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long time at it…’ The radical Tony Benn, on the other hand, liked his iconoclastic ideas
about various aspects of the royal role. Philip argued, in terms that were unlikely to
have pleased his wife, about the necessity for changing the Queen’s Commonwealth
role, by which he meant the Queen being Queen of Canada as well as of Britain: ‘They
don’t want us and they will have to be a republic or something,’ he told Benn in
February 1968. 21 He also said that he thought the Privy Council meetings were ‘an
absolute waste of time’ and that the Prime Minister’s audience should be broadened to
include other ministers who could explain departmental issues to the Queen. Curiously,
he thought government should be decentralized and showed himself to be a warm
supporter of Scottish and Welsh nationalism. All this was music to Benn’s ears: ‘He is a
thoughtful and intelligent person,’ he noted of Philip. He was more suspicious of
Elizabeth, whom he regarded as a siren figure luring members of the Labour Party away
from their attachment to pure democracy and the working class. ‘She is not very clever
but is reasonably intelligent and she is experienced,’ he wrote. ‘She has been involved in
Government now for eighteen years…’ He was surprised at the vehemence with which
she was prepared to express her views – ‘You can V cancel Concorde,’ she told him – and
her honesty: when he asked her what she thought of Pierre Trudeau as Canadian Prime
Minister, she replied that she had found him ‘rather disappointing’. 22
Richard Crossman, too, deplored Elizabeth’s seductive influence over his colleagues
and members of his party. After a meeting held to discuss a statement on the Queen’s
finances on 11 November 1969, he wrote:
Barbara [Castle], Roy [Jenkins] and I are republicans. We don’t like the royal position, we don’t like going to
Court or feel comfortable there, and we know the Queen isn’t comfortable with us. Fred Peart, on the other
hand, gets on with the Queen just like George Brown and Callaghan do… Harold is a steady loyalist and,
roughly speaking, it is true that it is the professional classes who in this sense are radical and the workingclass
socialists who are by and large staunchly monarchist. The nearer the Queen they get the more the
working-class members of Cabinet love her and she loves them… 23
Some of the more intellectual left-wing ministers found the historic pantomime of
royalty hard to take. Crossman, like Wilson a former Oxford don but unlike him a
journalist, became Lord President of the Council in Wilson’s first Government in 1964, a
post which put him in frequent contact with Elizabeth. He was outraged by the custom
which required busy ministers to attend meetings of the Privy Council in remote
Balmoral or Sandringham if that was where she happened to be. ‘The Privy Council is
the best example of pure mumbo-jumbo you can find,’ he wrote in his diary on 20
September 1966. ‘It’s interesting to reflect that four Ministers, busy men, all had to take
a night and a day off and go up there [Balmoral] with Godfrey Agnew [the Clerk of the
Council] to stand for two and a half minutes while the list of Titles [of Orders in
Council] was read out. It would be far simpler for the Queen to come down to
Buckingham Palace but it’s lèse-majesté to suggest it.’ One of his duties as Lord President
involved attending Elizabeth for the ‘pricking of the Sheriffs’, when she actually pricked
with a bodkin the names of these honorary local officials written on a document – ‘a