Books
The making of a monarch
John Grigg
Majesty: Elizabeth II and the House of Windsor Robert Lacey (Hutchinson £5.45) Books about living celebrities may be good business for authors and publishers, but they are seldom good biography, and when the celebrity in question is a reigning monarch in her silver jubilee year the dangers of suppressio veri and suggestio lalsi are maximal. There can be little doubt that Robert Lacey's book is good business. According to the Sunday Times (which is serialising extracts from it) the initial hardback print is 50,000 and 'another 100,000 are bespoke for book club editions this year and next.' To be worthy of such a very large distribution Majesty would need to be not only readable, but also—against all the odds—accurate, forthright and fair. Though its merits are considerable, it does not quite pass the test. .Readable it certainly is. Mr Lacey writes With liveliness and wit, and his occasional !apses into trashiness are probably tongueln-cheek. But is it accurate? For a book which is the product of two years' full-time' research by an author with historical qualifications, there are too many small mistakes, as well as a few that are not trivial. To the second category belongs the statement that labour would not, in 1940, agree to enter a coalition under Halifax. The truth is that Labour only refused to serve under Chamberlain, and that Attlee for one would have preferred Halifax to Churchill as Prime minister.
But the more serious criticism of the book is that it gives neither a sufficiently clear-cut 131cture of the Queen nor a balanced assessM. ent of her reign to date. More than half of It deals with the period before her accession —which is surely the wrong proportion— and the account of her reign contains too Much about constitutional formalities in United Kingdom, too little about her wider mission both here and in other parts °f the world. (The list of acknowledg°lents is revealing, since it includes the °aMes of no Commonwealth politicians or Journalists, no important foreigners and no representatives of recent immigrant corn
Unities in this country.)
, °fie may infer from the text that Mr LaeeY has met the Queen, and' perhaps s,.taYed at Sandringham, though protocol iiorbids him to say that he has 'interviewed' ,er. He describes her as shy, but also self;°rifident and strong-willed; privately .rtunt. orous though outwardly unbending: iktroited in outlook, yet impressive in her • n°wIedge and wisdom. There is some ,ruth in this portrait, but the paradoxes are too extreme for it to be wholly convincing, and anyway the total effect is blurred and superficially bland. The late Bill Connor (`Cassandra' of the Daily Mirror) once described Michael Foot as 'an acid drop with a marshmallow centre.' The opposite description might be applied to Mr Lacey.
While he affects to defend the Queen against her critics, a close reading of his book shows that he is ambivalent about her and even more so about the monarchy. The last words of the book are, to say the least, somewhat enigmatic:' "We'll go quietly," is one of her favourite jokes, its humour deriving largely from her well-founded confidence that her sincerity will not be put to the test. But if Britain were one day to decide it no longer needed the monarchy, then her response would be nothing but the logical continuation of her entire life. To comply, indeed, would be her ultimate service.' Mr Lacey may not expect the monarchy to come to an end in her lifetime. But does he really want it to endure ?
In a chapter entitled 'Lord Altrincham' (which was my name when I put forward some welt-meant criticisms of the Queen twenty years ago) Mr Lacey does not give a full or fair summary of my argument as a whole. Moreover, he makes one comment which is bound to be misunderstood at my expense. 'The 1950s criticism of the Queen's advisers missed the point,' he says, because 'the Queen is her own mistress. . . so her critics were deceived either by her youth, or by their own respectfulness, in blaming her entourage for what they disliked in her public image.' It will naturally be assumed that, in a chapter bearing my name, I am one of the critics referred to in this passage. But in fact I went out of my way at the time to explain that in all royal matters not covered by ministerial responsibility the Queen herself was responsible, and must therefore be criticised in person for anything that was wrong. It is tiresome to be thought to have 'missed' a point which I was particularly careful to stress.
Mr Lacey devotes a chapter to the Queen's use of her prerogative in the appointment of prime ministers, beginning with the fascinating might-have-been of 1953. That summer Churchill nearly died from a stroke while his heir-apparent, Eden, was also incapacitated by illness, and Mr Lacey reveals what has hitherto been a closely guarded secret—that in the event of Churchill's death Salisbury would have been appointed to the job temporarily, pending Eden's return to health and strength. When in 1957 Macmillan was chosen to succeed Eden, it was, in Mr Lacey's view, 'a miscalculation' for the
Queen to go through the public motions of consulting Churchill and Salisbury, so giving the false impression that 'she had selected a prime minister to run her country solely on the say-so of two elderly men with no clearly defined constitutional function.'
Even sharper is his criticism of her action in 1963, when she accepted Mr Macmillan's advice to invite Lord Home to try to form a government. This Mr Lacey regards as possibly 'a betrayal of responsibility,' suggesting that she should have either made 'wider soundings of her own' or handed 'the hot chestnut' back to the Conservative Party `by insisting that they should sort out their own problems for themselves.' But surely the first course would have been fatal, because it would have made her a direct participant in the Tory power struggle. The second would have been less objectionable, though in the circumstances it, too, would have had its dangers, because it would have involved her publicly in a controversial stand on a matter affecting party organisation.
Her real mistake was to have allowed another Tory leadership crisis to occur without having persuaded the Tories, for her sake, to democratise their method of choosing a leader. The old method, or absence of it, could only put the sovereign in an invidious position whenever a new leader had to be chosen while the Tories were in office. A constitutional monarch should have no political power, only influence, and after 1957 the Queen's influence should have been exerted behind the scenes to ensure that there would never again be any question of her having a more than nominal or formal share in appointing the country's chief executive.
In the domestic politics of any monarchical nation of the Commonwealth, the Crown should simply be a code-word for the Government. But the Queen is also Head of the Commonwealth as a whole, and if Mr Lacey is right in saying that she absented herself from the 1971 Commonwealth prime ministers' conference in Singapore because Mr Heath advised her not to go, her decision should indeed be condemned. In such a matter the prime minister of the United Kingdom has no exclusive right to advise her, and she no obligation to act on his advice. But Mr Lacey seems to be oblivious of this point, since he writes as though Mr Heath were to blame for the Queen's absence from Singapore.
Apart from her relative freedom as Head of the Commonwealth, the Queen is also free, even in the United Kingdom, to act on her own initiative in any number of ways not strictly political, and therefore not covered by ministerial responsibility. A proper assessment of her reign should focus above all upon her performance as an independent agent. Mr Lacey rightly praises her dignityand steadiness, but for the rest takes refuge in equivocation. His state portrait is neither grossly flattering nor an uncompromising presentation of the truth.
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