Her Majesty by Robert Hardman Page B

grandmother has few grounds for regret. ‘For her, it must be a relief to know that she has furrowed her own path and that she’s done that successfully and that the decisions she’s made have turned out to be correct. You make it up a lot as you go along. So to be proven right when it’s your decision-making gives you a lot of confidence. You realise that the role you’re doing – you’re doing it well; that you’re making a difference. That’s what’s key. It’s about making a difference for the country.’
    The Queen, on the other hand, sees nothing remotely remarkable in the way she approaches her role. Having spent some time accompanying her around Nigeria during a Commonwealth tour in 2003, Jack Straw, then Foreign Secretary, could not help reflecting that the Queen was only five years younger than his own mother. At the end of one day, he remarked: ‘Ma’am, if I may say so, that was very professional.’ ‘Foreign Secretary,’ the Queen replied, ‘I should be, given how long I’ve been doing it.’
    Recent years have been very good ones for the monarchy and the build-up to the Diamond Jubilee even more so. And herein, perhaps, lies the most important factor behind this new-found serenity. All bosses or commanders thrive when their organisations are successful. And the monarchy is not just back on track and prospering. It is breaking new ground.
    Few members of the Queen’s family or her staff had seen her as enthusiastic about a royal tour as she was in May 2011 during the first state visit ever made to the Republic of Ireland. This was a diplomatic watershed, a genuinely historic exercise in reconciliation and friendship which achieved more in four days than years of political horsetrading. No one else could have pulled it off. This was, arguably, the Queen’s most important state visit since her tour of Russia in 1994 or the day that Britanniasailed in to newly democratic South Africa in 1995. Here was a stirring reminder of the healing power of monarchy. And the Queen was visibly thrilled. It was almost as if she was saying: ‘ This is the point of me.’ The fact that her hosts also included three famous racing studs on the royal schedule made it as near-perfect a state visit as one could contrive.
    ‘She was so excited about it and really looking forward to it. It was quite sweet,’ says Prince William proudly, pointing out that whereas he himself could ‘nip in’ to Ireland relatively easily, it had been off-limits to the Queen all her life. ‘Normally, with a lot of tours, there’s a certain amount of apprehension but also “I’ve done this before”. But this was like a big door opening up to her that had been locked for so long. And now she has been able to see what’s behind the door.’
    But, he says, the Queen will have derived much greater satisfaction from the bilateral successes achieved during this visit than from satisfying any personal ambitions. There were certainly plenty of personal subtexts to this tour, not least the murder of Prince Philip’s uncle, Lord Mountbatten, by the Irish Republican Army during a family holiday in County Sligo in 1979. * Yet neither the Queen nor Prince Philip made any direct reference to it. ‘It’s “personal” v “duty”. There’s a big difference,’ says Prince William. ‘As far as she was concerned, in terms of the relationship between Britain and Ireland and the Troubles, it was time to move on from that. What’s happened has happened and no one wants to cover it up. We must make sure all the right things are done and that the right people are said sorry to or vice versa. But it was not about her losing Lord Mounbatten when she was younger. It was about the bigger picture. And the bigger picture is close relations between the state of Ireland and the UK.’
    The Prince’s ready grasp of the diplomatic imperatives not only shows a wise head on young shoulders. It is another contributing factor to the Queen being, in the words