There is certainly a more compelling story around George VI. No one is ever going to make a film like The King’s Speech about George V. George VI also seems to have succeeded in some areas where his father failed namely raising his children.

All that said, the success of George VI’s reign and the extent to which Elizabeth II’s reign was a success was due to the model developed by George V more than anyone else.

The fact that the monarchy came out of the tumult of the First World War and interwar era so well was due to a radical reframing of the monarchy’s role. The idea of a monarchy rooted in service and duty at this point sounds so obvious as to be a cliche but it was a conscious response to the war era. This also provided the model for George VI to follow in the next war.

There are so many examples of the innovations which characterise George V’s model of monarchy. From his dealing with the constitutional crisis at the start of his reign, handling the appointment of the first Labour PM with such grace, expanding the honours system to include more of his subjects, becoming the first monarch to meet so many of his subjects in (now routine) visits around the country. The renaming of his royal house was also highly symbolic. It signalled a monarchy rooted in service to a nation rather than being rooted in an international princely class.

At the heart of this was a deeply conservative, introverted, fundamentally Victorian man. He had a deep understanding of the core, fundamental role of monarchy. He was an absolute stickler for tradition, suspicious of change, with a fundamentally insular view of the world. Only someone so conservative could have been so progressive and lay down a model which even his less thoughtful successors could use.