Original subtitles

Queen Elizabeth II is the ultimate matriarch.

At 93, she's Britain's longest serving monarch.

As a young woman she pledged her life to one of service and duty.

I declare before you all

that my whole life, whether it be long or short...

..shall be devoted to your service.

Today, she is one

of the most powerful and respected world leaders.

So how has the Queen adapted to the changing decades?

And what qualities will Charles need to make the crown his own?

The Queen's discretion, I think, is her secret weapon.

She very, very, very seldom puts a foot wrong.

I don't think she'd ever pull herself up to her full height.

She's just not that sort of woman.

And that, I think, is one of her secrets, actually.

Poise, dignity, gravitas,

immense stamina...

It's a 24/7 job.

It's not a job that you can say, "I'm not going to work today".

My lords and members of the House of Commons.

As head of state, much of the Queen's work

requires a serious steadfast approach.

The Queen works every single day of the year.

And when I say work, they are her red boxes.

Red boxes have government papers.

And she doesn't get these once a day,

she sometimes gets them three times a day.

Yet those that know her,

reveal she has a much more mischievous side.

She is a wonderful mimic and she can take on accents

and things and she's got a very good eye...

I mean, she'll notice somebody and she will, you know,

after they've left or gone, she'll take them off.

Every year she goes into the toy shop at Balmoral

and buys a number of small toys for the children

and while she was in this shop, this American lady said to her,

"Gee, honey, you look just like the Queen"

and the Queen said, "how reassuring".

Royal photographer Ken Lennox

has photographed the Queen for over half a century.

He's seen how the Queen's dry sense of humour

has carried her through some tricky situations.

It's the Queen talking to her shepherd,

which she did once a year,

and he would relay to her how the flock went that year.

And he would address her in a thick Aberdeenshire accent.

It actually has a name for the language called the Doric.

And she's laughing because she couldn't understand a word

that he was saying to her.

Central to the Queen is a sense of duty and service.

And as guardian of 1000 years of British royal history,

she knows the power that legacy wields.

The magic of castles, carriages and crowns

is enough to seduce any world leader.

She's met pretty much anyone and everyone of substance

from the middle part of the 20th Century onwards.

She is absolutely part of the international landscape

in a way that no other world leader is.

She recognises, I think,

that she is not famous because of who she is,

but it's because of what she is.

She knows all these leaders are coming to meet the monarch.

Therefore, she is able to be utterly professional.

That professionalism was tested

during Donald Trump's first visit to the UK

as president in July 2018.

Either he's been

badly briefed or he's forgotten.

So when he meets the Queen,

he doesn't bow as he should have done.

And when they walk together, he walks in front of her.

Nobody walks in front of the Queen.

And yet the Queen seems unmoved by all of this,

just sort of shoos him on a bit.

Despite the protocol faux pas

the Queen got on with doing what she does best.

They'd only allotted 20 minutes in the diary for this meeting.

In fact, it overran by twice that length.

It was a huge success by all accounts.

She's always going to be the most important person,

but she doesn't have a sense of importance.

One of her favourite jokes is if a phone goes off,

she says, "That must be somebody very important".

So although she has a great sense of herself

and, you know, she is the Queen, but she's still Lillibet.

Lillibet Windsor was thrust onto the world stage

with the sudden death of her father on February 6th 1952.

A year later she was crowned queen aged just 27.

Despite being in the grip of post war austerity,

this was Britain's chance to put on a show.

Britain in the early '50s... There is still rationing.

It's drab, it's poor...

People stand in queues, women wear headscarves.

Prime Minister Winston Churchill famously said,

"You can't have coronations with bailiffs in the house".

So Britain had to look great.

This couldn't go wrong. There was so much riding on it.

It was a huge feat of organisation

with 29 bands, and 13,000 soldiers...

There was a feeling that Britain

now had to re-establish itself,

after war, after austerity, after the end of the empire

and royal ceremonial is the best way

of waving the flag from brand Britain.

A huge wave of cheering travels with her

flooding along the Mall as if it would lift her

and carry her on her way.

On June 2nd 1953,

up to three million lined the streets of London

to witness the arrival of the new Elizabethan age.

Waiting at the abbey was 20-year-old Lady Anne Coke,

today Lady Glenconner.

I remember standing at the door.

Suddenly, we heard the roar, and we knew she was coming,

and the roar got louder and louder and louder.

And, then, round the corner came this golden coach.

The colour and the music... It was like a sort of Disney film.

It was absolutely unreal.

Lady Anne had been hand-picked

to be one of Queen's six Maids of Honour.

We were earls' marquesses' or dukes' daughters.

We were treated, rather fanciful to say this, like a girl band.

There I am.

The little one.

Almost touching.

Lady Mary Baillie-Hamilton was just 19.

Today at 85, she's rarely spoken in public

about her role as a Maid of Honour.

I got the best place because I was the smallest,

and she looked so young.

And one thought, "Gosh, she's got so much...responsibility".

The maids too felt a great sense of duty.

Nothing could go wrong to spoil the Queen's big day.

Just in case any of them felt faint,

they were issued with a bottle of smelling salts

I had my phial of smelling salts in there, not that they did much good.

I started to sway.

I just...I couldn't see, everything was black.

It was awful.

I thought, "My God. I cannot let the Queen down".

I could ruin the whole thing. All the cameras.

Millions of people over the world were watching it.

Fortunately, one of the Queen's personal ushers,

Black Rod, saw what was happening.

Suddenly, I had this wonderful arm pinning me to the pillar at the back.

He didn't luckily use his rod, but he used his arm,

and he kept me long enough for me to recover.

Here comes the great moment.

And they say that crown weighs a tonne.

God save the Queen.

God save the Queen.

We all thought we were part of history.

We want the Queen! We want the Queen!

The noise, the love...

It was a sort of physical thing.

It more or less hit you, you could feel it.

It's the most marvellous thing I've ever done in my life.

Look at that.

Isn't that amazing?

I was there.

Extraordinary feeling.

300 million people around the world watched it.

It was a moment when the nation really did come together.

It was a real phenomenon.

Really, very few people now have a personal memory of it.

But it stands on the horizon of the past,

a sort of glowing moment in our history.

Since the coronation the diminutive queen's emerged

as a giant on the world stage.

She's met almost every world leader in the past 67 years.

Although not all were warmly welcomed.

For the first and only time,

she actually hides in a bush

in the palace garden to avoid her own guests.

For more than six decades,

a huge part of her success has been her visibility.

Ever since the spectacle of the coronation,

she's gone to extraordinary lengths to be seen...

..not only in Britain, but around the world.

The Queen's job is terribly easy and impossibly difficult.

She has to smile and wave, and she's pretty good at doing that.

But she also has to... relate to her subjects.

She can't be the gloved hand and the gold coach.

She has to be seen, as she says, to be believed.

She knows that people have come to see her.

She knows how important that is.

She recognises it's something that's big in people's lives.

They'll talk to their children and grandchildren about it.

The day they met the Queen.

Present arms!

I remember in Kingston, Jamaica,

the Queen was determined

to do a walkabout.

She said, "I'm Queen of Jamaica, I'll go to downtown Kingston".

So she began this walkabout and the ladies saying,

"Nice, nice, nice"

and they're putting their arms round her.

I'm afraid the bodyguards practically lifted her up

and threw her into the back of the Land Rover,

but she wanted to be seen and she wanted to meet the ordinary people.

Wesley Kerr was royal correspondent in the '90s.

He regularly accompanied the Queen on overseas visits.

She knew that my father was in Jamaica,

so she said, "Did you see your father, Mr Kerr?"

and I said, "Yes, he came down and he was... And he was..."

"Did he see me?"

She wanted to know that the work that she was doing was having a reaction.

One of the Queen's secrets

is her trademark block colour outfits.

At a little over five feet,

she's learnt how to stand out in a crowd.

Once upon a time monarchs were very identifiable

because they were wearing crowns and they had jewels

and they were sitting on thrones.

That is no longer the case.

If people are going to queue up behind barriers

and wait for hours for a glimpse of their monarch,

then she's got to be looking the part.

And the Queen looking very bright and summery

in turquoise and yellow.

Where clothes are concerned, it matters terribly to her.

Margaret Thatcher made an extraordinary overture to her

when she became Prime Minister.

She asked her whether she should consult the Queen

about their dresses not clashing.

And...she got a very chilly note back from the Palace saying

"The Queen does not notice what other people are wearing".

She's got to stand out.

That's why she does wear primary colours.

That's why you will see the hat in a crowd of thousands

and that's for a very good reason.

She once said to one of her dressers,

"I can't wear beige. No one will know who I am".

The Queen's eye for making a statement

goes right back to her Coronation.

Her dress, which took eight months to create,

was embroidered with flowers from the UK and the Commonwealth

in gold and silver thread.

She looked incredible.

It was the most beautiful dress, heavily embroidered

with all the symbols of the rose and daffodils.

The maids had dresses which were equally ornate.

Brings back memories, does it?

Certainly does, I couldn't get into them now.

The point was that they are so embroidered down the back,

because we were seen from the back a lot.

But, as you can see, it wasn't lined,

and here you can see where the embroidery is.

Extremely prickly.

But we were so proud of them.

Throughout the months of preparations

every effort was made to keep their dresses a secret.

The last rehearsal, we were told to wear our dresses.

They said, "Wear a shawl", you know, to hide it.

Well, when we left the abbey, there was quite a wind

and my shawl got whooshed away and to my horror,

the next day, front page...

.."She didn't know it was a secret".

And I thought, "Help, how awful".

The Duke of Norfolk is bound to ring me up and say,

"I'm terribly sorry. You can't take part".

It is a piece of history.

Lady Mary has also kept her precious dress.

What I think is lovely

is that I can show it to my children and grandchildren.

I haven't got any great grandchildren yet.

But hopefully I will have soon

and they will think, "Goodness me, what's that?"

Because it was very beautiful.

This dress is on stamps, on coins... Everywhere.

You turn on the TV and often there is a picture

of the Queen at her coronation with us behind carrying the train.

It's an iconic dress, isn't it?

Nearly 70 years later the Coronation still stands

as the finest example of British royal pomp and pageantry.

As a young Queen, Elizabeth was quick to learn

the power of perfectly executed royal ceremony.

Present arms!

It doesn't matter who you are as a head of state.

It's a big deal to be invited by Queen Elizabeth II

to be part of the great British royal pageantry,

to be in the carriage with her,

to be the guest of honour at the state banquet.

It's one of the great tools, if you like,

in the British diplomatic armoury.

The Queen pays great attention to detail.

She cares passionately about the accommodation

that visiting heads of state will have.

She will inspect the rooms herself,

she will choose what books should go by their bedside.

When she gives a banquet, she will inspect the table

and everything is done with a tape measure.

She is a very accomplished hostess.

It's the Queen's job to wine and dine,

but it's not her job to choose her guests.

That's the preserve of the government of the day.

And, occasionally,

the guest list has caused some panic at the Palace.

-Yes. -Indeed.

Every now and then, over the years,

I'm afraid the Government has invited one or two shockers.

President Mobutu of Zaire was definitely a low point,

specially when his wife smuggled her pet dog through customs.

The Queen was very unhappy about that.

But there was another visitor who was worse than the Mobutus.

Five years later, arrived from Romania...

..Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu.

The nadir in the royal visitors book.

Nicolae Ceausescu ruled communist Romania

with an iron grip for nearly 25 years.

Despite his despotic reputation by the mid-1970s,

he was willing to stand up to the soviet bloc.

The Government think this is a man we can do business with

behind the iron curtain.

He may be ghastly.

In fact we know he is, but let's get him here anyway.

At The National Archives

Daily Mail journalist Robert Hardman unearthed documents

which reveal the worry Ceausescu's visit caused.

The press started to question the Foreign Secretary David Owen

and said, ""Why are we inviting this monster to Britain?"

And here is a background briefing sent

from Owen's Private Secretary to the Foreign Secretary

and this is an extraordinary handwritten note at the top.

"Who did agree to this visit?", writes David Owen.

"Did I? If I did, I regret it".

Do you remember writing that?

Well, I've read it. I certainly... Absolutely...

I think the answer is that, you know, at various stages,

you can technically stop it, but, I mean, it's purely technical.

The repercussions of blocking that visit would have been huge.

Somebody asked me why I didn't mention it in my memoirs.

I said "I try to forget that it ever happened".

Years later,

it emerged just how much the Queen had disliked her guests.

So much so, that while walking in the gardens at Buckingham,

she made a very unregal quick exit.

She once told a lunch guest who in turn told me

of the occasion when they were staying

and she took the Corgis out for a walk in the Palace garden,

and she could see the Ceausescus coming the other way

and thinks "I can't, really can't talk to them".

So, for the first and only time in her life,

she actually hides in a bush in the Palace garden

to avoid her own guests.

The Queen puts up with many different people,

but Ceausescu was too much for her.

She made it quite plain she didn't like visit.

Years afterwards, she would still refer to Ceausescu

as that "frightful little man".

Despite the rareness of Ceausescu's visit,

the Queen's years of experience carried her through.

But, occasionally,

some of her guests have tried to get a little too familiar.

President Reagan put his hand on the Queen's lower back

to escort her to the ranch and we all couldn't believe it.

With the Queen's record-breaking reign

spanning nearly seven decades, she has been a constant

in an ever-changing political landscape.

From the Suez crisis to the miners' strike,

9/11 to Brexit.

The Queen has seen it all.

She has got more political experience

than anybody else in the world.

She's had red boxes delivered to her ever since the 1950s,

and so, she knows exactly what's going on.

For the Queen, her experience affords her power.

As such, she can humble even the most formidable of political beasts.

In 1969, US president Richard Nixon came to tea at Buckingham Palace.

Nixon is a really shrewd politician, extremely hard-nosed,

and yet he comes to Buckingham Palace and his knees turn to jelly.

It's a most extraordinary thing.

I think it's to do with the ineffable prestige

of a monarchy that goes back to...

You name it. William the Conqueror.

Aethelred the Unready...

And I think somebody like Nixon realises

that he's touching the hem of history really.

It's... It's magic.

During her reign,

the Queen has met 11 sitting US presidents.

Always welcoming, she has played a large part

in developing the so-called special relationship.

Yet few got as close

as the flamboyant actor turned president Ronald Reagan.

Ronnie Reagan comes out and he's got cowboy boots on

and he stuck his heel into the gravel

and scraped a line for us to stand on.

Ken Lennox was waiting at the Reagans' ranch.

Just as the President got too familiar with the monarch.

The Queen arrives by car, she gets out, President greets her...

..and they turn to do a photograph.

Snap, snap, snap, and they turn to go away,

and President Reagan

put his hand on the Queen's lower back...

..and we all couldn't believe it.

Reagan isn't the only US president

to break the royal rules.

In 2009, Michelle Obama caused a stir

when she put her arm around the Queen.

And President Carter raised a few royal eyebrows

when he got rather intimate with the Queen Mother.

Jimmy Carter kissing the Queen Mother on the lips

and she taking an abrupt step back

and saying, "No one had done that since my husband died".

It's not just over the pond

that the Queen works her magic.

From day one in the job,

she pledged her commitment to the new Commonwealth.

Unlike the Empire, which, ultimately, depended on force,

the Commonwealth is entirely a matter of soft power,

much of which it's forged by the Queen.

She took it on when it was just eight members.

It's grown to 53.

Many people predicted it was going to fall apart.

The fact that it didn't is down to Queen Elizabeth II.

As a young black person growing up here in the '60s and '70s,

the only major public figure you would see

as it were with black leaders,

as an equal, dancing with Kenneth Cowand

or greeting Mandela or...

It was the Queen.

She makes no distinction between people of other races.

The Queen has realised

she must defend the nations of the Commonwealth.

Many of which were republican.

They weren't even monarchists,

but she's the head of the Commonwealth.

It's been a major achievement in her reign.

I feel enormously proud of what the Commonwealth has achieved,

and all of it within my lifetime.

Prince Philip calls her the psychotherapist of the Commonwealth.

She knows all the leaders, she hears their problems

and they see her as a kind of mother figure.

Mother, wife, queen.

The job requires Elizabeth to play them all.

And much more besides.

Yet despite being the most famous face on earth,

being monarch can be an isolating job.

You are guardian of a whole heap of secrets,

you can't even share with your husband.

You spend a lot of time with strangers,

you are expected to know exactly why you're somewhere,

why the people you're speaking to are there.

I think it's a very lonely job, a very lonely job.

But the Queen has a secret weapon

or, as she put it, her strength and stay -

Prince Phillip, her dashing naval officer,

whom she married in 1947, has stood beside,

or more accurately, behind her for over seventy years.

He's not the kind of man you'd expect to follow

a few footsteps behind someone else.

Very forthright, but he attended to the Queen, he represented her,

he did everything that he could to help her,

and he calls her "cabbage", for goodness sake.

Can you imagine calling the Queen "cabbage"?

Ken Lennox was on the wrong end

of Prince Philip's forthright approach

when he tried to photograph him twice in one day.

He spotted me out of the side of his eye, turned his head round,

marched over to me and said,

"Has my face changed so bloody much

in four hours that you need to re-photograph it?"

I just stood there petrified.

-Just take the fucking picture. -Just take the picture.

Yet despite Philip's brusque nature,

when called upon to do his duty

he was the first to swear his allegiance to his new queen.

Philip, Duke of Edinburgh,

who, with his hands between the hands of the Queen,

becomes her liege man of life and limb.

This is the moment where he's subordinating himself

and his role to supporting the Queen.

He is dedicating his life not just to her as husband,

but as defender, as her number one, if you like.

The Duke of Edinburgh wanted to make

the coronation wonderful for the Queen,

looking after, but he was a bit fussy.

We had been trained absolutely by the Duke of Norfolk.

We knew exactly what to do.

But I remember him coming out, saying, "Anne,

you'd better lift that up or do something", you know,

and he wanted, I think, to be part of it.

And secretly one was sort of thinking,

"I do wish he'd go away", you know.

"We know what to do".

After the Coronation,

the Queen and Prince Philip undertook

a marathon six-month tour of the fledgling Commonwealth.

Becoming the first ruling British monarch

to set foot in Australia and New Zealand.

Her arrival sent the locals into a frenzy of patriotic fervour.

This is the first time I have spoken to New Zealanders

in their own homeland.

There was something almost medieval about that tour.

People were completely carried away.

There was one town where they'd made a very special red carpet

for the Queen to walk along

and, after she left, no one agreed what should happen to it.

So they cut it up into tiny pieces

and everyone in the town got a piece of it as a souvenir.

In another town, all wanted a piece of the royal loo paper

in the hotel that had been set aside for the royal rest stop.

And so each person who queued up, and they queued for a long time,

was each handed one sheet of loo paper.

Everyone's always pleased to see the Queen, but that country...

They pulled out so many of the stops.

Some sheep farmers even dyed their sheep red, white and blue.

Since the coronation,

the Queen has visited well over a hundred countries.

Today, she is the world's most travelled monarch.

To an outsider, it might look like a dream job.

But those in the know tell a different story.

The royal tours are so organised you wouldn't believe it,

and it's minute by minute. I am not exaggerating.

9.46, the Queen will arrive to open a new station.

9.49, the Queen will meet the Lord Major of such and such.

9.53, the Queen will get into the royal Land Rover.

9.57, she'll arrive at the park,

she will stay at the park for approximately nine minutes

and receive a bouquet and so on and so on.

It's minute by minute.

It's hard work, it's relentless work.

I remember in three weeks in the Caribbean,

she never seemed to sweat or...

I think perspire would be the word or glow, perhaps.

She never glowed, never seemed exhausted.

With so many people to meet and greet,

sticking to the programme is essential.

And while the Queen has learnt to take her timetable seriously

there have been other royals

who haven't always

played by the rules.

It's very important,

in these circumstances, you do not panic.

Lynda Chalker was Minister of State

for Africa and Overseas development between 1989 and 1997.

She organised many royal tours, including a trip to Nepal

where Princess Diana went missing in action.

One evening, when we had gone to bed

there was a knock, knock, knock on the front door.

Did I know where the Princess was?

I said, "What?"

She decided having been invited by the Crown Prince

to go out in his motor sports car

to go out with him, he had the roads closed off

and they had a little trip round the roads of Kathmandu.

When the errant Princess returned,

she was unscathed but unrepentant.

I said... "That was a bit risky, Ma'am, wasn't it?"

"It was alright", she said, "It was fun".

It's important never to panic, if you can avoid it.

Now aged 93,

the Queen has more than done her duty for the nation.

But what does the future hold for the Crown?

We're not anything like prepared.

Impossible act to follow.

Castles, crowns, and corgis.

Holding the top job comes with an array of perks.

But for the Queen, none of them meant as much as her beloved royal yacht.

Dating back to the restoration of the monarchy with Charles II

there have been a succession of royal yachts.

And on the 16th April 1953,

a crowd of over 30,000 braved the heavy rain

to watch the Queen launch number 83.

I name this ship Britannia.

Sleek and elegant Britannia

harked back to an era of great British maritime power.

Britannia had an amazing serenity

rather like a small version of those all old Cunard liners.

And the Queen and the Duke particularly loved it

because it was the only one of their many homes

that they themselves had chosen the furniture for.

The drawing room, like many rooms on Britannia,

has several pieces of furniture from the Victoria and Albert.

It has duck egg blue walls and a hyacinth blue carpet.

Britannia really was a genuine home for the family.

It could give them freedom,

a sense of not having to worry who looked around the corner.

The Queen put it to her crew.

She said, "It's the one place where I can be myself".

It was a very important part of all their lives.

In her 44 years of service,

Britannia would carry members of the royal family

on nearly a thousand trips all over the world.

For me, from the household perspective,

Britannia was a very welcome floating office.

You could catch up on paperwork, you could make phone calls,

you could get your laundry done. You could regroup.

It was a bit of Britain coming into the harbour.

Lots of business deals were done on that ship,

lots of receptions were hosted...

It was a fantastic place for her to relax,

but it was also a brilliant example of British soft power.

Everyone wanted an invitation aboard.

So, if Britannia stopped in your country

where you were the British ambassador

and you were able to ask people for a drink on Britannia,

everybody would turn up.

I remember when President Yeltsin came,

and showed a huge reluctance to leave.

He thoroughly enjoyed his dinner

and I think quite a lot of the wines as well

and would have gladly, I think, sailed with us to Finland

if he'd had half the chance.

Former Foreign Secretary David Owen

also remembers Britannia's power to woo.

In 1979, he was on board during a tour of the Gulf,

when the Queen hosted a dinner for King Khalid of Saudi Arabia

It was a terrific evening, he thoroughly enjoyed himself.

You could absolutely see it and when it came for him to go.

I mean, it was quite late.

And then we suddenly saw a stick, he was waving it.

And as he went away sort of 100 yards, 200, 1000,

he was still waving his stick.

He had the time of his life.

So, there's no doubt about it.

It gave the monarch's visit something very special.

After four decades and a million nautical miles,

the ageing yacht was proving too expensive to run.

So, on December 11th 1997,

at Portsmouth, Britannia was decommissioned.

It was a freezing day, we were all on the quay side

and there were several thousand former crew members

and their families there, as well as the Royal Family.

We were all in tears.

It was the greatest vessel in the world.

William Evans spent six months crewing on the yacht

before becoming Lord Louis Mountbatten's valet.

All the Royal family were at the end in a marquis,

the whole lot, everybody was there.

Everybody had tears in their eyes.

The Queen was streaming with tears.

I knew she was upset.

She wouldn't show it if she could help it, but she had a tear.

She loved it, you see, the freedom.

Britannia's decommissioning signalled the end of era.

At 93, the Queen has ruled longer than any monarch in our history.

But unavoidably,

there will one day be a change of reign.

Prince Charles will be king

and he will be the best prepared monarch

that this country has ever had.

Charles has spent much of his tenure as Prince of Wales

being outspoken on a range of issues from homoeopathy and politics,

to the environment and architecture.

What is proposed seems to me like a monstrous carbuncle

on the face of a much loved and elegant friend.

He's written his spidery letters to Ministers

asking the sort of questions that we would want answers to,

but he won't be able to do that when he becomes King,

because, constitutionally, he'll have to keep his mouth shut.

Charles' personal life too has often dominated the headlines.

He's got a lot of uncomfortable baggage

that the Queen never had.

She emerged absolutely pristine

onto the throne.

He has had a very rackety past,

he could do the crucial thing which a monarch shouldn't do,

which is to divide opinion rather than unite it.

But in recent years,

Charles' image has undergone a transformation.

Now happily re-married, today he seems to be enjoying life.

I think the nation has changed in its attitude towards Charles.

Years ago, we wrote him off as a nutter who talked to his plants,

but today he is in a really good place.

He has once again got back his joie de vivre.

Aha. There'll be snow. -He laughs again.

He jokes, he's relaxed...

The potential for flurries over Balmoral...

Who the hell wrote this script?

And I think that makes him a better Prince,

and a much better father, and a much better man all round.

You take something like The Prince's Trust,

which he started with the contents

of his Royal Navy pension from the '70s

and it's become the largest charitable network in the UK.

He's used his position to make a serious, tangible difference

to the lives of a lot of his future subjects.

He is a man who is utterly dedicated to hard work.

He has been brilliant in waiting,

because, my God, that's been a long time in waiting.

Despite Charles' preparedness,

he still might have a while to wait yet.

I mean, the Queen Mother

lived a good old age

and I think the Queen will too.

I mean, she's very fit.

She's riding. I saw her riding the other day.

Years ago, I remember one of her private secretaries telling her

that Queen Juliana of the Netherlands

had abdicated and the Queen just looked at her and said,

"Typically Dutch".

There is no question the Queen will abdicate.

Queen Elizabeth's record-breaking reign

has spanned nearly seven decades

of great economic, technological and political change.

In that time, she has had to balance love with duty.

You're not just marrying a person, you're marrying a job.

Seen fairy-tale marriages become the stuff of nightmares.

We were living a lie,

we were covering up for the fact that the marriage was dead.

Watch her family embroiled in scandal and gossip.

Princess Margaret was so much younger than him

and people were very shocked.

They felt he'd taken advantage.

And suffered great personal tragedy and loss.

The flames seemed to be 200 feet high.

You could see it in her face.

The emotion was palpable.

Yet through it all,

Queen Elizabeth II has remained resolute.

So much so,

that whilst around the world other monarchies have fallen,

the British crown has not only survived, but thrived.

Today, the future of the House of Windsor seems assured.

It is an institution

that works really well for this country,

because it is set apart from the grubby business of politics.

As King Farouk of Egypt said,

shortly before his own throne went south,

"Very soon, there'll only be five kings left.

the kings of hearts, spades, diamonds, clubs

and the King of England".