What does the queen do?

The section of the royal website devoted to the queen's role runs to five sentences, explaining that "the Queen is the United Kingdom's head of state," she carries out "significant constitutional functions" and "acts as a focus for national unity."

The page also explains that she is the head of the Commonwealth and that "no two days in the queen's working life are ever the same."

Each year, in full regalia, including the imperial state crown, she opens the new session of parliament and reads out her government's programme from her throne.

She grants an audience to the prime minister every Tuesday evening. Since she acceded to the throne in 1952, 10 have served her, from Winston Churchill through Margaret Thatcher to Tony Blair.

In theory, she names her prime ministers. She is the commander in chief of the armed forces and has the power to declare war. She signs the laws, which number more than 3,200 during her reign.

However, experts agreed that Britain's constitutional monarchy in practice has no real power. Its role is symbolic above all.

Symbolic, but irreplaceable, according to royal historian Robert Lacey.

He said the three paragraphs on the royal website could run to volumes of anthropology or sociology.

Over the years, "she has become the nation's undisputed mother figure," he said, with so many people having grown up during her reign.

"It's an emotional thing. The monarchy is embodying history going back a thousand years."

The queen "represents stability and something that is always there," said Ingrid Seward, editor-in-chief of Majesty magazine.

And British subjects appreciate their sovereign, who has shown unswerving duty throughout her 54-year reign.

Seemingly untiring, she has undertaken over 256 official overseas visits to 129 different countries, from China to the minuscule Cocos Islands, an Australian territory in the Indian Ocean of some 629 inhabitants.

She has thrown 91 state banquets, presided over 540 investitures, invited more than a million people to her summer garden parties and visited thousands of schools, hospitals and community centres.

She is the patron of over 620 organizations or charities.

During the 1990s, a series of blips caused doubts about the monarchy's purpose to surface.

There was the queen's "annus horribilis" in 1992, when the marriages of three of her children went up in smoke (Princess Anne divorced, and Prince Charles and Prince Andrew separated from their wives), as did parts of her Windsor Castle home, west of London, in a devastating fire.

Five years later, Charles's ex-wife Princess Diana died in a Paris car crash. The queen's stiff-upper-lip reaction to the tragedy upset many looking to their sovereign during a pang of national distress

Source:China Daily