He ventures to express his sense of your Majesty's most gracious kindness to him, and of the high honour which your Majesty has been graciously pleased to confer on him.
He can only offer devotion.
It will be his delight and duty to render the transaction of affairs as easy to your Majesty as possible; and in smaller matters he hopes he may succeed in this; but he ventures to trust that, in the great affairs of state, your Majesty will deign not to withhold from him the benefit of your Majesty's guidance.
Your Majesty's life has been passed in constant communion with great men, and the knowledge and management of important transactions. Even if your Majesty were not gifted with those great abilities, which all now acknowledge, this rare and choice experience must give your Majesty an advantage in judgement which few living persons, and probably no living prince, can rival.
He whom your Majesty has so highly preferred presumes to trust to your Majesty's condescension in this behalf.
Well, if Tony Blair had got off on that foot, The Queen would have been a different movie altogether.
The above is taken from Benjamin Disraeli's letter to Queen Victoria upon his first election as prime minister, although it reads today as if the Tory genius were celebrating her coronation or jubilee. This was not an accident. Disraeli was the most obsequious and attendant leader of parliament ever to court, as it were, the intimacy of a British monarch, who, with his enthusiastic consent, was named Empress of India, and to whom comparison with the present Elizabeth II seems almost de rigueur.
We know the tale by now: the enormous outpouring of emotion, the constant barrage of headlines, the perfunctory forelock-tugging, all of which followed one of the most dramatic events of recent memory.
Yes, Helen Mirren’s performance was that good. But if Stephen Frear's rendering of her character's climacteric leaves a sour taste in the mouth, it may be because we’re given a little too much sympathy toward an institution that is… how to put this mildly?… a batpiss anachronism of the highest order.
In A Child in Time Ian McEwan refers to daytime television as “the democrat’s pornography.” He got it wrong. It’s monarchy. And the hapless Hefner of the other side of the Atlantic is made to seem the real villain in the whole sordid advent of the Post-Diana epoch. Poor Tony Blair. Forget the sovereign whose upper lip is rimed with permafrost; it’s the guy given as fleetingly heroic in his attempt to precipitate a little moisture on the damn thing who comes seeming so tragic and Lear-like.
This was inevitable since prime ministers, unlike queens, have to answer to their constituency. And in England, they have to ask permission first. Fresh off his historic victory as the white knight of New Labour, Blair is tasked with humbling himself before someone he and his wife – especially his wife – view as a monument of nostalgia and age. If it weren’t enough to go on bended knee before Her Majesty to request the traditional by-your-leave to form a national government, Blair is immediately burdened with an added role that no one this side of Hollywood should ever have to inhabit – that of damage control artist. Who'd have thought that after eleven years of Margaret Thatcher, what England needed most was Ari Gold? "It's not like I have better things to do with my time," snipes the otherwise winsome PM, shortly after news of Diana's end is received by her former in-laws with the faintest and most notorious of whimpers.
The “bangs” are reserved for stag hunting, which is to be done the very next morning at Balmoral, the royal retreat in the Scottish Highlands, where that fateful summer was to be passed without interruption. (Disraeli, by the way, hated the place; he found it drafty, though now I wonder if he blamed solely the architecture.) The pretext for getting on with things right away — the prospect of a royal jet-flight to France is swiftly nixed — is to keep the heir and the spare distracted from dwelling on recent tragic events. The Queen would be nowhere in her set ways without the helpful reliquary that is her husband Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, who suggests "stalking" an elusive estate deer, which will later serve as lame, symbolic stand-in for another fair creature stalked to death, as a way of initiating the private healing process. Never mind the public version underway in London and rest of the world. Philip’s “bumbling, ossified attitudes,” wrote Andrew O’Hagan in the New York Review of Books, “could easily, any day of the week, make Lady Macbeth look like Coretta Scott King.” Indeed, we know from first glance at this sorry and steely lot that Frears and his scriptwriter Peter Morgan must have stayed as true to actual events as humanly possible. Some families defy caricature because they’ve dedicated their whole existence to embodying one. What to make of the immediate Windsors? The gin-sipping Queen Mum looks like a wobbling calcium deposit; she balks at the suggestion that Diana’s funeral follow even a modified version of the prescripted and rehearsed protocol for her own long-awaited ceremony. The thoroughly wussified Prince Charles can’t bear to stand up to his mother and instead issues innuendos –- or has his secretary issue them for him –- to Blair signaling that however anchored in elite tradition he may be by birth, his heart is on the side of populism and progress. This is tired blood that coagulates instead of flows.
Which is all the more reason to wince at the spectacle of Tony the Pony (don't you dare call him poodle) ridden to utter exhaustion in his first month as liberal head of state. Played by the brilliant Michael Sheen, who was his own sort of queen as Miles Malpractice in Bright Young Things, Blair knows he's the beamish face of a "quiet revolution" in British politics. Now if only he can help the ancien regime get in touch with its feminine side. The stiff-haired old broad who knew Churchill and war rations as a girl just won’t swim in the same grief and sentimentality as her bereaved kingdom. Yet, ironically, the one resource Tony’s got at his disposal is the same one the Queen mastered eons ago: time. He really doesn’t have to do much except wait and let the people mount their own, noisier insurrection against establishment "values." The contemptuous tabloid covers (“Show Us You Care”) don’t seem to do the trick, but then it’s disclosed that 25% of the populace now favors abolishing the line begun by William the Conqueror, and that simply can't be tolerated. That’s when you begin to wonder how Edmund Burke, not Tony Blair, plans to save the day.
Magisterial appearances of indifference can only last so long under the true and solemn reign of Oprah. It's important to remember that Elizabeth came of age with television: She hadn’t even received the investiture when the appliance was invented and commercialized. We should feel lucky that there are still unmelted cathodes left in the Commonwealth after she became the first broadcast crown. It's over her dead body, not Diana’s, that she’ll be the last. After viewing so much fawning TV coverage of the fallen “people’s princess,” Liz finally caves. She follows Blair's suggestions for making amends with a tripartite gesture: 1. Allow the royal ensign to be flown at half-mast at Buckingham Palace (an honor that, as the Queen points out, she would not be accorded on the occasion of her own demise); 2. Meet and greet the flower-wielding commoners, share their pain; 3. Give The Speech.
You remember The Speech. The Queen’s prime time boohoo, memorably satirized by everyone from Johann Hari to Eddie Izzard, had her cringingly identify herself as "your Queen and a grandmother.” I did not know until this film that that second epithet was a late-minute addition by Blair’s cynical communications director Alastair Campbell, he of the "people's princess" phrase-mongering. Grandmother, did she say? That's certainly one way for a socialist to have redefined "nanny state," and it should go down in history as the real instance of Campbell’s sexing up an official document. No wonder he resigned in ignominy.
The Queen is, at bottom, about two ill-fated collisions: the one between Dodie Fayed's car and that Paris tunnel and the one between antiquity and modernity. It’s amazing to consider which survived the ordeal and how in tact is still remains. The throne has, in the last ten years, tried to hip to the changing times, particularly as that bridge to the 21st century morphed into a highway of superinformation. Check out the Queen’s personal website sometime. There she is, bopping through the decades like a soulless Forrest Gump. There’s even zeitgeist-appropriate fonts and yearbook quotes to match! This is not your grandmother's monarchy anymore. Though all mention of the unfortunate mid-nineties episode, which threatened briefly to bring down the whole creaking edifice, is kept to a dignified minimum. Madonna and the Sex Pistols get better coverage than Diana at royal.gov.uk.
And should David Cameron become the next premier, we'd have a cuddlier Conservative who recycles, approves gay marriage and sways at campaign stops to The Smith's "The Queen Is Dead." Maybe not quite yet, but she's come a long way, baby.
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