Diamond Jubilee

Jack Straw Excerpts

Wednesday 7th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Jack Straw (Blackburn) (Lab)]

It is a great honour to speak in this debate and particularly to follow the right hon. Member for Louth and Horncastle (Sir Peter Tapsell), the Father of the House. I hope, Mr Speaker, that you, the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition, having listened with care to the address by the Father of the House, will have it in mind that the next diamond jubilee to be organised should be the one to celebrate his 60th year in the House—such has he become a national treasure and an entertainment to us all.

Of the many privileges that go with the best job in the British Cabinet—that of Foreign Secretary—the greatest is that the whole office is expected to accompany Her Majesty the Queen on state visits abroad. During my five years as Foreign Secretary, I went with Her Majesty to, among other places, Germany, France, Malta and Nigeria. Those visits gave me the opportunity to witness at close hand the extraordinary preparation, dedication, commitment and time that Her Majesty and Prince Philip devoted to these sometimes very difficult public engagements. The pace that the Queen and the Prince set for these visits would have tired somebody half their age.

In Nigeria, the arrangements for the day-to-day engagements showed a little flexibility—to be delicate about the matter—and Her Majesty and Prince Philip had to accommodate that flexibility. She had taken part in one engagement at which I thought she did stunningly well. I said to her afterwards, “Ma’am, if I may say so, that showed extraordinary professionalism.” There was a pause. She looked at me and said, with a benign motherly smile, “Foreign Secretary, it should have been professional. I’ve been doing this for long enough.”

As Home Secretary and then Lord Chancellor, I had a rather less public duty—that of administering the oath of homage, which all new bishops of the Church of England have to make to the sovereign, and have done since the age of Henry VIII. Through that prism, I was able to observe the profound seriousness with which the Queen treats her duties as Head of our established Church, as well as her encyclopaedic knowledge of the parishes and personalities of the Anglican communion.

As Member of Parliament for Blackburn for the past 33 years, I have seen the excitement and, more importantly, the sense of recognition that visits by Her Majesty and other members of the royal family have brought to the people of my area, as they have to every constituency and to people of every ethnic background and religion. These are but a handful of examples of the extraordinary, exemplary way in which Her Majesty has led our nation over the past 60 years.

Of the three most recent of the Queen’s dozen Prime Ministers, one was in nappies and two were not born when she acceded to the throne in February 1952. I guess that I am one of a diminishing band of Members who can recall that day and period. Food and clothes rationing were still in operation and, much more importantly for a six-year-old, so was sweet rationing. There was an acute housing shortage. Vast areas of our great towns and cities were still bombed wastelands, Britain was almost exclusively a white society and, at primary school, I can still recall, in the second year of infant school, the map of the world that our teacher had permanently fixed on the wall and to which he pointed with great regularity. It showed a quarter of the world’s land mass painted pink to signify the British empire.

Six decades on, the world is a very different place, and so is the United Kingdom. We are now a heterogeneous society, with people from many religious and ethnic backgrounds proud to call themselves British. The empire has gone, to be replaced by the Commonwealth. The rate of social, industrial and technological change has been breathtaking. But through all this change, there has been the Queen—constant, reassuring, providing a sense of security and stability in an uncertain world, yet, remarkably, remaining in touch. I am delighted to support the Prime Minister’s motion.