Queen of the World: Elizabeth II: Sovereign and Stateswoman

by Robert Hardman

  As soon as lunch was over, she asked her officials to contact the Foreign Secretary, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, and warn him what Amin had said. Douglas-Home was already aware that Amin was rearming because, quite separately, the newly-installed dictator had asked him for British assistance in obtaining new weapons, including a fleet of armoured cars. Douglas-Home duly shared all this information later with Arnold Smith. ‘It was obvious that Amin could be a very dangerous man, puffing out these grandiose dreams,’ Smith wrote in his memoirs.

  Despite this, Amin was still on the Queen’s Christmas-card list at the end of 1971, although a clerical error meant that her card was late. ‘When I gave the card to the president yesterday he was delighted but would have been even more delighted if it had arrived before Christmas,’ a frustrated Harry Brind, British High Commissioner to Uganda, wrote to Lees Mayall, Vice-Marshal of the Diplomatic Corps, in January 1972. A few days later, Amin invited the Queen to attend the tenth-anniversary celebrations of Ugandan independence. The Queen replied that she was ‘most disappointed’, but other commitments precluded a visit. At this stage she was still signing her correspondence to him: ‘Your Good Friend, Elizabeth R.’

  Within months, however, it was clear that relations with Amin were doomed, as he announced the expulsion of 80,000 Ugandan Asians, many of whom had close ties with Britain. Their properties and businesses were seized, and 28,000 of them would move to the UK as stories mounted of atrocities against all forms of opposition to Amin. Edward Heath’s government, which had been so ready to embrace the enemy of the irritating Milton Obote, now began lobbying for Uganda to be expelled from the Commonwealth. Arnold Smith warned that this would be regarded by many African leaders as a case of Britain reverting to its old imperial ways. Amin might be a monster, but at least he was their monster.

  He failed to appear at the 1973 and 1975 Commonwealth meetings, sending ministers in his place as the charge sheet of human-rights abuses stacked up. By the time of the 1977 meeting, most of the world had learned about Amin’s massacres and torture squads. Some 300,000 people in a country of twelve million were executed, often in the most grotesque fashion – forced to bludgeon each other to death, or pushed from aircraft or over a precipice. His behaviour was demonstrably worse than that of the pariah state of South Africa. Yet Uganda could still rely on Pan-African solidarity to maintain his membership of the club. Commonwealth double-standards had reached a new low.

  So there was alarm bordering on panic when Amin let it be known that he was planning to attend the 1977 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in London. It had originally been earmarked for Zambia but, at the Queen’s personal request, had shifted to Britain to coincide with her Silver Jubilee celebrations. Amin’s presence would not only be hugely embarrassing for the British government, now led by Labour’s Jim Callaghan, but would be deeply embarrassing for the more democratic Commonwealth member states and, in particular, for the Queen. If he came, she would be duty bound to meet him, in her capacity as Head of the Commonwealth.

  Pressure would have to be applied from various quarters to keep him away from London. Would Amin listen, though? Sir William Heseltine, former Private Secretary to the Queen, recalls that Buckingham Palace tried using the old-boy network by despatching an officer who, like Amin, had been in the King’s African Rifles. ‘He was sent to talk some sense and I remember him saying that it was hopeless,’ says Heseltine. ‘He’d been received in some sort of mud hut with a drain as an entrance and he’d been made to crawl through this to have his audience with Amin. It was a very unsuccessful attempt at diplomacy.’

  Amin was never going to listen to the despised imperialist British government. So the Foreign Secretary, David Owen, attempted to persuade other African nations to keep him away from the Queen’s party in London. That was a fruitless mission, too.

  Jim Callaghan consulted the new Commonwealth Secretary-General, Sonny Ramphal, for his advice. ‘He was terrified,’ says Ramphal. ‘I warned him: “You cannot turn Amin away”. After all, Ted Heath received him at Downing Street.’ Ramphal set off for Uganda, for what would be one of the most bizarre encounters during his entire fifteen years as Secretary-General. ‘Amin invited us to the opening of a tourist hotel in the Queen Elizabeth game park and offered us this helicopter,’ recalls Patsy Robertson, Ramphal’s press secretary. ‘I remember someone said “that’s the helicopter he throws people out of” which was a worry. Then one of the press said: “Why have they brought these children?” They turned out to be Amin’s troupe of pygmy dancers.’

  Ramphal gently but firmly advised Amin that if he came to London, he would only embarrass the Queen and alienate his allies within the Commonwealth.

  Amin seemed to relish the guessing game and all the attention. He vanished from public view just as the Commonwealth leaders began arriving in London, fuelling inevitable rumours. Might he really be on his way to upstage the Queen at her own party? Even as the heads of government were gathering at St Paul’s Cathedral for the service of thanksgiving to mark her twenty-five years on the Throne, there was palpable unease that Amin might make a last-minute appearance. Earl Mountbatten recorded in his diary that the Queen was not her normal self. ‘I asked her afterwards why she had looked rather cross and worried,’ he wrote. ‘She laughed and said: “I was just thinking how awful it would be if Amin were to gatecrash the party”.’ Mountbatten ventured to ask what she would have done. Noting that the Lord Mayor’s Pearl Sword had been placed before her, the Queen replied that she would have ‘hit him hard over the head’ with it.

  Though there was no sign of Amin at St Paul’s, tension mounted as the guests moved on to the Lord Mayor’s lunch that followed. The press had picked up word that Amin’s plane had just entered Irish air space. He might yet arrive in time for pudding. Jim Callaghan and his ministers were certainly not enjoying their lunch, as former Foreign Secretary David Owen recalls: ‘Merlyn Rees [the Home Secretary] came up to me and said: “David, Amin is about to land at London Airport!” We had made plans in case he was crazy enough to fly in so I said: “We will push him to a remote part of the airfield and just not allow him to get off the airplane”. Merlyn was on the phone for most of the banquet.’ In the event, Amin was having them all on. He had never left Uganda.

  Owen would have the last laugh a year later. ‘Amin was a menace and I got rid of him,’ he says proudly, adding, ‘I’d be in jail now for what I did!’ When Amin finally launched an invasion of Tanzania, as he had warned the Queen he would in 1971, Tanzania’s President Julius Nyerere came to Britain for help. ‘Nyerere was not a mild man by any means but he didn’t have any ammunition,’ says Owen. ‘I said: “I can’t buy you ammunition but I can increase your aid budget so you can buy ammunition”. You’d go to jail now for using aid money to buy ammunition. But there was nothing on paper.’ Armed with new British-funded weaponry, Tanzania went on to launch its own offensive against Uganda, forcing Amin into exile, never to return.

  Though he was a volatile and brutal dictator at home, Amin retained an abiding respect and affection for the Queen. Sonny Ramphal believes that is why he stayed away from her Jubilee. It would be a similar story with Zimbabwe’s megalomaniacal President, Robert Mugabe. Even in the latter stages of his regime, as he ranted and raved against the evils of the British government and the empire that had imprisoned him for eleven years, he never had a bad word to say about the Queen. While he led his country in the earlier years after independence, he was a firm royal favourite. One former member of the Royal Household remembers being mesmerised by him – ‘the longest fingers I’d ever seen on a man’. In 1994, the Queen formally invited Mugabe to pay a state visit to Britain and he even made a little bit of ceremonial history. That traditional state welcome at Victoria railway station was finally abandoned, for the novelty value of state visits had worn off over the years and the crowds along Victoria Street were getting thinner. For a sensitive head of state like Mugabe, a small, unenthusiastic crowd could be taken as a grave i
nsult. So the Queen approved a plan to greet Mugabe on Horse Guards, at the other end of the Mall from the Palace. Not only did the grand old parade ground look smarter, but the route would be much shorter. It was such a success that the Queen has stuck to that format ever since.

  British diplomats of the period recall that Mugabe was already morphing into a different character. His first wife, Sally, a teacher from Ghana, was widely regarded as a crucial, steadying influence in his life. ‘She was a remarkable woman, Sally Mugabe,’ says Sir Nicholas Soames, MP, whose father, Lord Soames, had come to know the Mugabes well as the last Governor of Rhodesia. ‘He never put a foot wrong while she was alive and then it went bad.’ Many who knew him chart Mugabe’s decline from Sally’s death, after a long history of renal failure, in 1992. ‘Sally was a tremendous support,’ says Sonny Ramphal. ‘My wife saw a lot of her and we knew the strength she was to him.’

  In 1996, Mugabe married Grace, a former secretary forty-one years his junior, by whom he had fathered two children while Sally was still alive. He was a changed man, according to another royal insider who had got to know him well: ‘Money got to him. He lost touch with reality. I asked his second wife what her main interests were outside of her husband’s political career? “Shopping!” she said.’

  Mugabe grew increasingly hostile to Britain after 1997, when the new government of Tony Blair announced that it would no longer fund a Zimbabwean land-reform programme. The scheme was supposed to help small farmers, but was very clearly enriching members of Mugabe’s family and his inner circle instead. As Blair remarked to the new Commonwealth Secretary-General, Don McKinnon: ‘He’s really an old-style Marxist.’ The New Zealander recalls Mugabe’s increasingly manic demeanour as Zimbabwe entered the twenty-first century. ‘He jiggled incessantly, hands flapping, head bobbing, I’ve never seen such a level of nervous energy in one person,’ McKinnon wrote in his memoirs. To this day, though, he remains in awe of Mugabe’s brainpower. ‘Never underestimate his intelligence,’ says McKinnon at his home in New Zealand. ‘And never underestimate his ability to know more than anyone about Commonwealth cricket scores.’ He believes that Mugabe had become increasingly embittered after the release from prison and subsequent election of Nelson Mandela in South Africa. Mandela enjoyed a global respect that had eluded the Zimbabwean leader, and Mugabe loathed being overlooked as the standard-bearer for black African self-determination. By 2003, after umpteen violations of Commonwealth rules, Mugabe had removed Zimbabwe from the Commonwealth before it could be expelled. McKinnon is confident that it will return in the new post-Mugabe era – and that the Queen will be thrilled when it happens. Yet, through it all, Mugabe never voiced any criticism of the Queen. Baroness Chalker, former Minister for Overseas Development, also got to know Mugabe well. She says that he always made a very clear distinction between the monarch and her ministers: ‘One of the things he would tell you is: “She is one of the most wonderful women. Pity about the politicians”.’

  Another African visitor of that period was less respectful of the Queen, however. At around the same time as the Queen’s shocking lunch with Idi Amin in 1971, Edward Heath’s government invited Mobutu Sese Seko, the fearfully corrupt President of Zaire, to pay a state visit to Britain. The date was fixed for 1973 and Mobutu arrived at Buckingham Palace with his wife, Marie-Antoinette, who exhibited a similar lack of tact and common sense to her ill-starred French namesake of a previous age. She had smuggled her pet dog into Britain in the presidential luggage. Given the strict quarantine laws and the prevalence of rabies in mainland Europe, it was a very serious breach of the law. Mrs Mobutu’s subterfuge was soon discovered when she requested some steak from the Palace kitchens to feed her pet. The Queen’s staff say that no one has ever seen her angrier than the moment she learned of the four-legged contraband hiding in the Belgian Suite. ‘Get that dog out of my house!’ she bellowed at the Deputy Master of the Household, and ordered the instant removal of the royal corgis to Windsor for safekeeping. Mrs Mobutu’s pet was promptly quarantined while the state visit continued in a glacial atmosphere.

  Despite this flagrant abuse of royal hospitality, the Mobutus are still not remembered as the worst guests of the Queen’s reign. That honour would go to the couple from Eastern Europe who arrived five years later.

  THE NADIR

  After a lot of thought, the Queen had prepared what she imagined would be the perfect present for her communist guest. President Ceausescu of Romania might be one of the nastiest state visitors ever invited to Buckingham Palace but there were still standards to maintain ahead of his arrival in the summer of 1978. So her officials had consulted the Romanian Ambassador for gift suggestions. Back came the reply that Ceausescu would like nothing more than a hunting rifle from a famous British gunmaker. The Queen had not only commissioned a rifle, with telescopic sight, but also a handsome leather case embossed with her ‘E II R’ cypher and the name ‘Nicolai Ceausescu’. On the eve of the visit, her deputy Private Secretary, William Heseltine, invited the Ambassador round to the Palace to check the final arrangements and to see the Queen’s present. ‘His face fell and he went ashen grey,’ Heseltine recalls. ‘He said: “You’ve spelt Nicolai in the Russian way.” I could plainly see he thought his head was going to be taken off if it was handed over with this misspelling. Fortunately, we had an amazing craftsman down at Windsor who was able to turn the ‘i’ into an ‘e’ overnight.’

  The Ambassador was not the only nervous wreck ahead of this visit. Over at the Foreign Office, David Lambert in the Eastern European & Soviet Union department had spent months trying to arrange a much trickier gift for the Romanian first lady, Elena Ceausescu. The volatile, semi-literate self-styled ‘academic’ had let it be known that she was expecting to receive an honorary degree from a prestigious British university during her stay with the Queen. The state visit would clearly be deemed a painful failure if her academic brilliance went unrecognised. Unfortunately, British seats of learning were not queuing up.

  Even more astonishingly, we now learn that Lambert’s boss, the Foreign Secretary, was actually in favour of calling the whole thing off. David Owen had been sent a confidential memo from his Private Secretary, Ewen Fergusson, warning that the media were becoming increasingly hostile to the first state visit by a dictator from communist Eastern Europe. Owen’s private response, though honest, was extraordinary, given that the state visit was just two days away. For the Foreign Office files reveal that he, too, was appalled by the prospect of welcoming the Ceausescus. ‘Who agreed to this visit?’ he scribbled on the side of Fergusson’s memo. ‘Did I? If I did, I regret it.’ As for the media, Owen had no quarrel. ‘They have some fair points of criticism,’ he added.

  At least he would not have to give the Ceausescus board and lodging. That unenviable task fell to the Queen. That is the way it always is when world leaders come to the United Kingdom. The government issues the invitation and the monarch delivers the royal magic. She and her staff would arrange Ceausescu’s state visit uncomplainingly because that has always been her duty, though she would surely have been displeased to learn that David Owen, the very minister responsible for imposing the guest from hell on her, now thought that the whole thing was a terrible idea. It was too late, anyway. There could be no going back. The horses and carriages were arranged, the banquet planned, the Palace’s Belgian Suite cleaned and prepared with fresh flowers. Finally, on June 13th, 1978, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh opened their home to their two unforgettably disagreeable guests.

  The Ceausescus’ state visit is a vivid illustration of British diplomatic priorities at the height of the Cold War. In those days, the government was willing to turn a blind eye to almost any misdemeanour and even embarrass the Queen, if a short-term political deal might be struck. In this case, it was all about selling a few British planes. The fact that the buyer was the most repressive dictator among the Warsaw Pact nations (even the Soviets regarded him as authoritarian) mattered not one jot.

  The Cea
usescus would arrive during the last year of Jim Callaghan’s troubled Labour premiership. This, though, was yet another visit that, like so many questionable invitations, had its origins in the Tory administration of Edward Heath. Foreign Office files show that Britain first suggested an official or state visit to the Romanians as far back as 1973, courtesy of Foreign Office Minister of State Julian Amery. Although a staunch member of the very right-wing Monday Club, Amery had been struck by Ceausescu’s willingness to stand apart from the rest of the communist Eastern Bloc nations. Romania had not supported the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Here was a leader who was keen to pursue his own trade and political agendas, regardless of what the Soviet Union might think. By engaging with Ceausescu, the argument went, Britain might gain some sort of foothold inside the Warsaw Pact and derive some sort of commercial advantage, too.

  The Labour leader, Harold Wilson, had already had similar thoughts during a visit to Romania in 1972, while returning from Moscow as leader of the opposition. Shortly after ousting Edward Heath as Prime Minister in February 1974, Wilson made fresh overtures to the Romanian dictator. On 3rd May he had a Downing Street meeting with some of the most senior figures in the Ceausescu regime, including Stefan Andrei, secretary of the Romanian communist party. According to a classified minute of the meeting: ‘Mr Andrei said that President Ceausescu would like to visit the Prime Minister in London but would need an official invitation from the Queen.’ Wilson replied that Ceausescu would be very welcome, but a state visit was ‘difficult to arrange’, and that ‘he could come much sooner’ if he made an ordinary ‘official’ visit. The Romanian leader, however, clearly wanted the full royal treatment. As the Cabinet papers reveal: ‘Mr Andrei did not reply to these remarks but at the end of the meeting took Mr Wilson to one side and emphasised the importance which President Ceausescu attached to a state visit.’