IT WAS a triumph, according to the critics. Religious leaders almost fell over themselves on Saturday to hail the Queen’s Christmas Message. Her decision to abandon the usual series of video clips on “what I did on my foreign tours” and inevitably bland platitudes about “peace and goodwill” in favour of a direct appeal for “tolerance”, “diversity” and “respect ” has been saluted by dozens of interest groups, countless official quangos and much of the mainstream media.

It was, we are told, her choice alone and one that had been inspired by her observations of modern Britain. It might prove to be, a royal authority intoned, the model for all such broadcasts. If so, then Buckingham Palace can rest assured of annual rave reviews for her appearance.

I wonder. I am not convinced that most of those who watched will have felt quite as comfortable as those in a position to pronounce on it. I sense that some will have found the scene in which Her Majesty was shown visiting a Sikh temple, behaving in an appropriately respectful manner, a little ironic — aired as it was a few days after violent protests in Birmingham forced a theatre to abandon a production which some Sikhs deemed offensive. I think that others will have been a shade disturbed at watching the Prince of Wales visiting a Muslim school in East London and looking on earnestly as boys — no girls to be seen — wrote Arabic in their textbooks. I suspect a few will have recoiled at footage of a “Christmas reception” in Buckingham Palace where the only white Anglo-Saxon male in sight was the Duke of Edinburgh.

I was certainly left pondering how the Liberal Democrats had managed to secure a party political broadcast on Christmas Day when, as far as I can tell from the Radio Times, no other political organisation has obtained a slot during the festive season. That some people in Britain are not wholly at ease with the complexities of a “multi-cultural society” was, to be fair, briefly acknowledged, but then politely dismissed as merely demonstrating the need to provide such souls with extra “reassurance” that the many advantages of diversity plainly outweighed the short-term difficulties. This had the whiff of a highly benign version of “some peasants have yet to appreciate what the Communist Party of Laos has achieved for them, but will do after re-education”.

What mattered, the head of state eloquently intoned, was our “shared values”. This is an entirely reasonable assertion, except that what these shared values might be was not identified.

After all that Her Majesty has had to put up with from her family and household over the past two decades, it is not surprising that she should regard tolerance as a virtue. What she said to her audience was sincerely meant and effectively delivered. It seems disrespectful to disagree with it. Yet the message within her message this year had the unfortunate ring of “be tolerant — or else”.

I write this as an ultra-liberal on immigration. I adore living in London, which is rightly regarded as a “world city” precisely because people drawn from across the planet reside in it. I could not imagine wanting to live anywhere where the population was tediously homogeneous. Iceland is welcome to its racial uniformity, in my opinion. Nor do I accept the position of bodies such as Migration Watch that we are such an overcrowded island that we cannot afford to welcome more people to our shores without sinking shortly afterwards. Whenever I travel around Britain by car, train or aircraft, I am struck, by contrast, by the expanse of green fields which, being an unreconstructed townie, I would happily fill with flats, supermarkets and wine bars. As a matter of principle, I agree with The Wall Street Journal that any restriction on the free movement of labour is an abomination. I like to think that few could outbid me in strident opposition to blood-and-the-soil nationalism.

I am also, nonetheless, equally ultra- militant on integration. A nation can easily be multi-ethnic (Britain has been since the Roman Conquest), multi-faith (as has been true from the Reformation, if not always easily) and multicoloured (that experience is not so novel either). It cannot, though, as Trevor Philips, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, sagely noted a while ago, be “multicultural”, if that phrase is to imply the absence of a single cultural core with roots in a shared social outlook.

These common links do not need to be especially demanding. They must, however, include the pivotal role of the English language. They do not — and should not — have to involve the elevation of secularism to the status of a de facto state (non) religion. Yet it should be recognised that the secret of religious pluralism in Britain has been the undemonstrative manner in which faith is normally exercised. This was the essence of the religious settlement established by Elizabeth I, badly shaken by the upheavals of the 17th century, but which has endured into our times. It is what leads, in my view, the typical British citizen to be as wary of the otherwise respectable white-toothed, dedicated Mormon as the superficially more alien imam.

I appreciate that a ten-minute television broadcast is not the best place in which to try to convey this balance. But to bypass integration entirely, as the Queen did, is to court serious trouble. It is to reinforce, albeit modestly, the sense that many already have that they are expected to be tolerant and not tolerated themselves. For the best of reasons, the monarchy risks mistaking its quest to symbolise national unity with the danger of becoming a mouthpiece for political correctness. It has found itself asserting that “diversity” is inherently good, while implying that the one subject where a diversity of outlook is innately bad is that of diversity itself. In my view, she may have been better advised to stick with “what I did on my foreign tours”.

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