Her Majesty the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Thursday 26th May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow all those who have offered their praise and gratitude to this remarkable person, who has reached a milestone moment in the history of this country. I have nothing but pleasure in adding my voice to theirs.

I will begin my remarks in a slightly different place following my noble friend Lady Merron, simply because I met the Queen once in Balmoral when her attire and sartorial sensitivity was quite different from the one the noble Baroness described. She wore a woolly jumper she had clearly worn habitually for a long time and a plaid skirt. She sat with us in a little group. I was the president of the Boys’ Brigade at the time, and there by her invitation, as she is patron of the Boys’ Brigade. She wanted in her Diamond Jubilee year of office to see all the charities with which she was associated.

It was a week or two after her much-lauded appearance at the opening of the Olympic Games. I had to make a speech and began by saying how much we admired the way she had made that parachuted entrance and come in to surprise everybody, how good it was to see how closely she had worked with James Bond, and that the star role the corgis had played pleased us too. There was a corgi at her feet as I spoke and I said, “Was that one of them?” She nodded. I said, “Where’s the other one?” “Dead,” she said. I promise you that, as an accomplished public speaker—I hope I am accomplished—I was stopped dead in my tracks.

I was furiously inventing the next sentence. It was to send forth a young man who was going to replicate the sending of the Olympic torch around these islands at the opening of the Olympic Games, but ours was to be a message from Her Majesty the Queen to the Boys’ Brigade annual council, which was to take place that year in Cardiff. She, with great pleasure, handed over a baton that had been given to the Boys’ Brigade by her grandfather, King George V, and a champion runner from Scotland then took it on the first leg. Three weeks later in Cardiff, it came in in the hands of another runner and was presented to me. I had given it to her, and I received it back from her. I read how glad she was to greet the president of the Boys’ Brigade, but she had said that before she sent it, and it was lovely to have the circle completed in that way.

The only other time that I have met Her Majesty was when I was introduced to her at a children’s charity by the then Speaker of the House of Commons, George Thomas. He said as he introduced me, “This is the president of the Methodist Conference.” “Oh,” she said, “and what does the president of the Methodist Conference amount to?” I replied, “Well, half my job is cheering up the troops and the other half is representing them to the larger world outside,” to which she said, “Oh, a bit like my job.” Those occasions have shown me her in a light that I would never otherwise have seen her in.

My academic studies were in literature and theology and, in both those disciplines, I learned how important symbols are. The way that I think about symbols has always been a part of the way that I look at life in general. One moment that I want to refer to—I think of it with some feeling—is a mystery that I have been wrestling with all my life, from when I was a child in south Wales. We were in dire circumstances. I was brought up in one room in a brickyard, in penury. I do not tell that tale in order that noble Lords reach for their clean handkerchiefs but to say that, in this rather bare hovel where I lived, with one window and no toilet—we slept, ate and did everything in the same room—the walls were unadorned except for two pictures that had been taken from a newspaper and stuck with flour paste, which we used to make to put up the Christmas decorations. They were pictures of Prince Charles and Princess Anne, both very young, if not babies—Anne was a baby. I have never understood how the most remarkable woman in my life, my mother, who was brought up within the constraints of dire poverty—literally having nothing—could keep a place in her imagination for whatever it was that these two pictures represented. The capacity of the monarchy to free itself from all the stuff about wealth, privilege and all the rest of it and to penetrate to something deeper than those mere mechanistic and arithmetical considerations is astonishing.

On another occasion, when I was 11 and my brother was 10, still living as I have just described, my mother insisted on the wettest of wet Welsh days—I promise you that they can be wetter than anywhere on the earth—that we went through the town from the little place on the building trade supply site where I lived to the top of the town, to Achddu corner, in the shadow of Jerusalem Chapel, the windiest place in Burry Port. Why? Because Her Majesty, just crowned, would be going through in a car from somewhere west of us to somewhere east of us. We caught a glimpse of her as she went past, and I have always struggled to understand how my mother could feel that it was the most important thing she wanted us two boys to do that day.

It is grappling with the mystery of the monarchy, as much as its obvious and wonderful external manifestations, that has been part of my attempt to understand just what happens in these august fields. I shall never forget the picture of Her Majesty, unaided and already in advanced years, walking up the steps to the library at Trinity College, Dublin, and turning around when she got there to greet the assembled company in the Irish language. I shall never forget what that amounted to. When all the backstage discussions, negotiations, quarrels and all the rest of it were taking place, it was a symbol that could achieve more simply by it happening, visually and imaginatively, than quite a lot of what happens in more tedious and circumlocutory ways.

We want to honour such a person, who, on so many levels in the public consciousness and within our national culture, plays a role and touches places that others cannot reach. For a teetotal Methodist, I think that was a good allusion.

My final remark will simply pick up, without developing in quite the same way, what the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, said. I find the way that the Queen manifestly speaks her Christian faith so charming. As a student of theology, I know that it took 450 years to frame what we now call the Nicene Creed. After all the shenanigans that went on and all the circumlocutive language within which it is framed in the different styles of Greek spoken around the Mediterranean world—and after, I think, Pope Leo I sent in his troops to say, “If we don’t get this creed today, we’re going to do something drastic to you all”—we got the Nicene Creed. The Queen opens her mouth and mentions the name of Jesus Christ as if He is her friend, and in a non-excluding way. I know people who mouth the religious language—of course, I do—but sometimes in a way that feels partisan, sectarian or “us against the world”. She is who she is, and the way she says it says to a Jew, a Muslim, a Hindu or a person of no faith, “I just want you to know who I am”. For me, all these things are profound. We could add a catalogue of ways in which we could recognise all the this-and-thats. I want to pay my tribute and do so not only from experiences I have had, but out of the disciplines in which I have been immersed for the whole of my life. God bless her.