The Last Queen by Clive Irving

Author:Clive Irving
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2021-01-05T00:00:00+00:00

When Frost relayed this conversation to me, we were both shocked. It seemed like such a reactionary position for a Labour government to take – the kind of automatically repressive judicial voice that belonged to another age. But we were gagged, and we knew it.

When the Aberfan tribunal reported a year later, its verdict was savage. The tragedy was the result of ‘bungling ineptitude by many men charged with tasks for which they were totally unfitted’. There had been frequent failures to hear clear warnings and ‘a total lack of direction from the top’. The head of the National Coal Board, Lord (Alf) Robens, accepted the findings. Robens was a party hack I had met several times and he would have been incapable of running a fish and chip shop.

In his diary, Harold Wilson wrote of Aberfan, ‘The highest praise was for Lord Snowdon. He had gone spontaneously and instead of inspecting the site, he made it his job to visit the bereaved relatives, sitting holding the hands of a distraught father, with the head of a mother on his shoulder for half an hour in silence…’

It seemed to me that Wilson had left something unspoken. The one commoner in the royal family had shown a natural common touch in the midst of a great tragedy. The Queen was not expected to show a common touch, but she had held herself aloof in a way that surprised many of her subjects.

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