Queen Elizabeth turned 92 yesterday. Her birthday present is the agreement that her eldest son will eventually succeed her as Head of the Commonwealth. Most unusually for a woman who almost never expresses a direct personal wish, last week she specifically, publicly asked for it. She made her request on Thursday. It arrived, gift-wrapped by 53 nations, at Windsor the following day.
A few days before the queen spoke, Jeremy Corbyn [Britain’s leader of the Opposition] gave his opinion on this matter. Declining to back the Prince of Wales for the role, he said that the headship of the Commonwealth should be handed out “on a rotational basis”. I calculate that if the Corbyn rotation operated at the current rate of churn (66 years minimum), it would take 3,498 years for every member state to have a go at the job.
It has always been a question whether the Commonwealth, and therefore its headship, mean very much. It has, after all, no formal power. One way to answer this question is to imagine what we would think if there were no Commonwealth and if the head of state of another medium-sized country — the president of France, say, or Germany, or the emperor of Japan — had an equivalent role and commanded an equivalent vague yet heartfelt allegiance from nations in every continent. We would think it mattered, wouldn’t we? We would be envious of it.
Think of the scale. The population of the Commonwealth today (2.4 billion) is roughly equal to that of the entire world when the queen became its head in 1952. Even the president of China, even the pope, lack that reach. Elizabeth II holds some sort of sway — titular, yet real — over more people than any other living human being in history.
She’s British. She is head of the Commonwealth, and queen of 15 other realms within it, only because she is queen of the United Kingdom. She could be Britain’s queen without having those roles, but she could not have those roles without being Britain’s queen. To put it in modern jargon, this is soft power — beyond the wildest dreams of any political leader.
Of course, the paradox is that it has to be very soft indeed to be powerful. The Commonwealth is the heir of Empire, and came into being only for that reason, yet if the former imperium were to use it to strike back, it would be struck down.
Indeed, there is sometimes an almost penitential aspect to the enterprise. Britain is host to the Commonwealth Secretariat in London. Britain, Australia and Canada between them pay 70 per cent of the Commonwealth’s expenses. In return, these old, rich, white powers have to sit quietly and take stick from African and Caribbean countries, some of which have distinctly unimpressive governance records. Last week, Britain got it in the neck in just this way over the “Windrush generation”.
In the early years, when the Commonwealth was much smaller, it had clear common values. In her Christmas broadcast (always a key Commonwealth propaganda moment) of 1955, the queen said that “Parliamentary government is also part of its heritage. We believe in the conception of a Government and Opposition ... All these things are part of the natural life of our free Commonwealth”. As the Commonwealth expanded, this became, in places — Uganda, Zimbabwe — embarrassingly untrue.
There have been occasions, too, when the policy of Britain conflicted with the views of Commonwealth leaders, and this has made it hard for the queen to do her duty to this country — which should always come first — and her duty to the Commonwealth at the same time. The classic case centred on South African sanctions in the 1980s, where it was a constitutional error for Buckingham Palace to stake out a different position from that of 10 Downing Street.
Yet, in part because of the queen’s longevity and integrity, the whole strange edifice has survived. Those common values mean something after all. In a globalised society, governance and the rule of law have become almost universal concerns, and the Commonwealth — in election-monitoring, for instance — furthers them. It is a worldwide multiracial institution, but with a British accent — parliamentary, using the Common Law tradition and the English language. This could not happen without political neutrality at the top, which is what the British monarchy — and, in this context, only the British monarchy — can provide.
So if one considers the astonishing fact that last week, a 91-year-old white woman asked 53 mainly non-white countries to let her 69-year-old son inherit her moral authority over them, and they said yes, one recognises how skilfully it was prepared.
The prime minister, the Foreign Office, the Cabinet Office, the Commonwealth Secretariat, the Commonwealth leaders, its “chairman-in-office”, Buckingham Palace itself, and the woman who has watched over Commonwealth affairs pulled it off. They faced down mutterings from the Indian Ministry of Foreign Affairs that it might be that great country’s turn to run the show. They guarded against all the possibilities of protest and disunity. They took advantage of this Commonwealth Conference being in London; of the queen attending what will almost certainly be her last one; even of it being her birthday. They carefully calculated the risk of the queen expressing her wish in public, and they took it. They got her to make the Commonwealth leaders make her an offer she would not refuse. It may be the greatest coup for the hereditary principle since the Restoration.
Why did the British authorities go to this trouble? I suggest that Brexit played its part. For many years, Britain’s supposed European destiny moved its attention away from the wider world and its unique heritage in it. In the 21st century, however, it becomes more and more apparent that Europe is the declining area of the world. And the Commonwealth, which has no presence on the European mainland, is the largest single entity in those areas that are growing. Britain is slowly waking up to the fact that it never ceased to be global. This awakening has not yet attained the status of a strategy, let alone a set of policies, but it is the right attitude at last. Now let’s see what Britain does with its next two years in the Commonwealth chair.
An interesting side-effect of the queen’s bold move is that it has stilled the debate about Prince Charles’s personal suitability. It prevented a campaign, and the division that goes with campaigning. La Reyne le veult (The Queen wills it), as it says on every Act of Parliament before it can become law. Those words settle a lot of things.
— The Telegraph Group Limited, London, 2018
Charles Moore has been editor of the Spectator, the Sunday Telegraph and the Daily Telegraph. He is the authorised biographer of Margaret Thatcher.
