How The Spectator reported the Queen’s life

The reason the British people love the Queen, and are willing to die for her, is that they can understand what she is about, in a way that they cannot understand what the constitution, cabinet and parliament are about, or the Courts of Justice or the Bank of England, or any of the other abstractions which comprise our so-called system of government. Monarchy is credible, as Bagehot said, because it is personal. Seeing is believing. That is why all the old royal ceremonials are important: not because they are incomprehensible and mysterious, but because they are intelligible and familiar. All that talk about the magic of monarchy is very misleading. The strength of monarchy lies in the fact that of all forms of government it is the least mechanical and the most recognisably and intimately human: government made of flesh and blood in the shape of a particular family, the more ordinary the better. Monarchs get married, have babies and die (unlike ministries, which are instructed, reshuffled and such like), and it is because these familiar activities require no effort of the imagination to appreciate and no great intellect to comprehend that ordinary British people feel more safe to see sovereignty lodged there than somewhere else.

Peregrine Worsthorne, ‘Queen and Common-wealth’, 3 December 1983

Birth

Universal pleasure has been caused by the birth of a daughter, on Wednesday, to the Duke and Duchess of York. The new Princess is third in the line of succession to the Throne, coming after the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York… It will be very agreeable to the nation if the child is given a characteristically English name; the marriage of the Duke of York to a British subject instead of to a foreign Princess has been as popular for the principle it embodies as Their Royal Highnesses are popular for themselves.