What is the most significant year of the Queen’s reign?

Andrew Roberts

The most important moment came on 11 November 1975 when her governor-general in Australia, Sir John Kerr, dismissed the Labour government under Gough Whitlam, doing so in her name. Although the Queen knew nothing about it before it happened (indeed, she was asleep at the time), it reiterated the vital constitutional principle that there is a power above politicians, even elected ones as in Whitlam’s case. Whitlam had driven Australia to the brink of economic and social collapse, but Kerr saved the country using the Queen’s royal prerogative. His decision was enthusiastically endorsed by the Australian people at the subsequent general election, with a landslide victory for Malcolm Fraser. Even while she slept, therefore, the mere existence of the Queen’s prerogative rights reminded the world that her politicians are the servants of both her and the people, not the masters.

Peter Hitchens

1997 must now be seen as the year the fatal blow was struck at the monarchy. Two things sum this up. Both were to do with Blairism. The first was the general acceptance that New Labour was right to abolish the hereditary peerage, at worst a harmless survival and at best an obstacle to the tyranny of the party machines and their whips. Nobody significant could be bothered to defend it on principle. Yet the change was a frontal assault on the idea that constitutional power can legitimately be inherited. From that moment onwards, the Queen’s influence depended purely on her own personal popularity. Her heirs and successors, if they cannot attain popularity, or if they lose it, will have no generally accepted entitlement to sit on the throne. The BBC’s portrayal of Tony Blair’s arrival in Downing Street, including a fake crowd of Labour supporters waving Union flags in a street which the public are forbidden to enter, was the inauguration of a president in all but name, as everything which followed showed.