Charles Moore
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Although the Queen is not susceptible to flattery, she would not be human if she did not notice the varying quality of the compliments paid her. Tony Blair’s words last week were perfectly pleasant and correct, but if I were the Queen, I could not help mentally comparing them with the speech of her first prime minister, Winston Churchill, when he gave a farewell dinner for her just before he left Downing Street for the last time (in 1955). ‘I have the honour,’ he began, ‘of proposing a toast which I used to enjoy drinking during the years when I was a cavalry subaltern in the reign of Your Majesty’s great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria’ (i.e., for the intervening 54 years the toast had been ‘The King’). He ended, ‘Never have the august duties which fall upon the British monarchy been discharged with more devotion than in the brilliant opening of Your Majesty’s reign. We thank God for the gifts He has bestowed upon us and vow ourselves anew to the sacred causes and wise and kindly way of life of which Your Majesty is the young, gleaming champion.’ Almost preposterous, in the Churchillian manner, yet also almost true. She is still the champion of that way of life.
Prince Charles’s words read strangely. It was a good gesture to give a birthday tribute, but his remarks had an undertow of self-absorption, a stream of mildly melancholy thoughts about the past, such as how his grandfather was dead at his age. The words ‘I’ and ‘my’ occurred more often than ‘she’ or ‘her’, and the memory of seeing his parents in 1954 after their six-month Commonwealth tour was essentially an evocation of loneliness. The broadcast felt as if it had been written by the Prince himself, and addressed to him too, more than to the rest of us.
My first experience of Mrs Blair’s now famous hairdressers found me at a disadvantage. I had just spent a week with British troops in Afghanistan in the first days of 2002. We had no electric light or hot or running water, and so I was smelly. The Blairs had just paid a flying night-time visit to Bagram airport to congratulate the servicemen and, thanks to the good offices of Alastair Campbell, I had managed to hitch a lift back to England in their plane. I was dozing in British Airways pyjamas on top of my filthy clothes when an aide tapped me on the shoulder and summoned me to Mr Blair’s presence in the expensive bit of the plane. We then had a long and very interesting talk about terrorism, Pakistan (where he had just been) and Afghanistan. Mr Blair was at his best, and I tried to listen intently, but I couldn’t help being distracted by the fact that, on the next-door BA bed, Mrs Blair was having her hair most elaborately and beautifully done by two assistants. We were approaching Heathrow, so I made to return to my seat, but as I did so Mrs Blair, still not quite fully coiffed, hurried after me, saying, ‘Charles, Charles, what are we going to do for the women of Afghanistan?’ Various satirical responses like ‘Highlights, perhaps, or a perm?’ sprang to my lips, but I suppressed them. At the time, I thought this was a scene worthy of Marie Antoinette but, on reflection, I think Mrs Blair would incur more criticism if she did not do her hair properly than if she did, and would do more damage to her husband’s cause. The £7,700 that her hair cost the Labour party at the last election seems a very small price to pay for making the television cameras — and therefore the voters — pleased to see her. In a way, there is more arrogance in not bothering about these things. On the famous Remembrance Day ceremony in 1981 when the then Labour leader, Michael Foot, wore a greenish donkey jacket, the investment of £200 in an ordinary dark coat would have saved him perhaps a million votes. Some people said, ‘Dear old Michael, he never thinks about those trivial sort of things.’ But I thought, ‘What colossal vanity that he thinks he does not need to.’ By the way, did the Labour party also pay for Mr Blair’s haircuts, and if not, why not?
The new film Junebug is charming, funny and sad. It has a line which should be made available to all families. Young wife to oafish husband: ‘God loves you just the way you are, but He loves you too much to let you stay that way.’
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