JUBILEE SPECIAL: Is the Queen for real?

A funny and thoughtful chat about Her Maj, with the distinguished royal biographer, ROBERT HARDMAN, in the back of a London black cab.

Photo by Mathew Browne on Unsplash

I met Robert Hardman twenty years ago this August, in a cafe in the Normandy seaport of Dieppe. We were both there, along with hundreds of other journalists from all over the UK and the British Commonwealth, covering the 60th anniversary of the World War Dieppe Raid, the 1942 water-bourne bloodbath in which thousands of allied soldiers died. The battle’s code name, it’s worth remembering today, was Operation Jubilee. 

I was eating a solitary plate of scallops, feeling a bit glum, reading a copy of the Spectator, the newsweekly for which I’d recently been commissioned to write a series of articles by its then upstart editor, Boris Johnson. Hardman, a columnist for The Daily Mail and former royal correspondent for The Telegraph had recently been sacked as the Spectator’s restaurant critic (more on how and why in the interview below). He was sitting with a lively gang of flush-faced Fleet St. hacks, and taking pity on the lonely Canadian, he politely  asked if I’d like to join their table. 

The next day I turned up to the ceremony with the rest of the press corps, choked back tears (the emotion of the ceremony having been amplified by the heat and my punishing hangover), then filed several inches of suitably moving copy and went out for more wine and scallops with the other hacks. Hardman, however, stayed back and spent the rest of the afternoon and evening fetching water and chairs and generally assisting the elderly British war vets whom he’d noticed were not receiving sufficient support. He then dashed off yet another feature story, this one drawing attention to the issue of the UK’s neglected war vets. He then kindly offered me a ride back to London, which I gratefully accepted.

When we got to the British border, the guard began giving me the typical rigamarole about my Canadian passport and UK work visa, and Robert – I will never forget this because it was the first and last time I have ever seen him get shirty with anyone – snapped,“Sir, do you not find it even slightly ridiculous to be hassling this woman, today of all days, when I’m sure you’re aware her Canadian ancestors fought and died for our country?”

(I’d mentioned to Hardman that my grandmother was in the Wrens but not that she’d been honourably discharged. For what, she never said. Carousing with sailors most likely.)

In any case, an alliance was formed! 

In addition to being an absolute bonafide gentleman and easily the most prototypically “English” Englishman I’ve ever meant (I mean that in an entirely good way), Robert is the author of two critically acclaimed books on the life and reign of Queen Elizabeth II, the most recent of which, Queen of the World, was published last month. He’s also made a series of lauded television documentaries about the Windsors, for which he was given unprecedented access to the family firm and their archive. Over 25 years he’s covered over sixty royal tours. Sixty! Back before he had a family, he travelled so much he kept separately pre-packed suitcases at home for last-minute trips to tropical and nordic weather conditions. It’s safe to say literally no one alive has seen more ribbons cut, or champagne bottles shattered by regal hands outside the royals themselves and the palace staff. He has astonishing stories to tell and a brain so rich with historical arcana, chatting to him is like touring a royal archive, with occasional dry jokes. 

While I’m fascinated by British history and, on a human level, an admirer of the Queen, years of churning out freelance copy for the Canadian magazine market rendered me, over time, if not a full-blown republican, a bit of a royal grinch. The whole concept of “divine right” – before you even get to the blood-soaked colonial dynastic legacy part – it’s just a bit silly isn’t it? My ambivalent take on constitutional monarchy itself (both in the UK, Canada and beyond) essentially boils down to fine okay, whatever. If it ain’t broke…

Having said that, in our interview Robert makes a compelling (even inspiring) case for why the monarchy is not just historically and symbolically important but integral for the smooth functioning of current and future of democracy. 

Whatever your feelings about the Queen, the monarchy, the future of the Commonwealth, the House of Windsor or Meghan Markle’s Netflix deal, this interview is worth a read, if only to hear about Hardman’s televised pint with Nigel Farage and of course, the full story of how he was arguably the first person ever (though certainly not the last) to be fired by our former editor, the UK’s venerable lockdown-partying PM. 

Toward the end I make reference to a certain fast approaching unspeakable event that shall not be mentioned (I’ll just say it: the Queen’s death). Inevitable as it is, for professional monarchists like Hardman it remains somewhat sacrilegious, or at the very least deeply undecorous, to speculate about the matter in public. Notice the wonderful way he skirts round the subject with the nimble-mannered elegance of a Hogwart’s headmistress avoiding talk of Voldemort. 

Like I said: a bonafide gent.

[Note: the transcript of this Zoom interview has been edited and condensed from the audio in which there was a bit of talking over each other and sound delay on account of my crap wifi. Also while Robert speaks in fully formed paragraphs, my questions were characteristically blathery, so I cleaned them up a bit to avoid boring you to death with sentence fragments.]

LM: There you are! You’re literally in a black cab… So where are you off to?

RH: Well, I’ve done a couple of Canadian interviews and I’ve just been doing a TV thing on GB News, on The Nigel Farage Show. 

LM: Oh my god. 

[derisive laughter — on my part because Robert is not, and never was, a supporter of Farage, the former leader of the now-defunct fringe right UKIP and Brexit Parties, now a broadcaster on GB News, the UK’s answer to Fox News… shudder]

RH: Look I mean, it’s the first interview I’ve done where you get given a pint of beer. And actually he’s quite knowledgeable –

LM: That’s the whole thing about Farage, isn’t it? He’s pretty good company, in spite of it all. 

RH: He was actually. He’d actually done his research. Anyway, then I’ve got Radio New Zealand, and I was meant to go on some Australian chat show at midnight but I’ve cancelled it because I’ve got to be up at five a.m. to go on the Today Programme so…

LM: Okay, first of all tell me about your book and this Jubilee – why is it so important? 

RH: Well, we are in uncharted territory, we’ve never had a Platinum Jubilee before, what they call the next one I don’t know. Where does the colour chart go after platinum? I did ask the palace and they didn’t know either. So I thought it was a good moment to reflect on this extraordinary reign. And a lot of people said, Well can there really be anything new to say about the Queen? And I speak as someone who’s written books and TV programmes about her before, and the fact is, as soon as you start digging, there’s an awful lot new to say and learn. I was very lucky that she allowed me to read her father’s war time diaries for example. And when you read his account of going through the bleakest existential crisis this country’s ever faced, it explains a lot about her. About her response to crises, how she handles difficult situations, and boy has she seen a few. There’s that old cliche ‘Keep calm and carry on,’ but she really does embody it, and I think that’s important. 

LM: She certainly does… I also wanted to talk to you a bit about your job. I’ve known you for years and you’ve had this extraordinary career, first as a proper jobbing royal correspondent in the Diana years, on the royal rota. And now you’ve emerged as this global commonwealth expert on the Queen and the House of Windsor. Can you talk a little bit about what that arc has been like?

RH: I was just thinking actually we’re coming up to another anniversary of the Dieppe raid [laughter] and this is the thing about monarchy, it really does anchor you in history. Wherever you go, if you follow the royal family, you’re always going to see the best of stuff. You’re not going to see it for very long though. I remember seeing the pyramids with Prince Charles, the only time I’ve ever seen the pyramids. We were there for half an hour and then we had to go and see a sewage works. But you know, the point was, we got a great view of the pyramids for half an hour.

When you’re on tour with them, you’re automatically ushered into the presence of whomever’s running the world. So it’s a fascinating way of seeing the likes of Boris Yeltsin or Barack Obama or Nelson Mandela. I mean, I don’t pretend to know these people, but to watch the Queen or the royal family, to see their interactions, that sort of bilateral relationship at any given time, that’s fascinating. Over the course of my journalistic career I’ve covered lots of other stuff… I did about ten years as a royal correspondent but I was also doing a sports column and lots of other stuff. I was even a restaurant critic for about a year until Boris Johnson fired me but that’s another story–

LM: No, no you have to tell that story, in particular the firing line. What was it? He called you up and said–

RH: Right, gosh, he called me up, I think on his first day. Come to think of it, I might be the first person to be fired from anything by Boris Johnson, which is something he might be about to experience himself, but that really is another story – 

[laughter]

Anyway he rang me up on his first day running the Spectator and said, ‘Well old boy, I’m going to have to let you go because you know, really, Conrad Black [then proprietor of the Specci], he wants some more birds on the paper and you know, you’re not really a bird are you?’ Which is manifestly true… And so I said, ‘Well this is sex discrimination isn’t it Boris?’ And he said ‘Well steady on old boy. You know I have been reading your columns and well, it must be said, they’re  just not very good.’ And of course he was right, they were rubbish. So I went without a fight.

LM: But didn’t he also say something about the food?

RH: Oh you’re right! You’ve got a good memory [ed note: I don’t] He’d noticed that everywhere I went I tended to order the same thing which was the squid, followed by the lamb and a bottle of Cote du Rone. [laughter] But I mean, gosh, why not? It’s a perfectly good test of a restaurant’s quality. 

[laughter]

LM: But weren’t all the restaurants also within the bounds of W10?

RH: Yes, I believe there was also a certain ah, radius issue. I wasn’t the most adventurous restaurant critic. 

LM: He’s a man of principle, our Prime Minister. Very decisive.

RH: Yes, quite. 

LM: You are a creature of habit, though. And you’ve made an absolute science of the royals. And you say you don’t know them, which sounds a bit strange, but this is true. I know because I’ve been on the royal rota a couple of times and it’s a strange thing because obviously you’re close to these people but they don’t give interviews, at least not officially. But obviously they have, the Queen in particular has, a relationship with the press that’s incredibly important. And especially when it comes to people like you, who are almost like real time historians in action. Can you just describe what that relationship is like? I almost imagine it as being like a zoologist. In the sense that you can’t talk to the Bengal tiger, but instead you study the Bengal tiger… 

RH: Well it is a very strange journalistic relationship. I mean, you’re in a curious position. I’ve been a political reporter and covered all manner of things and it’s very unlike that. With royalty it’s fairly one way. You can’t just chuck in questions or if the story’s going in one direction, there isn’t an opposition you can go to, in order to get the counter view. Because most of the time, there isn’t one. And they can’t answer back anyway. There’s not much they can say on many points because they’re meant to be above politics. So if they’re on a state visit and some bilateral row erupts, they can’t get involved, it’s for the Foriegn Secretary to do that. So you do sort of end up studying them. 

I’ve often likened going on a royal tour to being on a school trip. It’s like that, except that the kids at the back of the bus are kind of keeping an eye on the staff at the front. The press are there to see how it goes. And yes it’s a curious relationship, but over the years you draw a lot from talking to the people around them, and the people who’ve just met them. You watch their interactions with the public. It’s actually important that they keep an air of mystique. The Queen gets that. 

There is this sort of royal paradox that we want our royal family to be just like us, but at the same time we want them to be very different and well, very royal. So you always hear this cry that they cost too much and ‘Oh why can’t we have a bicycling monarchy?’ like some of the Scandinavians. And you know, at the same time at the Jubilee Parade, if the Queen turned up on a bicycle everyone would be absolutely appalled. [ed note: I disagree, it would have been awesome.] I mean, we want carriages and horses and cavalry and horses and crowns and diamonds. So it’s just a strange situation. We are where we are. But it remains a relationship of enduring fascination. Not just here and for people in her other realms like Canada and right the way around the world. 

LM: Okay, one last question. Around age five, all my kids have asked me the same question, which is this: Is the actually Queen real?

And I think it’s an extraordinary question, not just on a philosophical level, but because it’s never a question I would have asked as a child growing up in Canada. Unlike my own kids I grew up singing God Save the Queen every morning with a portrait of her at the front of the classroom – as you know Canada is more uniformly royalist in an unquestioning way, there is just a complete love of the Queen, primarily because she’s what makes us not American – but all my children have asked me this question and I didn’t know how to answer it. Or I answered it badly. I said something like ‘Of course darling!’ But I wonder if the answer isn’t actually more complicated than that. So what do you think, Is the Queen real?

RH:  [laughs] Well, yes, I mean it’s interesting because she’s sort of all things to all people. A question we always hear from children is ‘Why isn’t she wearing her crown?’ Because everyone’s grown up with this fairytale idea and of course she is the living embodiment of the fairytale in that she lives in palaces and castles with a throne and a crown and all that so it’s actually a very reasonable question to ask.

I think it goes to the heart of the mystique of the monarchy. Obviously children are not going to understand constitutional niceties, they’d probably run away if you tried to explain them. But they get that sense that the Queen is an entity, that this is a person who is somehow in charge but also very different from the politicians who are also in charge. And then that gradually morphs into the idea that there are politicians who govern and a Queen who reigns. The way I try to explain it to my children is by saying, she’s almost like a kind of referee figure. She’s there to stop the game from getting out of hand. 

While I was writing my book it was right after the mob had invaded Congress in Washington. At one point I was talking to George Bush about it and he conceded that it was the sort of situation that you just wouldn’t get in Britain because you’ve got that separation of powers. The executive and the head of state. It does create a layer of stability. There are only twenty-seven monarchies in the world and yet there are nearly two hundred countries, but when you look at the league table, of the countries that have the best human rights, the highest standards of living… by no means are all of them monarchies, of course, but a vastly disproportionate number of monarchies are up there. Look there’s Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Norway – Britain is quite far down the list I might add – but you can see that sense of stability. There’s a certain continuity that comes with this weird system of government – a system that frankly no one would create today. I mean if you were starting a new country today, no one would ever say ‘Oh I know, let’s pick one family and give them everything and then keep them there forever!’ It wouldn’t happen, quite rightly.

But we are a complex historical organism and life isn’t rational. The great Sir Anthony Jay who wrote two of the great royal documentaries as well as Yes, Prime Minister, and all sorts of other things, he was a friend of the Queen – brilliant man, he wrote the modern royal mission statement – and he said ‘It’s completely irrational to ignore the irrational.’ He made that point and it’s true. So much of what we do, our allegiances to sports teams, our rituals in church, the way we put candles on birthday cakes, why do we do these things? They’re not rational. Why aren’t roads in a straight line? Why does Britain drive on the left? 

It’s totally irrational. And yet these things have evolved with us, like the monarchy. We’re very comfortable with them. They anchor us. They explain who we are. They give us a living connection to the past. 

LM: So if they’re not broke, why fix ‘em?

RH: Yes, sure. And there’s a perfectly reasonable argument for doing away with them. There’s always about twenty to thirty percent of the country who think we should have an elected head of state. And I totally get that. I think it’s a perfectly logical position. It’s a very rational position. But you know, we’re not all completely one hundred percent rational. Thank god. 

LM: I think it’s fascinating, the idea of the two queens. The royal body versus the Crown. The royal ‘we.’ That essential division of her. It kind of echoes the separation of powers in a kind of lovely poetical way. And it seems to work, at least when it comes to Elizabeth II, but in the future…  I guess we’ll see how it plays out. 

RH: Well it’s been over five hundred years, so I think it has ups and downs and that will always be the case. For now, for the next few days, we’re just celebrating our platinum monarch. She’s not quite there yet. She’s got one record left. She’s not been the longest reigning monarch ever, that’s still Louis XIV of France. May 2024, I’m sure she’ll do it. She’ll break the record, which is amazing because you know, Louis was a boy king and she was twenty-five when she took over. 

LM: Oh god, Louis. He was a bit of a twat, wasn’t he? I’m definitely on Team Elizabeth. 

RH: [polite laughter] Yes, me too.