huge amount of listening, nodding and smiling. Most trying of all, there are the speeches.
The Queen is a naturally shy and quiet person who even now, after all these years, gets no pleasure from public speaking whether the event is grand or modest.
One journalist who has followed her for decades says, ‘Whether it is the Great Hall of the People or the Girl Guides’ Association, she gets nervous before the speech. And yet afterwards, once she’s completed that speech and she’s got marvellous congratulation and applause, then she’s… really buzzing because it’s out of the way.’
Beyond all this, the Queen has run the monarchy as a national adhesive, making constant visits around the country to be seen, to greet and to thank people who are mostly ignored by the London power-brokers and commercial grandees.
She holds parties, lunches and charity gatherings at Buckingham Palace and Edinburgh’s Palace of Holyroodhouse to thank or bring together other lists of good-doers, civic worthies and business strivers.
At special themed receptions she honours all sorts of disparate groups – they might be Australians in Britain, young people in the performing arts, campaigners for the handicapped or the emergency services.
These events are meticulously planned. The Queen hangs over the lists of who may be invited, and why. She plans the evenings and the choreography, and manages to remember at least many of the names.
Finally, there are the mass celebrations, the Royal jubilees and marriages, which get most of the attention.
The jubilees are an invented tradition, which allow the monarchy to dominate the crowded news agenda of a busy country and enable people to look back at the last 25, 50 or 60 years, and to look forward too: a kind of national pause-for-thought.
The marriages may turn out well or not, but allow the most fanatically Royalist, and many others, to go briefly mad.
If you are feeling a little exhausted already, consider that we have not yet talked about the extra little jobs of mother, grandmother, wife, aunt, horse-owner, manager of farms and estates, employer and overall accountant-in-chief that fill in the quiet moments.
For most of us the Queen seems always to have been there. She has done her job so well it has come to seem part of the natural order of things, along with the seasons and the weather. One day, of course, she won’t be there.
Then there will be a gaping, Queen-sized hole in the middle of British life.
‘The Diamond Queen’ by Andrew Marr is published by Pan, priced at £7.99.
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She's shy, has a wicked wit and animals are really important to her: Ten personal insights into the Queen from Sir Roy Strong
She can be very funny – a side of her which the public rarely gets to see. She is also known for her love of animals, and in particular her corgis
1. She's shy
I have a very real sense that she is her father George VI's daughter in so many ways - and she looked to him as the role model for her own monarch
Her Majesty may have reigned for 60 years but she remains quite a shy person at heart. Yes, she’s learnt how to handle all manner of social situations, rise to the occasion, and meet the incredible demands of being a monarch in the modern age, thanks in part to the advice of her closest courtiers – but I’m not sure if it’s a role she’s taken to naturally. I have a very real sense that she is her father George VI’s daughter in so many ways – and she looked to him as the role model for her own monarchy. Perhaps that helps explains why she’s a rather modest woman, like her late father. There’s nothing remotely over the top about her as a person, though I think that’s a good thing, and in a way this rather attractive quality echoes the reticence of us as a nation.
2. The smile is real
I've been very struck by just how happy the Queen looks these days. I think that's down to the fact that the Royal Family has survived the travails of recent decades to emerge as strong as ever
I’ve been very struck by just how happy the Queen looks these days. I think that’s down to the fact that the Royal Family has survived the travails of recent decades to emerge as strong as ever. I think the media love you when you’re young, try to destroy you in your middle age, but then appreciate you all the more when you’re old and aren’t in anyone’s way. I think there’s an element of that in Her Majesty’s story. Just as importantly, so much seems settled: Charles’s predicament following the death of Diana and the difficult years afterwards seems to have been resolved. What’s more, she’s still got the Duke of Edinburgh by her side, and her grandchildren – in particular William and Harry – have turned out to be everything she could wish for. In short, the future of the succession seems assured – and I think that’s a source of tremendous pride and satisfaction to her.
3. She has a wicked wit
The Queen can be very funny - a side of her which the public rarely gets to see. In private she can often display a real sense of fun and a lovely, spontaneous sense of humour
She can be very funny – a side of her which the public rarely gets to see. I remember talking to her at one art world function, and when she asked if I was enjoying myself, I said, ‘Everybody’s here who I can’t reach on the telephone.’ ‘Oh,’ she replied wryly. ‘I don’t know who’s here – I forgot to put my specs on.’ And we had a little chuckle. I think she’s all too aware that as a monarch she has to be serious and representative of the nation, but believe me – I have to tread carefully here – in private she can often display a real sense of fun and a lovely, spontaneous sense of humour.
I'm sure the Queen has drawn great sustenance from her faith during difficult times in her reign (left). She has never been an extravagant person... There is a real sense of make-do-and-mend (right)
4. Faith underpins her life
The Queen is of course the head of the Church of England – but it’s sometimes forgotten that she’s also a woman of deep Christian faith. I once saw her holding a rather worn prayer book which I think is in itself telling – because it shows that this is a woman who doesn’t just pay lip service to God, but prays and is a true believer. She is of course a regular churchgoer, and I’m sure she has drawn great sustenance from her faith during difficult times in her reign. It’s all too easy to forget that to have reigned for 60-odd years and pretty much never put a foot wrong is quite an achievement. That and the fact that she’s been able to bounce back from adversity is in part a tribute to her strength of character, which in turn is underpinned by her Christianity
5. She's a make-do-and-mend Queen
The Queen has never been an extravagant person. She was 13 when World War II began, so her formative years were hugely shaped by growing up in the shadow of the conflict. The entire nation had to make sacrifices and while no one is suggesting the Royal Family had to slum it, Britain stood alone for a while against Germany, food was rationed and there was a real sense of make-do-and-mend. That’s something that has stayed with the Queen all her life, and I think that’s partly why she likes Kate, who’s not afraid to wear the same dress twice, and is so patently not in the ‘spend, spend, spend’ mould.
6. Children are special to her
The way the Queen bends down to accept flowers from small children is tantamount to her saying that she regards them as her equals
It’s rarely remarked upon, but the humility the Queen shows when she receives flowers from children says a lot to me about the hidden monarch. She must have been handed thousands of garlands by countless children – but judging by the way in which she accepts them, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s the first time she’s been given flowers. I don’t want to make too big a thing of it, but I think that says a lot about the Queen as a person. The way she bends down to accept flowers from small children is tantamount to her saying that she regards them as her equals. Perhaps I’m a big softie but I always find it very touching.
7. She is serious about her duty
You only have to notice the sombre expression on her face to see the utmost seriousness with which she carries out her duty
The Queen has laid a wreath at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday on all but a handful years during her long reign – the only exceptions being when she was either pregnant or overseas on an official visit (1959, 1961, 1963, 1968, 1983 and 1999). This terribly moving annual ceremony, which sees the nation united in grief for the fallen in two world wars and other conflicts, means a huge amount to her, in large part because she lived through World War II, and saw how great a price we as a nation paid to preserve our freedom. You only have to notice the sombre expression on her face to see the utmost seriousness with which she carries out her duty, and regards the day’s proceedings. It’s also why she has such a keen awareness of the sacrifices that have been made by the forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, and it is of course no accident that that’s she granted Wootton Bassett a Royal Charter. (In recognition of the extraordinary way in which the town has honoured the wars’ victims.)
8. She's kind at heart
The Queen paid a private visit to Martin Charteris - who served her for many years as her Assistant Private Secretary and then Private Secretary, and did so much for her as a young monarch - shortly before his death
This isn’t something that’s ever much reported, but she’s very thoughtful for anyone she knows who has been bereaved or ill, performing little acts of kindness. For instance, she paid a private visit to Martin Charteris (above) – who served her for many years as her Assistant Private Secretary and then Private Secretary, and did so much for her as a young monarch – shortly before his death in 1999. She often displays a real pastoral, if very private, thoughtfulness for other people, which I think is an admirable quality in a monarch. It’s an interesting example of how while she’s a very public figure, she’s also managed to remain a very private person, and for that I think we should be grateful.
9. She loved her palace on the water
The Queen on board HMY Britannia in March 1971
The Queen was terribly saddened to see the Royal Yacht Britannia pensioned off.
She had a huge amount of affection for the ship because it was the only home that was ever specially created for her, in every sense of the word.
The Queen was terribly saddened to see the Royal Yacht Britannia pensioned off
Prince Charles and the Queen at the yacht's farewell service in 1997
Otherwise she was entirely living in old palaces, which may sound very grand – but you’re in effect living in high-class antique shops.
It’s interesting to note that the Royal Yacht was furnished in a much more contemporary style than the palaces, with their George III antique tables, so she didn’t feel weighed down by the panoply of the past, which I think she found rather liberating.
She also appreciated the freedom the yacht gave her to escape the prying eyes of the world and just be herself.
10. Animals really are important to her
The Queen with her son Prince Edward and pet Corgi at Windsor Castle, in 1965
This is a woman who is known for her love of animals, and in particular her corgis.
As monarch, from time to time she invites people to Windsor Castle, and I remember being there once when one of her corgis rolled over onto its back at her feet and there was a look of sheer unadulterated joy on her face, which I’ll never forget.
Again, I suspect that her bond with her corgis might be linked to her underlying shyness as a person.
It’s also a characteristic which chimes with us as a nation – because despite the odd horror story about someone mistreating their cat or dog, we are a nation of animal lovers.
Pony riding in 1940
At Sandringham in 1964 with her horse Betsy
Princess Elizabeth in 1936 (left), with her corgi and her father's labrador; At Windsor in 1962 with one of her many corgis (right)
On horseback in 1972
Easter ride at Windsor
READ MORE - Here's looking at you, ma'am... but what do we really know about the woman who's ruled us for 60 years?
