Dialogue: Long shadows of the past

ANNE McELVOY of the Independent considers the Queen Mother's impact on British politics.

Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon seems to have taken more readily to the role of Queen than her husband did to the role of King. Like a lot of members of great landed families who married into royalty, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon considered herself in some ways rather grander than the Windsors, being the product of Glamis Castle and initially unwilling to marry the Duke of York at all.

But the Queen Mother's experience of the monarchy as a burdensome glory sat heavily upon her understanding of its role. She never forgave Wallis Simpson for her role in the abdication of King Edward VIII, which thrust the Duke on to the throne as King George VI.

Later, in a different crisis, the Queen Mother saw Princess Diana in the same mould. "The worst threat to the royal family since Wallis Simpson," she was said to have remarked.

The Queen Mother's politics were deeply dull, in the sense that she identified exclusively with rigid social conservatism. And yet her understanding of the political role of the family and the need for the first family to absorb and reflect the preoccupations of the masses was extraordinary in a woman whose own upbringing had been both privileged and remote.

Given her husband's limitations - he remained a nervous and uncertain figure - much of the business of managing the royal family's behaviour and symbolism during the war fell to his wife. The tales of the clothing coupons, household economies and the Queen cutting down her own dresses were early, and effective, examples of royal spin-doctoring.

"I am glad we have been bombed," she said after the Luftwaffe hit the palace. "It makes me feel I can look the East End in the face."

Her conservatism was of a kind so innate as to see itself as being beyond question. At one level, the election of a Labour Government in 1945 was abhorrent. The King successively opposed intentions to make Hugh Dalton foreign secretary on grounds of personal dislike. But the royal couple soon came to realise that Atlee's radicalism made the royal family more, rather than less, useful, in that it became a counterbalance to political upheaval.

The present-day emphasis on the royal family's role as a symbol of unity and stability was firmly established in this period. But her contract with modernisation was always partial, her adherence to the more arcane manifestations of privilege innate. Asked by one friend whom she had disliked most in politics, she unhesitatingly cited Jimmy Carter (because he kissed her on the lips) and Labour politician Tony Benn.

Her close relationship with Prince Charles intensified when she facilitated his continuing relationship, after marriage, with Camilla. It did not seem to occur to her that the Princess of Wales could exact such a terrible revenge and cause the greatest destabilisation to the family since the abdication.

The challenges to the monarchy's existence after Diana's death were the agony of her late years, and she retained an iron belief that the hereditary principle is not to be tampered with. "The word 'abdication' was never used in her presence," one acquaintance recalls, "other than in sorrowful reference to an abnormal event. She would never have countenanced the Queen handing over the Crown to Charles."

Her death may open up the possibility of doing things differently. But very slowly. The past casts long shadows.