Lee Ruddin: The Diamond Queen ... A Republican’s New Best Friend?

Lee Ruddin is Roundup Editor at HNN. He lives in England.

The cost to the British taxpayer of supporting the monarchy rose marginally during the last financial year, according to Buckingham Palace accounts published this week, with the Queen’s official expenditure increasing by £200,000 from £32.1 million in 2010/11 to £32.3 million in 2011/12. Despite a 0.6% increase meaning that the Queen still only costs the taxpayer 52p per person, republicans have been quick to give their two cents’ worth on what Republic’s chief executive Graham Smith describes as ‘one of the most profligate institutions in the world’.

Whilst I share Smith’s disbelief that ‘it costs the taxpayer more to send [Prince] Charles to [post-riot] east London than it does to send the Prime Minister to Afghanistan’ and agree that ‘most people, monarchist and republican alike, would find that impossible to justify,’ I do not believe ‘Palace spin doctors’ are required to illuminate the necessity of the Queen’s trips abroad. I say this since ITV3’s documentary Elizabeth II – The Diplomat Queen does the job for them and provides all the ‘evidence’ and ‘benefit’ (if not ‘cost’) ‘analysis’ which Smith demands.

The Queen has made an incredible 261 official visits overseas to 116 different countries. Of the 96 State Visits until her Diamond Jubilee year, two particularly stand out: her October 1986 and October 1994 visits to China and the Russian Federation respectively. The rise of the east forced Margaret Thatcher, an ardent foe of communism, to deploy Her Majesty to communist China on behalf of the Government. Thatcher’s Conservative successor, John Major, likewise, deployed eastwards what Sir Roderic Lyne (former Ambassador to Moscow, 2000-2004) refers to as ‘Britain’s number one diplomat.’

The benefits of such visits are evident for all to see. Less than a decade after Elizabeth II became the first the British sovereign to step foot on Russian soil, she played host – in June 2003 – to Vladimir Putin, the first Russian leader to be invited to Britain for a full State Visit in 114 years in an attempt, Lyne recounts, ‘to help Russia establish itself as a democracy [and] as a free-trading nation.’ Either side of Putin’s presidential visit, Chinese Presidents Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao also visited Buckingham Palace (in 1999 and 2005 respectively) as a symbol of the growing trade links and to cement capitalist ties.

The most beneficial of all, though, would have to be last year’s State Visit to the Republic of Ireland, as evidenced by the recent handshake between Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness and the Queen, the preeminent symbol of British rule in Ulster. The latter’s conciliatory words and gestures on her acclaimed visit won over the former, paving the way for last month’s historic moment: a moment that marked the end of chapter in the labored history of Anglo-Irish relations. ‘Politicians don’t open doors like the Queen does’, Camilla Tominey, Royal Editor at the Sunday Express, affirms in the hour-long programme and the PM’s official spokesman reaffirmed this only recently when he said that the Queen had ‘taken relations between the two countries to a new level’.

The Queen has ‘been an inspirational and unmatched example of the highest ideals of our society,’ Foreign Secretary William Hague said in his Lancaster House Speech, displaying ‘dignity in the face of responsibility and adversity [and] selfless devotion to duty.’ Shaking the blood-soaked hand of a die-hard republican in Belfast who was a commander in the terror group which murdered her cousin, Lord Mountbatten of Burma, was an astonishing act of forgiveness and one most people, either monarchist or republican, should applaud.

It is for her role as host to visiting heads of state, however, which leads me to agree with Hague that ‘Our Queen is the unsurpassed Briton.’ I say this for the simple reason that, as significant as the State Visits to China and Russia were in bringing about return ones from communist-cum-capitalist premiers, playing host to the German Head of State and meeting a new American one had far-reaching consequences. President Theodore Heuss’s 1958 State Visit was, for instance, the first time in half a century that a German president visited the UK (the last being the Kaiser, Edward VII’s guest, in 1907) and it helped Britain and Germany, in the Queen’s words, “to forge anew the bonds of amity and peace.” In the post-war world, Anglo-German harmony was indispensable to the pursuit of peace and the Queen (the last person to perpetuate enmity, as evidenced above) showed Heuss that both monarchs were at one in determination to avoid the scourge of war.

Although Britain and America fought on the same side during World War II, Anglo-American relations were at a post-war low as John F. Kennedy touched down on British soil for a private visit in 1961. There had been, Sir Christopher Meyer (former Ambassador to Washington, 1997-2003) reminds viewers, a ‘row immediately after the war about money, and what we owed them, and would they give us a loan... Then Suez.’

It was a good job, then – at a difficult time of austerity and strained relations – that Britain’s Royal Family connected instantaneously with America’s own glamorous first family at an event which saw a Commander-in-Chief entertained in Buckingham Palace for the first time in over forty years (since Woodrow Wilson dined with George V back in 1918). Despite JFK’s assassination in November 1963, though, and the fact that the Queen did not meet his successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson (which contributor Hugo Vickers, royal historian, erroneously says she did when stating that ‘she’s met every president of the United States, back to President Truman’), Meyer believes this period marked ‘a new dawn in Anglo-American relations.’  

That may be so since it was during this time that America took over the mantle of the British Empire and became the preeminent economic power of the day. Yet despite not being able to ‘afford that many aeroplanes [or] many aircraft carriers’, as Lyne points out, the Queen continues to project herself around the world, as ‘an aspect of British soft power,’ staying true to the words she uttered to President Eisenhower on her first State Visit to the U.S. in 1957: ‘On the maintenance of understanding between us, the future of the free world depends.’

Republicans prefer elected heads of state and yet the pricless – not pricey – work Elizabeth II carries out should make them think again about the Diamond Queen as their best friend. ‘Men grow cold/As girls grow old/And we all lose our charms in the end,’ as Marilyn Monroe said in the film Gentleman Prefer Blondes, when singing the song “Diamond’s Are A Girl’s Best Friend,” so anti-monarchists must stop thinking that an elected head of state would surpass the unsurpassed monarch.