Conrad Black goes full monarch in his latest column:
The Queen has an outstanding record of absolutely unblemished service, through tumultuous changes and always having to endure suggestions of impending obsolescence — not just of the monarchy itself, but of its various separate functions, especially the ambiguous positions of head of the Commonwealth and supreme governor of the Church of England.
The 1950s were a constant round of independence ceremonies, mainly for countries that had a very rocky start and little aptitude for premature emancipation from unfashionable colonials status. This made for ever larger and more incongruous Commonwealth meetings, as the shared British traditions that supposedly united the “British Dominions, realms and territories beyond the seas” frayed and became always more threadbare except, perhaps, among the former so-called “white Dominions.”
In this present time of glaring, intrusive, nasty media, it is hard to imagine the proportions of the Queen’s achievement in serving 60 years, every one of them as one of the most prominent and publicized people in the world, without one gaffe, one embarrassing photograph, one injudicious utterance or slip on a banana peel, literal or metaphoric.
[. . .]
Queen Elizabeth II has personified the British middle-class virtues: moderation, unflamboyant consistency and unflappable reliability. It hasn’t always been exciting, and in satirical magazines such as Private Eye and on the BBC, she has paid a price for that and was lampooned for decades for stiff formality and stilted phrases — “My husband and I,” etc.
