The least that can be said about someone who retains the heights of popularity of Isabel IIsovereign of the United Kingdom, after 70 years on the throne is that she has had a extraordinary ability to adapt to any contingency both at the institutional level and at the personal and family level, always so convulsive and so scrutinized by the media, especially the British tabloids. To someone who lived her first ten years in peaceful country comfort and suddenly, against all odds, became heiress to the Crown following the abdication of her uncle, Edward VIIIand the enthronement of his father, George VI, he had no choice but to accommodate himself to the demands of a task that, in principle, should not occupy his life. And it was made even more complex by the changes that followed the end of the Second World War, the decolonization and the interference of the global village in the affairs of the palace, until then covered up by secrecy and the customs of the court.
One fact suffices to gauge Elizabeth II’s adaptability to circumstances: when in February 1952 she hastily returned from Kenya to succeed her father, Winston Churchill he was prime minister of the United Kingdom and embodied in public the rigor and formalism of the empire; he today occupies the position a character as unconventional and unpredictable as Boris Johnson. It is enough to also remember the rosary of shocks within the family Windsorbefore and after the call by herself annus horribilis (1992), with the consequent loss of popularity of the Crown, to gauge the queen’s ability to recover after each corrosive episode. So that neither the gallant life of her husband, nor the divorces, entanglements and dalliances of her children, nor the departure of her grandson Harry to get away from the demands of the palace nor any of the multiple moments that shook the foundations of the institution have prevented the old Isabel turn 96 without apparent erosion of the appreciation that the street has for him today.
Perhaps that peculiar consolidated relationship of the Crown with the citizens is an exclusive attribute of British society –more than English, less than Scottish–, impossible to transfer to other environments. Monarchy is more than just a form of government, is something similar to a factory brand that explains, for example, the successful ‘merchandising’ of that jubilee and the previous ones, more typical of the promotional campaign of a rock star than of a head of state. Not even the Nordic monarchies, so discreet and not very noisy, can conceive of such a degree of complicity with their fellow citizens, much less those that, like the Spanish or the Belgian, the latter for a longer time, have been the subject of heated discussion.
There is in the ingredients that concur in the jubilee a mix of theatricality and tradition, two sides of the same coin, which filters the memory of the worst days and exalts the character above any other consideration. It is quite certain that the paraphernalia and ostentation that surround the day-to-day at Buckingham Palace were little less than unaffordable by any other society than the British. But if it is in this one to honor the sovereign in the final stretch of her reign, it is because perhaps the brightness of the ceremony attenuates the longing for the loss of influence of a fundamental country in the history of Europe, but irreversibly dwarfed.