Queen of the World: Elizabeth II: Sovereign and Stateswoman

by Robert Hardman

  The Queen’s speeches could also force other leaders to try a little harder, too. Former Foreign Secretary William Hague says that he would only ‘fiddle with little things here and there’ when he was in attendance. But he recalls a certain degree of panic among the hosts during the Queen’s 2014 state visit to France, following the commemorations to mark the seventieth anniversary of D-Day. Having received a copy of the speech that President François Hollande was preparing to deliver later in the day, Hague sent a draft of the Queen’s speech across to the Elysée Palace. ‘When President Hollande saw the Queen’s speech for the banquet he asked for his own speech to be rewritten. He had to raise his game and increase the quality. He was going to say “Welcome to France, Cheers”, that sort of thing. He definitely had to make the speech more profonde.’

  TWO PACES BEHIND

  The Duke of Edinburgh’s pivotal role on tour would extend far beyond speech-writing. As she herself has made clear often enough, she would not have achieved all that she has without her ‘liege man of life and limb’. Whenever the Queen was on tour, the Duke would be there too, sharing the walkabouts and receptions, while always conscious that the Queen was the main attraction. If he spotted any children trying not to look too disappointed that they had picked his side of any given walkabout route, he would help them over the barriers to present their flowers to the Queen.

  Once the big set-piece features of a state visit were out of the way, the Duke was available to maximise diplomatic impact with a programme of his own. On Day Two of the Queen’s 1996 state visit to the Czech Republic, for example, as she met vast crowds in the second city of Brno, the Duke toured the old silver-mining town of Kutná Hora. The following day he broke off from the main tour to visit the country’s largest brewery. One of the Queen’s former Private Secretaries points out that the monarch would always be wary of overdoing any commercial activity during a state visit. ‘We always had to be careful about the trade side because you didn’t want to destroy the special atmosphere,’ he says. The Duke, however, could not only do more for the commercial section of any embassy, but usually enjoyed it, too. The media would always be on the lookout for any chance remarks that could join the long anthology of ducal ‘gaffes’. Some were, manifestly, a joke. ‘It’s a pleasure to be in a country that isn’t ruled by its people,’ he is reported to have told the Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner in 1963. Others would be an attempt to jolly along a sticky conversation. Every now and then they might backfire, like the fabled conversation with a Brazilian admiral in the capital, Brasília. Had the admiral won his medals on the local lake, he asked? ‘Yes, sir,’ came the reply. ‘Not by marriage.’

  In most cases, however, the local reaction to a gaffe would bear little comparison to the banner headlines in Britain. A joke about the food in Hungary – ‘You can’t have been here that long. You haven’t got a pot belly’ – was big news back home, but passed virtually unnoticed in Budapest. The Governor of the Cayman Islands, Michael Gore, was irked that the only international media coverage from an otherwise dizzying royal visit in 1994 was the Duke’s joke, at an exhibition about a famous shipwreck, that the islanders were descended from pirates. ‘This caused no offence locally because, just as Australians prefer to be descended from convicts rather than warders, Caymanians are not averse to being labelled as descendants of pirates,’ Gore wrote in his telegram to London. ‘I often pull their legs that the Wreck of the Ten Sails came about as a result of Caymanians having learnt from their Cornish forefathers!’ As the Duke once admitted to a biographer, there were moments when he might be ‘skating on very thin ice’, adding: ‘I go through occasionally.’

  The focus on trivia would leave the Duke’s staff and former staff wearily disappointed, but unsurprised. They would see a boss whose career in international public life had eclipsed that of most politicians. The World Wildlife Fund (WWF), of which the Duke was a co-founder and international president, has been a catalyst for the likes of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth. The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award for young people has been embraced in more than 140 countries around the world. Award-seekers and award-holders are to be found everywhere, as the Duke has discovered himself. He told Sir Malcolm Rifkind of the day he spent hours stalking a stag across a Scottish hillside at Balmoral. He was about to take aim when his quarry suddenly ran away at speed. Moments later, a band of ramblers came over the brow of the hill. ‘What they bloody hell are you doing?’ he thundered. ‘The Duke of Edinburgh’s,’ came the reply. ‘He likes to tell that story against himself,’ says Sir Malcolm, with a laugh.

  Added to all the other 700 international charities and organisations that he supported until his retirement in 2017, at the age of ninety-five, it means that the Duke would leave an imprint on the wider world for longer than almost any post-war figure alive. In that context, it is not so surprising there was that discreet campaign some years ago, by a handful of friends from different countries, to put his name forward for a Nobel Prize.

  For most of his life, however, his role has been that of the Royal Family’s (and the world’s) longest-serving supporting act, always walking two paces behind his wife. Jack Straw was struck by the fact that, on a long flight, the Duke would sit in the row of seats behind the Queen, too. He would also help to keep the rest of the entourage alert, even if he was not always wholly convinced of their reason for being there. ‘He would bring a virile dimension to a tour. His temper could keep things cracking along quite nicely,’ recalls a former member of the Royal Household. ‘Because when the Duke went travelling on his own, it would just be him and a policeman and his private secretary. So on these tours, he’d come in and see all these dressers and footmen and so on. “What are all these people doing here?” he’d say.’ It helped that the Duke had travelled so widely. ‘When the Queen went to somewhere she’d never been like Hungary, he’d been before,’ says a former Private Secretary. ‘He knew the place and that helped. And if anything went wrong, he’d say: “Who organised this bloody shambles?” ’ He could also lighten the mood in a crisis, like the Normandy veterans’ parade on the sandy beach at Arromanches in 1994. An incoming tide was already cutting things fine when the royal party were informed that President Mitterrand was running an hour late. ‘Who does he bloody think he is?’ roared the Duke. ‘King Canute?’ The parade stuck to the original timings.

  The Duke was not averse to taking on the Foreign Office, either. The Queen’s 1972 state visit to France was one of the most important of her reign, effectively paving the way for Britain’s entry to the European Common Market. Having been invited to address the joint chamber of commerce in Paris, the Duke prepared a speech gently arguing that some issues – notably the challenges facing the world’s poorest nations, and the threat of global pollution to the environment – were of even greater significance than Britain’s impending entry to Europe. ‘I do not believe we need to be mesmerised by the great debate about Britain and the Common Market,’ he wrote, noting that Britain’s entry had been ‘hotly debated’ and was still under discussion. He was concerned that ‘Europe has achieved a level of prosperity far higher than many other countries’, adding that he wanted to see Europe help the ‘less fortunate regions of the world’.

  Although few would quibble with his thesis today, it was viewed as dangerous heresy at the Foreign Office. William Adams, then head of the Foreign Office’s European integration department, wrote to his bosses warning that the Duke’s speech was ‘a gift to the anti-marketeers in Parliament and the country’. He added: ‘I wonder whether the Duke of Edinburgh really wishes to make what amounts to a policy statement about Europe’s attitude to the Third World.’ Lees Mayall, the Foreign Office’s head of protocol, was given the task of writing a blunt letter to the Duke’s office, warning that ‘we have to be careful not to play into the hands of the anti-marketeers’. He wanted some drastic changes, including the removal of the section about Britain being ‘mesmerised’ by the Common Market. The Duke was clearly having non
e of it because, come the day, he said exactly what he was going to say. ‘Mesmerised’ was not edited out. Rather than cause a stir, it ended up receiving extensive and favourable coverage across the British media. ‘Duke tells Europe not to forget needy nations,’ declared the Financial Times. Under the headline ‘Don’t be mesmerised by the Market, says Prince’, The Daily Telegraph reported that the Duke, ‘speaking in excellent French’, had delivered a speech ‘refreshingly free of official platitudes’.

  As a rule, if the Duke was happy, then the Queen was happy. On occasion, though, she would intervene to avert the odd local difficulty. The Labour politician and diarist, Chris Mullin, accompanied the Queen and Duke during a trip to Nigeria in his days as a junior Foreign Office minister. During a visit to the local offices of the British Council, the Duke was unimpressed by a jargon-filled speech of welcome from the director and turned to a group of expat staff. ‘You’re teachers, aren’t you?’ he said, within Mullin’s earshot. ‘Can you tell me what all that meant?’ One of the teachers – ‘a bit right-on,’ Mullin observed – replied: ‘No, sir. We’re not actually teachers.’ ‘Not teachers?’ said the Duke. ‘What are you then?’ ‘Well, sir, we empower people.’ It was precisely the sort of flaccid modern management-speak guaranteed to irritate the Duke, who has been known to bridle at the mere mention of ‘human resources’, ‘affordable housing’ and ‘stakeholder’. ‘Empower?’ he snorted. ‘Doesn’t sound like English to me.’ By now the Queen’s finely tuned early warning system was emitting signals. ‘Look,’ she said brightly, pointing over a balcony, ‘. . . at the pottery.’ After the royal party had moved on, Mullin went to look over the balcony. There was no pottery.

  Though the Duke would announce his retirement from public life in 2017, he would continue to accompany the Queen to important events and to remain central to the way she arranges her programme. At the end of a busy morning, she has been known to say: ‘Now I must give Philip his lunch.’ As the longest-serving double-act in royal history, they are unrivalled. No other royal duo have done so much together around the world. On her 1954 Coronation tour of Australia, it was estimated that seven million people saw the Queen and the Duke with their own eyes; a million on a single drive through Accra in 1999. The overall viewing figures remain incalculable, the overall impact unquantifiable, and yet the effect, in terms of soft power, is unquestionable.

  THE AFTERMATH

  After most tours, the Ambassador or High Commissioner would send a confidential report to the Foreign Office assessing the impact of the royal visit. With a new knighthood, damehood or CVO, and knowing that a copy would usually find its way to the Palace, the authors were seldom critical. On the other hand, they would not be thanked for treacly hyperbole. These reports would be circulated confidentially inside the Foreign Office and used by those planning future tours, as well as by those keen for a post-mortem. In his 1996 despatch, Sir James Hodge reported proudly that when the King of Thailand attended the Queen’s dinner at the British Embassy, it had been the first time in history that he had visited a foreign embassy. It had not all been plain sailing, however. ‘There were a few ragged edges,’ Sir James added. ‘The normal Thai practice of having dozens of senior officials accompany senior members of the Royal Family – including the Crown Prince’s Hat Bearer and Pipe Carrier – was not easy to manage, particularly for the return dinner.’

  In his report on the 1956 state visit to Sweden, the British Ambassador, Sir Robert Hankey, reported unsurprisingly that the visit had been greeted with ‘breathless interest by the whole of Sweden’. His assertion was supported by facts, however. He quoted the Swedish press, noting that even the anti-royal papers had covered the events with enthusiasm. The Ambassador observed that ‘the strongly socialist and feminist’ Welfare Minister, Ulla Lindström, had been very respectful towards the Queen, but had ‘elected as a matter of principle to bow rather than curtsey which earned her a certain amount of humorous comment in the press’.

  He also quoted reports that the visit had even ‘saved the Swedish Monarchy’, in the face of rising republicanism. The increase in antipathy towards the monarchy stemmed in part from ‘the rational and materialist cast of mind of the Swedes’, but was largely down to scandal surrounding the late King Gustav V and ‘the peculiarities of the King’s private life’. The report did not go into the details of Gustav’s widely rumoured gay past, or the prosecution of an alleged lover for blackmail following the King’s death in 1950, but it was emphatic that the presence of the British monarchy had ‘made Swedes more proud of their monarchy’. Sweden, Sir Robert added, was now ‘a country in which Great Britain is held in higher esteem than any other power’. No small boast.

  It was to be expected that all these visits would entail plenty of flag-waving and brand promotion on behalf of the UK but, equally, the Queen well understood that these occasions were about boosting the self-esteem of the hosts, particularly in countries recovering from war or oppression. Reflecting on the 1993 state visit to Hungary – the Queen’s first behind the former Iron Curtain (and less than four years after the fall of the Berlin Wall) – the British Ambassador, Sir John Birch, wrote to the Foreign Secretary: ‘There is still a lack of self-confidence in the country’s future, tinged with some shame about the past. The presence of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh struck a deep chord with Hungarians and showed that Britain cared about them.’

  These visits could preoccupy an entire embassy or high commission for months in advance, as the Queen herself was well aware. That is why her luggage would contain all those decorations, medals, photo frames and commemorative pens for the embassy staff. She likes to see that everyone is recognised, so she must have enjoyed the despatch of Alan Shave, the Governor of Anguilla, after her visit in 1994. As well as commending his team, he particularly wanted to place on record his thanks to Mrs Shave. Extensive renovation work on Government House had only just finished, giving Lidia Shave a mere three days to prepare for the royal visit. ‘To prepare a reception for 400 people is reasonable; to do so while living in our third temporary home in as many months was a challenge. To convert bedrooms into royal rest areas and reorganise an entire house and then instantly reconstruct gardens from builders’ rubble was her most outstanding achievement of a thirty-two-year unpaid diplomatic support career.’

  Other diplomats might be chided for the tone of their despatches. After the 1979 state visit to Tanzania, the Queen’s Private Secretary, Philip Moore, was distinctly underwhelmed by the report of the High Commissioner, Sir Peter Moon. ‘I was slightly surprised to find plenty of compliments for President Nyrere, the Tanzanians and also the High Commission staff but none for the Queen!’ Moore wrote rather crossly to Roger du Boulay at the Foreign Office. As the man in charge of royal liaison, du Boulay circulated a memo to his colleagues. ‘The Palace do not seek or enjoy sycophantic gush,’ he assured them, ‘but I thought when I first read the despatch, and still think, that it betrays a tendency to take the Queen and her personal entourage and their achievements for granted. Sir P. Moore’s note sounds a timely note of warning.’

  There was no shortage of praise, and humour too, in the lively 1968 despatch from Brazil by Sir John Russell. Brazilians, he said, had found the Queen to be ‘multo simpatica’ while the Duke had received the ultimate accolade of being hailed as a ‘pao’ (literally, a cheese roll, but also slang for an elegant young man). ‘The modernity of his style, his technological interests, the ready if at times caustic wit, the easy elegant clothes, all this endeared him to the Brazilians,’ wrote Sir John. The Ambassador wrote of ‘a thousand little points’, which had created a riotous triumph: ‘lights fusing at the Governor’s Palace and the party continuing with candles; the Governor’s black umbrella held against the sun, as often as not over his own rather than the Queen’s head; the vulgar mobbing in Congress; the Queen’s speech at the Banquet; the Gadarene rush of 5,000 guests to the buffet at the President’s reception where spurs and a lit cigar came in very handy and I reali
sed that in a previous incarnation I must have been a police horse . . .’ This was a visit that had ‘real impact not alone on the upper crust but also on the great mass of the poor’, notably at the Maracaña stadium, where the Queen had honoured the Brazilian national religion – football – in front of 140,000. ‘The seal was set by pictures of a smiling Queen shaking hands with Pelé, Brazil’s black “King”.’

  There had been glitches. Sir John was especially irritated by the behaviour of the crowd in São Paolo, ‘where I lost two buttons and a CMG’. At one point, the officer of the cavalry escort had been forced to take on an unidentified car with ‘the business edge of his sword’.

  Politically, however, the visit had been ‘a direct blessing to Brazil’ in so many ways. ‘The students called off their riots and the right wing suspended their retaliations; all parties are in much improved humour, united by the feeling their country has been greatly distinguished and has behaved well.’ He concluded by quoting the words of an eminent Brazilian: ‘It was the greatest event here since 1822 – independence.’