90th Birthday of Her Majesty the Queen

Nigel Huddleston Excerpts

Thursday 21st April 2016 Commons Chamber

[Nigel Huddleston (Mid Worcestershire) (Con)]

I am honoured and humbled to be able to follow right hon. and hon. Members and the Prime Minister in congratulating Her Majesty the Queen on her 90th birthday, and indeed on 90 years of tremendous service to her country and the Commonwealth.

How fortunate we are in this complex modern age to be British, and to have a Head of State who is admired and respected throughout the world. The contribution Her Majesty has made to the standing of the United Kingdom in the world is hard to overestimate. From my own view, the Queen’s greatest contribution has been as a steadying influence in British life through good times and bad. She is the one guaranteed constant in all our lives. In many ways, she has become the nation’s grandmother.

At the age of 45, I am precisely half the age of the Queen. Yet when I was born she had already been Queen for 18 years and she had been a public figure for many years before that. Indeed, like so many members of the royal family, the Queen has led her entire life in the public gaze. She sat for pictures almost from birth, and she made her first solo public appearance when she was a mere 16. Indeed, she has been a lady of so many firsts. She was the first British monarch to visit China, Australia and New Zealand, the first to address the US Congress and the first Head of State to have opened not one but two Olympic games. She made the first televised Christmas broadcast in 1957, and was the first monarch—and one of the first people in the world—to send an email in 1976.

It is to Her Majesty’s credit that, while being a figure of great stability, she has also moved with the times. As we entered the digital age, the royal email address was launched in 2007, as was the royal channel on YouTube. The royal Twitter account went live in 2009 and the royal Facebook page in 2010.

Today, the British monarchy has 2.2 million followers on Twitter—and growing—and 2.7 million likes on Facebook. That is a number of which many of us in this place will be rather jealous. A Google search for “Queen Elizabeth II” returns more than 21 million results, and “the Queen” returns 214 million results—and while many others, both past and present, can claim that rather generic title, the Queen, one has to go to page 6 of the search results before one comes to any topic other than Her Majesty—incidentally, and not surprisingly, that is indeed a public house.

The Queen is probably the most recognisable figure in the world and yet, as we have heard, one of her former protection officers, Richard Griffin, has shared a most endearing story this week. I recognise that the Member who represents Balmoral is here today, so I will not share the punchline or the details of that story, but it shows how gracious Her Majesty is. So many people have personal stories of their own interactions with Her Majesty. She has met hundreds of thousands of her subjects; and millions have seen her face to face at one of the many great festivals and events that she attends each year. In 2012, during jubilee year, many residents of Worcestershire met Her Majesty when she opened the Hive library and history centre in Worcester and when she attended a reception at the Guildhall.

Such personal interactions are one of the main reasons why the Queen is so incredibly and enduringly popular. Opinion polls show that, despite considerable competition, Britons consider Queen Elizabeth II to be our greatest ever monarch. She has reigned over a new Elizabethan age, and we are fortunate to have shared that age with her. On behalf of my constituents, the loyal people of the faithful city of Worcester and all the people of Worcestershire, I wish Her Majesty a very happy 90th birthday.