David Triesman – 2022 Tribute to HM Queen Elizabeth II (Baron Triesman)

The tribute made by David Triesman, Baron Triesman, in the House of Lords on 10 September 2022.

My Lords, it is a real privilege to take part in this debate and to follow the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Sentamu, and his inspiring words, and also the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, not least because I so strongly share his feelings about the first couple of short speeches by King Charles and the sentiments that they involved.

I do not think it would be to any purpose to repeat the many things that have been said about Her late Majesty’s graciousness, kindness and ability to respond to people in such a personal way—a pleasure which I enjoyed on a number of occasions. Those things have been said. It may well be that what we should remember are her comments when she described her first speeches as having been “green” but that none the less she was delighted to have made the commitments that she made and to have seen them through. I sometimes think that the best one can expect of one’s children is that after their long experience, we hope, of you as a parent they will say that they thought you a good parent and that you have contributed in a significant way to their lives. That is certainly the way I think with affection and humility about the late Queen.

A number of us have inevitably reached for anecdotes because they are not just expressions of the good luck and good chance of having met Her Majesty—in my case, a number of times—but illustrate things about her which, if you had not gone through those experiences, you would not necessarily know. When I first went as a Lord in Waiting, I had the great good luck of her inviting me to have lunch, and we sat, just the two of us, at a small table. She said, “I always have a light lunch”—I think I am allowed to say something about what she said—“I have ordered a ham salad but I thought you would not want a ham salad, so I have ordered a smoked salmon salad for you”. I thought how nice and good to have thought that, as it was absolutely true that, for various religious reasons, I would not have been able to eat a ham salad. It was a most enjoyable discussion and a very enjoyable lunch.

The noble Lord, Lord Jay—we do not sit on the same Benches, but I think of him as a very good friend, as many people in the Foreign Office become very close to the Diplomatic Service—was in Buckingham Palace at the time. As noble Lords probably saw yesterday, he is a very tall man and, wearing a hat with plumes which stuck up about another two feet, he looked like a basketball player on day release. He was introducing ambassadors, as he described. Her Majesty commented on the fact that there were more ambassadors arriving in London than she had ever seen in the course of her reign and that many of them were from countries she had had to look up. Bosnia-Herzegovina was one that day, and there were one or two others. It created in me a very strange memory. My father gave me stamp album—it did not have many stamps in it—when I was a small child, and I would looked through it and see all these countries, such as Bosnia-Herzegovina, and wonder where on earth they were. There were all sorts of places. I kept that stamp album because it was such a strange moment in history. Her Majesty very graciously said that her grandfather had collected stamps and had some wonderful albums. She asked whether I would like to see them and said that perhaps they would compare with my stamp album. I thought that was extremely unlikely, but I was delighted to take up her offer.

That was not the first time I met her. The first time was in the context of a football match. I have to say that I never thought of Her Majesty as being a very keen football person. There are no horses involved in the game and, try as we might to devise it, we could never find a way of involving horses in football. I had been told that she had a wonderful sense of humour and that she was at the match. She was indeed very gracious and, at the end, when I asked whether she thought anybody had played particularly well, she said, “The band of the Scots Guards”. I thought that was probably a pretty accurate reflection.

Funnily enough, the Scots Guards come into another memory I have, of when President Lula of Brazil made his state visit. At the state banquet, one of the things that Her Majesty liked was to have the pipes of the Scots Guards walk round the outside of the banquet table playing, as only they can. This playing “as only they can” gave a profound shock to President Lula, who thought it was either a declaration of war or something which he had never come across before. He said, “Do you always do this?”, and before I could answer Her Majesty said, “Of course we always do it”.

I have those memories and I couple them with affectionate memories of His Royal Highness Prince Philip, who was also so important on so many of those occasions and who also deserves great credit.

It has been said in this House that, during the course of her long reign, a huge number of things changed. I want to focus briefly on one of them. The invention of atomic weapons took place earlier, and the first explosion of atomic weapons took place during the war. But when thinking about those 70-plus years it struck me that, in that time, we have created circumstances among humanity where we have a capability we did not have, and which was not really thought of when Her Majesty was in the forces, to destroy ourselves completely and wipe out everything we know about human existence. We have the capability not only to obliterate the whole of the past but to obliterate what would have been the accomplishments of the future. I think Her Majesty had a strong sense of the value of the accomplishments of the future as well as of the traditions of the past, and she was well able to talk about them and make you feel them. That is something that I feel at the moment.

At the heart of it was a love of peace and democracy. She espoused both of those, though not in the sense that she would not wish to stand up to ruthless dictators who would try to interrupt peace or destroy democracy; quite the contrary, she would certainly always have wanted to do that, but in the cause of peace and democracy. I treasure having lived through a period in which a monarch felt so strongly about those things.

Yesterday, the noble Lord, Lord Polak, said a little about Jewish tradition at the end of a person’s life, and with great respect to those who are going to shelter my faith under their umbrella—although it does not always seem to me to happen, but none the less I am very keen that they should—I want to do one other thing which is also from Jewish tradition. Many noble Lords may well know it: we wish the family and the people closest to the person who has died long life. It is not just because we wish for them a long life—though we do, of course—but because it is in the lives of the people who survive that memories survive to the greatest extent. We carry the memories. God bless the King. May he have long life and cherish those memories.