The Real Elizabeth: An Intimate Portrait of Queen Elizabeth II by Andrew Marr

Author:Andrew Marr [Marr, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780805094169
Publisher: Macmillan

Of all the cabinet ministers privately offended by the duties required by the Palace, none was more outspoken in his diary, published after his death a decade later to much tut-tutting, than Richard Crossman, the irreverent intellectual. He reported more about the Queen than anyone else of that era. His own journey was from near apoplexy about the flummery of court ritual (noticeably more formal in the 1960s than it is today) to growing admiration for the Queen and her deft use of silences and confidences. Along the way, however, he proved himself a shrewd observer of the uneasy relationship between the Queen and her first socialist ministers. In October 1964 he expressed outrage about the ritual of kissing hands to become members of the Privy Council: “I don’t suppose anything more dull, pretentious, or plain silly has ever been invented. There we were, sixteen grown men. For over an hour we were taught how to stand up, how to kneel on one knee on a cushion, how to raise the right hand with the Bible in it, how to advance three paces towards the Queen, how to take the hand and kiss it.”

At the actual ceremony, Crossman found “this little woman with the beautiful waist” who had to go through “this rigmarole” for forty minutes: “We were uneasy, she was uneasy.”9 At that stage Crossman was housing minister, but from August 1966 until 1968 he was leader of the Commons and Lord President of the Council. In this latter role he was the prime link between Parliament and the Queen, expected to attend all Privy Council meetings and present a large number of decisions for royal approval. Crossman had a long and deep interest in the British constitution but found these duties onerous and irrelevant.

On September 20, 1966, he traveled to Balmoral, noting that the Grampian Mountains were not as beautiful as the Scottish west coast, and finding the building “a typical Scottish baronial house, looking as though it had been built yesterday, with a nice conventional rose garden and by the little church, a golf course, which nobody plays on except the staff.” His ill temper and mild contempt were not diluted by the formal meeting with the Queen, during which “I read aloud the 50 or 60 titles of the Orders in Council, pausing after every half dozen for the Queen to say, ‘agreed.’” It was, he felt, two and a half minutes “of the purest mumbo-jumbo” which had required four ministers, “all busy men, to take a night and day off to travel to Scotland.” Once the official business was over, however, Crossman’s irritation evaporated and his diarist’s eye took over:

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