The Queen has outlined the importance of her
own faith, and religion in general, in her
millennium Christmas broadcast.
In her traditional speech to the UK and
Commonwealth, the Queen spoke of what the
millennium celebrations meant to her
personally.
She said: "To many of us, our beliefs are of
fundamental importance.
"For me, the teachings of Christ and my own
personal accountability before God provide a
framework in which I try to lead my life."
She stressed the
importance of
spirituality for people of
all faiths.
"This spirituality can be
seen in the teachings
of other great faiths.
"Of course, religion can
be divisive, but the
Bible, the Koran and
the sacred texts of the
Jews and Hindus,
Buddhists and Sikhs, are all sources of divine
inspiration and practical guidance passed down
through the generations."
The speech, broadcast on international news
networks, and live on the internet, was seen
by an audience running into millions around the
world.
'Unforgettable' year
It featured footage of the Queen's year, which
she described as "unforgettable". including her
meeting with the Pope at the Vatican, the visit
of President Clinton to Buckingham Palace, and
her tour of the Millennium Dome.
She described her pleasure at visiting
millennium projects around the country "which
will be reminders for generations to come of
the time when the 21st century began."
The broadcast also featured footage of a
Palace reception for Britain's Olympians,
showing gold medallists Steve Redgrave and
Denise Lewis.
The Queen's visits to Newcastle and
Sunderland, and London's East End, where she
met a former homeless woman in her new flat,
also featured.
Prince William, 18, was
pictured twice - in
Cardiff, for a Millennium
Service, and in Chile,
during his university
gap-year, chopping
wood.
His father, the Prince of
Wales, was featured
also in Cardiff and on
the set of the long-running TV soap,
Coronation Street.
The Queen Mother was shown celebrating her
100th birthday and the Royal Ulster
Constabulary was featured receiving the
George Cross in Belfast.
But religion remained the main focus of the
speech, with the Queen outlining the
importance of Christ's life even in "our very
material age".
"The true measure of Christ's influence is not
only in the lives of the saints", she said, "but
also in the good works quietly done by millions
of men and women day in day out through the
centuries."
~*~
The Queen Mother's act of defiance(Electronic Telegraph)
By Robert Hardman
QUEEN ELIZABETH the Queen Mother ignored the advice of her family
yesterday to make her second public appearance in two days at the traditional
Christmas church service at Sandringham.
With a broken collarbone still causing pain and a
chill in the Norfolk air, the Queen had implored
her three times yesterday morning not to venture
out. Royal doctors were also understood to have
had misgivings about the Queen Mother, who
was 100 in August, attending the service and
suggested that she should spend Christmas
indoors.
But to the delight of the Sandringham crowds the
Queen Mother braved the freezing temperatures
to join the rest of the Royal Family at St Mary
Magdalene, Sandringham. On Christmas Eve,
she had used her special golf buggy to ferry her
around the back of the church for a televised service and she did the same
yesterday.
Again she left by the front so as not to disappoint around 1,000 people who
had gathered below the church's slippery steps to see her. With the aid of her
stick and some careful guidance from the Prince of Wales, she was able to
join the Queen for the traditional presentation of flowers and presents by local
children.
One onlooker, Pam Martin, from King's Lynn, said: "The Queen Mother is a
wonderful lady. To come out in this weather at her age really says something
about her. She just doesn't give up. I think she must just like people and hate
to disappoint them."
But the Queen Mother's display of duty and fortitude was marred by a bizarre
outburst from the Princess Royal as she made brisk work of gathering up
presents from outstretched hands. Taking one pensioner's offering for the
Queen Mother - a hand-made basket of flowers - the Princess remarked:
"What a ridiculous thing to do."
An astonished Mary Halfpenny, 75, from Leicester, said: "I was trying to give
it to Prince Harry to give to the Queen Mother but Princess Anne walked by
and just snatched it. It was a very hurtful thing for her to say. She has clearly
forgotten the meaning of Christmas. I've made these baskets in the past and
the Queen has always complimented me on them."
Mrs Halfpenny had spent several hours making the present. She then spent
even more time travelling to Sandringham before waiting outside the church in
the cold.
The Princess's brusque response was criticised by Mrs Halfpenny's friend,
Lesley Hirst. "I couldn't believe my ears. It was an awful thing to say," said
Mrs Hirst, 53, of Lancaster. "I've been a royalist since I was five. This is my
first time here and it will be my last."
The Princess did not endear herself to another cluster of ardent royalists as
they handed presents to the Duke of York's daughters, Princess Beatrice, 12,
and Princess Eugenie, 10. She told her nieces to "get a move on" and not to
take flowers from well-wishers. Emily Coughlin, a pensioner from Wakefield,
West Yorskshire, who was in the process of giving the girls hand-knitted
scarves, said:"It was not a very royal way to act."
A regular at the Sandringham Christmas church gathering, Mrs Coughlin was
one of many who felt that this year the Royal Family seemed in an undignified
rush to return to the main house. Last night, a Buckingham Palace spokesman
said that there appeared to be some confusion over what the Princess had
been saying to whom.
The spokesman said: "I can only assume there has been a misunderstanding
and I am sure the Princess would be sorry if there had been any
misunderstanding. I am sure she had no intention of being rude."
It is known that the Princess Royal has had a stressful few days following last
week's car accident involving her daughter, Zara Phillips. Miss Phillips, 19,
suffered minor injuries when her Land Rover overturned in fog. She was well
enough to attend church yesterday although cuts were visible on her face.
The only notable absentee yesterday was Princess Margaret. A Palace
spokesman said later that she had not attended church because she was
"feeling tired".
The Duchess of York remained at Wood Farm on the Sandringham estate,
where she is spending Christmas. The Duke of York is at the main house and
the couple's daughters shuttle between the two.
~*~
How Charles turned into the People's
Prince(UK Times)
BY MICK HUME
Madonna might be the Chameleon Queen of Pop, but if there
were an award for public makeover of the past year, the Prince of
Wales would beat her hands down.
Not so very long ago, Prince Charles was widely considered to be
an upstanding pillock of the community. He was pictured as “A
loon with his thoughts” talking to plants on the front of a national
paper, ridiculed for expressing the ambition to be a tampon in a
leaked recording of the “Camillagate” phone call to his mistress,
and frowned upon for his treatment of Diana, Princess of Wales.
These views were not confined to the public bar or the tabloid
press. The latest volume of Woodrow Wyatt’s journal claims that,
in 1994, both Margaret Thatcher and John Major told him that
they were “doubtful about Prince Charles being King”.
Yet today, the Prince seems to bestride British public life, admired
by many on the Right and the Left alike.
Just last week the Daily Mail carried its latest front- page splash
about the Prince under the banner headline “Charles: my fears
over the Euro army”. It gleefully reported the “sensational” news
that the Prince, not previously known as a military expert, had
expressed “anxieties” about whether plans for a European defence
force might damage Britain’s special relationship with America.
This revelation, said the paper, would be “a body blow to Tony
Blair”. Only a couple of days earlier, Prince Charles appeared on
TV at the Royal Variety Performance where he was warmly
saluted by a cast of largely new Labour luvvies. As compere, the
left-wing renaissance geezer Ben Elton gave a good impression of
an old-fashioned obsequious toady, as he called for a rousing
“Three cheers for His Royal Highness the Prince of
Wales!”Throughout 2000, Prince Charles has never seemed far
from centre stage. His millennium “Thought for the Day” on Radio
4 exhorted his future subjects to embrace the “idea of limits”,
follow the “grain of nature” and cherish “traditional wisdom”. In
May his Reith Lecture urged us to rediscover “a sense of the
sacred in our dealings with the natural world”. In June his
newspaper article posed “ten unanswered questions” about
genetically modified (GM) foods. In November he told the British
Medical Association Festival of Medicine that the BSE crisis and
the floods “are, I have no doubt, the consequences of mankind’s
arrogant disregard of the delicate balance of nature”. Then he
challenged the Government to commit millions to researching
alternative medicine. Every one of these speeches and sermons
was given high-profile coverage, and listened to in reverential
silence from Downing Street downwards. The odd critic like
Professor Lewis Wolpert, who branded the Prince’s views on
science “arrogant” and “ignorant”, was swiftly sent to the modern
media equivalent of solitary confinement in the Tower.
How has this dramatic transformation in the Prince’s public
standing come about? Conventional wisdom holds that his advisers
have successfully reinvented him as “the People’s Prince”. By
getting Charles to follow in Diana’s footsteps, from hugging babies
at an Aids centre to appearing on Coronation Street, they have
apparently won the PR battle to make him “King in people’s
hearts”.
However, anybody who has had to deal with the Palace’s
wind-powered PR machine might find this analysis hard to credit.
It would surely be truer to say that, in substance, what Prince
Charles represents has not altered at all. His speeches boast as
much irrational, unreasonable, small-minded twitter as ever. What
has changed is that society’s views have moved to accommodate
him. The Prince’s admirers would no doubt claim that public
opinion has raised its eyes to see the truth of his message. Some of
us might see it more as public debate sinking to his level.
The media researcher Graham Lee has recently reviewed
newspaper coverage from the Eighties, and found many examples
of the press ridiculing Prince Charles for expressing much the same
eco-mystical views as today. The Mirror expressed terror at the
prospect of the Prince sitting “cross-legged on the throne wearing
a kaftan and eating muesli”. The Guardian allowed a
commentator to mock his new Buckingham Palace bottle bank,
snorting that the next thing would be allotments, windmills and
“composting lavatories” in the Palace grounds.
Prince Charles has since been converted from a joke figure into a
guru, not because of any rise in his own intellectual stock, but
thanks to the collapse of society’s respect for conventional science
and politics. The loss of faith in the progressive potential of human
intervention in nature has created a greater space for superstitious
attacks on “mankind’s arrogance”. And the crisis of political
legitimacy has created a situation where the anti-GM crusader Dr
Mae-Wan Ho can plausibly argue that “the Prince is more in touch
with the common people than our elected Government”. The
Government certainly fears that is true; why else would an
ostensibly pro-science Downing Street have so spinelessly
welcomed the Prince’s prejudice against GM crops as “an
important contribution to an important public debate”.
What long-term consequences the Prince’s campaigns will have
for the constitutionally neutral monarchy remains to be seen. But
the “wise man of the people” status enjoyed by such an
unaccountable figure already speaks volumes about the dire state
of our public life. Perhaps it is time that those with the best
interests of humanity at heart had the “arrogance” to stop acting
like organic vegetables in his presence, and advised the Prince of
Wales to save the speeches for his plants.