Queen of the World: Elizabeth II: Sovereign and Stateswoman Read online

  Joannes has already been recognised by another one of the monarch’s Commonwealth initiatives, her Queen’s Young Leaders. At the same time, great swathes of the planet are being designated as protected forest under a different scheme, the Queen’s Commonwealth Canopy. She and her family have been endorsing Commonwealth projects with patronage and support throughout her reign. So why this recent run of initiatives in her name? It turns out that since her Diamond Jubilee in 2012, there has been a fresh strategy to reflect her personal dedication to the Commonwealth and its people directly, rather than going through institutions, bureaucracies and governments.

  It has been the politicians, not the public, who have caused the greatest problems for the Commonwealth. The Queen wants to lend her name to lean, purposeful organisations and initiatives that do not get bogged down in politics. After all, as we shall see, it has been the Queen who has been called upon, time and again, to clear up the mess caused by others, to do the healing and the fence-mending.

  The writer and broadcaster Andrew Marr has described her as Britain’s ‘slightly mysterious Department of Friendliness’. It has required a lot more than a smile and innocuous conversation, however. That wise old Commonwealth consigliere Sir Sonny Ramphal,¶ who steered the organisation through its most tempestuous years, talks admiringly of the Queen’s ‘quiet insistence’ when it comes to resolving quarrels within her ‘family of nations’.

  On several occasions, the Queen has found herself and her loyalties pulled in different directions, not least when it comes to Europe.

  David Cameron, who resigned as Prime Minister following Britain’s decision to leave the European Union, still believes that, for the Queen, the greater challenge was not Brexit, but Brentry – when Britain was determined to join the European Economic Community (EEC) in the Sixties and Seventies, to the dismay of the Commonwealth realms. ‘That would have been much harder,’ says Cameron.

  Today, Europe might continue to divide Britain. No longer, though, does it drive a wedge between Britain and the Commonwealth, which must be a source of considerable relief to the Head of the Commonwealth. The former Prime Minister of New Zealand, Sir John Key, believes that the Queen has played a crucial part in the way that people in his country have come to terms with a difficult moment in post-war relations with the old ‘mother country’. ‘They can understand that Britain was doing what’s best for Britain at the time,’ he says, adding that it was the monarch who prevented a deeper rift between New Zealand and the UK. ‘The Queen has been the one consistent voice – and the glue.’

  So what are the Queen’s own views on Europe? David Cameron says that the Queen remained steadfastly non-committal when he discussed his negotiations with the EU. ‘I explained to her every week where we’d got to. She was very sympathetic. I never got the impression that she had a very strong view,’ he says. Caution, he believes, would be the default position for the whole Royal Family. ‘My sense is that they are risk averse. I don’t think they were ever Heathite Euro-enthusiasts, as it were, because it had been a painful choice,’ he says. ‘That is the point about Europe. It has always been a painful choice for Britain. We’ve always been the reluctant member.’ Those who confidently place the Queen squarely on a particular side of a polarising issue like Brexit are being short-sighted. They neglect the quiet pragmatism of someone who has remained steadfastly neutral for longer than the vast majority of human beings have been alive, someone who really has seen it all before. In any discussion of the Queen’s long reign, the same question is always asked: ‘what’s she really like?’ It is to her great credit that, in her tenth decade, the question is still unanswered.

  The former Labour Foreign Secretary, David (now Lord) Owen, praises what he calls her ‘courage to be boring’. He says it is fundamental to the separation of powers under a system of constitutional monarchy. ‘Everybody likes to be interesting but you have to be disciplined to be boring. You aren’t going to get the real person on display at a formal dinner, nor should you.’ During his years as a minister, often in attendance on engagements and overseas tours, he saw a different, private side of the Queen. ‘It is a really remarkable privilege to have seen her in her own setting and to realise that there is a huge amount to this woman. She’d have got a first-class degree if she’d gone to university, I have no doubt about that.’

  In order to assess the Queen’s place in the world and her own view of it, as this book aims to do, it is necessary first to appreciate her own perspective.

  This is a monarch whose father served in the First World War and who, with her husband, served in the Second. Yet today she meets members of her Armed Forces who were unborn at the turn of the millennium. On her first tour of southern Africa, in 1947, she met the seventy-eight-year-old nephew of the great Victorian explorer, Dr David Livingstone. On her first tour of Australia, the Queen held receptions for Boer War veterans in every city and met a veteran who had served in Sudan in 1885, the year in which General Gordon was killed at Khartoum. On her first tour of Canada, in 1951, she was introduced to Benjamin Mansell, an old soldier of such advanced years that he had been too old for the Boer War. Mansell, of Springfield Junction, Nova Scotia, had served in Afghanistan during the 1870s and had gone on to meet Queen Victoria, Edward VII, George V and George VI. The Queen must, therefore, be the only person who has heard first-hand accounts of both the Anglo-Afghan War of 1878 and the twenty-first-century Afghan war against the Taliban.

  By any measure, her life and reign comprise a vault of experience unrivalled by any world leader. It is one of the reasons that even those who are not royalists by inclination applaud her dedication to duty. ‘I’m not a believer in the hereditary principle and I’m not a monarchist,’ says Lord Owen. ‘But if monarchies suit countries, then have monarchies. Seeing her handle it so brilliantly, you realise it is a huge skill.’

  ‘She was of the generation that saw the Commonwealth grow up,’ says Sir Sonny Ramphal, listing many of the founding fathers of post-colonial nations like Tanzania and Zambia. ‘They were her age group – and so was I – and I think the Queen grew with the Commonwealth.’ He places great significance on the fact that the pivotal moment in the Queen’s life – her accession to the Throne – occurred in the heart of Africa, as she visited Treetops in Kenya’s newly created Aberdare National Park. ‘It made a big impact on the other leaders,’ says Ramphal. ‘It made it so much easier for her to be a player in their midst. She really became a player at Treetops. She was a child of the Commonwealth too!’

  The Princess Royal, who visited the site on her first overseas tour, aged twenty, has always been intrigued by what it was like for her twenty-five-year-old mother to succeed to the Throne in a remote part of Kenya. ‘It must have been really weird. What an extraordinarily fundamental environment to be in to be told that your father has died – and what that meant.’

  The Cold War was in its infancy, and the Jet Age had only just begun. The Space Age was years off, while the Digital Age had not even occurred to writers of science fiction. Yet the Queen would reign through it all. Of all the changes that have occurred on her watch, says the Princess, one of the most infuriating, from a royal point of view, is the advent of the mobile phone and its ilk. ‘I’m glad I’m not starting now because at least you had people to talk to,’ she says. ‘Now you don’t really. Phones are bad enough, but the iPads – you can’t even see their heads! You have no idea who you’re talking to.’ The Princess Royal has a blunt response to people who put a camera in her face: ‘I either don’t bother or just say: “If you want to meet somebody, I suggest you put that down.” It is weird. When you’re standing immediately in front of them, it makes it almost impossible to have any kind of chat with them. People don’t believe that they’ve experienced the event unless they’ve taken a photograph.’

  The Queen certainly regrets the way in which technology has erected this new barrier between her and the public, as she told incoming US Ambassador, Matthew Barzun, when he came to the Palace
to present his credentials. The new Ambassador mentioned the crowds who had been taking photographs of him as he sat in his top hat being driven through London in the Queen’s horse-drawn carriage. As Barzun recalls: ‘The Queen said: “There’ve always been tourists and they always used to have regular cameras. They’d put them up, take a picture and then put them down. Now . . .” – and then she put her hand over her face – “they put these things up and they never take them down. And I miss seeing their eyes.” I thought that was just the sweetest thing – she missed their eyes. You think it’s a one-way thing, snapping a famous person. But it’s a two-way thing. There’s a connection and an energy. And technology is getting in the way of that now.’

  The Queen is a traditionalist, but she is not a sentimentalist. Her former Prime Minister of New Zealand, Sir John Key, says he once asked her why she still wore formal dress on occasions when there were no crowds or cameras around. ‘I am the last bastion of standards,’ she replied. It was not doing things for the sake of it, Key realised. It was just part of the job. He explains ‘People ask me: “Who was the most impressive person you met?” I say: “The Queen”. What you see is what you get. Equally, she really is a tireless worker. When you are prime minister, you work horrendous hours but you are elected to do that. When your time is over, it really is over. It’s different. We’ve got Barack [Obama] coming out for a few weeks and he’ll play a bit of golf. We’ll have a nice time. For the Queen, it’s a lifetime of dedication. It’s a lifetime of service.’

  Sir John Key remains genuinely astonished by her power of recall, arguing that it proves the Queen does not regard being monarch as a mere job. ‘I had lots of discussions over the years with her and her knowledge and understanding goes vastly beyond any briefing note anyone can write for her. There are a million things I can’t repeat. But it’s the difference between going through the motions of a job and really having a deep, passionate belief in what you do.’

  Those who have worked with the Queen have often talked of her elephantine memory. Republicans and cynics dismiss such talk as oleaginous nonsense. Peter Morgan, the writer of the fictional Netflix series, The Crown, echoed the modish agnosticism of some sections of the commentariat in 2017 when he described the Queen as a ‘countryside woman with limited intelligence’. No one – least of all the Queen herself – has ever suggested that she is an intellectual. Yet unlike many intellectuals, she has a genuine interest in and innate grasp of what makes other people tick – often more so than her own prime ministers. Sir John Birch, former Ambassador to Hungary, had only met the Queen a couple of times before she arrived in Budapest in 1993 for her first state visit behind the former Iron Curtain. He certainly wasn’t expecting what he found, as he told the British Diplomatic Oral History Programme after his retirement: ‘She knew a lot about Eastern Europe. It was a rather strange contrast with Mrs Thatcher.’ On her visit in 1990, Mrs Thatcher had quizzed him at length about every aspect of post-war communism. ‘People say she never listened, she just talked. Actually she did listen. She wanted really to know these things,’ says Birch. ‘But I was surprised – perhaps a comparison one shouldn’t make – between the Queen’s knowledge and the Prime Minister’s knowledge. On that occasion, and on that subject, the Queen had the edge.’

  The Queen likes to remember the past. Yet she does not like to dwell in it, a luxury reserved for those who have retired. And she has no plans to do that – ‘unless I get Alzheimer’s,’ as she told her cousin Margaret Rhodes. As a serving head of state, she wants to live in the present and look to the future. It is why, in later life, the pattern of her engagements has seen a marked shift towards young people, a sentiment that is fully reciprocated. On the first day of her Diamond Jubilee tour of Great Britain, her initial port of call was a university campus in Leicester, where huge student crowds turned out to welcome her. In any speech about the Commonwealth, she likes to remind her audience that the majority of its people are under the age of thirty.

  ‘Everyone can agree she’s super-important and someone to aspire to be like,’ explains the British-South African celebrity youth ‘vlogger’ Caspar Lee, during a Buckingham Palace reception for the Queen’s Young Leaders programme. He calls her ‘a mother figure to us, somebody who has everything in the world but also gives everything’. Just a few feet away the Queen is discussing the initiative with one of its supporters, the philanthropist Bill Holroyd. ‘It’s rather exciting. I’m trying to involve the young,’ she explains brightly. ‘I couldn’t think of a better legacy,’ says Holroyd. ‘They’ve got wonderful go-ahead ideas,’ says the Queen, pointing admiringly at her younger guests. ‘Wonderful people who’ve already done a lot.’ Members of the Royal Family and their staff prefer not to use the word ‘legacy’. ‘Do you go through life trying to make a legacy?’ the Duke of Edinburgh told the author in 2005. ‘I’d rather other people decided what legacy I’d left. I mean I’m not trying to create one!’

  Yet the Queen has always thought about what she will be handing on. Her observations on the first President of independent Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, were as revealing about her as they were about him. Writing to her friend, Lord Porchester, she said Nkrumah was ‘naïve and vainglorious’ and ‘unable to look beyond his own lifetime’. That was in 1961, when she was barely thirty-five.

  In fairness to Nkrumah, looking beyond one’s own lifetime comes more naturally when you are the custodian of a thousand-year-old institution whose core purpose is continuity. The first duty of each successor is to ensure a safe handover to the next one. The monarchy has had its wobbles on the Queen’s watch, of course. During the darker days of the 1990s, the republican-minded political theorist and commentator Dr Stephen Haseler wrote confidently of the Queen as ‘Elizabeth The Last’. By the end of the 2002 Golden Jubilee his argument seemed, at best, eccentric. By the end of the 2012 Diamond Jubilee it was preposterous.

  It is why, in recent years, the Queen has appeared as happy as those who know her best can recall. She is the first monarch since Queen Victoria to be able to look three reigns into the future. The Royal Mail stamp to mark her ninetieth birthday featured a delightful shot of the Queen in the White Drawing Room of Buckingham Palace, flanked by the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Cambridge and a beaming two-year-old Prince George, standing on a pile of box files to ensure a level eyeline. It is a scene that exudes permanence.

  ‘She has been there all my life. I can’t imagine her not being there. I just can’t,’ says the actress Dame Maggie Smith (of whom some might say much the same). The Downton Abbey star – who regards the Queen as the ‘best of Britain’ – has joined her at Hampton Court Palace to mark the centenary of the Order of the Companions of Honour. The ‘CH’ was created by George V for distinguished people who deserved national recognition but did not necessarily want the ‘opprobrium of a title’. The current crop of Companions of Honour – who include ex-politicians Sir John Major, George Osborne and Lords Howard, Heseltine and Owen, plus eminent national treasures like Sir David Attenborough, Dame Judi Dench and Lord Coe – join the Queen in the small Chapel Royal for a service of thanksgiving. The address is delivered by the former Bishop of London, Dr Richard Chartres, who reminds his illustrious congregation that ‘the order stands not merely for public achievements but for the kind of integrity and unshakeable commitment to principle which comes from obeying a calling beyond our immediate self-interest’. Dr Chartres notes: ‘Some members of the order have been household names but this is not an order for celebrities who are well-known for their well-known-ness but for practitioners with a sustained record of service of national importance.’ It is pretty clear whom he has in mind. The Queen looks on, utterly expressionless. ‘I suppose it’s a contradiction in terms but the word that comes to mind is modest,’ Sir David Attenborough says afterwards. ‘She’s not flamboyant.’

  These are precisely the qualities that have made this assiduous non-celebrity the most celebrated woman on Earth (one whose face has been reprinted more than that of any pe
rson since Jesus Christ, be it on stamps, in the media or via more than thirty currencies in the course of her reign). Thomas Kielinger says that, to the outside world and his German compatriots in particular, she is increasingly Britain’s greatest asset. ‘She appears to be the last man standing,’ he says. ‘Everything else seems to be collapsing. Democratic institutions appear to be crumbling. The monarchy suddenly stands tall and that translates into respect for her.’

  He says that when the Queen made the first state visit to Germany in 1965, she was seen as the representative of ‘a glorious country’. Today, he argues, that is no longer the case; that Britain is now regarded as a diminished, damaged nation, particularly post-Brexit. Yet he is not unduly pessimistic. ‘History shows the British always get through these things,’ says Kielinger. ‘In Germany, we can’t live with such uncertainty. We’d have a mental breakdown. You have a maritime mentality.’ He quotes Nelson: ‘Something must be left to chance; nothing is sure in a sea fight.’ What underpins that mentality today, he believes, is a sense of stability personified by the Queen herself.