Only a minority can remember the day Elizabeth II became Queen. I was just coming up to thirteen at the time and I recall it with surprising clarity. It was a chill and gloomy day when the news came, in a formal announcement on the BBC radio (then the wireless) that the King was dead. The nation was stunned. He was so young. He had been there for them all through the terrible war, the bombs and the sorrow and he had been there at the end to celebrate victory. It was this shock which consumed the nation that day rather than too many thoughts about the new Queen, away with her husband in Kenya at the start of a tour on the King’s behalf. Of course she flew back at once.
It was the picture of her emerging from the aircraft on her return, a tiny figure dressed in black, but not veiled, on the top of the steps, with the entire Cabinet bare headed and lined up below, led by Churchill, now her Prime Minister, that brought home to the nation that it was about to experience a change unknown since Victoria’s accession in 1837. Victoria presided over the expansion of the British Empire to its highest point to make Britain the number one world power. Elizabeth was destined to preside over the dissolution of that Empire in a seamless transition to a voluntary Commonwealth with few sorrows and little bloodshed. Now nobody regrets its passing and the young have only a vague idea of what the Empire was. But Britain is still there at the centre of the world, not an Empire any longer, but a power still. Not a super-power but a special sort of power with a unique and mysterious authority which cannot be defined.
It is perhaps best explained by the magic of the Monarch, a Head of State like no other, admired by even republicans, a kind of Queen for all the world; Elizabeth at 90. And long may she reign.