When the inhabitants of the United Kingdom and television audiences across the world celebrate Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee this weekend, one telling secret of her popularity is likely to be overlooked. As her most authoritative recent biographer, Robert Hardman puts it, "the queen genuinely enjoys being queen.”
That is not the dominant narrative about the "Firm.” Watch the Netflix drama series "The Crown” (regarded by millions of viewers as historical fact, rather than truth mixed with surmise and exaggeration), and you see a family in which personal feelings are forever sacrificed to the claims of duty. It presents a joyless, careworn monarch forced to overcome crisis after crisis over her seven-decade reign.
If modern monarchy is such a vale of tears, why didn’t the queen hand over the reins to her eldest son and heir, Prince Charles, long ago?