Her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth embodied all that was good from a calmer age. That was the view enunciated by the editor of the London Daily Telegraph on 17 September following the launch of the authorised biography by William Shawcross.
The editorial continued:
“Her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth, whose official biography is currently causing such a stir, may have come from the middling aristocracy, but she knew how to behave like a Queen. It was for that reason, at her death seven years ago, that the public filed in such vast numbers past her coffin in Westminster Hall."
" She was not merely the woman who helped lead Britain through the Blitz: she was the last Empress of India, she embodied noblesse oblige, she had all the resonances of a better and calmer age. Her strictures about her ill-fated granddaughter-in-law, the epic consumption of gin and it, her adoration of Mrs Thatcher can all be seen as parts of a much larger canvas: of a woman who cared about the continuity of her country and the institution of which she was a part.”
“ For the last time, Ma'am, God bless you.”
Most Australians, and not only those who actually remember the way she fulfilled her role in those dark days of the Second World War, would strongly.