ANOTHER VOICE
Now the Queen joins our great national moan
AUBERON WAUGH
Whatever he may now say, or Shea, I have no doubt at all in my own mind that the Queen's press secretary was authorised by the Queen to speak to the Sunday Times as he did. The Sunday Times broke the rules by practically announcing that the Queen had authorised the leak, and Shea is culpable to the extent that he chose the Sunday Times, rather than some more credible newspaper which would have been believed when it said what the Queen was thinking without announcing how it came to their knowledge. The proper way for the Queen to make her opinions known — if she is not prepared to write a regular signed column in either of the two great organs of intelligent information, the Spec- tator or Literary Review — is to send an old buffer in a bowler hat round to the Guards Club (or whatever has taken its place) to buttonhole Mr Kenneth Rose. The in- formation is then conveyed through in- numerable nudges and winks over a glass of sound but not sensational vintage port and transcribed into an elegant paragraph in the Sunday Telegraph's feature called 'Albany at Large', where it is read by whatever proportion of the literate popula- tion takes an interest in what the Queen is thinking.
Even as I offered the Queen a column in Literary Review a few minutes ago, it occurred to me that the feature might prove to be of minority interest among the readers. That we all love her goes without saying. We also admire and feel grateful to her for the beautiful way she has carried out her duties. By her existence, she reassures us that we need not be guilty about such privilege as may attach to our separate conditions, since this is but a tiny reflection of the quasi-divine privilege which reposes in the monarchy. Far more effectively than Mrs Thatcher, she con- vinces us that there is nothing wrong in inequality, that even wealth itself is not necessarily evil (or 'obscene', as left-wing MPs may put it, having just voted them- selves £20,000 in tax-free allowances).
But there has never seemed much need to know what she was thinking. For myself, I must admit that while deferring to her experience of public life and the enormous number of State papers she must have read in 34 years as monarch, I have never spent much time pondering her attitude on poli- tics or public affairs. It seems to me that people's judgment in these vast public areas is nearly always determined by self- interest, or at any rate by their interpreta- tion of where their advantage lies. There is nothing wrong with that, of course, but it makes discussion of the subject rather boring, not to say depressing, as people insist on dressing up their self-interest in the shining garments of disinterestedness: patriotism, national duty, compassion, an urge for progress. . . I am not saying that none of these emotions exists, merely that they have little or nothing to do with political choice. They may be clothes pro- duced by politicians to hide the nakedness of their own power-urges, but they are also used by all of us as a covering for our own selfish interests.
It may be depressing to learn that the Queen is 'very much to the Left on social issues', that she feels Mrs Thatcher's poli- cies (the policies for which the Conserva- tive Government was re-elected in 1983) are 'uncaring, confrontational and divi- sive', but it was also fairly predictable, and, as such, not very interesting. The monar- chy has everything to gain, and nothing to lose, by sucking up to Labour voters. It has everything to gain by dissociating itself from the Conservative Government, parti- cularly if the Queen's access to confidential papers about oil revenues or' whatever makes her believe that Mrs Thatcher is either going to lose the next election or find herself in an irredeemable mess after it.
do not propose to discuss the Common- wealth issue, except to observe that even in the matter of South African sanctions the Queen seems to have won the trick where public opinion is concerned. It may be mildly interesting that 61 per cent of the voters now think (according to Gallup) that Mrs Thatcher should defer to the Queen on sanctions, although this can be explained by the fact that the government propaganda machine has not yet fallen in behind the no-sanctions line while it pre- tends to keep its options open. When it starts spelling out the damage which sanc- tions will inflict on jobs in the car industry (no chromium, the poor darlings) and a hundred other industries, public opinion will almost certainly change back.
But what is much more significant, from the same Gallup poll, is that 76 per cent of Labour voters now believe that Mrs Thatcher should defer to the Queen on all major matters where they disagree. This is
almost unbelievable, even allowing for the extreme stupidity of Labour voters. No wonder Mr Benn had his reservations about the Queen's initiative on behalf of the black South Africans.
However, it is to the domestic scene that we must return, where we now face the gloomy prospect of having a self- proclaimed Shirley Williams figure on the throne. Last week both Charles Moore and Sir Peregrine Worsthorne predicted that the Queen's intervention would bring a great upswell of affection and support for Mrs Thatcher among Conservatives, and rather to my surprise I find this is exactly what has happened with me.
Both Mrs Thatcher and the Royal Fami- ly are by now such fixed points in the firmament that we have all, I imagine, gone through extremes of feeling towards them, both in favour and against. Apart from dismay at the proletarian appearance of Prince Andrew (now abated) and a flash of cold fury against Prince Philip when he insulted my friend Terry Wogan on televi- sion, I have generally kept the Queen at the door of my weatherhouse, Mrs Thatch- er skulking inside. Everything has now changed.
No doubt the Queen was speaking for a large part of Britain when she allowed her mouthpiece to describe Mrs Thatcher's policies as 'uncaring, confrontational and divisive', but what sort of Britain was she speaking for? Obviously, she was speaking for that part of an already divided Britain which is good for nothing except granting itself huge wage increases (now running at 8 per cent against 21/2 per cent inflation). She was speaking for the miserable North which has moaned itself into a posture of total state dependency and can think of no solution to its problems except to moan for more. She was speaking for a Britain which is not only in irreversible decline but knows it, a Britain which is not only doomed, but self-pitying and odious in its predicament.
The greatest and most obvious injustice is to suppose that Mrs Thatcher does not care. Anybody can see that she cares passionately. One sometimes has the im- pression that she is almost the only person in Britain who cares. It might not make her very likeable, but it certainly makes her less odious than those who equate caring with moaning. Now the Queen has joined our national moan, we have only Mrs Thatcher left.
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