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

  To most people in Britain, her legacy will be to have led the nation and the monarchy through more change – demographic, social and scientific – than that experienced by any British monarch in history. Globally, however, her legacy will take many forms. To some nations, the Queen has been an old friend. To others, she has been the genuine face of reconciliation. To those emerging from a painful totalitarian past, she has been a symbol of encouragement. To large parts of the old British Empire, however, she has served as a bridge during the transition from subjugation to self-determination and independence. That the vast majority of ex-colonies should choose to remain enthusiastic members of her Commonwealth has been, in no small part, down to her. That it should have survived intact and gone on to do some great things – from the battle against apartheid to the ongoing struggle against avoidable blindness – is to her credit, too.

  In 2018, it emerged that some of the smaller nations of the Commonwealth were talking about nominating the Queen for the Nobel Peace Prize. Some would probably dismiss the idea as ludicrous. Others regarded it as original and wholly appropriate, pointing to former Nobel recipients such as US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former US Vice-President Al Gore, President Barack Obama (within days of taking office) and the European Union. Nor would the Queen be the first member of the family to be nominated. Princess Anne was once proposed for her work with Save the Children, and Prince Philip for his role in founding the World Wildlife Fund and the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award.

  The only prizes that the Queen has received to date have been for her horses and livestock – plus a gold disc from the recording industry for CD sales of her Golden Jubilee concert at the Palace. As the ‘Fountain of Honour’, she sees it as her role to give out awards rather than receive them. Like Alfred Nobel, she has now created a prize of global pre-eminence in one field that Nobel himself overlooked, as he drafted his legacy to the world in 1895. Founded in 2013, the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering recognises ‘ground-breaking innovation’ that has ‘a major impact on humanity’, with a cheque for £1 million (30 per cent more than a Nobel Prize). Like the Nobel, it is open to all-comers from all nations.

  There are many people all over the world who feel a connection with someone to whom they have no lineal, historical or linguistic connection at all. The notion of her as ‘Queen of the World’ might seem a tad presumptuous (even un-British) to some of her understated British subjects – and, no doubt, to the subject of this book herself. It is not, though, an idea that originated in Britain. It was inspired by countless conversations and observations all over the globe. It has encountered no resistance whatsoever overseas, merely unsurprised acknowledgement of a sentiment widely held and deeply felt.

  In 2015, on the first full day of her fifth state visit to Germany, the Queen and Prince Philip visited the Berlin University of Technology. During her first state visit in 1965 she had instituted an annual address in her name. Now she was back for the fiftieth anniversary of ‘The Queen’s Lecture’. The university had invited Neil MacGregor, outgoing director of the British Museum and incoming director of Berlin’s Humboldt Forum, to deliver it. Moments before he started, there was mild panic at the door. To the delight of both the organisers and British diplomats, the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, had suddenly arrived unexpectedly. Exasperated by the lack of progress in a meeting to discuss the eurozone crisis, she had bailed out in order to spend a little extra time with the royal visitors. MacGregor gave the packed theatre a witty talk on ‘symbols of a nation’, exploring shared Anglo-German tastes in pets, politics and gardens, before turning to the ultimate symbol, the Queen herself. What’s more, he added, Elizabeth II had now officially entered the German language. MacGregor pointed to the latest edition of Duden, the definitive reference work on German grammar. The correct word for a ‘queen’ had always been ‘die Königin’, he said. However, new editions now carry an additional entry: ‘die Queen’. As Duden states clearly: ‘There is no plural.’

  * William Hague was MP for Richmond, Yorkshire from 1989-2015, Conservative leader from 1997-2001, Foreign Secretary from 2010-2014 and ennobled as Lord Hague of Richmond in 2015.

  † For many people around the world, the most memorable moment of the London Olympics was not a sporting one. It came during the opening ceremony when the Queen and James Bond actor Daniel Craig appeared to parachute into the Olympic stadium. The cameo role was such a closely guarded secret that even the Royal Family were taken by surprise. Games chief Lord Coe, sitting with Princes William and Harry, remembers the cry of: ‘Go, Granny!’ The Queen is also the only person in history to have opened two Olympiads: London 2012 and Montreal 1976.

  ‡ Former Cabinet Minister David Howell is the only person to have been a minister in the governments of Edward Heath, Margaret Thatcher and David Cameron. As an MP, he spent ten years as chairman of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee.

  § Knighted four times by the Queen, Sir Christopher Geidt was ennobled as Lord Geidt after leaving the Palace in 2017. He used his maiden speech in the Lords to promote the work of the Commonwealth.

  ¶ Sonny Ramphal, former Foreign Affairs Minister of Guyana, was Commonwealth Secretary-General from 1975-1990.

  Chapter 1

  ON TOUR

  ‘There are no harems in active use . . .’

  THE JOURNEY

  As duty officer of the day, Lieutenant Jock Slater was keeping a close eye on the movements along the quayside. It was a sultry West African evening. The Royal Yacht Britannia was berthed in the Gambian capital, Bathurst, the point at which the Gambia River meets the Atlantic. The Queen was nearing the end of her 1961 tour of West Africa, following a tense trip to newly independent Ghana. Despite bomb threats and the mood-swings of Ghana’s President, Kwame Nkrumah, it had turned into a great success. From there, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh had sailed on to Sierra Leone and Liberia, where they had been received by President William Tubman, dressed in thick morning coat and black top hat, as he came out to greet them in his own presidential yacht. Finally, Britannia had reached Bathurst (today known as Banjul). Spirits were high at the end of a long tour. The Queen had just knighted the captain of Britannia, ahead of his impending retirement. A steady stream of dignitaries was arriving for the Queen’s farewell dinner before she sailed on to the Senegalese capital of Dakar, and her plane home. Suddenly Slater was approached by a visitor who was definitely not on the guest list, a young boy clutching a biscuit tin with holes in the lid. He explained to Slater that it was a present for the Queen and required a certain amount of care. The lid opened to reveal a baby crocodile. Slater thanked the boy and went to seek the advice of the Queen’s omniscient deputy Private Secretary, Martin Charteris. ‘Martin instructed me to put it in his bath,’ Slater recalls. And there it remained all the way back to Britain, where more suitable accommodation was arranged. As Slater* remembers: ‘It became quite a size in London Zoo.’

  The records show that the Queen has visited at least 126 nations and territories, many of them several times. No one is entirely sure how many miles she has travelled. The Royal Yacht alone logged more than one million nautical miles during more than four decades at sea, and royal flights have covered many times that distance. The number of countries visited is debatable, too, since many of those states would change their name and status in between visits by the Queen. It is why Buckingham Palace will not produce an official figure.

  Southern Rhodesia was a colony when the Queen first visited as a princess in 1947. It was the proud Republic of Zimbabwe when she returned as Queen forty-four years later. The Pakistan that the Queen visited in 1997 was significantly smaller than the one she saw in 1961, much of it having broken away to become Bangladesh – which she also visited in 1983. Of her five state visits to Germany, two were to the former West Germany and three to the Federal Republic. The Caribbean island of Anguilla had gone from being a colony to independence within a federation and then back to colonial status again, by the time the Qu
een visited in 1994 (and met nearly a quarter of the population in a couple of days). Few things better illustrate the scale of change during this reign than the fact that most of the nations on Earth today have only come into existence since the Queen came to the Throne. Yet she has visited most of them.

  In 2017, when the Royal Collection wanted to stage an exhibition marking the Queen’s interaction with an ever-changing world over sixty-five years, it chose to do so through the prism of gifts. Even a tiny cross-section of the presents she has received still managed to occupy all the state apartments at Buckingham Palace. Put together, they represented a spectacular answer to a question people have been asking themselves since 1952: what do you give the woman who has everything? In the case of Russia’s President, Boris Yeltsin, the answer was a silver samovar. Pope Francis settled for a copy of a seventeenth-century decree canonising King Edward the Confessor. In 2012, the people of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific decided that the Queen should receive a Jackie Kennedy-style Kili handbag, made entirely of coconut leaves. Six decades earlier, the Girl Guides of New Zealand had given her a giant jigsaw puzzle of New Zealand, along with a delightful book inscribed with a handwritten message from every single Girl Guide. On her travels through Africa the Queen has often received seats – the concept of the Throne is by no means unique to Britain – including an intricate beaded stool from Kenya and a brightly painted kitchen-style chair, her seat for the 2007 Commonwealth meeting in Uganda.

  The world, and in particular the Commonwealth, has been extremely generous, with the result that the Queen has a very personal selection of ‘E II R’ Crown jewels in addition to the inherited collection. They include the ‘Flame Lily’ brooch that she received as a Princess from the children of Southern Rhodesia in 1947, the 203-carat Andamooka Opal given to her by Australia in 1954, the golden porcupine brooch presented by the King of the Ashanti in 1961 and the exquisite sapphire-and-diamond snowflake that she received from the people of Canada in 2017. Be it the engraved glass cup that the Queen received on her first state visit to the USA in 1957, or the gold camels resting beneath silver palm trees hung with amethyst dates that she received from a Saudi prince in 1997, or a stunning portrait of herself in Rwandan banana leaves, every last gift has been logged and noted and put somewhere safe for future generations. Perhaps, one day, someone will put them all in a museum dedicated to the longest reign in British history.

  There are plenty of gifts that have never made it through the doors of Buckingham Palace. That baby crocodile in a biscuit tin was by no means the most exotic. In 1968, during her state visit to Brazil, the Queen was given two jaguars, Marquis and Aizita. In 1972, President Ahidjo of Cameroon gave her an elephant. Like the jaguars and the crocodile, it went to London Zoo. Sadly, not all these kind gestures would have happy endings. The Princess Royal remembers receiving two gazelles in Djibouti. ‘That was a tragic story. There are sometimes things that you really don’t want to be given,’ she says. ‘No cloven-footed animals have been imported from the Horn of Africa for over forty years. And they turned up at London airport where they were very nearly shot on the runway. We persuaded Air France to take them back to Paris. They passed through the zoo and ended up finally back in the game park in Nairobi but they didn’t last very long, I’m afraid.’ The Princess now leaves any living gifts in situ. ‘I’ve got, I think, three Mongolian horses – but they’re still in Mongolia, fortunately.’

  When the Queen was given a pair of trumpeter swans in Canada in 1956, she presented them to Sir Peter Scott’s bird sanctuary in Gloucestershire. Few countries have been as generous or thoughtful as Canada, but then she has visited it more often than any other country outside Britain. Her much-loved mare Burmese was a gift from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.†

  It was also in Canada that the Queen was presented with the largest gift she has ever received (not including 170,000 square miles of Antarctica, renamed Queen Elizabeth Land in her honour). It is a 12-ton, 100-foot totem pole from the Chief of the Kwakiutl people, to mark British Columbia’s centenary in 1958. After it was presented to the Queen, it embarked on a long journey by ship down the Pacific coast, through the Panama Canal and across the Atlantic. A barge took it some of the way up the Thames, before two lorries moving at walking speed deposited it in Windsor Great Park. There the Royal Engineers were given the task of erecting it, 4,600 miles from its birthplace. The pole’s sacred status means that only a relative of the original creator may conduct maintenance work on it, as happened in the spring of 2018. Fearing that other provinces might feel compelled to come up with something even larger, the Palace issued some gentle guidance, ahead of the Queen’s next visit to Canada. In future, said her officials, she would be happier if any larger gifts could be translated into endowments for scholarships. The Queen Elizabeth II Canadian Research Fund has been going strong ever since. The basic human urge to present a powerful and important visitor with a present has never changed.

  No monarch – perhaps no world leader – has seen as much of the planet and its peoples as Queen Elizabeth II. From the earliest days of her reign to her latest overseas visit, less than six months before her ninetieth birthday, every trip has had its own unexpected challenges and pleasures. The objectives and priorities have changed from year to year. The Foreign Office mandarins who thought it would be a good idea for the Queen to befriend autocrats, or invite Idi Amin to lunch, or go tiger-hunting in Nepal have long since retired or moved on to an eternal embassy in the hereafter. To view newsreel footage or diplomatic files chronicling some of her earlier travels is to view a world and a mindset that sometimes seem more in tune with Edwardian thinking than the present day. Yet so much else has a strikingly contemporary feel. As the years progress, so the people around the Queen get younger, her Commonwealth grows larger and the fascination with her grows exponentially.

  The core business of international monarchy has not changed one bit. With a handful of exceptions that can be counted in single figures – all of them connected to racehorses – the Queen has never travelled overseas for pleasure. Other members of the Royal Family, from Queen Victoria to Prince William and Prince Harry, might have enjoyed the idea of a foreign holiday. For the Queen, holidays have always been synonymous with Scotland. Abroad equals duty. She has also welcomed more fellow heads of state and other world leaders to Britain than anyone, too. Of course much of this is down to longevity – and to Sir Frank Whittle’s invention of the jet engine. It is also down to the sheer pulling power of a world leader who has been doing the same job in very much the same way since before most people were born; and who continues to do so, with the support of her son and heir and the rest of her family, very happily. So how does this constant presence continue to engage with an ever-changing world and its people?

  THE DESTINATION

  Long before any visit is ever decided, a discreet group of some of the most senior public servants in the land will have assembled in a Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) conference room for the quarterly meeting of the Royal Visits Committee. Chaired by the head of the Diplomatic Service, the Permanent Under-Secretary, it also includes the Private Secretaries to the Queen, the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Cambridge. There, too, is the Vice-Marshal of the Diplomatic Corps, otherwise known as the Director of Protocol, who acts as the intermediary between the Palace and the Foreign Office. Sir Roger du Boulay, himself a former Vice-Marshal, recalls that in the Seventies the committee also involved the two supreme mandarins, the Cabinet Secretary and the Head of the Civil Service. It has to be a balancing act between the demands of the British government, with its UK-centric focus, and the expectations of the Queen’s fifteen other realms. Little thought is given to where the Royal Family might actually want to go. However, the committee still needs to be aware of anywhere they are not keen to visit.

  ‘We started with British foreign policy: where did we want to go, and in what order?’ says Sir Roger. Ahead of these meetings, the Foreign & Commonwealth Office would assembl
e its own internal committee to work out which leaders might be appropriate as either a host or guest of the Queen and her family. Even at the height of the Cold War, it transpires that Margaret Thatcher’s government was pondering the idea of sending the Queen behind the Iron Curtain. Minutes of the FCO’s sub-committee meeting in October 1979 show that the Royal Visits Committee was exploring royal tours of ‘China, the USSR and Eastern Europe’. The FCO wanted to invite the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, for a state visit in 1982 or 1983, and that would have required a reciprocal visit by the Queen. Having just entertained the loathsome Romanian dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, it seems that the Queen was not wildly keen on going to the Eastern Bloc. ‘The main problem lay with the USSR,’ it was noted. ‘The Queen was unlikely to want to go there, although she wanted to go to China.’ ‡

  Forthcoming trips to Italy, Norway and Sweden were on the cards in 1979, but a long-standing proposal to send the Queen to Egypt was dropped as ‘too controversial’. Perhaps that would explain why the Prince and Princess of Wales were asked to incorporate a dinner with President Sadat into their honeymoon plans two years later.

  In terms of royal guests, President Portillo of Mexico was a frontrunner, while President Marcos of the Philippines was among a list of possible reserves. It was then decided that, on balance, he should drop back down the list until at least 1982, not because of his kleptomania or his autocratic rule or his human-rights record, but ‘because of the instability of his regime’. In any event, Marcos would be gone by 1986 without ever enjoying a state visit.