And they’re off – Derby thrills launch jubilee

And big it is, very. The four-day weekend starts with the Derby at Epsom — they offered to move it but the horse-crazed Queen said absolutely not — features a huge concert and the lighting of thousands of beacons on Monday before ending with a thanksgiving service at St Paul’s on Tuesday. For most people the focal point will be today’s colossal river pageant when more than 1m spectators are expected to crowd onto London’s riverbanks to watch a flotilla of 1,000 ships — from rowing boats and Dunkirk veterans to an Australian surf rescue boat and practically everything in between — sail regally up the Thames.

As the seven-mile flotilla makes its three-hour journey up the river, 10 music barges will play, with one orchestra matching its soundtrack to match the passing buildings — choosing the James Bond theme for the MI6 building.

Across the country millions more will gather to toast the Queen at one of almost 10,000 street parties or perhaps just to watch the show on the TV.

But, frankly, Epsom’s the one for her; she loves the Derby but it is the one classic she has never won and she won’t today because, sadly, she hasn’t got a horse out there. Never mind.

The loudspeakers keep blasting on about how proud the Derby’s sponsor — Investec — is to be launching the jubilee, a claim that may rankle with Portsmouth which claims the 21-gun salute by that weird-looking robot warship on Friday was the real start. The Queen would go with Epsom but she won’t say a word, she never does. As many commentators have said, her genius, her unparalleled gift of survival, lies in her nun-like reticence.

“In drama as in life,” wrote the playwright Sir David Hare, “the secret of her power has been her silence.”

At 7am Epsom Downs are ghostly, wrapped in damp morning air and a cold grey sky, but also expectant. Horse racing is a strange conspiracy of fun between the toffs in the white stands, and the chavs on The Hill — the free viewing point for the working class. And these, not coincidentally, are the Queen’s two natural constituents. Too many of those inbetween, the queasy middle classes, tend to get embarrassed when flags begin to wave. But the toffs and the chavs just go for it, the whole patriotism thing.

The hours pass and the place fills up in a surreal festival of arrival. The traditional double-decker buses, mobile parties basically, rumble in kicking up clouds of dust. The Hill fills with cars and sudden encampments and, behind the Queen’s Stand, circus performers — girls with multiple hula-hoops, men and girls on stilts — entertain the morning-suited toffs and their women, some wearing shocking chav-toff combinations of fascinators or big hats and jeans.

Meanwhile, a rather disconsolate group of men walk around the course prodding the grass with pitchforks; somebody, I suppose, has to make this whole thing work.

Up on The Hill the party is well under way. It’s as if the whole of south and east London and all of Essex have been decanted into Epsom. A huge land grab has taken place with families and friends seizing quite extensive slices of Surrey real estate.

“We’ve been doing this for 22 years,” explains Paul Dimmock, proprietor of a juicy slope with a good view of the finishing line, “there’s 48 of us, all from Sutton.”

Does the jubilee make a difference? “Well, not really, but we did have a big golden 60 up there . . .” he points to a mast over their little marquee, “but it got blown away.”

Everybody on The Hill I meet seems to be a regular, not necessarily horse freaks but just there for a good day out with a free show. But that’s no offence to the jubilee. There’s plenty of flags and patriotism-themed disco, but, in any case, the way they talk, it seems as if she is just one of them, very special, but, then again, nothing special.

The first monarch greeted by all classes is that mezzo-soprano Katherine Jenkins, queen of song. In the still very chilly morning she comes out to rehearse the anthem with the Band of Her Majesty’s Royal Marines Portsmouth. She is wearing high heels, a floaty top and perilously short shorts. Being among photographers at that moment, none of whom were allowed to snap the rehearsal, all I can report is the general verdict that she had a “nice a***”. The going, however, is a little soft for the high heels, and Katherine’s acceptable teeter slips into an awkward stumble.

Then it all begins with the Red Devils parachuting on to the course, the band, the flotilla of cars and Katherine again, this time in a gold, very off-the-shoulder ball gown, the concluding skirts of which are rearranged by a man in a morning suit. Touchingly, gracefully, she leaves the band with a little silent clap and a mouthed “thank you”. Okay, she got me with that. The snappers, of course, nearly miss the shot of the real Queen.

The third race — the Coronation Cup — is the first in which the Queen is really involved and she goes down to the parade ring to view the horseflesh. Then, of course, the sun finally comes out — how does she do that?

At 4pm, at last, the Derby. Boringly the favourite, Camelot, wins. But who cares? Some 200,000 voices rise in ecstasy for the entire length of the race — admittedly less than three minutes, but even so . . . I am standing a few feet from the finishing line, and as the horses, mouths frothing, veins bulging, pass, I feel myself swept up into this single ecstatic roar.

It is an ecstasy of belonging. Everybody at this strange ritual, toff or chav, knows who they are and why they are there. The horse-racing business itself has a guild or craft structure which mandates that things must be done just so. Similarly sarf London and Essex know they are on The Hill and the toffs know they should be in the stands. But what differences there may be in that are papered over by the funny little woman in her blue hat and coat (underneath, I am authoritatively informed, a blue and white silk day dress).

Epsom is, in short, a fitting start for this weekend. Elizabeth never stops being Queen but she likes horses because they don’t know she is.

But consider this: what do the millions that will line the route today at the river pageant, the tens of thousands that will flood the Mall for the balcony gig or the privileged view at the concert really want? To belong. To belong as firmly and surely as they did on Epsom Downs, toffs and chavs roaring together in a moment of ecstatic faith that life is a boat on which we all sail.

But, to be honest, it’s the chavs that really got it. They come and grab their place on The Hill and, yeah it’s the jubilee, but next year they’ll be back with their beer and their tents and their discos and their funfair. The Hill goes on forever, just like Queen Elizabeth II, defender of the faith.