Word: queen
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...Queen is 80 on April 21, and in the run-up to her birthday, TIME has been exploring how the institution of the British Crown retains meaning by watching the Queen at work. At her direction, the palace also granted unusual and exclusive access to her senior aides and her son Andrew. But in keeping with her lifelong custom, she granted no interview; she prefers to be observed rather than questioned...
...Queen is acutely aware that the continued success of the monarchy depends on the careful nurturing of popular consent - and that a peculiar danger of being the best-known woman in the world for over half a century is becoming background noise, ubiquitous but forgotten. Her press secretary, Penny Russell-Smith, says that the last 15 years of coverage, focused mostly on the misadventures of the younger royals, has created "a generation of readers and viewers who aren't aware of what the Queen's work is all about." The antidote is more exposure. So not for the Queen...
...What, precisely, is the Queen's job? There is not much she can do entirely at her own whim. Technically, she could dissolve Parliament to get rid of a Prime Minister she disliked, but it would provoke an unthinkable constitutional crisis if she tried. The great 19th-century journalist and constitutional scholar Walter Bagehot said the monarch had the prerogative "to be consulted, to encourage and to warn" the government of the day, but it is one Elizabeth II never exercises in public (unlike her opinionated son Charles). Yet she still derives power from her twin roles as head...
...matter how irrational may be people's desire to invest their love of country in a single person, the Queen's well-polished routine still resonates. In February she went to Reading, 65 km west of London, to open a hospital wing. She stepped out of the limousine wearing a lime green suit; the townspeople cheered and the hospital's cooks pressed their faces to the windows. As officials and doctors gave her a tour, the corridors were lined with hundreds of staff, patients and families who cheered and waved flags. Teenagers laughed and gave each other high-fives...
...assistant private secretary on duty, Edward Young, pointed out the Queen's professional skill: at just the right moment she turned to give the cameras a perfect backdrop of happy, flag-waving children. The emotional pitch was not quite the hormonal exchange of former U.S. President Bill Clinton working a rope line, but in her subdued way the Queen is a rock star whose charisma is curiously magnified because she seems to have no desire for the fame she cannot escape. As her limousine crawled away (she deadpanned to the chauffeur who tested it at the factory that its most...