Queen Elizabeth and Pope John Paul II - 11 March 1983

It’s not often that we – meaning I – wonder where to begin, when in doubt about something bizarre that happened, something that, at first glance, seems to be new.

In the history of the world, I comfort myself with the words of my first newspaper boss, or chief, as we used to call him, the venerable Washington correspondent of The Times, who finally surrendered all his press passes to the White House, to Congress to political conventions and the like, saying in his mellow, Episcopal voice, my dear boy, everything that happens today, has happened yesterday, and will happen again tomorrow.

Well I found, down the years, that there was more truth in this than an eager young reporter kid to believe. And it’s certainly true that in politics in any country, in any system, the same people are drawn to them, they act on the same impulses, they wriggle out of trouble with the same gymnastics. But some things do change. How about a millionaire who is unable to get a credit card? Have you ever heard of a big labour union that, after a year of negotiation with management, voted almost three to one to cut its hourly wage, reduce Sunday pay, and give up more than two weeks' a year holiday?

We’ll come to these novelties shortly. I’d l like to begin with a topic on which many people may have expected me to end, last time, namely the Queen’s visit to storm-tossed California. I went out there a few days before the Queen arrived and we took up again with the miserable London winter weather we’d suffered from on our February visit.

I am pretty sure that the Queen was less put out by it than any of the natives, who kept assuring her of their embarrassment. After all she is so used to a climate in which it's risky to arrange a picnic for any particular day in the year and certainly some of the royal party must have shared the stoical feeling of an old television director of mine, who said, "Whenever you arrange a day or two’s filming anywhere in the world, the natives will always tell you when you arrive that they have never seen anything like it."

Well, poor California, poor proud Mr Reagan the professional Californian. There are no Californians so ardent, as people born in the midwest who moved out there later on. The fact which we will dispose of as briskly as possible is that nothing like the rains and the ferocious winds that accompanied them have been seen at any time of the year in California since they kept meteorological records.

And for the first time on any sort of record, the entire 900-mile coast was battered at the same time. It’s as if the same, pelting weather doused Edinburgh and Milan and everywhere in between. In places 600 miles apart the beaches have gone forever.

In particularly San Francisco gets 19 inches of rain a year, usually, and the palace should have known this. In January and February, so far, with four months still to go, San Francisco has had 34 inches. So, when I came back to New York people asked me, how did Californians really take the Queen’s visit? This is as hopeless a question as, how did Americans take to the Queen. You have to say which Californians, which Americans? Every possible response or reaction was felt, if not expressed by someone, from idolatry to rage.

In between, I dare to say the mass of people were pleased, impressed and many friends of mine out there from simple cab drivers to double dome writers and professors, made a startling discovery that had not previously crossed their minds. Whatever their theoretical or ideological feelings about monarchists they discovered, to their horror or admiration, or both, that the Queen's daily routine throughout the year is more exacting, more compulsory, than that of any other worker you can think of.

When the Queen finally left Yosemite and flew out of California, a lady who is a doubty republican with a small r, who is suspicious of monarchies but an admirer of this particular monarch, said she must be so relieved to have that over and done with. I dared to suggest that that what the Queen had gone through in California is what she would shortly go through in Seattle, and then in Western Canada and, pretty soon, would take up again in Birmingham and London and Coventry and – choose your city. I don’t understand, said the doubting lady. I decided to take it gently and slowly.

I recalled years ago, watching a morning television show called Queen for a Day, a sort of capsule one-shot Miss America performance, in which nubile young women with impressive equipment, competed by way of a little speech, a quick stately walk, a rapid quiz, a soupcon of talent, competed for the title – the winner's prize, was one day, paid for by the sponsor, during which the new queen so-called was driven around in a limousine, provided with a small retinue of servants, had the run of her favourite of her sports, whether it was on a horse, in the swimming pool, on a golf course, and wound up in the evening as the guest of honour at a ball.

The show I saw picked out a large and gorgeous and fetchingly tremulous blonde and when she was asked, what was her secret ambition – her secret, about to be immediately shared by several million goggle-eyed viewers – she said, actually to be the Queen of England. Why, they asked her. Well, she said, it must be wonderful to be able to order anything you want, to go where you choose, to wear fabulous jewels, to have a train of servants always on call, not, she said, not to have to work.

Well in London a little later, I asked an old editor to get me a flock of photostats of the page that prints the daily court circular in The Times. I looked these pages over. I researched them, as we say in this country, and came up with the interesting discovery that in any given year the Queen has maybe two weeks on her own in Scotland, a weekend or two at Sandringham, but for something like 300 days a year her time is booked from morn to dusk and beyond.

Apart from the daily reading of the boxes and the mail, there is then a continuous round of visits, in Britain alone, to this regiment and that guild, to hospitals for the blind, disabled children, flower shows, horse shows, army veterans, navy veterans, marines, silicon chip exhibitions, city halls, county halls, and in the evenings, government dinners, state dinners, not to mention, the necessary annual beef recognition of – how many diplomatic establishments are there in London? – the official representatives of something like a 190 countries.

Why am I telling you all this? While I was telling the doughty republican lady, her flesh did wince. She decided, along with the rest of us, that whether or not the job is worth doing or ought to be done, or should be paid for, or ideology aside, it is a job of ferocious boredom and it is done with grace and an even temper. This revelation alone may have made the California visit worthwhile. Apart from that, all there is to say is that the mass of ordinary people smiled and clapped, mean people discovered mean motives, and the trashy press, on both sides of the Atlantic, wrote trash.

Once this festival was over, we looked around it and saw a world maybe little different from the world of Victorians with the unenviable difference that, whereas they had to look for trouble for revolutions and murders and political upheavals in the fine print of their morning papers, we have them tumbling about our ears, and our eyeballs, thanks to the miracle of satellite television.

If it had not been for the Queen’s visit there is no question that the theme which would have overwhelmed the press, and the tube and did it pretty well notwithstanding, was the Pope’s visit to central America.

This pope has visited so many countries that it’s possible to see the latest tour as yet another trek entered on his calendar to make sure that nobody is left out. But the Vatican, since the earliest times, has always been as well informed as, if not better informed than, most embassies or news agencies. Central America was chosen – and there must have been many voices raised in Rome beseeching him not to do it – was chosen at the moment of its direst experience as the cauldron of revolution in this hemisphere.

By the same token, it was the part of the world most hazardous to the Pope's personal safety. Whatever message the Pope wants to deliver, however distasteful it may be too many people inside and outside the church, it took immense courage and the most unflagging view of his own mission for the Pope to go into Guatemala, El Salvador and seething Nicaragua, where he had to stand and pray under a vast revolutionary billboard where no cross was displayed, so that he seized his own staff and its cross with both hands, and held them high above the heads, of the rebel leaders.

Nowhere on earth was he more likely to confront, and did confront, so many sorts of dissidents and warring factions outside the church and within it. The best comment on his enormous trip came from the Pope himself. He was asked by some dumb reporter on board his plane what exactly was the point the purpose of his Central American tour. It gave him the opportunity to reply at once "One should be with those who suffer".

I must end with the two novelties I mentioned at the beginning. The union I had in mind was the United Steel Workers. It has 260,000 members. Just around 130,000 – half of them – have been laid off. Last week they voted overwhelmingly, in order to call more men back to work and to offset the steelmakers $3billion lost, they voted to reduce their hourly wages by a dollar and a quarter, to take less Sunday pay, and to forego the 13-week holiday that steelworkers with 10 years' service get every five years. This desperate act of self discipline or self sacrifice echoed the forlorn remark of a Detroit automobile worker earlier this year, "We priced ourselves out of the market".

The other item is short and bitter sweet. A man who won a million and a half dollars in the lottery, applied for a famous credit card. He was refused. In his humblest days he always paid cash, he didn’t believe in debt. But you see that means when they looked him up downtown, he never charged anything – he had no credit rating, a bad risk, a man who pays only when he has the cash. He proposes to go on doing it.

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