The electorate would eject Keating before he could hold his referendum. His (monarchist) successor, John Howard, accepted that the issue could not now be set aside. He organised a constitutional convention in 1998 to devise an alternative to the Crown, which could then be put to the people. For the most part it would be a debate about process, not personalities, though the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997 had, inevitably, coloured some attitudes towards the House of Windsor. The 55:45 result in favour of the status quo was certainly a surprise to most republicans, who were convinced that the nadir in royal fortunes would be enough to get them over the twin thresholds required: not merely an overall majority, but overall majorities in a majority of the six states.
At Buckingham Palace, less than two months short of the new millennium, there were no great celebrations. Some courtiers – and, it is said by some, the Duke of Edinburgh – were incredulous and less than thrilled. The inevitable had not been avoided, merely deferred. Others voiced a quiet contentment that the concept of constitutional monarchy still held firm in a progressive, modern democracy. Yet it had been a grim experience for an institution that is supposed to stand above political debate to be in the thick of it.
An ex-member of the royal team at the time says that they had explored and ‘road-tested’ every scenario. ‘There was a fear of a run on the Crown. We expected the outcome would be OK, given the threshold, but the risk was that it would trigger something in a country like New Zealand where the result just needs to be fifty per cent plus one. So there was a concern about the domino effect. We did examine all options, including the thought that it might be better to say “let’s go before we’re pushed”; it was only speculative.’
One thing was not speculative, however. We now learn from a very senior Palace official that the Queen did come to one firm conclusion ahead of the Australian vote. In the event of this or any other realm opting to become a republic, it would then have to get on with it. ‘It could not be tied to the death of the Queen,’ says the source. ‘That would be untenable for the Prince of Wales, untenable for the Queen and untenable for the country itself because, obviously, they’d be looking at their watches waiting for her to pass away. So if any realm was going to walk away from its sovereign relationship, the Palace view was: “You’ve got to name a date because we can’t have this lingering ‘deathwatch’.” ’
Because of the republican rumblings and the 1999 referendum, the Queen had not set foot in Australia for eight years. In 2000, it was time to return. As soon as the referendum had been announced, it was agreed that she would visit shortly afterwards, regardless of the result. Some Palace veterans regard this as one of the most challenging and sensitive tours of her reign – and one of her most underrated achievements.
Both the Palace and the Australian government were keen to avoid any suggestion of triumphalism. Her arrival at a Canberra air base took place at night with no guard of honour, no public access, no bouquet and not even a red carpet. The greeting party of four consisted of the Prime Minister and the Governor-General, plus their wives.
Predicting that a broadly republican-minded media would seek to compare the crowds with those that had greeted her first visit, John Howard had gone out of his way to play down expectations. He made a point of telling the media not to expect big crowds. ‘Nobody should imagine that it will be anything like it was in 1954,’ he told reporters. ‘The world has moved on. It’s very different.’
It was not that different, however, as around 10,000 people gathered to cheer the Queen as she arrived at Sydney Opera House. The main themes of the visit, according to the Palace, were unity and multiculturalism. In her main speech of the tour, the Queen struck a note of humility that won applause from both royalist and republican commentators. There was no skirting around the vote on the Crown or, as she called it, ‘the proposal to amend the constitution’. She had followed it ‘with the closest interest’ and it had not made a jot of difference to her ‘lasting respect and deep affection’ for the place. ‘I shall continue faithfully to serve as Queen of Australia under the Constitution to the very best of my ability, as I have tried to do for the past forty-eight years,’ she told guests at a state lunch in the Sydney Convention Centre. ‘That is my duty. It is also my privilege and pleasure.’
She had been heading for this ‘rugged, honest, creative land’ when her father died in 1952. ‘I have shared the joys and the sorrows, the challenges and the changes that have shaped this country’s history over these past fifty years,’ she added. Some were in tears at the end. The following day, several prominent republicans, including former Olympic gold medallist Dawn Fraser, said that they would still like the Queen to open the Olympics later in the year. It had already been decided, however, that this duty should fall to an Australian and that the Queen’s representative, the Governor-General, Sir William Deane, would have the honour. The Queen, however, would formally open the new Olympic stadium during her visit. In one of the oddest and saddest moments of the tour, she did so watched by no one at all, bar a handful of construction workers, a few reporters and the Governor-General. All 110,000 seats remained empty, for ‘security reasons’. Elsewhere, though, the crowds continued to defy expectations. When the Queen ventured to the remote town of Bourke, ‘gateway to the Outback’, she met a delirious contingent from the even more remote town of Coolabah, 80 miles further on. Coolabah had the distinction of recording the highest vote for the monarchy in the whole of Australia. Of its fifty voters, forty-six had supported the Crown. So all forty-six had chartered a bus to see the Queen in Bourke, leaving the four republicans to keep an eye on Coolabah.
Two years later, the Queen was back again to mark her Golden Jubilee, and republicanism was firmly off the agenda. By the time she returned for her sixteenth visit in 2011, to attend the Commonwealth summit in Perth, the conversation had moved on from removing the Crown to securing its future. The impetus was coming from the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, who was keen to amend the rules on royal succession before they could blow up into a political issue. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge had been married six months earlier and it was reasonable to assume the couple would soon want children. Under existing rules, any firstborn girl would be superseded by any subsequent younger brother. David Cameron wanted to head off all charges of twenty-first-century institutional sexism before they might arise. So he asked the leaders of all the other fifteen realms to attend a mini-summit in Perth. ‘I initiated it – and the Crown was fully supportive,’ he says. ‘The thinking was that we had better get on with it, better to have the thing sorted out.’ While they were at it, this prime ministerial gathering could also discuss two other pieces of ancient and oppressive legislation. In addition to the law excluding Roman Catholics from the line of succession, Cameron wanted to overturn the law ordering all lineal descendants of George II to seek the sovereign’s permission before marrying.
Over the years, many British MPs and peers had argued for changing these laws of succession, but had been rebuffed by successive governments citing the same arguments: ‘too complicated’, ‘a Pandora’s Box’, ‘impossible to get all the realms to agree’, ‘waste of parliamentary time’, and so on. Given all the issues facing the world, some would argue that it was absurd for sixteen modern democracies to spend even one minute discussing the dynastic arrangements of one family.
Cameron could see its symbolic importance, however. So he and his Foreign Secretary, William Hague, were pleasantly surprised at the enthusiasm with which the other fifteen prime ministers – including Australia’s republican premier, Julia Gillard – approached the subject. Lord Hague says that, until he saw all the realms sitting down at the table together, he had never fully appreciated the extent of the Queen’s authority. ‘They all liked having this role,’ he says. ‘They liked the fact that a little parliament in somewhere like Tuvalu was going to have a veto on the future of the British monarchy. And even though someone like Julia Gillard might have been on the other side
of the argument, she took it very seriously.’
Tom Fletcher, foreign policy adviser at Number Ten Downing Street, remembers the quietly pivotal role of the Queen’s Private Secretary, Sir Christopher Geidt, as he calmly guided sixteen prime ministers through the constitutional elephant-grass. ‘It was handled very closely by the Palace,’ says Fletcher. ‘It was very interesting because they wouldn’t normally lean in on policy issues.’
Hague still marvels at the speed of the outcome. ‘In the space of forty-five minutes, they had all agreed the principles for equal succession,’ he says. All their efforts would be rendered largely redundant on 22nd July 2013, when two footmen walked across the gravel at Buckingham Palace to place the traditional announcement before the railings: it was a boy. None the less, the sixteen realms had all rather enjoyed their modest part in the latest chapter of a thousand-year-old story.
By now Australian support for a presidential model had dwindled to around one-third and the once-mighty Australian Republic Movement was down to a single, part-time employee. In New Zealand, as younger royal visitors continued to come and go, the issue was dormant, if not comatose. Any campaign to replace the monarch with a president would always be easier in New Zealand, given that it is a unitary state rather than a federation. Yet republican-leaning prime ministers had been and gone without seeking to put the issue to the test. One of them had been Jim Bolger, the Queen’s host at the 1995 Commonwealth summit in Auckland.
It is a general rule that when the Queen travels to one of the old dominions, they foot the bill. In 1995, as the Queen prepared to head for New Zealand, Bolger’s government suggested that she might like to fly on a scheduled flight. Officials at the Foreign Office in London tried to scupper the idea, arguing that the Queen does not take scheduled flights, ‘for security reasons’. However, as the Queen’s staff at the Palace had to remind the British government, all things relating to a tour of New Zealand were a matter for her New Zealand government. On 30th October 1995, she duly boarded Air New Zealand Flight NZ1 for the long journey from London to Auckland via Los Angeles. The Queen had First Class to herself (Prince Philip was flying in separately from South Africa), undisturbed by the duty-free trolley, and watched a Sam Neill film called Cinema of Unease. The Business Class cabin was occupied by twenty-six members of the Royal Household, and 384 ordinary passengers filled economy, safe in the knowledge that their flight was not going to be delayed. Each received a commemorative pen.
Though that visit would see another small Maori protest, it also marked a change in Maori attitudes towards the monarchy. The old days of bottom-baring would give way to respect when the Queen, dressed in her kiwi-feather coat, acted once again as ceremonial guarantor of Maori rights. She signed an Act granting historic compensation of nearly 40,000 acres of land and £26 million to a federation of Maori tribes in the North Island. She did so on the advice of her government, of course, but giving her Royal Assent to it in public, in front of a deputation of Maori elders, was a reminder that their forebears had done a deal with Queen Victoria in 1840, not with the government of a nation that did not exist at the time. Since then, many Maori have come to view the Crown as an ally in the quest for justice, rather than as a symbol of oppression.
‘If the Government in Wellington ever decided to set up a republic, we would want our own sovereign state,’ said Rick Rakihia Tau, chief of the Ngai Tahu tribe, during the Queen’s Golden Jubilee tour in 2002. ‘We signed a treaty with the Crown in 1840, not with the white settlers.’ By then, New Zealand had another republican in charge, Labour’s Helen Clark, who received what Palace officials sometimes refer to as ‘the look’ when she arrived at the Queen’s state banquet in a trouser suit. Nothing was said, however. Indeed, many Palace staff speak very highly of Clark, who would later stand (unsuccessfully) to be Secretary-General of the United Nations.
Come the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in 2012, the Queen’s future in both her Australasian realms seemed settled for the foreseeable future. Republicanism was neither a burning issue nor a taboo subject, and that is how it would remain – something deemed inevitable at some point, but just not now. The 2018 wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, just weeks after the birth of Prince Louis, third child of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, would certainly not bring that day any closer.
The British government has sought to re-engage with the region, too, and is poised to do so again once the UK has settled on a post-Brexit direction. ‘When we were elected in 2010, we thought there were various things we could do overseas that were worthwhile and one was to pivot to Australasia,’ says former Prime Minister David Cameron. ‘The Foreign Secretary hadn’t been to Australia for seventeen years and obviously there is a great relationship with the Crown there.’ Britain’s lack of interest in the region had not gone unnoticed. Alex Downer, former High Commissioner for Australia, points out that it was the Queen, rather than the British Foreign Office, who kept that relationship strong and secure during the years of neglect. ‘I don’t think there’s a country in the world – not even New Zealand – where Australians feel more loved than Britain,’ he explains. ‘In all those years when the British Foreign Secretary never came to Australia, it didn’t really matter so much because the Queen came.’
Over the subsequent years the republican pendulum would swing in both directions in Canberra and Wellington. The former Prime Minister of New Zealand, Sir John Key, whose centre-right administration broadly overlapped with that of David Cameron, cannot now envisage a republic in his own lifetime. ‘There was a time, to be blunt, when the monarchy was under a lot more pressure. I used to think it [a republic] was inevitable,’ says Sir John, a staunch monarchist. Even with a change of reign, he believes that there would be ‘no appetite’.
As Britain seeks new trade deals post-Brexit, Sir John says that he senses no residual bitterness towards the way Britain turned its back on its old allies, on the way into Europe. ‘In 1984, New Zealand went bankrupt. Did Britain have an impact? Absolutely. But the truth is that if we’d started to do some modern economic thinking, we could have taken control of the situation. People have moved on and think Britain is a market we want to be in.’ Like Australia’s Alex Downer, he puts it down to the Queen.
By the time of the 2018 Commonwealth summit, a committed republican was at the helm in Australia. Malcolm Turnbull had been the leader of the campaign to remove the Crown back in 1999. His belief in the need for an Australian-born head of state remains undimmed. Yet he is entirely happy having a royal Head of the Commonwealth, and robustly endorsed the Prince of Wales as the next head when the subject arose at the London summit. So, too, did the new, republican-minded Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern. Having travelled halfway around the world while seven months pregnant to attend her first Commonwealth gathering, Ardern enjoyed long private audiences with both the Prince of Wales and the Queen and was invited to make one of the toasts at the Queen’s banquet. The experience had merely reinforced her personal respect for the ‘hugely impressive’ monarch. ‘I have to say, I admire the stamina of Her Majesty because my feet are killing me and she’s been working all day,’ Ardern reflected as she left Buckingham Palace.
The arguments for and against the monarchy have not changed, but there has been an important shift in the tone of the debate. The awkwardness has gone, even when discussing the future of the Crown in royal company. As Malcolm Turnbull is among the first to admit, however, it is just not a pressing issue for the moment. ‘There needs to be very strong popular momentum,’ he has said. ‘There has to be a sense that the time is right. There are many more urgent issues confronting Australia than the desire for Australia to become a republic.’
The first approximation of a twenty-first-century vote on the subject would come in 2016, as New Zealand held a referendum on the adoption of a new flag. Voters could choose a new design – championed by the Prime Minister, John Key, his royalist credentials notwithstanding – that featured the silver fern, sacred emblem of
the revered All Blacks rugby team. Or they could stick with the existing flag, featuring the British Union flag in the top-left corner. ‘I wasn’t trying to dump the Union Jack. It was a branding exercise,’ says Sir John. ‘The Canadians have done it with the maple leaf. But some people feared a reduction in our ties with the UK and a republic.’ In the end, it boiled down to a simple choice: modernity versus Empire, Queen and tradition. Nearly 57 per cent of Kiwis voted for the latter.
CANADA
If the British connection coloured the Queen’s fortunes Down Under, it was the French connection that would play the most significant part in the royal story in her largest realm. Roughly one-fifth of Canada speaks French as a first language, a legacy of the days when a lot of the territory belonged to pre-revolutionary France. It would all become British in the eighteenth century and, 100 years later, would become a nation, with the confederation of three colonies under one name approved by Queen Victoria: Canada. It was the first self-governing dominion and the first to receive a visit from a reigning monarch, when King George VI and the Queen arrived in 1939. That trip went so well that, as Queen Mother, she would return to Canada more than to any other part of the Commonwealth. Her last visit, at the age of eighty-nine, would conclude, appropriately, with a day at the races. The crowds on that first visit were not just enormous – the turnout of half a million people in Windsor, Ontario was greater than Windsor, Berkshire had ever produced – but also very respectful. More than 20,000 people in Sudbury turned out to watch the Royal Train come through at 1 a.m., but did so in silence so as not to wake the King. To the relief of the royal party, the welcomes in French Canadian areas were every bit as enthusiastic as anywhere else.
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