The Queen can handle coups – she’s been on the receiving end of one

Supplies of Brexit invective are now almost exhausted. While the Prime Minister is denounced for denouncing Remainers as ‘collaborators’, his denouncers denounce him as a ‘tin pot dictator’ in need of a ‘rope’ and ‘lamp-post’.

Of all the bellicose hyperbole, however, it is the battle cry of ‘Stop the coup’ which is the loudest this week.

There are plenty of charges which can be levelled at this government. But to apply the term ‘coup d’état’ to a trio of genuflecting members of the Privy Council asking the Queen for the umpteenth prorogation of her reign is risible. For the central figure in this non–usurpation happens to be the one person in British public life who knows more about genuine coups than anyone. As head of the Commonwealth, the Queen has studied dozens of them. She has even known leaders who were ousted while sitting at her own table.

What few recall is that she has also been on the receiving end of a real coup herself. During the late 1980s, there was trouble in Fiji, then one of her realms. Fiji had become part of the British Empire (at its own request) during the reign of Queen Victoria but her great-great granddaughter had been the first monarch to go there. Visits by ‘Tui Viti’, ‘Monarch of the Fijians’, were always a hugely popular, spectacular affair, with an escort of torch-bearing warriors jogging alongside the royal convoy through Suva.

In 1987, an army officer, Colonel Rabuka, overthrew the government in back-to-back coups. Having failed to secure the endorsement of the Queen via her governor–general, he announced that he was now head of state. It all came to a head as the Queen attended the 1987 Commonwealth summit in Vancouver. In the absence of any support for outside intervention and with the situation looking increasingly precarious for her governor-general Sir Penaia Ganilau, the Queen decided he should step down for his own good.