Queen’s annus traumaticus

The queen made her mea culpa and in response to calls to cut protocol and move closer to the people, promised changes.

Diana may therefore have taken with her to the grave a monarchy, rigid and remote from the people, encapsulated in tradition. "The monarchy is dead, long live the monarchy," said some members of the royal entourage.

The warning had been taken seriously by Buckingham Palace to judge by the media counter-offensive which followed Diana’s funeral.

It culminated on November 20 with the golden wedding celebrations for the Queen and Prince Philip which took place with subdued pomp, without carriages but with a walkabout outside Westminster Abbey and a policewoman and an engineer at the top table at the "people’s banquet" which followed.

The Queen recognised in her toast that the monarchy only existed with the consent of the people. She had already promised in an address to the nation the night before Diana’s funeral that "lessons would be learned" from the public response to her death and the royals perceived indifference to it.

To conserve and win over the hearts of her subjects Elizabeth in 1992 reduced the civil list — the money paid to other members of the royal family — and agreed to pay income tax.

Other initiatives followed. The royal yacht Britannia will not be replaced, the costly royal train might also be abandoned and the budget for 1998-99 will be held to $71 million, a cut of 39 per cent compared with 1990-91.

An ex-palace adviser, Simon Gimson, said the Queen was also thinking of slimming down the royal family which for official purposes comprises 13 people.

Some minor royals have been urged to find "suitable" employment and several of the seven castles and palaces might be partially opened to the public, according to carefully orchestrated leaks.

On the other hand Gimson qualified as "absurd" the possibility of the Queen abdicating — she will celebrate her golden jubilee in 2002 at the age of 76 or of the Prince of Wales stepping aside in favour of his son William. "It’s an extraordinary idea, abdication, generation skipping. It isn’t going to happen," he said.

The monarchy is modernising to keep in step with a country which has just handed back to China one of the last vestiges of its empire, Hong Kong, and which put into Downing Street Tony Blair, the youngest Prime Minister this century.

Blair has made the monarchy seem older by granting autonomy to Scotland and Wales, playing down England’s traditional beef-eater image, and even playing God Save the Queen through synthesizers at the Commonwealth summit in Edinburgh.

But Blair insists that a strong and flourishing monarchy can play the same role it has in the past in a new, modern Britain.

Suddenly the press is again praising the monarch, congratulating her on the restoration of Windsor Castle five years after it almost burned down, has come under the spell of a charm offensive by Prince Charles and at the same time respected a total blackout on his relationship with Camilla Parker-Bowles.

But the press, notably that of Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch, is always on the lookout for royal gaffes. On a recent visit to television studios where she met actors of one of Britain’s most popular soap operas, Eastenders, which has run for 10 years, the Queen said: "How do you do. Who are you?" — an illustration of how out of touch the monarchy can be.