The nation needs the Queen as much as ever — so give her a break

As the nights draw in, the temperature drops and the focus of the news gradually returns to winter stories about the price of fuel or the plight of the homeless, we need something to cheer us up. As if on cue, the nation’s most reliable entertainer has just reminded us of her presence. The Queen may be 95 years old, but she is certainly not ready to call it a day. On the contrary: her sense of humour is as undiminished as her indefatigable energy.

This week she politely refused an offer from The Oldie to follow in her late husband’s footsteps by letting herself be nominated as Oldie of the Year. “The Queen does not believe she meets the relevant criteria to be able to accept, and hopes you will find a more worthy recipient,” her assistant private secretary wrote to the magazine’s editor, Harry Mount. 

It isn’t only Her Majesty’s wit that is in demand. This week she hosted a reception at Windsor Castle for the Global Investment Summit, a jamboree for politicians and tycoons. She will have enjoyed the keynote address by the vaccine pioneer Dame Sarah Gilbert, but listening to billionaires boasting about their philanthropic activities must have tested her patience. Her diary is full of engagements, including national events such as the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow and marking Remembrance Sunday at the Cenotaph. 

So the Palace was wise to scale back one of our nonagenarian monarch’s less essential trips, this one a two-day visit to Northern Ireland. Yet such is her sense of duty that we can be sure that her expression of regret about the postponement was entirely genuine. “The Queen,” a Palace spokesman said, “has reluctantly accepted medical advice to rest for the next few days. Her Majesty is in good spirits and is disappointed that she will no longer be able to visit Northern Ireland…” Apart from any other considerations, she takes her duties as sovereign of the whole United Kingdom very seriously and will have been well aware of tensions arising from the Northern Ireland Protocol. Anything the Queen can do to remind people in the Province of their valued place in her realm, she will do — and her presence will be missed in Belfast.

Yet there is another factor apart from sheer fatigue that must have played a part in the decision to curtail the punishing Royal schedule — a decision that is reported to have caused “dissension” among her advisers. The rise in Covid cases to alarming levels of nearly 50,000 a day is bound to have caused concern in the Palace. Among people over 80 with Covid, according to the Sky News correspondent Ed Conway, the present case fatality rate for those who have been fully vaccinated is 12.6 per cent. Not nearly as high as the 42.9 per cent fatality rate for the unvaccinated, but still worryingly high. After preserving the Queen from the pandemic over long periods of isolation at Windsor during the lockdowns, it would be a great pity — to put it no stronger — if she were now to catch the virus on her travels around the UK.

The urgent and paramount need to consider the Queen’s health before exposing her to unnecessary risks does not mean that she should stop doing what she does best. As she reminded The Oldie, “Her Majesty believes you are as old as you feel.” She will carry on with her duties for as long as she is physically fit to do so, just as her father did, even while suffering from lung cancer and other smoking-related diseases that killed him aged just 56. But however vigorous the Queen may feel, and however strong her devotion to public service, some concessions to advancing age must be made. One such is the use of a walking stick, which she has only recently done in public. It makes perfect sense for her to rest properly after each engagement and, if in doubt, to put off whatever can wait until a more auspicious time.

There can be no other living person in the world who has given so much joy to so many for so few rewards. Not all of her predecessors saw their role in this way. The most comparable of them, Queen Victoria, largely withdrew from public view after the death of her husband, Prince Albert; except for a few official duties she was seldom seen in London again for the remaining 40 years of her reign. After the death of Prince Philip, by contrast, the present Queen has quickly returned to her normal range of engagements. We may surmise that she misses her late and beloved husband every day, but she also knows that remaining in the public eye is what he would have wanted. 

We should never forget how lucky we are to have Elizabeth II as our Queen. The less well-known second verse of the National Anthem implores the Almighty: “Thy choicest gifts in store/On her be pleased to pour.” For those of a certain age, the best of these gifts is, surely, the chance to put one’s feet up after a hard day’s work — even if the Queen is reported to have given up her evening Martini. However that may be, she is still evidently enjoying herself, doing the job for which she was born. Despite having broken most, if not all, records of royal longevity, she is not ready to renounce her vocation yet. And so we Britons are still glad to sing proudly: “Long may she reign.”

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