Her Majesty Read online

  On arriving at an engagement in Lanarkshire, she noticed that her then Lord-Lieutenant, Lord Clydesmuir, was having considerable trouble extracting both himself and his sword from the official car to do the introductions. The Queen cut through this intractable ceremonial impasse by marching up to the greeting line, hand outstretched, with the words: ‘My Lord-Lieutenant appears to be having difficulty in getting out of the car, so I’d better introduce myself. I’m the Queen.’

  During their Downing Street years, John and Norma Major held a dinner to mark the eightieth birthday of Sir Edward Heath. ‘The Queen came and Ted fell asleep between Norma and the Queen,’ says Major fondly. ‘I remember saying to Her Majesty: “Ted’s fallen asleep.” And she said: “I know, but don’t worry. He’ll wake up soon.” And he did. And the Queen just merrily went on chatting to him.’

  Throughout her reign, there have been complaints that the Queen does not smile enough. Lady Pamela Mountbatten, royal cousin and former Lady-in-Waiting, has pointed out that if the Queen smiled for all of the people all of the time, she would have developed a twitch by now.

  Edward Mirzoeff, who spent most of 1991 filming her at close quarters, says that the Queen’s mood – and her smile – depends on the feedback she is getting from those she meets. ‘There were good days when she would get a good response and everything would flow,’ he recalls. ‘But there were days when people would be overcome by the moment and it would dry up. On a good day, she scintillates and she is aware of that – and she likes it when that gets captured on camera.’

  ‘The Queen is absolutely exhilarating, you know,’ says a regular royal guest. ‘That po face hides an acute intelligence and sense of humour.’

  There was nothing sycophantic about the laughter when she addressed the leaving party for her former Private Secretary Sir Robert (now Lord) Fellowes. ‘Robert is the only one of my private secretaries I have held in my arms,’ she declared (Fellowes is her godson). The Queen loves dry asides, like the one from another Private Secretary, Sir William Heseltine. As she cleared up after lunch in a Balmoral log cabin, he prompted much royal mirth by remarking: ‘Queen Elizabeth swept here …’

  On occasions, her problem can be containing her mirth rather than exhibiting it. A visit to Trinity College, Oxford, earlier in the reign went magnificently askew when the Lord-Lieutenant, the Earl of Macclesfield, fainted during lunch, followed swiftly by his wife, who thought he had died. As Miles Jebb recounts in his history of the Lord-Lieutenants, a college servant tripped over in the confusion, dropping a tray of drinks. Summoning up Herculean reserves of composure at the end, the Queen remarked: ‘We’ve had a wonderful lunch. Bodies all over the place!’

  Sometimes, it’s an innocent phrase which has the Monarch chuckling all the way home, such as the remark from a mayor of Dover as he was showing her some ancient regalia in a glass case. ‘When do you wear it?’ she asked. ‘Only on special occasions,’ he replied. Sir Malcolm Rifkind MP, the former Conservative Cabinet Minister, was accompanying the Queen to Stirling Castle during his days as Secretary of State for Scotland. ‘There’d been this restoration work going on and she asked the foreman: “When will this all be complete?” Back came the reply: “It won’t be in your time, Ma’am.” She dined out on that!’

  A piece of well-judged humour can go a long way. It is the time-honoured duty of a senior government whip, always known as the Vice-Chamberlain of Her Majesty’s Household, to write what is known as a ‘message’. It’s a daily account of the day’s proceedings in the House of Commons written for an illustrious readership of one – the Sovereign. During John Major’s Conservative administration in the mid-nineties, the task fell to Sydney Chapman, MP for Chipping Barnet.* As the Tory party’s ‘Back to Basics’ morality crusade foundered on a succession of personal scandals, the MP found himself lost for appropriate words one day. ‘It was a very quiet day in Parliament,’ says Chapman. ‘There were all these scandals going on so I composed this message, in the traditional third person way, saying that even Her Majesty’s Vice-Chamberlain had dreamed that he himself was involved in a scandal and had been caught writing secret notes to a married lady of great importance living in a large house. I thought I might have overstepped the mark. But it obviously went down all right because I later got a very nice call from someone at the Palace saying: “Everyone here wishes they were Sydney Chapman right now.”’ It clearly didn’t do him any harm. When he finally stepped down from the job, he had the unusual distinction of being offered an instant knighthood.

  It is often said by – and of – those in authority that it is lonely at the top. There are times when the Queen prefers to seek the company of her dogs or horses. She will sometimes have pressing matters on her mind which she is constitutionally forbidden from sharing with those closest to her. But she enjoys taking a collegiate approach to the job. ‘She reckons she is part of the team,’ says a former Private Secretary. ‘She’s a marvellous colleague. I learned a hell of a lot from her about patience; about attention to detail without being too pernickety; take time to make up your mind – but when you do, don’t be fickle and don’t swing like a weathervane. And there’s an unquestioning loyalty to the people who work for her. People underestimate how loyal she has to be sometimes to her own people.’

  Perhaps it’s a subliminal military thing. The Queen comes from a Forces family and has served in uniform herself. The Royal Household is the nearest thing she has to a regular command. And when her people are in action, she likes to be part of that team rather than an observer. The sense of team spirit is never more pronounced than on tour.

  In the days when the Royal Yacht Britannia was afloat, there was sometimes the atmosphere of a works outing. Ron Allison recalls that everyone would have their own roles to play. Arriving on board Britannia could be alarming for a visiting guest. Allison and Air Commodore Archie Winskill, then Captain of the Queen’s Flight, would be expected to generate a mood of informality. ‘I wouldn’t say we were Court jesters, but if the Queen was entertaining on the Yacht, we would break the ice a little bit. It was not anything ever approaching rudeness but we might pull each other’s leg so the others present could realise it was OK to unwind.’ And, at the end of a long day, the Queen liked to kick off her shoes and catch up on all the inside information from her fellow players in the royal production. ‘She wanted to be part of it. She didn’t miss a thing,’ Allison recalls. ‘Back on the Yacht, she might say: “I noticed you seem to be getting along very well with the local journalists here.” I’d say: “Yes, Ma’am.” She’d say: “And I saw you helping that very blonde lady working for the local press …”’

  The Queen always has her Foreign Secretary or a senior Foreign Office minister in attendance on these trips. Lord Hurd, a veteran of many, says that he always enjoyed the royal post-mortem at the end of the day. As well as enjoying her commanding officer role on tour, the Queen will sometimes adopt a maternal role towards her troops. Lord Hurd was suffering from a particularly heavy cold during the 2004 state visit to Russia. ‘The Queen sent me to bed,’ he laughs. ‘I was suffering and she said: “I think your place is in bed, Foreign Secretary.” She prescribed the equivalent of Lemsip and I quickly recovered.’

  This royal team spirit was never more necessary than during the most chaotic state visit of the reign. In 1980, the Queen’s Mediterranean tour concluded with the first state visit to Morocco and the court of the autocratic and unpredictable King Hassan II. The true tale of what the media would call the ‘Tour from Hell’ has never been told before. But it is a useful illustration of all the various regal skills with which the Queen has reigned over the last sixty years.

  Her trip to Morocco came as the last stop on a two-week tour of Italy and North Africa. The trip had already presented the Queen with some novel challenges, not least an interesting main course in Algeria. ‘I saw the extraordinary sight of the Queen confronted with a roast lamb but no implements,’ says Lord Hurd, the Foreign Office minister in attendance. ‘It
was very hot so she looked around for a spoon or a fork or a knife to attack it but there was no such thing. And then she got the idea she was supposed to claw at it with her hands and she did.’

  Even this, however, was scant preparation for her next stop – Morocco. ‘It was a unique state visit in that nothing that had previously been arranged actually took place as arranged,’ says a Foreign Office official who was part of the tour. ‘And if it did take place at the time that it was arranged, it took place in a different place, probably several hundred miles away.’

  Having survived a number of assassination attempts, including a massacre at his own birthday party just nine years before, Hassan II was deliberately erratic in his movements. ‘He was a catlike figure. You almost felt that he might pounce on you at any minute,’ says one British diplomat. ‘The only way you could approach him was through the Minister of the Court, a chap called Moulay Hafid who was really the Grand Vizier. He was a quite terrifying figure in a fez and dark glasses who would only speak to the Queen’s Private Secretary, Philip Moore. He didn’t bother with diplomats.’

  Even the late Philip Moore, a former England rugby international, was powerless to keep control of the schedule from the moment the Queen arrived. Lunches were moved from one palace to another at a moment’s notice. In one instance, an open-air affair, it hardly happened at all. The King disappeared to issue reprimands and orders to his chefs, leaving the Queen sitting in the sun for most of the afternoon until he reappeared, followed by some food, at around five o’clock.

  At the King’s state banquet, the Queen arrived in full regalia on time only to find the royal palace in question closed. It was left to the debonair Lord Rupert Nevill, Private Secretary to Prince Philip and a close family friend, to jolly along the British royal party for nearly an hour until the King arrived. As the King redefined the term ‘lady-in-waiting’, Lord Rupert managed to procure a dry martini and pass it through the window of the car to the Queen. She endured all these slights with cheerful equanimity. However, what she would not tolerate was the King mistreating her own staff. At one point, during another belated meal, the King turned to the Queen, pointed to Robert Fellowes, then her Assistant Private Secretary, and said: ‘That’s the person who’s responsible for this terrible muddle.’ It was at this point that the Queen delivered the immortal retort: ‘I’ll thank you not to speak about my staff like that.’ As a British diplomat puts it: ‘That was the end of the conversation.’

  There was a further sovereign-to-sovereign bust-up later on the same day as the Queen was due to reciprocate the King’s hospitality by taking him to see a British-funded Leonard Cheshire centre for the disabled. ‘The King was also the Commander of the Faithful,’ explains a member of the entourage. ‘He thought that sort of thing was beneath his dignity. So he told the Queen that it was too late to go to the Leonard Cheshire home and he would take her back to her palace.’ The Queen was having none of it. ‘Well, you can stop the car in that case,’ the Queen told him. ‘And I’ll go with my security people.’ The convoy duly delivered the Queen to the charity.

  There was nothing anti-British or anti-Queen in the King’s behaviour. He was famously erratic with all his guests. Years later, Queen Sofia of Spain described her own visit to Morocco as ‘a nightmare’ and accused the King of lacing her food with lamb, despite knowing that she was a vegetarian. Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom seems to have had a relatively easy ride. Certainly, some of the British entourage were almost starting to enjoy the surreal nature of the situation. Members of the British media were less amused. ‘I’ve never been so b***ered around,’ the BBC’s Keith Graves told the Queen’s Press Secretary, Michael Shea. ‘You think you’ve been b***ered around?’ came the reply. ‘What about us?’

  The comedy of manners reached its climax on the last night as the Queen prepared to host her farewell banquet for the King on board Britannia. ‘The Minister of the Court turned up and said the King would be grateful if the banquet could be postponed for a few hours,’ Lord Hurd says, still slightly incredulous at the thought. ‘The real reason was that he was nipping about from one palace to the other for security reasons.’ At this point, the Queen would have been within her rights to sail off there and then. Instead, she calmly explained that the event could not be postponed. ‘She was not being bullied into changing the time of the banquet because all the guests had been asked for such and such a time,’ says Lord Hurd. ‘But then she said: “I will perfectly understand if His Majesty is late.”’

  The King was a mere fifty-four minutes late. But there was a further problem: gatecrashers. ‘The King arrived with some princes, mainly cousins, who had not been invited. So we had to find a lot of extra knives and forks,’ says Lord Hurd. According to another guest, the King arrived with iceboxes of food for himself, terrified that someone might try to poison him. He was also furious that the honorary British decorations granted to some of his family – and all agreed long in advance – did not include knighthoods.

  The Queen, meanwhile, had grown quite fond of the old ogre. ‘It was very revealing,’ says one member of the Royal Household. ‘She had brought some toys for the King’s children. So she said to him: “Now, Hassan, have you given those toys to your children yet?” And he said: “No, I haven’t had time.” “Oh, Hassan!” she cried in despair. “You are hopeless!” And it was very touching. He took it on the chin from her!’

  As Lord Hurd recalls, the King was actually afraid of the Queen. Hassan II might have been a terrifying autocrat to his people but even he could recognise a fellow sovereign who was not to be messed with. Over dinner, the King did his best to charm the Queen but remained angry with her officials over the missing knighthoods. ‘He started hissing at me about how I had to arrange for the British ambassador to be sacked,’ says Lord Hurd. ‘The poor man was going to be knighted the following day on the deck. I was completely new. So I consulted Prince Philip who burst into laughter and said: “You do absolutely nothing and wait until tomorrow.”’

  Sure enough, the storm blew over. ‘The next day, everything was smiles,’ says Lord Hurd. ‘We took our leave, and there were presents of carpets and so on.’ Out on Britannia’s deck, the British ambassador, Simon Dawbarn, became Sir Simon – and went on to spend another two years in Morocco.

  The Queen sent an immediate thank-you letter to King Hassan praising the ‘extremely warm and generous hospitality’ and adding: ‘We have been especially touched by the way in which Your Majesty took such a personal interest in our programme.’ It had been a textbook example of how not to organise a state visit and came very close to being a diplomatic disaster. At a time of renewed tensions in the Middle East, Britain certainly did not want a high-profile falling-out with one of the more pro-Western nations in the Arab world. But the visit was saved by the Queen herself. She had refused to lose her temper under extreme duress. Equally, she had refused to compromise on certain points of principle – defending her staff, supporting good causes, not letting people down. To this day, it remains a diplomatic masterclass. What’s more, it provided the Royal Family with enough anecdotes and horror stories to last for years. It certainly wasn’t dull. ‘In a funny sort of way, it was good fun,’ says one of the Queen’s team. ‘You know, I think she actually rather enjoyed it.’

  * The pre-war cartoonist H. M. Bateman, a royal favourite, specialised in scenes of excruciating social ineptitude.

  * Known as ‘the QE3’ by the crew of the Royal Yacht, ‘Bobo’ was so close to her mistress that Palace newcomers would be warned: ‘Don’t upset Miss MacDonald or you’ll ruin the Queen’s day.’

  * It was not just the death of Lord Mountbatten which appalled the Queen and the Royal Family. The bomb hidden inside his fishing boat also killed his fourteen-year-old grandson, Nicholas Knatchbull, his mother-in-law, Doreen, Lady Brabourne, and a fifteen-year-old local boy, Paul Maxwell. Nicholas’s parents and twin brother, Tim, were so badly injured that they were unable to attend his funeral.

  *
Even Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams acknowledged the ‘sincerity’ of the Queen’s Dublin speech in which she declared: ‘To all those who have suffered as a consequence of our troubled past I extend my sincere thoughts and deep sympathy. With the benefit of historical hindsight we can all see things which we would wish had been done differently or not at all.’ Her opening words – ‘A Uachtaráin agus a chairde’ (President and friends) – prompted the Irish President, Mary McAleese, to exclaim: ‘Wow!’

  * Her bodyguard, Inspector Jim Beaton, was later awarded the George Cross, the highest decoration for bravery beyond the battlefield. Now retired, he remains in regular contact with the Royal Family and helps to run one of the most exclusive clubs in the world, the Victoria Cross and George Cross Association.

  * The Queen was seen to fall asleep very briefly at Dusseldorf’s Heinrich-Heine University during the 2004 state visit to Germany. It happened during a lecture entitled: ‘New insights into biology and medicine with the use of magnets’.

  * The Vice-Chamberlain also serves as a hostage whenever the Queen opens Parliament. He or she must remain at Buckingham Palace until the Sovereign returns. As Sir Sydney Chapman admits: ‘It’s not much of a swap.’

  3

  Her Greatest Challenge

  ‘We had to get sex and money off the agenda.’

  Prince William would probably prefer to be somewhere else. Not only has he had to put on a dark suit for one of the hottest afternoons of the year but England’s footballers are involved in a crucial match. As President of the Football Association, the future Duke of Cambridge would rather like to be watching the game, if not in person then in front of the television. Instead, thirty-seven minutes into the match, it is time to abandon the radio commentary in the royal car and walk into the Royal Festival Hall to meet seven hundred of the cleverest people on earth. Ten Nobel Laureates and the inventor of the World Wide Web are among those waiting to see him. Even for a chap with three A levels and a 2:1 in geography, it’s going to require extra reserves of small talk. There is no question of trotting out old faithfuls like ‘And what do you do?’ when the bearded gentleman in the moth-eaten jacket may turn out to be the pre-eminent world expert on DNA.