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Some of the best programmes in celebration of her 60 years have been on the World Service, collecting memories and thoughts on what the Queen means to the rest of the world, where she is often appreciated far more than at home among us cantankerous, penny-counting Brits. Take The Royal Visit (produced by Mark Rickards), in the first part of which on Sunday Dzifa Gbeho led us to Ghana in 1999 and the Queen’s speech to their parliament in Accra. It was a delicate time for Ghana, as the former military dictator, Jerry Rawlings, was coming to the end of his eight-year term of office. Would he step down quietly and enable Ghana to move on to full democracy?
The speech had been drafted and approved at every level but at the words ‘Next year your President who has led you through these momentous changes will reach the end of his second term…’ the House erupted, drowning out the Queen. At first she was nonplussed, not sure how to carry on, but all those years of doing the right thing paid off, and after a while we heard her voice ringing out clearly, stilling the unruly, ‘Mr Speaker, an open society, a free media, a truly independent judiciary, a democratically chosen, accountable executive…’
It’s what she does so brilliantly — deliver speeches written by someone else, with absolutely no inflection, but with clarity and direction, so that we hear what she says but never know what she herself thinks of it. Yet at the same time she always dresses to be conspicuous, knowing that it’s what people expect — to look to her as the centre of attention.
How can you be self-effacing and self-assertive at the same time? And get away with that as a woman, too? The feminists have never seized on the Queen as a role model but they should have. She’s never given in to fashion, yet has never gone out of fashion.
Over on Radio 2 on Wednesday, Celia Imrie presented an hour-long celebration, We Are Sixty (produced by Andy West). A curious collection of luvvies and ex-politicos (Nigel Havers, Lulu, Sir Terry, John Major, Simon Callow, Anthony Wedgwood Benn) gave us their memories of their meetings with HM. Perhaps most telling was Kelvin MacKenzie, ex-editor of the Sun, ruefully recognising that his chasing of royal stories in the 1990s was less than helpful, and especially his hounding of the Queen for not showing her grief at the death of Princess Diana. ‘She now turns out to be correct,’ he was forced to admit. ‘She understood that stories come and go… but the job of the monarch is to stay there, be regal…’
Who, though, will be the new Elizabethans? On Radio 1Xtra last week, Generation Next, presented by Gemma Cairney, gave us some inspiring stories of young people, mostly still in their teens or early twenties, who have decided that they’re not going to settle for jobs they don’t want to do, or to a lifetime of no job at all. Instead they’ve set up their own businesses, editing magazines, selling T-shirts, networking, cleaning, cycling. They’ve reckoned that at the rate things are going, with life expectancy increasing and government funds declining, anyone born in 2012 will have to work until they’re 80 before receiving a pension. Cairney quoted a statistic which suggests that the number of self-employed graduates has gone up 46 per cent in the past six years. Who wants to work for 60 years at something they’re not interested in? Better by far to turn the job round to suit you.
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