This has been a bad year for those who thought they were on the verge of a United Republic of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. One reviewer described William Shawcross's oleaginous BBC golden jubilee series, Queen and Country, as "an almost religious hagiography," a tribute to "a saint or suburban Sun God." This was true of the entire jubilee, which was partly sheer flummery, bedecked with newly-manufactured tradition, and topped up with an oldsters' pop concert. But this isn't all it was. It is worth thinking carefully about what such an astonishingly popular event means, even if you are a dyed-in-the-viscose republican.
Reflecting on the meaning of the queen's 1953 coronation, Edward Shils and Michael Young, an American and an English sociologist, observed that "the coronation was throughout a collective not an individual experience." This was also true of the golden jubilee, though the collectivity has changed. At the jubilee weekend, researchers from the Institute of Community Studies, founded by Michael Young, carried out a follow-up study. Fanning out across working-class, often multiracial London, they confirmed that this time, street parties were few. For anyone who wanted a day out, the collective experience was centralised around the Mall, where 1m people congregated on the Monday of the pop concert, and left 50,000 champagne bottles behind. For the majority, who wanted to stay private, the collective experience meant a long weekend of television, interweaving jubilee and World Cup. The concept of "neighbourhood" isn't what it was. Many parties were laid on by community centres, local authorities or churches, not by friends and neighbours.
The jubilee produced much debate about continuity and change. Most fell into predestined grooves: the Guardian sceptical, the Daily Telegraph adoring, the BBC treacly, Channel Four pursuing the arcana of the royal finances. But there were quirks. Graham Turner's rivetingly gossipy book Elizabeth: The Woman and the Queen stripped off the veils from the queen and her family as individuals. It was deeply damaging, yet co-published by the Telegraph.
Do you want evidence of continuity, tiny but symbolic? At a St James's Park refreshment kiosk, as workers erected bulbous plastic awnings outside Buckingham Palace for video screens for the concerts, I noticed they still sold "Coronation Chicken" sandwiches. A Jubilee Chicken recipe was being devised for the palace events-root ginger, shallots, cr?me fra?che-but it hadn't seeped across.
Do you want evidence of change? I stared at the kiosk display for a minute or two, saw nothing but varieties of chicken fillings, and wandered off muttering "salmonella" to myself. In 1952-53, at the queen's accession and coronation, no one outside the bacteriology trade had heard of salmonella. The only fast food was fish and chips. Battery farming had scarcely begun. Poultry was such an unconsidered food that it wasn't included in the system of wartime meat rationing, still in force after six post-war years of Labour government; Winston Churchill's recently elected Conservatives didn't abolish it until 1954. Few people had a fridge. No one had a freezer. Grocers sold goods in small quantities, individually weighed out. My parents had a corner shop in a busy Pennine industrial small town. As the queen came to the throne, there were 12 other small shops, dotted around the nearby streets, within five minutes' walk, well away from the town centre. All 13 have gone. There is very little industry left, either.
It is amazing that the monarchy has survived everything that has happened these 50 years. Yet, as Ben Pimlott points out in his excellent political biography, The Queen, to dismiss the monarchy as "a survival" is to beg the question: why has it survived? Part of the answer may lie in Vernon Bogdanor's observation that republics rarely come about simply because some people in the state-perhaps many people-have a republican agenda. Usually it takes extreme social and political trauma: the American war of independence; France's recurrent revolutions; Germany's defeat in 1918 in a war which was the Kaiser's own; the impact of Soviet communism and the Soviet army, on eastern Europe. It is easy to add to the list. In Spain, the monarchy narrowly survived only because Franco saw himself as regent as well as caudillo, and arranged things so that Juan Carlos could help to ease Spain into a post-Falange world.
The British monarchy has faced no such trauma. It, or its ministers, lost an empire but it never lost its core territory. It was sometimes a close-run thing, as when most of Ireland increasingly went its own way (and the Irish harp disappeared from the royal coat of arms), culminating in 1949 with De Valera's long-delayed declaration of a republic. But when the queen, as Queen Elizabeth I of Scotland, went to open the devolved Edinburgh parliament, crowds lined the pavements ten deep. Not bad, even if in the Mall they were 30-deep for the Jubilee carnival (a glorified church f?te).
To its chagrin, the New Statesman found, in an opinion poll it commissioned in April, that 72 per cent of British 16 to 25 year olds wanted to keep the monarchy (68 per cent wanted to get married and the same percentage approved of global capitalism). This didn't stop the magazine running a jubilee leader headed "The monarchy has absolutely no role to play." An odd phrase because the queen had been enacting a role like mad, from Cornwall to the Hebrides, for the previous three months. She had also started smiling, perhaps now that her mother, royalty's previous smiler-in-chief, was no longer around. In one Shawcross episode, a former commonwealth secretary-general, Sir Sonny Ramphal, noted that she used constantly to smile when she visited "her" commonwealth, but that she seldom smiled at home. This had changed.
George Orwell's essay, "The Lion and the Unicorn," took its name from the heraldic supporters on the royal coat of arms and the nursery rhyme derived from them. Writing in 1940, he sought to define English patriotism in a year when Britain stood on its own against Hitler's Germany. (The great cartoonist, David Low, drew a soldier on the cliffs of Dover, shaking a fist at Luftwaffe planes, with the caption, "Very well, alone.") Yet, despite the essay's title, Orwell makes only two passing mentions of the monarchy. "It is a strange fact," he says, "but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during 'God save the King' than of stealing from a poor box." (When all theatre and cinema shows ended with the national anthem, I confess that I, too, sat tight.) In thinking forward to the English socialism he hoped would follow victory, Orwell wrote: "It will not be doctrinaire, nor even logical. It will abolish the House of Lords, but quite probably will not abolish the monarchy." That's it.
Orwell famously said that the best way to describe England in a phrase was as "a family with the wrong members in charge." He seems to be thinking of the upper and upper-middle classes, not the monarchy: men like Baldwin, Chamberlain and Halifax. The monarchy, with its lion and unicorn, was just a source of imagery. It was, and is, curiously empty imagery, best-suited for biscuit tins. Until I came to write this essay, I never knew that the unicorn represents Scotland, as against the lion of England, and that the heraldic pairing dates from James I's uniting of the two crowns in 1603. Most of the queen's subjects share my ignorance, I'd guess, although every receipt from John Lewis's stores, for example, carries a printed footnote touting their line in "Jubilee glass, pottery and silver." To judge by the display in the Oxford Street store, most are emblazoned with the coat of arms. Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living; but most symbols go unexamined, most of the time.
The golden jubilee helped to underline the strange combination of frailty and strength in the monarchical symbolism. It is hard to know what the queen and her offspring now stand for, but the institution seems to have remarkable stamina. In the Institute of Community Studies survey, the keenest royalists were west Africans, who had many bad memories of non-hereditary rulers: greedy dictators and gun-toting soldiers. But in Britain, one of the monarchy's chief functions is to give a good excuse for a party. England is notoriously short of celebratory dates. No one has managed to put any oomph into St George's day. When Ken Livingstone was reproached this year for handing out subsidies for St Patrick's day and not for St George's day, his unanswerable defence was that no one requested any. Once, the ritual burning of Guy Fawkes annually endorsed England as a Protestant state. It is now merely a fireworks night.
Apart from two or three sporting highlights, among which the Grand National is probably the front runner, the only English national events are royal ones. A really good funeral, like the Queen Mother's or the Princess of Wales's; a really good wedding, like (in due course) Prince William's; a coronation; or, that rarest of royal occasions, a jubilee. This is only the fifth-ever golden jubilee for a ruling English sovereign, after Henry III, Edward III, George III and Victoria. (A shorter-run silver jubilee was a new tradition, especially invented for George V, who was surprised in 1935 at how popular it showed him to be, despite his permanent dourness.) These grandiose public f?tes are what the English have instead of an independence day or a Bastille day. An Irishwoman told an Institute of Community Studies researcher: "It's a Paddy's day for the English."
In the early 1990s, the monarchy was running into the sands. The death of Diana was the saving of it. This is not only because the royal family's greatest tormentor was removed. Her death and the tumultuous public grief forced the queen to raise a half-mast flag over Buckingham Palace. She had to listen to crowds applauding Earl Spencer's criticisms of the royal family and its hangers-on, at Diana's Westminster Abbey funeral. It all emphasised not only what might happen if the court didn't change, but also the strong, if residual, symbolic power of the monarchy. People wanted the queen to do the right thing. Her television tribute to Diana, however unwillingly uttered, lanced the hostility.
Looking back, the coronation year of 1953 is the best point of comparison with the jubilee. The queen's accession, in 1952, was a technicality, a change in the small print, not a cause for celebration. The following year, minds delighted in the novel splendours of the coronation, amid the encircling greyness. Speaking in a Commons debate on the costs of royalty, Clement Attlee said: "It is a great mistake to make government too dull." His post-war administration, which Orwell drew on for 1984's "Ingsoc" regime, did its bit for drabness. Herbert Morrison's 1951 Festival of Britain came too late to save a dispirited government, if it could have done. Festivities are bubbles on the surface of the stream.
Shils and Young claimed that the coronation was more than a pretty bubble. There was something sacred about it, they said, and they didn't mean the presence of the Archbishop of Canterbury and his Anglican paraphernalia. They meant that it was a public sanctification of common national values: a ritual made stronger by the perceived personality of the young queen as a wife and mother, taking on a great burden of duty. It was also the first time most people in Britain watched a television screen (the queen, in less PR-obsessed days, had at first rejected a televised coronation) and so it was a collective experience beyond the scale of any previous royal event. You can still feel something of what Shils and Young meant. When clips were re-broadcast for the jubilee, it was undeniably moving to see the young, pretty, almost frail Elizabeth nearly buried beneath her huge new crown-even though, or because, we know that the fairy tale didn't end happily ever after for everyone.
By contrast with a wedding or a crowning, a jubilee is just a mark on a calendar. The queen's 1977 silver jubilee took place, as the coronation did, in a glum, downtrodden Britain. The prospect of a party was a welcome relief. The tacky euphoria of the 1960s had faded; Britain felt like a banana republic; economic failure and strikes foreshadowed Margaret Thatcher's purgative election as prime minister. Four thousand street parties were reported in London, though in west Yorkshire, where I was, I don't remember as much song and dance.
In 2002, jubilee Britain prospered (think of all that champagne). But, as in 1953, an emblematic funeral preceded the celebration. In 1953, the queen's grandmother, Queen Mary, widow of George V, died a few weeks before the coronation. She was a fierce figure. Outside Clarence House, on the Mall, soon to be Prince Charles's London home, a luscious art nouveau bronze honours Edward VII's long-suffering queen: "Faith, Hope, Love: the Guiding Virtues of Queen Alexandra." A stern grey-slate portrait of Queen Mary, further along the high brick wall, gives nothing but her dates. In 2002, the death of the Queen Mother two and a half months before the jubilee weekend, was of a different order. She was the first native-born spouse of a reigning king or queen since the Hanoverian dynasty (latterly rechristened "Windsor") took over in 1714. She was a media star. She seldom spoke in public, but she always smiled. At Clarence House, she was cosseted in splendour by her daughter's financial generosity and by a clique of old Etonian gay devotees. (In May, newspapers published obituaries of one of them, Major Sir Ralph Anstruther of that ilk, seventh baronet, who served her for nearly 40 years.) But publicly she was a populist.
Reading the Daily Telegraph after that funeral, you felt you would never escape from the acres of eulogy. But the greatest joy was to read the republican Guardian. On Monday 1st April, the first issue after the Queen Mother's death, the front-page headline was "Uncertain farewell reveals a nation divided"; the lead editorial was headed, "The way we were: now it's time to look to a different Britain." The printed letter writers were unremittingly hostile-and were rebuked on the Tuesday by another reader as "a charmless and emotionally stunted bunch." By the Wednesday, Hugo Young was telling us, in his column, "This obsession with history is an affliction for Britain." A week is a long time in journalism. By Monday 8th April, popular response had battered the Guardian into a leader headed "Lest we forget: she meant more than we realised." The funeral was reported under the front-page headline, "Farewell to a mother, a queen and a symbol of a bygone age," which even erred in a Daily Telegraph direction. A leader murmured, "Gladly into the night: a funeral service of symbolic importance." Game, set and match to the palace in that bout of royal tennis.
And then the jubilee. It was a bigger razzmatazz in London than elsewhere. The capital has always had a closer relationship with kings and queens, if only because they live there. As the hullabaloo built up, the executive producer of EastEnders, John Yorke, published an essay, describing Elizabeth II as "the queen of all soaps." I think it was in grudging admiration. "The recent death of the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret," he said, "gives the jubilee a symbolic narrative role it might otherwise have lacked. The destruction of a dynasty, followed by death, followed by rebirth, is an almost perfect narrative arc; the more hideous and painful the journey, the greater the sense of joy at its happy end. And, as with other soaps, it is at such moments that the royal family guarantees its biggest ratings." You could argue, contrariwise, that soap stars seek to ape the appeal of royalty.
Royalty-watchers enjoyed some delicious moments. Jilly Cooper revealed that she based her novels' sexiest cads on Andrew Parker Bowles, just as his ex-wife, Camilla, moved a peg or two up the royal hierarchy. At the palace classical concert, she sat in the royal box, a little behind the star turns, next to Sir Michael Peat, the ultra-smooth accountant who helped disentangle the queen's finances. His grandfather was the P in KPMG; her great-grandmother was Edward VII's bedmate, Alice Keppel. They were like camp-followers at Agincourt or Waterloo: the royal purse-keeper alongside the royal mistress.
The jubilee gave the Guardian a worse pummelling than the Queen Mother's funeral. The paper fought every inch of the way. There were ironic articles about "alternative" jubilees and scathing ones about royal wealth. On the morning of the pop concert, cartoonist Felix Bennett drew a grumpy queen sitting on the lavatory, in a parody of Whistler's portrait of his mother. ("50 years on the throne," get it?) The impact of David Low's hostile "morning after" cartoon in the Manchester Guardian, the day after the coronation in 1953, was so powerful because the paper had until then been mildly supportive of the new queen. This time it went the other way. After weeks of carping, the Guardian yielded to the millions on the Mall. It hoisted up a republican white flag. Two days after the cartoon, its lead editorial began: "We need to face up to the facts. The queen's golden jubilee celebrations of 2002 have been in every respect more successful than either the organisers had feared or the critics had hoped."
One jubilee doesn't wash everything white. For anyone thinking ahead, there were important hints. Addressing parliament, the queen made it clear she was no abdicator. Then, at the pop concert, she went out of her way to praise Prince Charles, to whom she gave her first recorded public kiss. Speaking at the City's Guildhall lunch, Tony Blair lavished praise on Charles as heir to the throne. So that was that, then, was it? Queen Elizabeth II it is, till death do us part, followed by Charles III, assuming he's still with us.
It may not be so simple. The celebrations had many moments of sheer flashiness and dire sentimentality (the worst was when Charles decided that the popular touch required him to call his mother "Mummy"). It was designed as long-term sustenance for the idea of royalty; it may end up as transient as fast food. The Daily Telegraph jotted down guidelines for how a diamond jubilee in 2012 could build on this year's success. This should have come with a health warning. Within two years of Queen Victoria's glamorous diamond jubilee in 1897, Britain was plunged into the Boer war, of which the outcome was, at best, a nil-nil draw. It became clear what damage a small, determined nation could inflict on the mighty British empire. It was the beginning of the imperial end.
The current queen has put her strongest political energies into her role as head of the commonwealth, now that the empire has gone. But this is one glory that will inevitably fade at her death. Many diplomats are certain that future British sovereigns, such as a putative Charles III, will have to take turns with the presidents of India or South Africa, the Yong di Pertuan Agong of Malaysia, and the rest. Then again it is said that Prince Charles, in his idiosyncratic way, might want to move the royal base to Windsor Castle, away from noisy, smelly London and those throngs of people. If so, it could be his Versailles, the final beginning of the end. George VI and his wife, the future Queen Mother, squeezed every drop of favourable coverage from supposedly spending the second world war at Buckingham Palace, despite the bombing. They kept quiet about commuting back to Windsor every night and weekend.
Military strategists argue that Russia is always neither as weak as it appears, nor as strong. The same is true of the British monarchy. It is not yet certain how durable it is, though most Britons put it under the pragmatic heading, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Abolition is on no major political party's agenda. But the Boer-like guerrilla campaign to cut back the monarchy's role as the apex of social snobbery will continue. The queen had better keep smiling.
