Queen reflects on ‘bumpy’ year in Christmas Day address

The Queen has sent a clear message to the world that the Royal family will pursue a slimmed down focus.

Queen Elizabeth II records her annual Christmas broadcast in Windsor Castle. Picture: Getty Images

The Queen has sent a clear message to the world that the Royal family will pursue a slimmed down focus during her annual Christmas Day address where she is to refer to 2019 as being “quite bumpy”.

While Her Majesty doesn’t spell out these lumps of her year, she could be referring to both the constitutional crisis surrounding Brexit and closer to home, Prince Andrew’s withdrawal from public life over his friendship with the sex trafficking pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

The Queen is also personally finding the past week challenging with her husband, 98-year-old Duke of Edinburgh having spent time in a London hospital before his release on Christmas Eve.

In her speech, that will be broadcast at 3pm in England (2am Thursday AEDT) on Christmas Day, she encourages Britons to put past difference behind them and honour the freedom and democracy won in WWII.

She will say: “Small steps taken in faith and in hope can overcome long-held differences and deep-seated divisions to bring harmony and understanding.

“The path, of course, is not always smooth, and may at times this year have felt quite bumpy, but small steps can make a world of difference.”

But the visual clues in the prerecorded message are just as illuminating.

The Queen is sitting behind a desk surrounded by photographs of the Royals, and there is no picture of Prince Andrew, nor of Prince Harry and the Duchess of Sussex and their baby Archie.

While Andrew has been cast adrift from public life, Harry and Meghan elected not to attend the Queen’s summer residence in Balmoral, with Meghan instead jetting across the Atlantic to attend a tennis match of her friend Serena Williams.

The Sussexes have decided not to attend this week’s Christmas festivities at Sandringham, instead taking six weeks off and going to Canada with Meghan’s mother Doria.

The photos on display surrounding the Queen highlight a recent move to focus on the direct line of succession in the Royal family and begin to minimise the public life of other Royals. This realignment has been fast tracked given the controversy of Andrew and has been encouraged by Prince Charles and Prince William.

There is the Queen’s father King George VI in black and white, one of the heir, Prince Charles and his wife, the Duchess of Cornwall and the Christmas photo of the second, third, fourth and fifth in line to the throne: the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and their children – Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis.

Last week Buckingham Palace released a photograph of the four generations: the Queen, Prince Charles, Prince William and Prince George around a Christmas pudding.

For the first time, both Prince George and Princess Charlotte are expected to attend the Christmas morning Service at Sandringham.