Her Majesty Read online

  Having enjoyed good health throughout her life, she is not always entirely sympathetic to those around her when they fail to keep up. The Queen was more bemused than concerned when Margaret Thatcher started feeling faint at the annual diplomatic reception: ‘It was always intolerably hot at that diplomatic reception as there was no air. It had been a long day and Mrs Thatcher had to sit down,’ remembers one of the royal party. ‘The Queen went sailing by like Britannia and just said: “Oh, look, she’s keeled over again.”’As Sir William Heseltine, a former Private Secretary whose Palace career spanned almost thirty years, from the sixties to the nineties, puts it: ‘The Queen has a great capacity for measuring herself.’

  He recalls the final stages of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee tour which concluded in Northern Ireland. The terrorist threat was at its highest level and there were serious misgivings at Cabinet level about this final exercise. After tens of thousands of miles and millions of people, the added tensions were taking their toll on the royal party. Sir Martin Charteris (then not yet a peer) had already decided that this would be his final bow and that he would retire at the end of the Ulster tour.

  ‘They were nervous days. Merlyn Rees [Home Secretary and former Northern Ireland Secretary] was a bag of nerves and trying to stop the Queen doing things; but she was determined to go round and meet everyone,’ says Heseltine. ‘The Queen said goodbye to Martin Charteris and he formally took his leave on the last day. I have a picture of Martin and me. We look at the last stages of exhaustion. But the Queen could have done a couple more days.’

  The stress of royal duty is seldom discussed, not least because it invites the inevitable riposte from the commentariat: ‘Stress? Those royals don’t know the meaning of the word.’ It is true that no plane or train is ever going to leave without them; job security is not an issue; they will never endure the scream-inducing frustrations of lost luggage, parking tickets and call centre idiocy. But royalty is a life, not a career. ‘The Queen knows she doesn’t have to go on the Underground or queue for a bus or deal with the other daily hazards of our lives,’ says Ron Allison, former Press Secretary. ‘And that is part of what makes her determined to do her duty as she sees it, to go to Belfast in the pouring rain.’ And while politicians and celebrities by definition have an appetite for the spotlight, the same is not true of the Royal Family. George VI loathed public-speaking – as the 2011 Oscar-winning film, The King’s Speech reminds us – and his successor is not much more enthusiastic. Yet speeches are expected and speeches must be delivered. If the Queen’s engagements have become more adventurous over the years, the same could not be said for her speeches – usually safe and giving little of herself. This is in part down to the fact that she normally speaks ‘on advice’, her words crafted by ministers and civil servants as well as her own officials and herself. On occasion, they can combine to produce a great speech, such as her words of reconciliation during her state visit to Ireland.* Her message of condolence to the United States following the 9/11 atrocities contained a phrase so astute that it has now entered the language of bereavement: ‘Grief is the price we pay for love.’ Most of the time, though, she and her speech-writing team err firmly on the side of caution. ‘The Queen is not keen on – and possibly not capable of – making off-the-cuff speeches,’ says one former adviser. ‘She thinks it’s dangerous, which it obviously is. But particularly with an American audience, I find myself wishing she’d let go – which, of course, the Prince of Wales is very good at. Her instinct is to be very cautious.’ And why not? For someone who has never had a politician’s craving for the microphone, a lifetime of compulsory oratory must, at times, have seemed a formidable burden.

  A rare example of serious regal fatigue came in the immediate aftermath of the investiture of Prince Charles as Prince of Wales in 1969. It had been a summer of relentless royal activity, including the screening of the most eye-popping royal documentary ever made, Royal Family. The Prince’s investiture was the first made-for-television royal event, a pantomime of ancient druidry and medieval homage set on a sixties film stage with a chi-chi perspex canopy. But it was taking place against a backdrop of nascent Welsh separatist terrorism. The members of the Royal Family were doing their best to look on the bright side. As the Queen later told Noël Coward, she had been ‘struggling not to giggle’ because, at the dress rehearsal, the crown she had placed on the Prince’s head was too big and ‘extinguished him like a candle-snuffer’.

  ‘There was a fairly tense atmosphere the night before with bombs going off as we were on the Royal Train,’ recalls a former member of the Royal Household. At one point, a bomb hoax stopped the train altogether. As it chugged towards Caernarvon on the morning of the event, the onboard television was showing old footage of the investiture of the last Prince of Wales and the Queen Mother tried to lift the mood. ‘Oh, you’ve missed it, darling,’ she joked as the Prince appeared for breakfast. ‘It’s already happened.’

  But there was no hiding the news of a bomb explosion thirty miles away (it had killed two men, believed to be its makers). Another blast could actually be heard by the royal party as a bomb went off in a Caernarvon goods yard and, come nightfall, a soldier would be killed in a car explosion. Added to the political and security tensions was the fact that this was all being watched around the world. It was arguably the biggest set-piece royal event since the Coronation but without the same all-embracing sense of goodwill.

  Once it was over, the Prince of Wales began a tour of Wales but the Queen returned immediately to London. She then took to her bed for several days while the Palace issued a statement saying that Her Majesty had suddenly developed a ‘feverish cold’. The royal physician, the late Sir Ronald Bodley-Scott, advised the cancellation of all engagements, including a trip to the tennis at Wimbledon where the Queen had been due to watch the ladies’ final between Ann Jones and Billie-Jean King. A senior Palace official now admits that it was not a cold at all. It was nervous exhaustion. It would be six days before the Queen was seen in public again. This turns out to have been a genuine and very rare case of royal stress.

  If the Queen and her family are conscious of the danger lurking in every crowd, they do not show it. But it is hardly conducive to job satisfaction. ‘Logic tells you to deal with assessed threats,’ says a former member of the Royalty Protection team. ‘But history tells you that the greatest threat is from fixated lunatics.’

  Queen Victoria survived six assassination attempts. Her second son, Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, was shot and badly wounded during the first royal visit to Australia in 1868 and the future Edward VII escaped uninjured from shots fired by an anarchist in Brussels in 1899. In March 1974, Princess Anne escaped a kidnap attempt by an armed loner during which her protection officer was shot three times.* The Princess proved an imperturbable target. On being ordered out of her car by the kidnapper, she replied ‘not bloody likely’. After reading a confidential report, Prime Minister Harold Wilson noted in the margin: ‘A very good story. Pity the Palace can’t let it come out.’ Both the Queen and the Prince of Wales have been the targets of gun attacks – Her Majesty during the 1981 Birthday Parade and the Prince in a Sydney park in 1994. In both cases the bullets turned out to be blanks fired by disturbed youths, though no one knew that at the time. In 2010, the Rolls-Royce carrying the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall to the Royal Variety Performance was attacked when it strayed into the path of a riot. The couple pressed on with the engagement. ‘There’s a first time for everything,’ the Duchess remarked on arrival.

  The risk is not just on the streets. In 1982, the Queen had the unimaginable shock of being woken by an intruder in her bedroom. A series of police blunders meant that she had to keep Michael Fagan, another mentally disturbed loner, talking for ten minutes until a chambermaid entered with the cry: ‘Bloody hell, Ma’am. What’s he doing in there?’ ‘I don’t think the Queen ever got the credit for what she did then because it was almost too embarrassing to talk about it,’ says Ron Allis
on. ‘That, to me, is still the most extraordinary single event which has happened to the Queen.’

  Her own mother endured the same horror – ‘my heart stood still’ when a deranged deserter emerged from behind her curtains at Windsor Castle in the darkest days of the Second World War.

  A secretive team within Scotland Yard now maintains a ‘Fixated Persons Index’ but history would suggest that it can only be of so much use. And quite apart from all the oddballs and random thugs at large, there is the list of known threats, such as particular terrorist organisations. Police sources admit that, just months after the fire at Windsor Castle, there were credible intelligence reports of an IRA plan to attack Buckingham Palace using mortar bombs. The Queen was informed but refused to countenance a change of strategy, let alone a temporary move.

  ‘The Americans or the Israelis have a completely different approach,’ says a senior royal security source. ‘They don’t do risk. Their response is to put down a lot of heavy fire. But we try to manage out the risk. And, in any case, the Royal Family want invisible protection. It’s partly because they are in what they call “the happiness business” and partly because they don’t want people moaning about how many people they have around them.’ In the late nineties, the Queen’s Private Secretary, Robert Fellowes, actually appealed to chief constables to instruct their officers to be less heavy-handed when policing royal events.

  It is another variation on the royal paradox. How dare they demand all this expensive protection? But we must protect them at all costs. It certainly earns them sympathy from any politicians who have been in a similar situation. ‘I had protection for thirteen years,’ says a former Labour Cabinet Minister. ‘And while the police are great people, they’re in your space – literally. My wife was praying for the time when it was all over. But it’s a life sentence for the royals.’

  The royal biographer Elizabeth Longford wrote that the Queen’s life is ‘rooted in physical and moral courage’. For royal sang-froid it is hard to match the Queen’s remark when a concrete block was dropped on her car from a Belfast tower block in less peaceful times. Shrugging her shoulders, she observed: ‘It’s a strong car.’

  Much of this robust stoicism is inherited, no doubt. And much of it must have its roots in a wartime childhood during which the family lived in constant fear of German assassination and kidnap plots. The wartime correspondence of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, recently revealed in the Shawcross biography, shows a family as worried, fearful and uncertain as any other, except that they also had Winston Churchill dropping round to give them the full, bleak picture. The letters are endearingly honest, modest, sometimes funny – ‘Tinkety Tonk, old fruit. Down with the Nazis!’ – and often very moving. In a particularly touching one, as the doodlebugs start raining down on London in 1944, the Queen gives instructions to Princess Elizabeth on what to do in the event that she (her mother) is ‘done in’ – ‘Keep your temper and your word …’ Even in her darkest moments, though, the wartime Queen never contemplates retreating to safer territory. It is an example which has been faithfully followed by her daughter.

  The Queen does not like confrontation, least of all with her prime ministers. But she is prepared to quarrel over issues which involve her own safety. So when the British Government urged her not to visit Canada in 1964 because of separatist unrest, she ignored the concerns and went. In 1979, her New Zealand Prime Minister, Robert Muldoon, urged her not to attend the Lusaka Commonwealth summit as the city had recently been bombed by Rhodesian planes. She ignored him, too. Most controversial was her proposed visit to Ghana in 1961. An outbreak of bombs and civil unrest during the days beforehand led to widespread concern in Britain. Many MPs and most of the media were demanding cancellation. The Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, was half minded to call it off – Parliament was all for postponement – and later called it ‘the most trying week of my life’. It came close to a constitutional crisis since the Monarch is supposed to follow the Prime Minister’s advice but, in this instance, the Monarch was having none of it. The Queen was adamant. Reflecting on the episode afterwards, Macmillan wrote: ‘If she were pressed too hard and if Government and people here are determined to restrict her activities, I think she might be tempted to throw in her hand … She loves her duty and means to be a Queen and not a puppet.’ Aside from the fact that the Queen felt a certain obligation, having called off the visit two years earlier (not unreasonably, given that she was pregnant with Prince Andrew), she was also well aware of the geopolitical situation. Ghana, until recently a British colony, was being wooed by Khrushchev’s Soviet Union. Macmillan and US President John F. Kennedy were determined that its prickly dictator, Kwame Nkrumah, should remain friendly to the West. So was the Queen. As she told Macmillan: ‘How silly I should look if I was scared to visit Ghana and then Khrushchev went and had a good reception.’

  In the event, the tour was a huge success. Macmillan picked up the telephone to President Kennedy and gleefully announced: ‘I have risked my Queen. You must risk your money.’ A month later, the US agreed to back the mighty Upper Volta dam scheme. The Soviet seduction of West Africa was off.

  Whenever the prospect of saturation security raises itself, the Queen has been heard to reply: ‘I have to be seen to be believed.’ At a recent private lunch, her view was, as ever, rooted in practicality. ‘I’m not afraid of being killed,’ she said. ‘I just don’t want to be maimed.’

  Looking through the Queen’s life, the only things which seem to have unnerved her have been mechanical. She never liked Concorde much, using it just four times. And for many years she refused to travel by helicopter, not least because the former Captain of the Queen’s Flight, Air Commodore John Blount, was killed in one in 1963. It was not until her Silver Jubilee year of 1977 that the Queen was finally persuaded to get into one and that was only to cross part of Northern Ireland following terrorist threats on the ground. Now that the only aircraft at the permanent disposal of the Royal Family is a rented Sikorsky helicopter, she uses it regularly. In any case, she is surrounded by chopper pilots. Prince Philip learned to fly a helicopter in 1956, Prince Andrew was a helicopter pilot with the Royal Navy and both Prince William and Prince Harry have followed suit – with the RAF and the British Army respectively. The Prince of Wales has even been involved in a helicopter emergency landing (although it managed to avoid the press). ‘We were flying out of Exeter Airport at the end of an awayday,’ recalls Elizabeth Buchanan. ‘We said goodbye to the Lord-Lieutenant and we took off. I was pouring a glass of water and I noticed it was going sideways and then the pilot very calmly said that an engine had gone down and we would have to go back and make an emergency landing. I thought: “Well, maybe I’ll get a footnote as someone who died in a royal crash.” But the Prince’s main concern was that he had people coming for dinner and he knew that he would be going home by road. He just said: “Oh hell, I wanted to go round the garden before dinner.”’

  At high points or low, the routine of royal life can sometimes be stifling, not that the Queen will complain. ‘In more than twenty years of working for her, I’ve never heard her say, “That was the most boring day ever” or “Gosh, that Lord Mayor was a bore,”’ says a former Private Secretary. ‘If one was unwise enough to say, “It looked as if it was heavy going at lunch, Ma’am” or something like that, she would say: “Didn’t you realise that chap’s father was the son of my father’s valet?” or something. She would have found out something that interested her. I don’t think that I ever saw her go to sleep in the middle of an engagement. I think she’s been recorded as having done it once.* It is staggering if you think of it. I was caught sound asleep in the middle of a native dance in Canada, I remember. I’d gone the whole way. It’s self-discipline if you want to sum it up.’

  The Queen would be inhuman if she did not find that some of her encounters bordered on the narcoleptic. But, as Prince Philip has observed: ‘The Queen has the quality of tolerance in abundance.’ She also has the ability to ab
sorb the tiniest details from the most mundane situation. As Sir Malcolm Ross observes: ‘It’s one of the amazing skills she has. She’d come out of an investiture and say: “Did you see the man in the red socks?” And I’d think: “How did she see him?” She came out once and said to me: “Why was there an extra director of music in the gallery?” The man was hardly showing because he was sitting down. He was a new bandmaster and wanted to see the ropes. But she’d missed nothing despite having 120 people to concentrate on.’

  The eye for detail keeps everyone on their toes. Ron Allison says that the Queen would sometimes help him do his own job. During one church service she spotted a rogue photographer creeping into a spot where he should not have been. With little more than a raised eyebrow and a slight jerk of the head, she caught Allison’s eye and directed him to the miscreant.

  Just as she will find something unusual in the most formulaic situations, so the Queen loves the unexpected. ‘As a diplomat, you’re always worrying that something will go wrong,’ says Lord Hurd. ‘But you don’t realise that the Royal Family lead such curious lives that they’re longing for something to go wrong. That’s the late-night conversation: “Did you see that chap with his shirt undone? Did you see the man on the left fall over?” …’

  But while the Queen enjoys the occasional unscripted glitch, she is also sensitive to the embarrassment of others. If someone makes an innocent mistake, however glaring, she would rather press on than dwell on it. There was an excruciating moment in May 2011 when President Barack Obama raised a toast to the Queen at the end of his state banquet speech but then carried on speaking. By now the orchestra of the Scots Guards had already started playing the National Anthem and it was too late for either of them to stop. When both had finished, the Queen simply turned to her guest and said: ‘That was very kind.’