The queen at 90: the secret of one’s success 

The Queen’s coronation, Westminster Abbey, London, 1953. Photograph: Fox Photos/Getty Images

Last modified on Friday 1 April 2016 19.05 EDT

Elizabeth II is a good queen; monarchists have won this reign. To understand why – or how – she has succeeded, you must understand what the British monarchy is, and what it is not.

Reverence is not analysis – for that you must go to other newspapers, who prostrate themselves (and I love to read them). Do monarchists know, as they praise the Queen’s personal qualities, and grope for the superlative, that they are only acknowledging the flaw in constitutional monarchy? The system, itself, is defective. They just got lucky with this one.

Monarchy is not a tourist attraction, any more than St Peter’s in Rome is a tourist attraction; that is incidental. It is not soap opera, even if it sometimes seems like one, as when Diana and Camilla fought for Charles, for example. Nor is it a game, with pretty princesses and toy soldiers. Monarchy is a narcotic; Elizabeth II is not known or understood, she is imbibed. Ignore those who call her a living connection to the withered power of empire, and lay her popularity there. It is much deeper than that.

As a young child, she did not know she would be queen; she did not know if there would be any more queens at all

In 1936, during the abdication crisis, Elizabeth was 10, and this, I think, is why she is sane and resolute. As a young child, she did not know she would be queen; she did not know if there would be any more queens at all. Her narrative was written for her in early adolescence, and she took it: dutiful Elizabeth, who left her bed at night to tidy her shoes.

The Queen Mother, then Queen Elizabeth, with princess Elizabeth at Royal Lodge, Windsor, Berkshire, during the second world war. Photograph: Popperfoto

She was 13 when the war began, and 19 when it ended; she may have been shrouded at Windsor with her sister Margaret, but she would have heard the aircraft heading for France, seen the bomb craters. I also suspect that, with the last Queen-Empress Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon (“the steel marshmallow”) for a mother, Elizabeth would never fall to narcissism, for there could only be one star in that household. (After her husband died, the Queen Mother asked to move from Clarence House to the far grander Lancaster House, but her daughter, who knew how it would look, would not allow it.)

Elizabeth succeeded her father George VI at 25; it was, to put it heartlessly, a good start to a reign, for a young and pretty woman is a good victim and monarchy is, explicitly, martyrdom. Her life may be gilded, but it is not her own; even her critics know that.

She has succeeded chiefly because, whatever she does not know – her mother had a horror of female intellectuals and her nanny, Marion Crawford, had to conspire with her grandmother Queen Mary to get Elizabeth any education worth the name – she knows the power of saying nothing, and of gesture. I have seen her book shelves at Sandringham House (Labrador Retriever, A Sloth In The Family, Gnomes); even so, she has a weighty silence, which can be considered wisdom in dim light. She has never given an interview (as of when this magazine went to press), or assisted personally with a biography.

Her manners are, in public, notable; contrast them with her husband and her children, who are often rude, and leak rage, and they grow even better. I remember the diamond jubilee when she stood, aged 86, on a silly golden boat on the River Thames. It was raining. Anyone else would have sat down, or gone inside, but not the queen of England; she stood, a victim of our subtle barbarism, for hours in the rain. This moved me, reluctantly and utterly; this is the awesome power of the silence and the martyrdom. It reminded me of the first Queen Elizabeth, who was sent to the Tower of London by her half-sister Mary for perceived treason. She paused on the steps of Traitors’ Gate in 1554 – it was raining – and refused to enter, until people had seen her refusal. Then she went in. I am innocent, said the first Elizabeth. I am grateful, said the second. I honour you by standing in the rain.

Whatever her real thoughts, which I suspect tend to horses and dogs, she projects, convincingly, that she cares for us

She has also, largely through intermediaries (I call them spokesfriends, or spokescousins) pretended, in an amazing contortion, to have practised thrift. This is ludicrous – consider the paintings, the horses, the jewels – but the story is deeply felt; the myth would be human and she tries, but she fails. She uses a small electric fire; she eats cereal from Tupperware. She turns off lights.

Her style is, again, an expression of humility; of clothes worn not for her sake, but our own. They are expensive and handmade but they are not fashionable or foreign; they are bright (she must be seen from far away); modest (myths have no thigh); almost dowdy (the queen who could be you). No woman wears her wealth so lightly.

Whatever her real thoughts, which I suspect tend to horses and dogs, and things that cannot speak, she projects, convincingly, that she cares for us; longevity, always a friend to famous queens, did the rest.

In the rain on the River Thames during the diamond jubilee celebrations. Photograph: WPA Pool/Getty Images

Who knows how long monarchy will outlive Elizabeth II? Charles may be a kind man (I do not know), but he is self-pitying and self-serving; his rudeness to the BBC royal correspondent Nicholas Witchell – “I can’t bear that man,” he said on a ski slope in 2005, “he’s so awful, he really is” – exposed how he misunderstands his role. Witchell is not a person to be loathed, but a conduit to people, who must be respected. (At the periphery, there is Prince Harry dressed in a Nazi uniform, as if he had forgotten the war, which was the foundation of his immediate dynasty’s success; recently, Prince Andrew viciously assaulted a gate).

William, meanwhile, seems to both shrink from and exploit his destiny; he has, since his marriage, renovated two homes at vast expense, as if austerity is something he need not even acknowledge with tact. His interviews show an anxious man who seeks to keep something for himself , and this will not do, cruel though it is. Monarchy is a sacred contract; and a contract goes both ways.

With Prince William and Kate, Duchess of Cambridge on the balcony at Nottingham’s Council House, 2012. Photograph: REX/Shutterstock

Elizabeth’s only mistake, in the eyes of monarchists, has been to fail to ready her heirs – a mistake to excite the psychologists. Could she not bear to lay them on the same pyre? Was her indulgence of her family the only form of rebellion she could allow? Can you be a good queen and a good mother, or does motherhood require something doughtier?

Some think the Queen is a jewelled blank, and maybe it is true. I recoil instinctively from a monarchy that insists, by its very existence, that a strict class system is the best way to unite a nation. I deny, utterly, the supposed political neutrality of the monarchy, because it is predicated on its own self-preservation; it is all conservative. But even a republican has to say, in the end – what a performance!

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