The Queen alone emerges unscathed from the latest family meltdown. This is no accident. How many interviews has she given since 1952? None. How many gratuitous revelations making her privileged personal life the story, rather than her role as symbol of national unity and service? None. Over seven decades.
Yet we feel we know her well. She has latency: always present, but as a symbol not as a talking head, least of all a controversial one. Because she has exuded this latency since before most of us were born we take for granted the skill behind it: the combination of pomp, public messages, motifs, public and charitable events, self-discipline, suitable hobbies and holidays. There is a lot of spin, but as always with successful PR, it works because of the substance.
“I have to be seen to be believed,” she says. Regular public visibility but only in appropriate contexts, and clockwork repetition of symbolic events, from the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday to her Christmas message, the state opening of Parliament and attendance at a public church every Sunday.
A key element is her visibility across the United Kingdom. Of the UK’s state institutions, the monarchy—at least, the Queen’s non-Californian bit of it—is the only one not solely based in London and the south-east. Her iron annual routine takes her to Scotland every year: Edinburgh for a week at the end of June at the palace of Holyroodhouse, then Balmoral Castle for the next 12 weeks.
Surprise, surprise, the SNP’s independent Scotland would keep the monarchy. The first minister spends a weekend at Balmoral every September, the weekend after the prime minister. For recent occupants of No 10, apart from Gordon Brown, the Balmoral weekend is the longest period they spend in Scotland each year.
Why don’t more state institutions venture north too? Because England’s professional leaders mostly can’t bear the thought. When the Blair government announced it was creating the Supreme Court as an institution separate from the House of Lords in 2003, I suggested to the then-Lord Chancellor Charlie Falconer that it should be located in Leeds or Manchester. His own declared policy for new legal institutions was that they should only be in London if unavoidable, and the UK’s final court of appeal no more needs to be in Westminster than Germany’s equivalent needs to be in Berlin (it is in Karlsruhe, 400 miles away).
“Totally absurd,” he bristled. He didn’t attempt an argument of principle against the idea, just: “You won’t get top judges and their staff to go and live in Manchester: they aren’t footballers.” That was that. So the Supreme Court is located next to the Treasury in Parliament Square, opposite the Palace of Westminster.
However, political pressure to make the British state a bit less London-centric yields intermittent initiatives to move stuff out of London. Generally this is junior staff and lesser activities, so Whitehall eyebrows are properly raised by Rishi Sunak’s “Treasury North” announced last week, following a tussle between the chancellor, who wants to be seen doing something for the so-called northern “Red Wall,” and the Treasury permanent secretary who warned him not to overdo it.
The anxieties are overdone. Only a quarter of the department will ultimately move to Darlington, which—coincidentally or not—is only a 25-minute drive from Richmond, the upmarket Dales town that Sunak represents in parliament. The top bods will stay in London, including all the ministers. Even this decision might not stick. “The choice of a town over a larger city raises questions about potential disruption to the Treasury’s work and the new office’s prospects beyond the tenure of the current chancellor,” intones the Institute for Government, located next to Buckingham Palace. It then asserts the following about a Treasury agency which moved out of London a decade ago: “When the Office for National Statistics shifted its headquarters from London to Newport in south Wales, 90 per cent of London-based staff chose to stay in London and find other jobs. Even a decade after the move commenced, a review found that the resulting disruption continued to hamper the quality of ONS work.”
I hadn’t noticed the quality of national statistics declining because they are now generated in Newport. More concerning is how the government manipulates statistics, and what they say about the vast social and economic disparities across England and Wales, greater than for any other large European country.
But good news. Now a bit of the Treasury is moving to Darlington, the chancellor will need to fund HS2 through to the north-east, so you can get there from London in less than two hours. Rishi was planning to cut it.
