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DOMINIC SANDBROOK: Let's be frank: The young woman who became Queen in 1952 could not have imagined the Britain of today

Published: 18:51 EST, 8 September 2015 | Updated: 03:53 EST, 9 September 2015

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For all her famous stoicism and self-control, the Queen, pictured in Berlin in June, might be forgiven a smile of satisfaction when she wakes today

For all her famous stoicism and self-control, the Queen might be forgiven a smile of satisfaction when she wakes today.

For almost unnoticed amid the chaotic hurly-burly of life in Britain in 2015, this moment marks an extraordinary landmark in our national story.

Elizabeth II, who has reigned since February 6, 1952, today becomes the longest-serving monarch in British history, overtaking her great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria’s record of 63 years and 216 days on the throne.

It is an achievement based, of course, on her longevity, a testament to the vast improvements in diet, healthcare and life-expectancy that have transformed and extended so many lives since Victoria’s day.

But the story of our Queen’s record-breaking reign is also a tale of the monarchy’s extraordinary resilience in an age of astounding change — and of the triumph of the unassuming, understated Christian conservatism that has been her lodestar since she succeeded George VI at the age of 25.

Symbol

The vast majority of us, of course, have never known another monarch than Elizabeth II. For the past 63 years, she has been the one constant in our national life.

The Empire has gone. So, too, have so many things the Queen and her generation took for granted, from imperial measurements to shillings and sixpences.

Yet this solemn 89-year-old woman remains the supreme symbol of Britain’s underlying continuity. Prime Ministers and archbishops come and go, but the Queen remains.

And this is more than merely a personal milestone, for it tells a deeper story about our national life since 1952. Almost uniquely among the major nations of the world, we measure our shared history in the lives of our monarchs, from the wife-consuming figure of Henry VIII to the indomitable Elizabeth I, the doomed Charles I and the carousing Charles II.

In our modern history, however, two monarchs occupy a league of their own. One is Victoria, who ruled from 1837 till 1901 and became synonymous with the age of railways, telegraphs, naval supremacy and imperial glory.

The other, of course, is our current Queen.

In some ways she and her predecessor seem remarkably similar characters. Both often cut serious figures, and both became international icons, symbols of Britannia herself.

Like Victoria, Elizabeth II turned herself from a blushing young princess into the grandmother of the nation — the incarnation of duty and service.

And, like Victoria, she ruled during a period of extraordinary change, an era in which the old certainties about Britain’s place in the world were steadily undermined.

And yet the underlying differences are much more glaring than the similarities — so much so that I wonder whether the two women would even have approved of one another.

In stark contrast to her great-great-granddaughter, Victoria (pictured) — who became Queen aged just 18 — was a giddy, wilful character, who endured long periods of deep national unpopularity

In stark contrast to her great-great-granddaughter, Victoria — who became Queen aged just 18 — was a giddy, wilful character, who endured long periods of deep national unpopularity.

And far from remaining loftily above the political fray as the Queen does, Victoria was an instinctive Conservative who made no secret of her private sympathies.

She famously loathed the high-minded Liberal statesman William Gladstone and, by contrast, adored the flamboyant, charismatic, unprincipled Tory leader Benjamin Disraeli, the Boris Johnson of his day.

What our Queen would make of all this can easily be imagined. She has had no fewer than 12 Prime Ministers since 1952, from Winston Churchill to David Cameron, but we have no real idea — apart from gossip — about what she has thought of any of them.

What the two women undoubtedly have in common, though, is that they managed to steer the monarchy through a period of extraordinary social and technological change.

Elizabeth II, pictured in 1951, turned herself from a blushing young princess into the grandmother of the nation — the incarnation of duty and service

Victoria’s reign, for instance, opened in a world of stagecoaches, candlelight and canals, and ended with electricity, cinemas and motor cars.

Yet throughout her 63 years on the throne, her people’s underlying assumptions remained remarkably constant, from their views on Britain’s position as the world’s greatest empire to her people’s fundamentally conservative Christian morality.

Elizabeth II, however, has reigned during an age of staggering political and cultural turbulence. Indeed, to millions of Britons today, the world of 1952 — the world of Stanley Matthews and Vera Lynn, tin baths and ration books, smog and stodgy dinners — must seem like ancient history.

By today’s standards, the Britain in which she became Queen was a cold, damp and uncomfortable place. Central heating was almost unknown. Few people had telephones.

There were just three million cars on the roads — compared with ten times that number today — while fridges and washing machines were expensive luxuries. More than one in four households in 1952 still had an outside lavatory — a statistic that must strike today’s youngsters as unfathomable.

Vision

What, I wonder, would the young Elizabeth have thought if someone had showed her a vision of Britain in 2015 — a country obsessed with selfies and social media, in which most of us live longer, more comfortable lives than ever before, and in which the NHS struggles to cope with a wave of obesity?

Surely she would not have believed it. And yet the irony is that for all the advances in home comforts and everyday technology, the real changes in our national life have been political, cultural and moral.

What, I wonder, would the young Elizabeth have thought if someone had showed her a vision of Britain in 2015 — a country obsessed with selfies and social media (stock image above)

When the young Elizabeth heard the news about the death of her father, George VI, she was in Kenya, visiting not an independent African country, but one of Britain’s prize imperial possessions.

She became Queen during the last heyday of the Empire, a world that has vanished completely. Barely 20 years into the Queen’s record-breaking reign, the Empire had broken up, with colonies across Africa and Asia becoming independent amid a surge of nationalism.

The Queen remains a staunch ambassador for the principle of Commonwealth unity, and is still the monarch of some 16 Commonwealth member states.

But although she has been an outstanding standard-bearer for the principles of racial equality and post-imperial friendship, the truth is few people in Britain could give two hoots about the Commonwealth.

Grace

Indeed, nothing marks the disappearance of the Empire more completely than the fact that, to most people today, the thought of Britain directly running the affairs of, say, Jamaica, Nigeria or Sudan seems utterly inconceivable.

When you look back at the Queen’s reign, in fact, the striking thing is that Britain adjusted to the loss of Empire with such equanimity and good grace. But much of that is down to the Queen herself.

Another monarch — Victoria, perhaps — might have bitterly resisted the loss of Britain’s imperial might. But the Queen has not merely accepted imperial decline, she’s embraced it.

No politician has ever worked harder to smooth our passage from a proud worldwide empire to a diminished European nation-state — not through grand statements and soaring speeches, but through her quiet acceptance of international reality.

No one in 1952 could have predicted how much our moral and cultural lives would change during the next 63 years, from the collapse of Church membership and the mainstream acceptance of homosexuality (stock image above) to the surge of immigration, the rise of feminism and the spread of pornography

And although we rarely think of the Queen as a politician, I think her political skills — her mastery of public relations, her ability to win an audience, her command of popular opinion — are often underestimated.

Britain itself, of course, has changed immeasurably since that February day when she stepped off the plane from Kenya to receive the condolences and acclamation of her people. We may be a richer, more open society, but we are also a greedier, more anxious, more fragmented and more unequal one.

No one in 1952 could have predicted how much our moral and cultural lives would change during the next 63 years, from the collapse of Church membership and the mainstream acceptance of homosexuality to the surge of immigration, the rise of feminism and the spread of pornography.

One statistic says it all. In the early Fifties, the number of divorces was so tiny it was almost non-existent. Yet today the divorce rate in England and Wales is a staggering 42 per cent.

Who could have imagined, back in 1952, that three of the Queen’s own children would be among the divorce statistics — including the heir to the throne?

I think this moral and cultural transformation posed a challenge far greater than anything Victoria had to face. Indeed, if it had happened during the reign of a less accomplished monarch — including the stubborn, proud Victoria herself — then it could easily have blown the monarchy away.

It is easy to underestimate the Queen’s achievement in keeping the show on the road. In an anti-deferential, populist age, where we have lost respect for institutions and authority figures from politicians to the police, it would have been easy for the monarchy, too, to have lost respect.

But it has been Elizabeth II’s signal achievement to have become the supreme embodiment of continuity in an age of change. Of course, she has bent a little with the wind: just listen to her first broadcasts to hear how much her accent has changed.

The content, however, has remained remarkably constant. As former Tory MP Matthew Parris recently observed, the Queen represents the essence of conservatism, standing for the values of ‘solidity and permanence’ that seem so endangered in our superficial, celebrity-obsessed age.

With her, we see not merely the incarnation of dedication to duty, but the embodiment of British history itself. Even her heartfelt Christian faith, now so unfashionable, seems a reassuring throwback to a kinder, gentler age.

There is a lesson there for Britain’s politicians. Perhaps the route to public affection lies not, as they often think, in slavishly following fashion, but in sticking to the values of service, responsibility and self-discipline that the Queen learned as a child in the Twenties.