Long life | 7 July 2016

Amid the bloodshed and chaos that followed David Cameron’s resignation as prime minister, Theresa May earned praise for seeking to convey calm and steadiness. In the speech with which she launched her bid to succeed him, she said: ‘I know I’m not a showy politician …I don’t often wear my heart on my sleeve. I just get on with the job in front of me.’ These were just the kind of words that many people reeling from the Johnson-Gove fiasco were happy to hear from another possible prime minister. But there is already someone in a great office who could say these words with even greater conviction, and that is our head of state, the Queen. For there is no one else in British public life who so consistently hides her private feelings and gets on with the jobs in front of her. More than anyone else, the Queen conveys calm and steadiness. And if people yearn for stability in these troubled times, she alone now represents it.

She is so reluctant to wear her heart on her sleeve that, when she’s asked how she’s feeling, she will only admit to being still alive; and when it comes to getting on with the job in front of her, she has few equals among people of any age. Last year she carried out 306 engagements, 35 of them abroad. And this year, the one of her 90th birthday, she may well have been surprised to find she is still alive, for her workload has been yet more enormous.

Apart from her reception of the usual list of routine callers, such as departing and arriving ambassadors, there have been her own special birthday to celebrate, the centenaries of the battles of Jutland and the Somme to commemorate, visits to Liverpool and Northern Ireland to pay, and a visit to Edinburgh to open the fifth session of the Scottish parliament, at which in a speech she urged British politicians to allow ‘room for quiet thinking and contemplation’ in the aftermath of Brexit.