In a world of crumbling values, Queen carries on

The monarch’s 70 years on the throne and enduring popularity embodies the tenets of conservatism, duty and her Christian faith.

Queen Elizabeth II smiles on the balcony of Buckingham Palace during Trooping the Colour alongside (L-R) Prince Charles, Prince of Wales, Prince Louis of Cambridge, Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge and Princess Charlotte of Cambridge on June 02, 2022 in London, England. The Platinum Jubilee of Elizabeth II is being celebrated from June 2 to June 5, 2022, in the UK and Commonwealth to mark the 70th anniversary of the accession of Queen Elizabeth II on February 6, 1952. (Photo by Chris Jackson/Getty Images)

The Queen has gone platinum. This weekend the British public will be out in force with their silly Union Jack-emblazoned tat celebrating Elizabeth II’s 70 years on the throne. As she is head of state of Australia, we have a certain investment in this celebration which is a bit more than curiosity.

We now have an Assistant Minister for the Republic, Matt Thistlethwaite, and it is dubious whether the next monarch and head of state will live up to the popularity of the current queen.

It wouldn’t be the first time. After the death of Diana, princess of Wales, it looked as if the royals were going down the drain. Then came the golden jubilee and everyone was cheering the Queen again. What is the secret of her appeal? Is it just that it is monarchy, with its air of mystery – people not really like us, although we like to pretend they are – that is part of the trick? Or is it another reason? Is it to do with the Queen herself?

It is almost fashionable to talk about the Queen’s great skill in her job as constitutional monarch. Even the most trenchant critics of the monarchy find it difficult to fault her sense of the extraordinary delicacy of her position and the subtlety of the constitutional role she embodies.

She has surpassed her avowed model, Victoria, not only in dogged dutifulness (Victoria gave up for about 10 years) but also in the tact and caution she has employed in dealing with prime ministers and constitutional crises, not least our own in 1975 and the 1999 referendum to see her off as our head of state. She didn’t see the referendum’s defeat as a personal victory but, as she made clear in her last visit to this country, she understood Australians were dissatisfied with the model.

Royal fans line the Mall as they wait for the trooping of the colour as part of Queen Elizabeth II's platinum jubilee celebrations, on June 2, 2022, in London. - Huge crowds converged on central London in bright sunshine on Thursday for the start of four days of public events to mark Queen Elizabeth II's historic Platinum Jubilee, in what could be the last major public event of her long reign. (Photo by Ben Stansall / AFP)

However, we don’t admire the Queen for her supposed graciousness, although her beautiful manners are legendary, and who cares if she is funny or humourless (I suspect her sense of humour has that sharp derisive English edge like Prince Philip’s) or if she loves dogs (I admit it, I do).

She is admired partly because of her personal qualities: she puts her hat on her head and one foot in front of the other. The values she exemplifies are crumbling in the world of Oprah Winfrey and Meghan Markle, but she carries on and does the job while doing her best for her self-absorbed, lazy, mixed-up brood.

So, the Queen’s extraordinary popularity is indeed partly because of her personal qualities of character, but also, and I think more importantly, because she is a symbol of permissible conservatism in a world that has junked most conservative values. It is OK to hold the Queen in regard, even though you don’t really hold the values she has lived by, especially her Christian faith.

This is particularly evident in the popularity she has among the young. Woke Gen Zs (including my own) are fascinated by her. Young people, especially in Britain, who in general have discarded most of the intrinsic values of family, religion, even democracy, sometimes become very defensive of “our Queen”. Criticise her at your peril! Perhaps for many young people she is a sort of granny figure. She represents something that is often missing in the lives of the young today, stability and continuity.

The Queen being an institution is also different things to different people. For women she is a wife and mother and grandmother, and we can all identify with her struggles with her difficult family, their hopeless marital situations, their truly tawdry scandals. Every household has this sort stuff. As the jubilee spotlight focuses on her, she exemplifies determined equilibrium in the face of private anguish; the virtue of duty. Hence, she has perfectly succeeded in marrying her public and private lives. She has turned into a venerable embodiment not only of the nation and its people but also of a time and a supposed set of mores, the last remnant of “the spirit of the Blitz”. The Queen doesn’t whinge, although we sophisticates of the third millennium, enmeshed in a more morally fluid world, have made an art of whingeing.

What we admire about the Queen is her endurance, her solidity and her old-fashioned refusal to allow the changing mores of the world and her family to seem to affect her and the sacred trust she undertook at her coronation. Her character is the secret of her popularity. It is the element that isn’t supposed to matter for heads of state, as long as they follow the constitutional rules – but it does. Ironically, her most important personal quality is the thing that makes her a sort of non-person, an institution – her unflinching sense of duty. The root of that sense of duty is her Christian faith. Many people don’t realise how religious is the Queen. She took the anointing seriously.

For the Queen the monarchy is not a just a privileged echelon you happened to be born into. It is an appointment for life as a service to the state – but, more, it is a vocation from God.