Elizabeth II by Douglas Hurd review – bootlicking obsequiousness

The Queen is revealed by the former home secretary to be without moral defect, possessed of penetrating insight and only an accidental tax dodger

Slight, dry and dismally unoriginal though it is, Douglas Hurd’s oleaginous portrait of the Queen contains one stunning revelation. Uniquely among humankind, it would seem that she is afflicted by not a single moral defect. No suggestion that she falls short of the archangel Gabriel in perfection is allowed to pollute these pages. Her notorious rudeness and intell ectual nullity? Not a whisper. The swollen coffers of this former tax dodger, some of whose subjects can scarcely feed their children? No comment. Her renowned ability to freeze a dandelion at 100 paces? All a misunderstanding. Hurd even manages to whitewash her curmudgeonly consort, a man who has “unintentionally [sic] acquired a reputation for tactless, even brutal remarks”, though he wisely draws the line at putting in a good word for Andrew and Edward. If the Duke of Edinburgh passes the odd ethnically dubious comment, it is simply because he “wants to stir things up” and longs “for something exceptional to happen”. Over the years, however, these embarrassing episodes have become “fewer and better understood”. With his saccharine, insufferably bland sensibility, Hurd would no doubt find Abu Ghraib a little distasteful.

Early in the book, there is a delicious “Hitler: my part in his downfall” moment, as the former foreign secretary insists that Elizabeth Windsor played “a small but noticeable part in the cause of Britain’s lonely stand against the Nazis”. She pulled off this feat, he tells us, by “learning about the inner workings of a motor car” while a member of the Auxiliary Territorial Service. That must have had Goebbels shaking in his boots. Despite what Hurd more or less concedes is her utterly conformist, conventional mind, she is capable of some remarkably penetrating insights. Asked by her sister, Margaret, whether their father’s ascent to the throne meant that she herself would one day be Queen, she replied: “Yes, I suppose it does.”

Continue reading...