Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II

Debate between Lord Triesman and Lord Bishop of Coventry

Saturday 10th September 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Triesman (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a real privilege to take part in this debate and to follow the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Sentamu, and his inspiring words, and also the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, not least because I so strongly share his feelings about the first couple of short speeches by King Charles and the sentiments that they involved.

I do not think it would be to any purpose to repeat the many things that have been said about Her late Majesty’s graciousness, kindness and ability to respond to people in such a personal way—a pleasure which I enjoyed on a number of occasions. Those things have been said. It may well be that what we should remember are her comments when she described her first speeches as having been “green” but that none the less she was delighted to have made the commitments that she made and to have seen them through. I sometimes think that the best one can expect of one’s children is that after their long experience, we hope, of you as a parent they will say that they thought you a good parent and that you have contributed in a significant way to their lives. That is certainly the way I think with affection and humility about the late Queen.

A number of us have inevitably reached for anecdotes because they are not just expressions of the good luck and good chance of having met Her Majesty—in my case, a number of times—but illustrate things about her which, if you had not gone through those experiences, you would not necessarily know. When I first went as a Lord in Waiting, I had the great good luck of her inviting me to have lunch, and we sat, just the two of us, at a small table. She said, “I always have a light lunch”—I think I am allowed to say something about what she said—“I have ordered a ham salad but I thought you would not want a ham salad, so I have ordered a smoked salmon salad for you”. I thought how nice and good to have thought that, as it was absolutely true that, for various religious reasons, I would not have been able to eat a ham salad. It was a most enjoyable discussion and a very enjoyable lunch.

The noble Lord, Lord Jay—we do not sit on the same Benches, but I think of him as a very good friend, as many people in the Foreign Office become very close to the Diplomatic Service—was in Buckingham Palace at the time. As noble Lords probably saw yesterday, he is a very tall man and, wearing a hat with plumes which stuck up about another two feet, he looked like a basketball player on day release. He was introducing ambassadors, as he described. Her Majesty commented on the fact that there were more ambassadors arriving in London than she had ever seen in the course of her reign and that many of them were from countries she had had to look up. Bosnia-Herzegovina was one that day, and there were one or two others. It created in me a very strange memory. My father gave me stamp album—it did not have many stamps in it—when I was a small child, and I would looked through it and see all these countries, such as Bosnia-Herzegovina, and wonder where on earth they were. There were all sorts of places. I kept that stamp album because it was such a strange moment in history. Her Majesty very graciously said that her grandfather had collected stamps and had some wonderful albums. She asked whether I would like to see them and said that perhaps they would compare with my stamp album. I thought that was extremely unlikely, but I was delighted to take up her offer.

That was not the first time I met her. The first time was in the context of a football match. I have to say that I never thought of Her Majesty as being a very keen football person. There are no horses involved in the game and, try as we might to devise it, we could never find a way of involving horses in football. I had been told that she had a wonderful sense of humour and that she was at the match. She was indeed very gracious and, at the end, when I asked whether she thought anybody had played particularly well, she said, “The band of the Scots Guards”. I thought that was probably a pretty accurate reflection.

Funnily enough, the Scots Guards come into another memory I have, of when President Lula of Brazil made his state visit. At the state banquet, one of the things that Her Majesty liked was to have the pipes of the Scots Guards walk round the outside of the banquet table playing, as only they can. This playing “as only they can” gave a profound shock to President Lula, who thought it was either a declaration of war or something which he had never come across before. He said, “Do you always do this?”, and before I could answer Her Majesty said, “Of course we always do it”.

I have those memories and I couple them with affectionate memories of His Royal Highness Prince Philip, who was also so important on so many of those occasions and who also deserves great credit.

It has been said in this House that, during the course of her long reign, a huge number of things changed. I want to focus briefly on one of them. The invention of atomic weapons took place earlier, and the first explosion of atomic weapons took place during the war. But when thinking about those 70-plus years it struck me that, in that time, we have created circumstances among humanity where we have a capability we did not have, and which was not really thought of when Her Majesty was in the forces, to destroy ourselves completely and wipe out everything we know about human existence. We have the capability not only to obliterate the whole of the past but to obliterate what would have been the accomplishments of the future. I think Her Majesty had a strong sense of the value of the accomplishments of the future as well as of the traditions of the past, and she was well able to talk about them and make you feel them. That is something that I feel at the moment.

At the heart of it was a love of peace and democracy. She espoused both of those, though not in the sense that she would not wish to stand up to ruthless dictators who would try to interrupt peace or destroy democracy; quite the contrary, she would certainly always have wanted to do that, but in the cause of peace and democracy. I treasure having lived through a period in which a monarch felt so strongly about those things.

Yesterday, the noble Lord, Lord Polak, said a little about Jewish tradition at the end of a person’s life, and with great respect to those who are going to shelter my faith under their umbrella—although it does not always seem to me to happen, but none the less I am very keen that they should—I want to do one other thing which is also from Jewish tradition. Many noble Lords may well know it: we wish the family and the people closest to the person who has died long life. It is not just because we wish for them a long life—though we do, of course—but because it is in the lives of the people who survive that memories survive to the greatest extent. We carry the memories. God bless the King. May he have long life and cherish those memories.

[The Lord Bishop of Coventry]

My Lords, it is a great honour to follow the noble Lord, Lord Triesman. I will offer some words of tribute on behalf of the people of Coventry and Warwickshire, especially to express our great thanks for the Queen’s part in the renewal of Coventry after its wartime destruction and its discovery of a new identity, aspiring to be a city of peace and reconciliation.

A few days after the worst of the bombing of Coventry, the Queen’s father stood in the ruins of the cathedral and wept. In 1956 the young Queen laid the foundation stone of the new cathedral—a new cathedral for a new Queen, in an ancient city now being rebuilt for a modern age, in a nation finding its place on the international stage in a new Europe and a new world. In 1962, 60 years ago this year, the Queen—herself a consecrated monarch, of course—returned to Coventry for the consecration of the new cathedral. There was hope in the air, and Coventry became a national symbol of the traumas of war, with all its suffering still evident in the ruins, and the possibilities of peace built on reconciliation rising from the ashes of the past into the simple grandeur of the new cathedral. What better person than Queen Elizabeth to lay the foundation stone of a new future and to see a building, a people, a nation consecrated to serve the ways of peace?

Serving the cause of reconciliation for which Coventry Cathedral and its city have become known was remarkably demonstrated through the Queen’s service to the nation and the world, as we have heard in many ways. The Queen helped the nation to celebrate its past and carry forward its great traditions and noblest values while, at the same time, reaching out to the future, accepting its challenges, welcoming its opportunities and easing its coming. Whether steering the nation from imperial power to shaper and sharer in a Commonwealth of Nations, or facing head-on the harm that peoples have inflicted on themselves in families, in communities and between nations, and showing them how we may live better together, the Queen well used the strength of her character and the powers of her office to create new conditions for co-operation.

Among the many examples on the world stage, I pay particular tribute to the Queen’s part in Coventry’s and the country’s reconciliation with Dresden, that symbol of the brutality of war and its challenge to face our own past. Her visit in 1992 with one of my predecessors was a brave act and not without cost to her. It exposed emotions that were still raw in that city, but I know from my own many visits and close relationships that it was deeply healing, transformative even, on the long road to reconciliation.

As we have heard powerfully from the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, and the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, the Queen’s words and gestures—the way she used the combination of her status and credibility of character to serve the good of the future—were breathtaking in their effect during her state visit to the Republic of Ireland in 2011 and then Belfast in 2012. Again, we saw something, as we have heard, of the risk and cost that walking the road of reconciliation involves. There are many other examples, of course, in her long years of service, as indeed there are in the untiring, unstinting work of her son, our King, in his now former life.

As has been acknowledged, the Queen’s own foundation, the rock on which she built her life, is well known. The cause for which she felt and knew that she was consecrated—God’s kingdom, peace, justice and mercy—served her well. We know that it will also serve our King well. It makes me wonder whether all our foundations and all the causes to which we give ourselves will be as secure and enduring as hers.

The most reverend Primate the Archbishop of York referred to his granddaughter crying when she heard the news. I cannot resist saying the same about my mother. She is 93 and frail. She wept for the Queen and, I think, all that great generation that is passing. She said, “She was always there”—we all feel that—but she also said something that got it for me: “The Queen had such a beautiful face. It was her smile.” That has been referred to already. I was blessed by that smile in the encounters I had with Her Majesty our late Queen. Genuine life-giving smiles can restore relationships that once looked irreparably damaged. Our world is a better place because of the smile of that gracious lady.