It was just under 18 months ago that the Queen made her first video conference call. With a helping hand from Sir Edward Young, her private secretary, she spoke to carers as the royal family worked out ways to communicate with people during the first coronavirus lockdown.
For the Queen, that unfamiliar technology was a new way of dealing with a national medical crisis. Now, a year later, it is about to prove its worth once more as Buckingham Palace takes a long hard look at how, at the age of 95, the Queen can perform her role as sovereign without jeopardising her health.
The immediate concern about the Queen’s condition evaporated this week after it emerged that she had flown by helicopter from Windsor Castle to Norfolk to spend the weekend on the Sandringham estate.
She is not staying at the main house, as she would at Christmas when the family comes to stay, but at Wood Farm, the private retreat where the Duke of Edinburgh spent much of his time after his retirement from public duties.
It was not clear exactly why she had gone, other than that it was an arrangement that had been in her diary for a long time. To get Sandringham ready for Christmas was one mildly implausible suggestion: another was that she always used to spend this time of year there with Prince Philip and wanted to honour those memories. Either way, there is no doubt that a break from her routine at Windsor will do her good. Hugo Vickers, the royal author, said it would be a welcome opportunity for her to check up on her horses. “She will have a nice time there, because she can go and see the stud,” he said. “She will be very happy.”
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For everyone else, the Queen’s weekend away can be taken as a sign that, whatever the reasons for her doctors telling her to rest for more than two weeks, it was not so serious that she is not allowed to enjoy herself.
That much was evident earlier in the week when the Queen was photographed driving her Jaguar — the car she often uses when taking the dogs for a walk — alongside the River Thames near Datchet, Berkshire. To the photographers present, who had not been expecting to see her, it looked like a deliberate move on the Queen’s part to be seen, evidence that she was far from death’s door. As one of them put it, “it was like we were being given a picture”.
Since then The Times has spoken to two separate sources close to the Queen, both of whom are also convinced that it represented a conscious effort on the Queen’s part to be seen out and about and in good health.
That, however, is not to take away from the seriousness of the fact that she cancelled a trip to Northern Ireland at the last minute on doctors’ orders, spent a night in hospital for reasons which are not entirely clear, cancelled her trip to Cop26 in Glasgow and was subsequently told that she should rest for another two weeks, missing the Festival of Remembrance at the Royal Albert Hall.
Palace sources concede that her future engagements will have to be re-examined in the light of what has happened in recent weeks. While the Queen’s appetite for work has not diminished, and neither has her appreciation of the importance of being seen, a sense of reality has crept in — for officials and the Queen herself — about what is possible.
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“They should prioritise the times that are really important for the nation,” Vickers said, “maximise her exposure but minimise the effort.” On most engagements the Queen is likely to be accompanied by another member of the royal family, an arrangement which has the advantage that if she has to cancel, at least one member of the family will still be able to show up.
The physical demands of individual commitments will be carefully looked at and video calls will be used to allow the Queen to connect to people without indulging in unnecessary travel.
While she has seen Boris Johnson for an audience at Buckingham Palace, most of her recent audiences with the prime minister have been held by video call as the Queen regards it as an unnecessary waste of his time to expect him to travel to Windsor every week.
Video calls are also seen as a useful way of engaging with the realms and the Commonwealth at a stage in the Queen’s life when she no longer undertakes overseas travel.
When she gave her video speech to Cop26, the passage in which she said how proud she was of the work done by the Prince of Wales and Duke of Cambridge may not have received the attention that it deserved. The royal family is not always as good at complimenting each other in person as they might be: instead they often reserve such supportive remarks for public speeches, rather than private conversation.
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Her remarks may also reflect a greater closeness between the three of them.
Since they had to deal with two significant crises in the past couple of years — the Duke of York and the Sussexes — the three have found themselves talking together more often. “It has cemented the fact that, on all the key issues, they are all in alignment,” a source said. “They have had to debate them, and they have found that they are all in agreement.”
