Bernard Ingham: Iron discipline of steadfast ruler in an age of upheaval

It has been my privilege to live through every one of them and marvel at the performance of the Elizabethan who knighted me.

How any mortal can preside pretty uncontroversially as head of any state for that long during the fastest evolution of mankind in the history of the planet passes human understanding.

It takes an iron discipline, even if you are born to rule, to keep your nose out of trouble and restrict yourself to your constitutional duty to be consulted, to encourage and to warn.

I cannot tell you how she does it – and there is much more reigning left in her yet – because Margaret Thatcher never enlightened me. She regarded her dealings with the Queen as strictly confidential.

This came in extremely useful in 1986 when the Sunday Times splashed its claim that Queen and Prime Minister were at loggerheads over the social consequences of unemployment and the Commonwealth, where Mrs Thatcher was in a minority of one over sanctions against South Africa.

I refused to say a word, which was perhaps interpreted as Wellington’s “publish and be damned”. But the Sunday Times was far from damned. Its tidings were music to the ears of Thatcherphobes who delighted in this further evidence, as they saw it, that she could not pass an institution, even the monarchy, without handbagging it..

The Queen said not a word, though two things were noticed. Her press secretary left after a decent interval and astonishingly quickly she bestowed on Thatcher the Order of Merit and Lady of the Garter after her resignation. I conclude that the monarch and our first female Prime Minister got on better than some people would have you imagine two strong women ever could.

Whatever the truth, there is no denying that Thatcher’s housewifely economics did create social stress in turning Britain round and the 1980s were turbulent to say the least in the Queen’s Commonwealth. It would have been a curiously detached monarch who was not worried about both. Thatcher certainly was.

Which brings me to what else the Queen has lived through up to now. She came to office at the dawn of the television and jet agea when we in Hebden Bridge regarded a trip 
eight miles down the valley to Halifax as a day out.

Rationing was still in force but where there’s muck there’s brass. Reeking Britain – before the Clean Air Act – was working its way out of World War II bankruptcy to Harold Macmillan’s “you’ve never had it so good” conclusion to the 1950s.

The British Empire was transforming itself into the Commonwealth while the USA brought to an end our world power pretensions by stopping us messing about with Egypt over the nationalisation of the Suez Canal.

In the 1960s, it became increasingly impossible to reconcile low inflation and full employment as trade unions abused their power and managers exposed their limitations.

Britain was heading for the knacker’s yard, so we decided to join the Common Market and be ruled partly from Brussels.

At the same time celebrity “pop” culture took off on a rising swell of splendid tunes.

Social mores were turned upside down and the permissive society became licentious on the back of medical advance.

Technology took the drudgery out of women’s lives. They were poised to shatter the glass ceiling. And it took a woman – Attila the Hen, as Clement Freud described her – to tame the unions and preserve democracy after a year-long miners’ strike.

Then Communism collapsed and mobile phones and computers arrived 
to revolutionise the way we live and 
learn.

We – and the Queen – probably ain’t seen nothing yet as technology evolves Some are warning us of the mortal threat of intelligent robots.

Meanwhile, the old Adam lives on in man as we see in Vladimir Putin, the Islamists’ Middle East killing zone and a debilitated Europe being swamped by armies of migrants from Arabia and Africa’s failed continent. The Queen’s realm faces altogether new menaces.

And irony of ironies on this remarkable day for the Queen and her people, we have two hard-line British republicans in Jeremy Corbyn and Nicola Sturgeon threatening a new, de-stabilising national revolution.

Your Majesty, there is no end to it. Thank you for putting up with us ephemerals. If only we could match your concept of duty and discipline.