Over her long reign, the Queen has shaped and reflected the world we live in while remaining mysterious and unknowable. Like it or not, she has been the silver thread that runs through Britain’s collective story
t was raining cats and corgis by the time I arrived in Finsbury Park last Tuesday, a fact that only served, given the dubiousness of my mission, to make me feel the more furtive. Everyone was rushing about, trying in the midst of the downpour to get their shopping done, to catch their bus or to pick up their children, and yet here I was, having bunked off work, intending to spend the rest of the afternoon watching a film about the Queen.
Rather, it is a mosaic: a collection of archive clips, artfully arranged to artfully chosen music. Occasionally, the monarch’s subjects, past and present, get to have their say. “It was worth the wait,” announces an ecstatic old lady, who has collapsed after standing too long at a royal garden party. “She [the Queen] looks after us all,” explains an adenoidal little girl who is about to celebrate the silver jubilee by eating half her bodyweight in buttercream.
You don’t have to be the kind of person who leaps happily to their feet at the sound of the national anthem to feel a sense of wonderment, perhaps even a small lump in your throat, at the sight of the Queen describing, a decade or so on, her return to London in the Royal Yacht Britannia after a long tour of the Caribbean in 1954.
But, anyway: facts. Stick to them, and there’s no getting away from the simple truth that the monarch both reflects and subtly shapes the world we live in; that she herself is a silver thread that runs through our collective story, whether we like it or not. There is barely anyone living who remembers a time when she wasn’t here, as princess or queen.
Yet in other ways, she is far from oblivious. John Major has said that it was her decision, not the government’s, that she should begin paying tax – she grasped the public mood – and Hardman, among others, believes it was only thanks to the Queen that the system of primogeniture in the line of succession was abolished in 2011 . Commentators insist she is no fuddy-duddy: she likes, they say, to try new things .
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