By the end of the Sixties, the Commonwealth had risen in size to nearly thirty member states. Since all enjoyed equal status, the old guard could be outvoted with ease. Many leaders had rather enjoyed the experience of kicking the British at that emergency meeting in Lagos. Might these regular gatherings of ‘the club’ not move to a different location under a different chairman every other year instead? And might these events not have a new name? It seemed silly to keep calling them ‘prime ministers’ conferences’ when so many republican leaders were now presidents. The idea of the ‘Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting’ was born. As a result, one of the uglier words in the diplomatic lexicon was coined – the ‘CHOGM’ (pronounced: cho-gum). Before today’s busy calendar of peripatetic international talking shops – from the G7 and the G20 to APEC and OPEC – the CHOGM was the only truly global gathering outside the United Nations.
THE TALKING SHOP
It was agreed that the first CHOGM was to be held in 1971 in Singapore. The Queen, understandably, expected to be there. The idea of holding this summit outside Britain met with no opposition whatsoever from the recently elected British Prime Minister, Edward Heath. He was positively delighted. Like his predecessor, Harold Wilson, Heath was resigned to the fact that many leaders looked on Commonwealth meetings as primarily an opportunity to beat the old colonial power over the head. If he was to be spared the job of hosting the event, so much the better. What’s more, he was preparing to implement a deeply unpopular policy, which threatened to split the Commonwealth down the middle. He was going to resume arms sales to the apartheid regime in South Africa. As a result, he had bad news for the Queen.
Knowing that his policy would create a poisonous atmosphere in Singapore, he formally advised her that she should not attend, explaining that she might be drawn into an embarrassing dispute. It was advice that she would always regret taking. It left her ‘deeply unhappy’, in the words of Heath’s biographer, John Campbell, particularly because of the Prime Minister’s ‘undisguised disrespect’ for the Commonwealth and many of its leaders. For a relatively new Prime Minister to tell the Queen, in her twentieth year as Head of the Commonwealth, that she was not to attend an important assembly of her beloved organisation must have been a challenge, even for someone as thick-skinned as Heath. What we do know is that the Queen was determined not to miss another one.
Heath’s decision to sell arms to South Africa led some countries to threaten an exit from the Commonwealth altogether. At the summit, there were heated exchanges about the evils of capitalism and Britain’s collusion with racist South Africa. Heath loathed the entire exercise. To compound his bad mood, there was one further embarrassment. Long before the summit, officials from the Singapore government of Lee Kuan Yew had travelled to Britain in the hope of acquiring a fleet of forty Daimlers to carry the leaders around town. A Commonwealth summit, they explained, should be using Commonwealth-built vehicles. Daimler, however, was unable to guarantee delivery within the fifteen-month deadline. Singapore turned to Germany as India had ahead of the 1961 tour. Mercedes promised to deliver in less than half that time. Heath refused all offers of an official Mercedes and insisted on riding in the British High Commissioner’s Rolls-Royce.
Yet compromise prevailed. In the end, the British government was persuaded to limit its arms sales to South Africa to a few naval helicopters. Of greater significance was a joint declaration signed by all the leaders, laying down a new set of shared principles regarding good governance and human rights. Not that some of the signatories would take much notice. In the very same week, one of these Commonwealth nations discovered it had a new leader. This was the occasion when President Obote of Uganda was deposed by Idi Amin.
Those who did make it to Singapore were all adamant that Heath had made a major mistake in excluding the Queen. His own Foreign Secretary, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, agreed. ‘He was really quite annoyed with Heath,’ says former Commonwealth Secretary-General Sonny Ramphal. If there was one thing that would have lifted the sour, bellicose mood, it was the Queen. ‘It was a disservice to her and the Commonwealth that Ted Heath advised her not to go,’ says Emeka Anyaoku, a future Secretary-General who, back then, was a rising star within the organisation. ‘I believe had the Queen been there, the atmosphere and the tone of the discussions would have been a lot more even-tempered.’
A senior member of the Royal Household says that the Queen has always regretted missing Singapore, because it would mean she could never claim a ‘100 per cent’ attendance record. As her former Private Secretary, Lord Charteris, told the royal biographer, Robert Lacey, ‘If she’s there, you see, they behave. It’s like Nanny being there. It also works because she knows them all and they like her.’
By keeping the Queen at home, Heath had not merely left her determined to attend the next CHOGM, but had also, unwittingly, opened up a secret back-channel between the Queen and the Commonwealth Secretariat, one that would surely have infuriated him if he had ever known. The Commonwealth archives contain a memo from a senior official reporting on a lunch with Philip Moore, the Queen’s deputy Private Secretary, in 1972. Moore had been complaining that the Queen’s red boxes contained ‘virtually nothing about the Commonwealth’. The official, Hunter Wade, agreed that the secretariat would begin sending papers ‘of particular interest’ to the Queen, adding that ‘the problems faced by Commonwealth countries in the wake of British entry into the EEC was a case in point’. In other words, the Head of the Commonwealth was about to be fed potentially hostile reports on Heath’s beloved European project behind his back.
Having detested Singapore, Heath informed Arnold Smith that another gathering would surely not be required until 1975 ‘at the earliest’. Smith was having none of it. The British government did not own the Commonwealth. The members would have a meeting in 1973, whether Heath liked it or not, and Smith had already drawn up plans for one in the Canadian capital, Ottawa. The monarch was definitely in favour of the idea. So an all-Canadian plot was hatched by the Canadian Commonwealth Secretary-General, involving the Canadian Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau, and the Queen of Canada herself. First, Smith asked Trudeau if he would be the host, and Trudeau readily agreed. Then, in his capacity as her Canadian Prime Minister, Trudeau invited the Queen to come. She was under no obligation to seek the permission of her British Prime Minister and gladly accepted, without talking to Edward Heath. The summit now had the Head of the Commonwealth on board, leaving Heath with little option but to put it in his diary. He was much more interested in steering Britain into the new European Common Market than in being dragged to another stormy meeting with the ex-imperial club. ‘The reluctant traveller was Edward Heath himself,’ wrote Smith. ‘Up to the last few days, he would not say whether he would come. It was the Queen’s firmness in showing that she at any rate would be in Canada that ended his sulky attitude. He could hardly stay away if she were there. So he came.’
This time the Queen’s presence would, indeed, have a conciliatory, calming effect on everyone. Despite some robust arguments about Rhodesia, nuclear weapons and Marxism, Heath had a much more congenial trip. He even agreed to sign up for another CHOGM two years later, although by then he would have been ejected from Downing Street in favour of Labour’s Harold Wilson – but not before meddling with the Queen’s travel plans, once more.
When Heath called an election for the end of February 1974, the Queen was already undertaking a major tour of her Pacific realms. It meant that she had to abandon her visit to Australia after just two days, without even wearing the new yellow chiffon ‘wattle’ dress that her designer, Ian Thomas, had created specially for the visit. This was certainly a far cry from the sort of treatment she had received from her earlier Conservative prime ministers. In 1959, Harold Macmillan had shelved the idea of a June election entirely, because he did not want to disrupt the Queen’s summer tour of Canada. Since she would need to be at home for the result, he deferred the election until October. Heath had much more pressing concerns on his m
ind in 1974 than the Queen’s travel arrangements. Britain was regularly being paralysed by strikes and industrial action. In forcing her early return from Australia, however, he further undermined the case for the Crown in a country that was already developing an appetite for republicanism. This was only a year after Britain’s entry into the EEC, at the expense of the old Commonwealth cousins, and a year before an Australian prime minister would be sacked by the Queen’s Governor-General. Thanks to Heath, the Queen’s default position had been made very clear: all realms are equal, but one is more equal than others.
The Commonwealth, meanwhile, was in robust form after that unexpectedly happy Canadian gathering. Pierre Trudeau had come up with a number of clever innovations in Ottawa, which would help create a very different sort of summit atmosphere, one that endures to this day. There would be no reading of pre-prepared texts, as at the United Nations. That immediately spared everyone hours of pointless tedium. He came up with the idea of a Commonwealth flag and, more importantly, the idea of the ‘retreat’. This was an informal break at a secluded location, where the leaders could relax without officials and any formal record-keeping. ‘It was a place where leaders could share things they would not discuss with their own wives,’ explains Patsy Robertson. ‘Trudeau played a historic role in defining the culture of the Commonwealth,’ says Kamalesh Sharma. These retreats could, in a matter of hours, reach conclusions that it might take years to extract from the UN. The leaders would emerge from the 1977 retreat at Gleneagles, for example, with the first concerted international plan to ostracise white South Africa from world sport. Some retreats were memorable for other reasons. Years later, at the 1989 CHOGM in Malaysia, the leaders ‘retreated’ to a spa resort at Langkawi, where the hosts introduced a karaoke session, to the horror of Mrs Thatcher. ‘Various leaders came up and gave excruciating performances of well-known tunes,’ Stuart Mole recalls. ‘Mrs Thatcher sat there, clutching her handbag and hating every moment of it. I don’t think she sang anything.’
After Trudeau’s success in 1973, the next CHOGM was scheduled for Jamaica in 1975. The Jamaican Prime Minister, Michael Manley, was keen to present himself as a world statesman, but was strangely fearful of the Queen. According to his friend, Sir Sonny Ramphal, Manley was worried that a royal visit would damage his left-wing credentials. ‘He was posturing as a Marxist,’ Sir Sonny said later. ‘Of course, she was a star. All his republicanism vanished.’ Manley would not be the first – or last – radical politician to mellow under the influence of a little royal stardust. At the Queen’s request, the 1977 meeting came to London to coincide with her Silver Jubilee celebrations. There were fears among some of the more radical Commonwealth leaders that holding that year’s summit alongside her Jubilee might lead to a latter-day London ‘durbar’, an ostentatious homage to the ex-colonial matriarch in the old imperial capital. ‘You have to remember that these guys were just out of their freedom struggle,’ explains Sonny Ramphal. ‘Their political intuition was focussed in that direction. But as they got to know the Queen, all that melted away.’
‘HEATHEN’ RITES
During those acutely sensitive early gatherings of her Commonwealth, the Queen rapidly realised that it was her role to keep the peace – discreetly but firmly. She made a series of subtle but important gestures, which, when viewed from a distance, make her views on the need to ‘de-imperialise’ the Commonwealth brand abundantly clear. In 1966, she approved a suggestion to rename Empire Day as Commonwealth Day and, just for good measure, she shifted the date from Queen Victoria’s birthday to her own official birthday (the date would later move to March). At the same time the Queen also gave a very clear indication of the sort of Commonwealth that she favoured. It would embroil her in a controversy from which she made no attempt to extricate herself. It was also in 1966 that a London vicar, Austen Williams of St Martin-in-the-Fields, together with the Royal Commonwealth Society (RCS)† organised a multi-faith service for the eve of Commonwealth Day. They planned to include all the main religions and an invitation was issued to the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, who readily accepted. The presence of the Supreme Governor of the Church of England herself, however, was not enough to avert furious complaints afterwards. Some traditionalists objected to ‘heathen’ rites being observed in an Anglican church. The Bishop of London, supported by the secretary to the Archbishop of Canterbury, warned that such an overtly non-Christian event, particularly one calling itself a ‘service’, should not be permitted in a Christian church again.
Chastened by such senior clergy, the organisers backed down from holding another multi-faith church service. The Queen was plainly unhappy. In 1968 the organisers arranged something called an ‘act of witness’ in the secular setting of the Guildhall in the City of London. Though the Queen attended once again, to show her support for the idea, she disliked the compromise. ‘The message came through that she would not come to it if it continued to be held in a secular location. She felt it was a faith occasion and should be organised like one,’ says Stuart Mole, a former director-general of the RCS. It was the Queen who came up with a solution, too. Westminster Abbey, like St George’s Chapel, Windsor, comes under the direct authority of the monarch rather than any bishop. As such, it is known as a ‘royal peculiar’. As Mole recalls: ‘The Queen said: “You can use my royal peculiar to do this and then you don’t need the Church of England. You don’t need bishops on your back”. So they did.’
As a result, in 1972 the event was remodelled at Westminster Abbey under a new title. It was not a ‘service’ but an ‘observance’. The Queen was delighted to attend, and much enjoyed tea with Arnold Smith at Marlborough House afterwards. ‘She and the Duke of Edinburgh were extremely pleased that it was possible this year to hold the Commonwealth Day Observance at Westminster Abbey,’ her assistant Private Secretary, Bill Heseltine, wrote to Smith, ‘and the Queen felt the tea party made a most apt and pleasant sequel’. Both the Abbey service and the party would become immovable fixtures in the royal diary for decades to come.
The observance has since been rebranded once again and is now a ‘celebration’. Yet the event remains as quirkily omnispiritual as ever and now frequently enjoys live television coverage on the BBC. Come Commonwealth Day 2018, for example, it featured a dozen faiths, a conch-blower, a Maori choir, a band of Ghanaian drummers, pop star Liam Payne and a prayer from a Sunni Muslim cleric: ‘O magnificent Creator, enable us to respect and celebrate the diversity you have created.’ The sermon came not from a clergyman but from Andrew Bastawrous, a young British eye doctor who left home to set up 100 eye clinics in Kenya and is now at the forefront of the royal campaign against blindness in the Commonwealth. The Queen listened attentively, but she knew the story already. A few weeks before, she had invited him to a private audience at the Palace.
The Queen sees no conflict between her role as Head of the Commonwealth and that of Supreme Governor of the Church of England. Indeed, she regards them as complementary. She is the first to acknowledge that the Commonwealth comprises all faiths and none, and that most of its citizens do not happen to share her own (there are more Muslims and Hindus than Christians among the 2.4 billion citizens of the fifty-three member states). She regards it as her duty to defend the religious freedoms of all of them. Stuart Mole recalls an illuminating conversation with her when she came to visit the Royal Commonwealth Society shortly after a church service to mark her 2002 Golden Jubilee. ‘As I was escorting her, she stopped me as we were walking along and said to me: “I need to tell you something”. I thought: “Oh my God, she’s about to tell me I’ve got brown shoes on or something”. And she said: “Do you know, at that service, there was no Hindu representative. Wasn’t that bad?” There had been a multi-faith attendance and they’d missed out the Hindus for whatever reason. I was very interested that she should have said that. Obviously that was a point of connection between her and the Commonwealth.’
One of the Prince of Wales’s most famous quotes is his 1994 remark that, a
s King, he intends to be a ‘defender of faith’ rather than Defender of the Faith – the monarch’s subsidiary title since 1521. The Prince’s words made banner headlines at the time and were interpreted by some senior Anglican clergy as bordering on the rebellious. In fact he was merely endorsing the status quo, for the Queen has been doing precisely the same all through her reign. She even said so in 2012, at a Lambeth Palace reception marking her Diamond Jubilee. It was just entirely overlooked at the time. ‘The concept of our established Church is occasionally misunderstood and commonly under-appreciated. Its role is not to defend Anglicanism to the exclusion of other religions,’ she told a room full of clergy from all the main religions. ‘Instead, the Church has a duty to protect the free practice of all faiths in this country. Gently and assuredly, the Church of England has created an environment for other faith communities and indeed people of no faith to live freely.’ She could very well have been summing up her own philosophy towards both her Church and her Commonwealth. She had no demands for action, no finger-wagging lectures on human rights but, rather, ‘a duty to protect . . . gently and assuredly’.
It is the Commonwealth that has been the main driver of Britain’s evolution from a monocultural to a multicultural society, a challenging process for any nation. As one faith leader after another has attested, however, the Queen has played a major part in smoothing that process. Whatever their religion, they have found it very reassuring to have a head of state who is entirely comfortable putting faith at the heart of national life. ‘The fact that she is head of a diverse, worldwide association means that she’s never felt any instinct to panic about multi-culturalism,’ the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has explained. ‘That’s part of the message her Christmas broadcasts have given almost subliminally over the years.’ The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, puts it down to confidence. ‘Because she’s so secure in her faith as a believer in Christ, it actually gives her room to reach to anybody,’ he says, pointing to her Christmas broadcasts. ‘There is no way you hear them without her ever talking about the way of Christ.’
Queen of the World: Elizabeth II: Sovereign and Stateswoman Page 19