All countries come with a history attached
and ours centres on one of the oldest and grandest monarchies of all.
And the opinion polls show with remarkable consistency
that the British like this idea.
And in our lifetimes, the reason for this liking
has been Queen Elizabeth II.
As a young girl, she didn't expect to become Queen.
Until the age of 10, she could have hoped for a quiet country life.
But a crisis in the British monarchy made her father King
and 60 years ago, on February the 6th when he suddenly died, she became Queen.
Now in her Diamond Jubilee year, she reigns over a different country
and indeed 135 million people around the world.
You know, she was 25. You think about how young that is for somebody
to take on this incredible responsibility.
But what does that mean? What does she actually do?
It has been a life of turning up
and reading official papers by our most familiar enigma.
The Queen has provided a huge stability
and a huge wealth of experience for those that want to tap into it.
Oh, did you?
You've had such a year, Ma'am.
This series follows the Queen's working life over a year and a half.
We'll hear from some of those closest to her.
As all mothers, she's put up with a lot, and we're still on speaking terms
so I think that's no mean achievement.
We explore her own history and look at just how much,
behind the pageantry, she has changed the British monarchy.
"...some of the Knights Companions elect."
She's a proper professional at her trade.
You've got some young upstart like me trying to do it his way,
it's always important every now and again
to look at how it's really done.
For 60 years she's been looking back at the rest of us,
understated, sometimes hard to read.
And over 60 years, many of us have become so used to her,
we've stopped asking quite what she does or why she does it.
We've taken her rather for granted.
And after 60 years, perhaps it's time we stopped.
Ripped By mstoll
It's spring 2010. Hullo, Queen!
She's making a regional visit to Wales.
This is what she does, a symbol of the country on legs.
She's been on parade for six decades, seen it all,
but watching as closely as ever, remembering names, comparing.
Her role includes jobs done in other countries by presidents,
but also native traditions presidents know nothing about.
She never stops, rarely pauses.
Every day, almost every hour, is carefully planned.
We talk about veteran politicians out on the campaign trail.
This is the real endless perpetual campaign, year in, year out.
And in terms of pressing the flesh, meeting people,
this is the real veteran.
She's here one week after her 84th birthday
but retirement, never mind abdication,
seem to be words never mentioned in her presence.
This is a typically busy schedule on a two-day visit to North Wales.
She's getting about. The Queen has a private motto.
"I have to be seen to be believed."
And this, of course, is a family trade.
She's professional in her ability to know how to move around,
to who to speak to and how to also engage with people,
you know, within a few split seconds of meeting them.
And the way that she carries herself forward, smiles constantly,
able to go into a room and bring the room to life,
these are the things that at her age, she shouldn't be doing.
Yet she's carrying on and doing them.
And not only in this country but all around the world.
To some extent, that's in the genes, I think.
There is an understanding
- of getting out and about. - Yes.
You actually have to go and meet people to find out what's really going on
and to give people a sense of your understanding of what is happening.
Whenever Granny walks into a room, everyone stands up, stops
and just kind of watches her,
because obviously it's huge when she walks into a room.
And I find that incredible. I kind of go...
Now of course, she's not ordinary.
She's very rich, privileged, protected and cherished.
Different in so many ways, big and small.
She doesn't need a passport or a driving licence,
though her husband does.
But more important, she's only the fourth
in what is effectively a new royal dynasty,
stamped with her personal style
but built by her grandfather in years of mayhem and war.
The First World War toppled
the monarchies of Russia, Germany and Austria.
George V faced criticism that his family,
Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, were somehow pro-German,
and he knew there were anti-royal murmurings at home.
When the writer HG Wells spoke of an uninspiring and alien court,
King George retorted, "I may be uninspiring
"but I'm damned if I'm an alien."
In 1917, he changed all the German-sounding family names
and, not knowing what his own surname might really be,
he chose Windsor for its thoroughly British ring.
He insisted the Royals criss-cross the country,
visiting hospitals, towns and barracks.
And a lot about today's monarchy comes from him.
For the Queen, this was not something that she had to read about in books.
The Queen remembers very well the man she played with
when she was a small girl. She called him Grandpa England.
And George V really was the man who made the Windsors.
Her father was George V's second son, Prince Albert of York,
who'd married a cheerful young Scottish aristocrat,
Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon.
She turned him down twice
but it turned out to be a very happy marriage,
so that Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary
spent her early years in a private world of quiet security.
But when she was born, it was a time of turbulence.
April the 21 st, 1926,
and there is a really uneasy air in the country.
The General Strike is just about to start.
A lot of people predict a revolution.
And a princess is born, third in line to the throne,
here in Bruton Street, a fairly posh part of central London,
but in a relatively normal house owned by her aristocratic grandparents.
Later, the German bombs would remove it.
And it's now possibly one of the dullest buildings in central London.
At eight months, her parents left her
to take a six-month sea voyage to Australia and New Zealand.
Her mother was very upset to leave the baby,
but the Empire called.
Duty first, family feelings second.
Her parents were following the rule book set out by her grandfather George V,
"get out there, be seen, work hard".
His wife, Queen Mary, once retorted to an exhausted princess
who complained she was tired of traipsing round hospitals,
"We are the Royal Family and we love hospitals. "
If you're looking for a motto for this Queen's 60-year reign,
it's not a bad place to start.
She loathes being late,
still criss-crosses Britain and hardly ever cancels.
On the second stage of her North Wales visit,
she's about to do it all over again.
Well, here in Llandudno, she's not due for another hour.
There hasn't been much advance publicity
and already there is a pretty substantial crowd hoping to see her.
Now, I ask you,
how many politicians could draw a crowd in advance,
not only hoping to see them but hoping to be pleased to see them?
Celebrities court the camera. They open up.
The Queen is not a celebrity,
cameras court her and she doesn't.
Is this instinctive or something she's learned?
Well, it's shrewd. Celebrities flare and then they burn out.
It's pretty remarkable that in her eighties,
she still generates the same warmth and excitement as ever.
The Queen has developed this into an absolute art form,
how to get round the maximum number of people,
make as many people as possible
feel that they've made some kind of contact,
some small human connection with her.
The thing is when you're in the presence of the Queen,
you are keyed up and you know, you...
You want to be your best. You want the occasion to be
something you can talk to everybody about afterwards.
That, of course, is the magic of what she is wherever she goes.
The real human exchange that happens there
is not a facsimile and it's not drummed up by the press.
It's something about the best of us.
If we've come to take this for granted, it's worth remembering
that she would never have become Queen
if her uncle hadn't been a failed, unsuccessful monarch.
On a cold, sunny, January day,
the body of His late Majesty King George V,
starts on its last journey from Sandringham.
Behind the coffin walks His Majesty the King,
their Royal Highnesses the Duke of York,
the Duke of Gloucester, the Duke of Kent and Lord Harewood.
She was nine years old when her grandfather King George V died.
As he was lying in state, part of the Imperial State Crown
fell from the top of his coffin.
His heir, Uncle David, as she called him, the Prince of Wales,
saw this and wondered if it was a bad omen.
It was.
1936 would become the year of the three Kings.
Already loved and respected as Prince,
he set out to do his duty as King in the industrial areas of Britain.
But behind the scenes, the constitutional crisis grew,
a crisis which concerned not only
politicians at Westminster but the Church of England,
and which was to prevent his coronation.
Edward VIII reigned for just 325 days,
surrendering the throne to marry the twice-divorced American Wallis Simpson.
He was the bad King, the Windsor who got it wrong.
Vain and self-indulgent, he demonstrated that charisma,
while useful in politics or entertainment,
is a dangerous confection for a constitutional monarch.
These are the unreleased stamps, designed by him,
looking like an emperor, to mark the coronation that never was.
He was bored by duty,
left official papers lying around with whisky stains on them.
Could the Queen's moral seriousness have been an instinctive reaction
to her uncle's short and disastrous reign?
It must have been a terribly cruel betrayal for her
because he was such an enjoyable, relaxed member of the family
in this very stiff sort of environment.
And then suddenly she discovers,
it must've been revealed to her at the time of the abdication,
that he's blotted his copybook in this terrible way,
in a way that they probably didn't...
her mother and father couldn't talk to her about.
Mrs Simpson, divorced women, all this sort of thing.
Um, the very silence about it,
people going quiet when she came into the room,
this must have made it all the more awful and all the more of a betrayal.
Carefully stored away in Victoria Tower
at the Palace of Westminster are archives
which record these dark days of the monarchy.
These are the papers on the abdication of Edward VIII
and they reek of misery and crisis.
This is his address to the House of Lords
in which he says, "I will not enter now into my private feelings
"but I would beg that it should be remembered
"that the burden which constantly rests upon the shoulders of a sovereign
"is so heavy, it can only be borne in circumstances different
"from those in which I now find myself."
And you then get the Act of Abdication,
which went through both houses of Parliament,
all of its stages, in a single day.
That's a sense of crisis for you.
And then here is the royal assent to that.
And it finishes with the great red seal,
"By the King Himself, Signed with His Own Hand."
And his own hand is on the front of the document.
Edward RI. Edward Rex Imperator. King-emperor.
And by writing that signature on this document,
he ceases to be king.
So it's the only example I've ever seen and may exist
of a signature which destroys itself.
Amazing.
With barely time for the country to take it all in,
the Queen's father was crowned King George VI.
Eleven-year-old Princess Elizabeth was a little shocked to realise
she would have to move into the draughty Buckingham Palace.
But she caught the sense of magic, writing of the coronation,
"I thought it all very, very wonderful, and I expect the Abbey did, too.
"The arches and beams at the top were covered with a sort of
"haze of wonder as Papa was crowned. At least I thought so. "
"Papa" was only 41
and the prospect of her own reign must have seemed unimaginably distant.
But that quiet little family, her mother's sense of fun,
her sister Princess Margaret's mischief, what they called "we four'",
would now be changed forever.
That's our Royal Family.
And it's a family whose joys and sorrows are much like yours and mine, I suspect.
The new King George VI
moved his family out of the comfortable and familiar house in Piccadilly
and into the grandeur of Buckingham Palace.
Imagine what it must have felt like for the young girls.
And the shift certainly pushed the father
and his older, rather serious 10-year-old daughter,
who he now knew was going to be Queen, much more closely together.
It was a pretty intimidating, draughty old barn of a place.
Yes, and pretty austere and some fairly strange working practices as well.
Mind you, the working practices
had been going there for a long, long time.
I think even in Queen Victoria's day, I think that she
or Prince Albert complained that there were three different departments
that were responsible for a fireplace.
So there was... Actually, there may have been four.
I think one was responsible for cleaning it,
another one was responsible for laying it,
because the forestry department had to produce the logs.
And somebody else had to light it.
And then another department had to look after it.
It was absolutely ridiculous.
It's got a lot better since then.
Her childhood was comfortable but not exactly crowded.
No random friendships,
city streets for looking down at, not for walking on.
Remarkably, even then, security issues,
including Irish Republican threats, loomed over the girls.
Elizabeth and Margaret lived in a world dominated by family jokes
and private games, often played in a kind of
anti-palace hidden away in the grounds of Royal Lodge, Windsor.
The people of Wales gave YBwthyn Bach, The Little House,
to her on her sixth birthday. And here she'd play and read books,
beginning a tradition that now includes her granddaughter, Princess Beatrice.
Granny and her sister played here growing up
and we've been lucky enough to play here
and cousins and second cousins.
- And it's a big family... family treat. - Hmm!
It's the most glamorous Wendy house ever,
but it's really beautiful. And what you're seeing it as now
is after over a year of renovation.
Which you've been in charge of?
Yeah. Well, I've been one of the people.
It's completely been re-thatched
and new curtains, new wiring, new sort of...
Bit of spruce-up, really.
Because it's such a wonderful little place that...
- If you want to have a look inside... - Can we see inside?
Have a little look.
Wow!
So, as you see...
As you see, it's all... Sort of all the little...
All the little china and glass and everything were sort of created for...
- made especially for the house. - It's got...
It's got a very 1930s feel to it, doesn't it?
Yes, it does.
The kitchen is very 1930s, too.
And actually, the fridge in there is not supposed to be in here,
it was the fridge from the nursery,
but when all the boxes came back, it suddenly reappeared.
So we now have the original 1930s fridge in the house.
And Granny was very clear that all the fabrics...
She wanted very little designs
because it was such a little house that she would have gone for
very little flowers and little rosebuds.
We have some quite new, modern friends that have
- made their appearance as well. - Have arrived as well.
But she spent many, many happy hours and days here as a girl?
Yeah, she did. And still now, she likes to come back and visit.
And it's wonderful that we can have...
You know, Granny is a great-grandmother now
so we can have Savannah come and play in here as well.
- That's fantastic. - And more great-grandchildren
in the future.
As a child, "Granny" never went to school.
When her mother was urged to get her more books,
they all turned out to be comedies by PG Wodehouse.
But she learned French and she was taught about the constitution
by an eccentric history teacher from Eton.
More important, the new King was passing on his own advice.
And despite his stammer and lack of readiness for the role,
was growing in confidence himself.
He refused to leave London during World War II's Blitz.
The Queen Mother took up pistol practice in the palace grounds
in case she had to make a last stand against German paratroopers.
And they visited the battered East End.
Upon hearing that yet another London hospital had been bombed,
Their Majesties visit the scene to bring comfort and cheer
to all those who have suffered from this all-too-frequent form
of Nazi frightfulness.
On September the 13th, 1940,
King George VI and Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother were very nearly killed
when a German bomb landed right here in the quadrangle at Buckingham Palace.
If the window in the room where they were standing
had been closed rather than open,
they would have been hideously mutilated by flying glass.
A workman nearby was killed.
Showing fine British phlegm,
one of the policemen there turned to the Queen Mother and said,
"A magnificent piece of bombing, if I may say so, Ma'am."
Within a few yards
from where the King and Queen were sheltering,
the royal chapel was struck.
Tearing through the roof, the bomb completely wrecked the altar
and hurled 20 tons of debris into the basement.
We thank God that Their Majesties were unhurt.
During World War II, the whereabouts
of the princesses was a national secret.
In fact, they were at Windsor Castle,
from where they made a radio broadcast to the children of Britain.
Thousands of you in this country
have had to leave your homes
and be separated from your fathers and mothers.
My sister Margaret Rose and I feel so much for you,
as we know from experience what it means to be away
from those we love most of all.
You only have to look at pictures of the Queen's father before
and after the war to see the toll it took on him.
A dramatic ageing.
But this was also the time when the ties were more tightly bound.
I think that was the time when the Queen got closest of all to her father.
And to see him wasting away in front of her...
And you wondered, was she aware
that even as she's losing her father
and can see his mortality, what that means for her
and how that's going to limit her own personal life?
He was really the only person
from whom Princess Elizabeth could learn about how to reign.
How far to go with the politicians, how to do the paperwork.
He'd become a revered symbol of the British,
reliable, constant, still in his mid-50s.
For her, an anchor. And then the cable snapped.
King George VI's death came 60 years ago
here at Sandringham, the private estate he loved so much.
His daughter was then 25, she had two children of her own.
But this sudden death pitched her straight into
the public and private world of remorseless meetings and duties,
which she's always taken with the same kind of
dead-straight seriousness that she learned from him.
And she was considerably younger than you are now when she became Queen.
Do you ever sort of reflect on what an extraordinary jump
that must have been, from a relatively private life,
suddenly thrust into that role at her age?
Yeah, definitely. And one of the things that's also really struck me
when I sort of look back at it now
was also in a very probably male-dominated age,
where it must've been extremely daunting to be put in that position.
Um, and that age, you know,
I still have trouble trying to be serious about certain things
so for her at that age, it must have been incredible
having that burden, that responsibility placed on you.
She's shouldered the responsibility since then.
One day, after his father, it will land on Prince William's shoulders.
But what is the essence of that responsibility?
What's the point of a constitutional monarch?
What really is the job for?
Well, first, the Queen is Head of State, and the State is a political creation.
One of the most important of the monarch's duties
is something the Queen has done thousands of times,
her weekly audiences with the Prime Minister.
These meetings mostly happen here in the deep privacy
of the Queen's apartments at Buckingham Palace.
The Queen's first prime minister was Winston Churchill,
a titanic figure she found a great speaker.
The Queen can do no wrong.
He saw things in a very romantic and glittering way.
But perhaps a less good listener.
Since then she's had 11 British prime ministers alone.
And at the heart of the relationship
are those totally confidential conversations,
compared by one official to a weekly meeting with a therapist.
It's simply two people sitting down, talking
in an entirely relaxed and informal way.
But they cover everything. I mean, the Queen, as Head of State,
has a right to know what is happening,
has a right to know what her prime minister has in mind to do.
I certainly found I could discuss anything with her in total confidence.
And that included, by the way, all sorts of cabinet ructions and difficulties.
Early on in her reign, the Queen had to cope with prime ministers
who were older, wilier and often ruthless.
Anthony Eden came close to entangling her in his deception
of the House of Commons and the wider world
during the Suez invasion of Egypt in 1956,
a disastrous adventure that divided the Queen's advisers and family.
She was said to have been upset by the dishonesty involved
and so was Prince Philip's uncle, Lord Mountbatten.
Lord Louis Mountbatten, very close to the Royal Family, was First Sea Lord.
And he tried to resign as that crisis deepened
and was ordered by the First Lord, Quintin Hailsham, to stay at his post.
And he did. The resignation,
the attempted resignation letter, all declassified.
So the Queen was deeply, deeply concerned.
Eden's successor, Harold Macmillan,
entangled her in politics by forcing the pace when he resigned,
so that his favoured successor, Alec Douglas-Home got the job.
Order, please, order.
The Queen had visited Macmillan in hospital to hear his views
and many thought that the Conservative leader was using her
for his own ends.
Oddly, perhaps, she seems to have established a very warm relationship
with her first northern Labour prime minister, Harold Wilson.
I think it was said that Harold Wilson once remarked
that at particular times of crisis, late '60s, when he was in deep trouble,
and there were plots, as he thought, against him,
he used to say that he looked forward to the meeting with the sovereign,
which I think was then on a Tuesday evening,
because it was the only meeting he attended in the week
which didn't leak and it was the only time he met somebody
for a proper serious conversation who wasn't after his job.
As the Queen has grown ever more experienced and grown older,
and her prime ministers have grown younger, the balance has changed.
Perhaps the most pivotal, important premiership of all
was that of Margaret Thatcher.
Good evening, Your Majesty.
You've had a very long day, haven't you?
Yes, it ran over just a little bit today.
In 1986, The Sunday Times suggested the Queen
thought Mrs Thatcher was uncaring and confrontational,
that the Queen was a political infighter prepared to take on her prime minister.
This was over-briefing
by an enthusiastic Buckingham Palace press officer.
The Queen was fascinated and sometimes amused by Margaret Thatcher.
Once, during a particularly stuffy diplomatic reception
when the Iron Lady felt faint for the second year running,
the Queen glanced over and said, "Oh, look, she's keeled over again."
And the Royal Family isn't comfortable with too polarised politics.
As the people at the top,
they like the idea of the country holding together.
However, the Queen always saw the point of Margaret Thatcher,
she admired her guts
and she was intrigued by this self-made female leader.
The evidence is generally that actually, on a personal level,
- they got on very well. - No, I think they did, I think they did.
I think they each thought the other was slightly strange but...
Which indeed was true.
I am the 10th prime minister of Queen Elizabeth II's reign.
Tony Blair's New Labour presented a different problem,
a vigorous government of self-proclaimed modernisers,
which, Whitehall insiders said, had little instinctive feel for monarchy.
Being in power changed that.
You know, the fact is any prime minister ends up with...
with unexpected events and happenings and crises.
And you need to be able to come through those and handle them,
and actually handle them psychologically as well as politically.
And I often used to talk to her about the past,
about previous prime ministers, what it was like,
how they handled things and she was...
She was prepared within the context of the audience
to be very frank and open and informative, in fact.
I mean, I think they want to do a deal if they possibly can.
The question is whether we can get everyone through it
at the end of this week, really. But it's...
For the new countries particularly, they want one.
And that's the best chance we've got at getting one.
I can imagine.
We now have an older, grandmotherly Queen
who remembers so many forgotten scandals and got-past-that-one crises.
The Queen has, according to the great Victorian journalist Walter Bagehot,
the right to be consulted, to advise and to warn.
The more experience she has, the more, perhaps, that means.
And today it's David Cameron's turn.
We're recording this as it happens on Budget Day
and at a time when British pilots are flying over Libya.
So there will be a great deal
for the Prime Minister and the Queen to talk about
once they get down to the meat of their conversation.
What will she say to him? What will he reply?
We will never know. And that is the point.
But here's a rare glimpse,
though David Cameron's probably keeping his dynamite news
or his best gossip for when the camera has gone.
I think what you heard last night in the House of Commons was broadly the same.
I think it was broadly the same.
It went well. As I say, I think it went well. It was an hour long.
But it was a lively... I'd warmed them up a bit beforehand with Question Time.
- Oh, yes. - And also on Monday we had the...
- I hear you had the Libyan thing. - The House of Commons was amazingly...
It's probably the only meeting,
apart from seeing Mrs Cameron at the end of the day,
it's about the only meeting when there's no one else in the room.
And I feel the responsibility as Prime Minister
to try and explain my perspective on the big issues
going on in the world and the country that week.
- Does it make you think more clearly? - So it makes me think... Absolutely,
because there's no one else in the room, because there are no minutes taken.
I think you... You reveal both to her, but also to yourself,
your deepest thinking and deepest worries about these issues.
And sometimes that can really help you to reach the answers.
- That sounds quite a sensible... - It was good.
Full of warnings, mainly for me.
It was very good. I sat in the chamber and listened, actually.
But does all this really matter? What's it for?
Has it in any way changed the lives of the British?
The prime minister is the executive arm of the government
and the monarch has this extraordinarily important
set of ceremonial duties.
That means that the country, whatever it thinks of its politicians,
can feel a great sense of ownership and unity
around the institution of the Royal Family
and in particular Her Majesty the Queen,
I think gives us not only all the advantages
in terms of people wanting to come to Britain and engage with Britain,
but it gives us a huge advantage of stability.
The Queen stays on top of things.
She reads the newspapers. Not just The Racing Post, the lot,
she really does.
- Good morning. - Good morning.
She listens to the radio and the evening news on television
and every day, wherever she may be,
those fat, heavy red cabinet boxes arrive,
brimming with closely-typed paperwork,
carried to her through the corridors of the Palace.
In these boxes have been some of the deepest secrets
of the British State over the last 60 years.
What they really thought in Whitehall
during the most dangerous parts of the Cold War,
when the world was on the edge of nuclear annihilation.
What they really felt about some of the big domestic stories,
those great confrontations when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister.
Or the true story of Tony Blair
and taking the country to war in Iraq and Afghanistan,
the fight between Blair and Brown.
The Queen really has had an absolute
ringside seat for everything that's most important.
They call her in Number 10 Reader Number One.
She uses a desk glossy with royal history.
Modern Britain's business is dispatched on furniture
which once belonged to the Bourbons of Paris,
brought down by the bloody French Revolution.
Here is British democracy's Reader Number One,
always ready for when the next box of documents arrives.
Why does she read those papers? Is it important
that she sees the secrets of the State and knows what's going on?
If she's going to fulfill that function of keeping
prime ministers and secretaries of state on their toes
in her weekly meeting with the Prime Minister
or the bilateral she regularly has with the big ministers,
she got to be well-primed.
And she has this enormous accumulated compost
of memory and knowledge, but you have to keep it up to speed.
I suspect it's her equivalent of athletic training.
It's her workout.
I've heard it said that there are only three people in government
who really, truly understand what's going on,
Chief Secretary to the Treasury, the Prime Minister and the Queen.
One of her former private secretaries,
way back in the '70s,
said that if she wasn't on top of all of this stuff,
very quickly people would notice.
Prime ministers, ministers, ambassadors,
would realise that she didn't know what was going on.
And sort of something soggy and soft would happen at the apex of the State.
I think that's probably true,
although to be honest, quite a lot of the Queen's functions
- are almost rubber-stamping. - Hmm.
I think on a more personal level,
if the Queen didn't keep up this great discipline
of having to read every single day and keep on top of things,
she might never be able to catch up again.
Or she would feel under pressure.
And she has an iron discipline to read.
Iron discipline is, of course, a military quality.
And the Queen grew up often surrounded by men
with regimental instincts for timekeeping, order, dress code and duty.
Responsibility was drummed into her.
Her South African speech, aged 21, is the speech of a true believer
in monarchy, nationhood, God and destiny.
There is a motto which has been borne by many of my ancestors.
A noble motto, "I serve."
I declare before you all that my whole life,
whether it be long or short,
shall be devoted to your service
and to the service of our great Imperial family, to which we all belong.
So this is the woman who became Queen.
We've seen the way her reading and her private meetings
with politicians mesh at the heart of the British State.
But what about the grand public occasions,
such as the opening of Parliament, which she's done 58 times?
Britain, unlike other countries, has no written constitution,
no founding document.
Her authority is more like an ancient echo, a half-hidden mystery.
And this is the room that you never see. This is the robing room.
And the Queen will come in here
and the Imperial State Crown, which, with the other jewellery,
has arrived in its own coach from the Tower of London,
and then she gets robed.
This is not the House of Lords and it's not the House of Commons.
This is the Queen's bit of the Palace of Westminster.
And it's really important symbolically because the monarchy, the State,
the unending United Kingdom
meets the day-to-day world of politicians
arguing about the things that politicians argue about.
And when the Queen leaves this room
with that great crown on and all the regalia,
she is going to speak the words of her "here today, gone tomorrow" politician,
the prime minister of the day. But she is still the Queen.
She is not the government. It's her government,
but she is not the government. And this is a crucial distinction.
We don't live in a Tory country or a coalition nation.
There was never any such thing as New Labour Britain.
These are just the labels of governments,
who aren't quite squatters, that would be unfair,
but are merely lodgers.
The State is meant to represent all of us,
whatever we think of the people running things at the moment.
The State should have an acute memory
of what happened in the old days and how things used to work
and a lively interest in the longer-term future.
Other countries represent the State
with a constitution, a book, a bit of paper,
some kind of symbol. France has Marianne.
Or a clapped-out politician called a president.
We have a lady,
who, every year, reads out what her government is up to
and, quite rightly, never lets us know what she really thinks of it.
My Lords, pray be seated.
In modern times, the State Opening of Parliament
can look like a gaudy pantomime or convocation of playing cards,
but its political significance is real enough.
My Lords and members of the House of Commons.
My government's legislative programme will be based upon the principles
of freedom, fairness and responsibility.
And yet all the work at home is only part of what she does.
A lot of the Queen's life has been about travelling abroad.
Again, why?
Why is she the most well-travelled monarch in history?
Why has she made more than 325 overseas visits
to more than 130 countries?
Going far beyond the states she reigns over
or even the Commonwealth. They included Russia,
where revolutionaries killed her relative
Tsar Nicholas II and his family. And Communist China.
All of this costs money.
Does it really bring Britain much in return?
Does her presence make a real difference
to the way we sell ourselves abroad?
Well, yes, it does. It undoubtedly adds great weight to how we...
And it draws attention to us, selling ourselves abroad.
Now, the Queen doesn't do trade deals, the Queen isn't actually, herself,
soliciting business for the country.
But the presence of the Queen draws enormous attention.
And her travels take her deep into Republican territory, too.
If there's one place on the planet
which challenges the idea of monarchy more than any other,
it's the United States of America,
the most successful democracy of all time.
They didn't just reject monarchy, they rejected our monarchy.
And built a system with an elected leader
whose powers are far greater than any king or queen has ever had.
On the other hand, what they lost
was continuity. They're always remaking themselves.
The Queen remembers Eisenhower,
JF Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan, Carter.
And there's nobody at the apex
of the United States you could say that about.
Here in the United States, you might think that nobody thinks
much about that.
You might think that in hardboiled New York,
people don't miss continuity or a sense of history.
But you'd be wrong.
She's like an icon in the community.
Like here, in America, you don't really see
as much females with her stature.
So I think she has a great influence.
I like that she's a remnant of the past, though, I like that, though.
You don't see too many of the monarchs still around, so I don't mind the Queen.
- We love the Queen. - She's fantastic.
I didn't know that she was going to be here.
High five!
I don't know, that's really cool she's coming here, though.
She's here to make a speech at the United Nations,
the organisation set up to promote world peace.
It's a speech she's worked hard on.
The four largest current providers of peacekeeping troops in the world
are Commonwealth countries.
She's Head of State of 16 United Nations members.
So this matters to her.
The Queen makes speeches all the time
but she's not one of those people who like the sound of their own voice.
She is pleased when the speeches are over.
Public speaking is a routine, familiar, well-oiled ordeal.
In less than two hours' time, the Queen is going to be standing there
addressing the United Nations. First time she's done it since 1957.
This assembly was born of the endeavours of countless men and women...
Back then she was upbeat and optimistic, and so she will be today.
You might say mostly her story has been the triumph
of optimism and hope over bitter experience.
But after all, that is the story of monarchy
and it's the story of the United Nations, too.
It has perhaps always been the case that the waging of peace
is the hardest form of leadership of all.
That was a really important speech and she was able to go there
and talk a lot about foreign policy aspects,
talk about the successes that the UN has had
and the issues that are still troubling it, about failed states.
So, you know, she can do an enormous amount.
The Queen is not controversial and therefore everybody feels included
in... when she goes abroad.
And there is a completely different atmosphere
when the Queen comes down the stairs, as it were.
It's different from anybody else doing it. It just is different.
In tomorrow's world, we must all work together
as hard as ever if we are truly to be United Nations.
Rousing speeches aren't really her thing.
In truth, the way the Queen connects best is with a personal touch.
She may not be a natural performer. She's never provocative.
But she has found the right words for times of grief and crisis
and she moves people just by turning up,
as she's about to do here in the last part of her New York visit,
at the site of the Twin Towers.
Ground Zero. Nearly a decade on
and it's messy and dirty and busy and hot
and still very sad.
Part of the job of a monarch is to articulate what people feel
when tragedy strikes, when things go wrong.
Sixty-seven British people died here among the nearly 3,000 who perished.
And in the days afterwards, the Queen spoke very well.
She spoke through the British Ambassador just along the road
at a church, as the rain streaked down.
And she said these were dark and harrowing times.
And she finished by saying something which is simple and true.
Which is that grief is the price we pay for love.
Now, so long afterwards, she's back. She's going to be laying a wreath.
Prince Charles and Camilla have been here before but she's never been here.
And it's going to be... I think it'll be a poignant moment, actually.
Among those waiting for her is firefighter John Morabito,
who survived the collapse of the South Tower.
Four hundred and eleven emergency workers lost their lives
as a result of the terrorist attacks.
Just to be able to meet the Queen and see her human side,
that she would come down here and grace us with her presence
at the World Trade Center site,
I think it lifts the spirits of Americans, especially New Yorkers.
There are times, especially in the Fire Department,
we feel like the world kind of forgot about us and what we went through.
So to have someone like the Queen of England,
which is, uh, you know, a sister country to us,
we feel very closely, a close bond to England,
to come down here and to pay her respects,
it means a lot to New Yorkers especially and I think to Americans.
- It shows a human side of her as well. - Sure.
Watching the Queen operate abroad, even outside the Commonwealth,
you do see her differently.
People I've talked to here in New York
were genuinely thrilled and moved that she'd come,
in a way I don't think they'd feel
about a British prime minister or politician.
It would be absurd, however,
to say that the Queen helps to project British power.
Power seems the very last thing that she's about.
Or glory or pomp, at least here.
It's as if we have a Foreign Office,
a Ministry of Defence, a Department of Trade,
and she is our slightly mysterious Department of Friendliness.
It is a rum business, but in a good way.
It's November 2010 in Abu Dhabi and the Queen is in the Gulf.
Once the Windsors were king-emperors,
now they travel as would-be wealth creators, promoters,
first onto the beaches, with the politicians
and the businessmen at their backs.
The colour of the carpet waiting for her never changes
but the world certainly does.
When she became Queen, this place was in British hands
and it was mostly dust and camels and old forts.
When she was last here more than 30 years ago,
this was an independent country on its way.
And now it's one of the great
mushrooming Jack and the Beanstalk economies. Enormously powerful.
Do they need us still?
Do we need them? We certainly do.
It strikes me that this has become a place which matters an awful lot to...
I mean, Manchester City fans,
but also to a lot of workers, as well as British firms.
It's not just... It's not just the UAE.
- It's the whole region. - Yeah.
Hugely important from the business opportunities,
the business case. There's an awful lot going on.
I've been coming to this region now for whatever it is, nearly 12 years.
- Yes. - And developing the relationships.
And this part of the world needs continuous hand and touch.
- And personal contacts matter a lot? - Oh, hugely. Hugely.
And the fact that Her Majesty is coming now is really, really important.
Especially after the new government has reinvigorated the relationship
with the whole of the region.
As you can see, the aeroplane is rolling up now.
- Yes. I mustn't keep you from the Queen. - Back to work.
- Thanks very much. - Thank you.
Monarchies are a minority in today's world
but they're hardly unusual.
Forty-odd countries have monarchs, depending on how you count them.
And there's no doubt that monarchs have a natural curiosity
about one another which can oil the wheels of trade.
The Kings and Queens club.
Tonight this Queen is greeted by the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi.
So, straight from the airport, her first stop
is the exuberant Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque,
one of the world's largest, and partly the work of British companies.
Shoeless, the Queen, whose range of hats is famous,
now wears her tribute to local fashion,
including her version of the traditional abaya gown.
She meets children learning the Koran rather late at night.
One of the things that's changed in the Queen's reign
and she is now very conscious of
is that she is also Queen of 1.6 million British Muslims.
Ambassador, what does it actually mean in concrete terms for Britain
that the Queen comes all the way out here?
It's tremendously important for the relationship.
This is a country that counts for the UK.
It counts because 100-120,000 British people live here.
It counts because of their security.
So the defence and security relationship between the UK and UAE,
with our troops serving alongside each other in Afghanistan,
with our law enforcement agencies intercepting bombs
- on the way to the UK is very important. - I suppose...
Yemen's just around one corner
and Iran's over the water, so it's a pretty important place.
If there was no Royal Family, if we were a republic,
what would be the difference, do you think?
It would be shallow, shallow, shallow. How big a deal is it?
This is probably the most important bilateral contact
between the UK and the UAE of the decade.
The official welcome is a traditional Bedouin one
but again, this is really about corporate Britain.
A European influenced museum,
designed by a Briton, backed by the British Museum.
A British architect, Lord Foster, produced it, so lots of money involved.
But the bigger picture is that in the Gulf, the Chinese are moving in.
And this dance of royal diplomacy
is one of the ways the British government
is trying to fight back.
The role the Queen can play as Britain tries to find its place
with the other great powers, the other great powers of the world,
is a very big one.
The fact that they have such esteem and affection for her
actually I think gives Britain an enormous advantage.
And you know, she is seriously interested
in the project and in architecture.
- She's done her homework. - Which is really impressive.
Another thing you have to realise when you're abroad
is that people absolutely adore the notion of the British monarchy,
they are fascinated by it, they want to know about it.
I mean, if I'm... Whatever part of the world I'm in,
they will always ask me about the Queen,
about what it's like, about the monarchy.
And so for us, as a country, it's a no-brainer, actually,
in terms of what they bring.
'Cause they bring something no one else can.
The pinnacle, of course, is the Queen's visit.
But it's what's going on beforehand, where the political context is,
what's going on with the relationship.
And then you've then got to look at what happens afterwards.
And it's the gathering of those strands
that you pull together and then, as it were,
the Queen is the person who sort of cinches them
at that one particular moment.
And so these are special and they add shine,
varnish and, to some extent, paint
to the canvas that is the relationship between us and another country.
The Queen's visit continues to the kingdom of Oman,
ruled by an old friend of hers, Sultan Quaboos.
At times it feels more like Narnia.
Bagpipe-playing, camel-mounted soldiers, glittering forts.
But Oman counts,
an oasis of relative peace in an increasingly angry region.
Often ignored by her people at home, the Queen has been helping keep Britain
quietly plugged in around the world for 60 years.
She seems to enjoy it. That is the job.
But for a woman of her age,
the politicians keep on pushing her hard.
Is there any sense that sometimes it's a bit much
to ask a lady of her age to undertake some of these huge trips?
Well, not really. I mean, of course one naturally thinks,
"Would it be a bit much?" But very clearly it isn't a bit much.
I mean, she's extremely well-rehearsed
at these sort of things now,
but having done that for so many years, it must be incredibly tiring
and is extremely emotionally draining.
But she's led the way in doing walkabouts
and with engagements and long may that continue.
At that level of Head of State, with the Queen as our monarch,
with the institution of the Royal Family, even if you covered it
with a sort of cold heart and a clear head,
it is a brilliant organisation for Britain.
The experience of following the Queen,
even for a short time, takes you to some strange places
and involves a great deal of exotic transportation.
It's sometimes like ordinary life
with the colour balance turned up so high it's almost shrieking.
But it's hot, hard work
and underneath the clatter and the glitter,
rather more hard-headed and down-to-earth than it looks.
For 60 years the Queen has been, many people would say, an adornment.
What she isn't is an ornament.
It could have been done differently,
running this monarchy in modern times,
juggling old authority and noisy democracy
hasn't just happened.
It's been carefully thought through by the Queen,
her father, her grandfather and their advisers.
They had an idea, a plan, and by and large, they've stuck to it.
In Episode 2 of The Diamond Queen we explore that plan further.
We look at how the Queen has been a quiet but restless moderniser.
She did close a circle of history.
We ask how the family have learnt from her.
She very much leaves the family to go off and find their own way.
If you get it wrong, stand by, you'll be put back in your place.
And we hear the inside story of her grandson's wedding.
I rang my grandmother up for some clarification on the issue
and duly got told that it was ridiculous.
She was right, as she always is.
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