Down With the Royals by Joan Smith

Author:Joan Smith [Joan Smith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781849549011
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
Published: 2015-08-28T16:00:00+00:00

The same paper did the job it was supposed to do, spelling out what the Queen’s words meant in a strapline: ‘The monarch breaks her silence on Scottish independence four days before voters go to the polls, with her comments interpreted as support for a No vote.’

The Daily Mail went even further, describing the Queen’s observation as a ‘stark warning’44 about independence.

What actually happened behind the scenes emerged three months later, when The Guardian laid out the high-level planning that went into her apparently off-the-cuff remark.45 The paper reported that ‘senior figures in Whitehall’ were panicked by a YouGov poll published two weeks before the vote that showed a six-point drop in support for the ‘no’ campaign in the previous month; they approached Buckingham Palace, suggesting that an intervention from the Queen would be helpful. The situation became more critical during a subsequent visit to Balmoral by the Prime Minister, when the Sunday Times published the first opinion poll to show the ‘yes’ campaign ahead, if by the narrowest of margins (51 per cent). The shift in public opinion led to last-minute negotiations between the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood, and the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Christopher Geidt; they came up with a ‘carefully worded intervention’ as No. 10 experienced what the paper described as a ‘meltdown’ over the prospect of a ‘yes’ vote. The Guardian then described precisely the process I outlined above:

The two men are understood to have initially discussed the wisdom of a public intervention by the monarch, who is scrupulously impartial. Once it became clear that the Queen was minded to speak out, Geidt and Heywood then needed to fashion language which, while broadly neutral, would leave nobody in any doubt about her support for the union [my italics].

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