REQUESTS AND REFUSALS
The Queen had been dropping some heavy hints of her own. In November, the Foreign Office received a letter from Heath’s Private Secretary, Robert Armstrong, following the weekly audience. The Queen had told the Prime Minister that she hoped her visit might take her beyond Paris and the industrial north, where she had been on her previous visits. In short, she wanted to see real France. She would dearly like to visit Bordeaux, the Loire Valley and, if possible, the lands of her forebear, William the Conqueror, in Normandy (or at least see the great Bayeux Tapestry). All this would be passed on to the Embassy in Paris. The Queen was not under any illusions about the true purpose of the visit, however. This was business, not pleasure, as a letter from her deputy Private Secretary, Martin Charteris, to the FCO illustrates. Despite her already excellent grasp of French, the Queen wanted to become even more fluent. She wished to embrace the new fashion for do-it-yourself learning and would like some Linguaphone teaching tapes. ‘Not just a lot of stuff about food and architecture,’ Charteris added firmly. The Queen, he explained, wanted to discuss the finer points of EEC membership with President Pompidou and needed ‘modern business phrases and economic language’. Time was of the essence, as the Queen was hoping to start brushing up on her business French during the upcoming state visit to Thailand and beyond. ‘I should like to ship these in HMY [the Royal Yacht] so she could listen to them during quiet periods of the South East Asia tour,’ Charteris explained, thereby raising a glorious image of Britannia sailing serenely through the South China Sea, with the Queen on the Verandah Deck, headphones on, talking to herself in French about European farm subsidies.
No sooner had the visit been announced than all manner of requests started pouring in to the British Embassy. Besides the usual heavy-handed reminders from people seeking invitations to royal receptions, there were plenty of business propositions, too. An executive from a French food manufacturer wondered if he might be permitted to put the Queen’s face on some commemorative yoghurt pots. The response from the Palace was firm. ‘There is, in this country, a standing rule that the Queen’s portrait may not appear on any packets, cartons, or containers and this specifically includes such refined packages as chocolate boxes,’ wrote R. F. Hill in the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, adding that ‘a genuine souvenir’ would be ‘quite acceptable.’
Much of the organisation had been left to Roger du Boulay, then Head of Chancery at the British Embassy in Paris. On him had fallen tasks great and small, not least organising the presentation of an honorary knighthood to President Pompidou. The Queen would be making him a Knight Grand Commander of the Order of the Bath. Although the Most Honourable Order of the Bath might be an illustrious and ancient order of chivalry, originating from medieval forms of purification, it did not translate well. ‘“L’Ordre du Bain” sounds very uncouth in French,’ he warned Bill Heseltine at the Palace. ‘Should we not stick to the English?’.
Du Boulay was also negotiating with the French about the royal itinerary. The Queen might have set her heart on Bordeaux, but the French had other ideas. It would mean her being introduced to some of M. Pompidou’s opponents. ‘The President does not want to invite the Queen to the Bordeaux area for political reasons,’ du Boulay told the Palace. However, both sides had agreed that southern France should be included, with Arles and Avignon on the schedule, along with a day-trip to the wilds of the Camargue for the Duke of Edinburgh. Whereupon a storm appeared that threatened to wreck the entire state visit. It had nothing to do with politics or economics, let alone the Common Market. It concerned Gallic amour propre.
At issue was the question of royal transport. The French were adamant that the Queen should travel across France in a French aeroplane. Buckingham Palace, however, was insistent that she should not. The issue for the Queen was not so much one of safety, but of precedent. The French might be proposing the presidential Caravelle and it might be a perfectly proper aircraft, but if the Queen accepted a flight from one president, then how could she turn down a flight from another without causing offence? As Martin Charteris explained in a letter to Sir Christopher Soames, the Palace had rejected all offers of flights from other hosts during recent visits. To fly in a French plane would deeply hurt the Turks, the Brazilians, the Chileans and the Thais, among others. As a result, the Palace was standing firm. The Captain of the Queen’s Flight was Air Commodore Archie Winskill, who had twice won the Distinguished Flying Cross for his gallantry. Yet he was not going to risk his sovereign in a French plane. The Queen would fly in a VC10 of the Royal Air Force, and Winskill had already ordered one. The French, it transpired, were not budging, either. It was their show, the Queen was their guest and she would fly in their plane. Caught in the middle, with weightier matters to attend to, Sir Christopher was clearly exasperated. He informed the Foreign Secretary that ‘it could be necessary to take it up with Pompidou himself’. The President was shortly due to meet Edward Heath at Chequers.
Cue panic at the Foreign Office as officials looked for urgent solutions. The British side tried a compromise: why not send the Queen by train? It turned out that this had been overruled by the French. Lees Mayall reported – intriguingly – that President Pompidou ‘has a strong personal dislike of trains and railway stations’.
Sir Alec Douglas-Home, in turn, raised the matter in a confidential memo to the Defence Secretary, Lord Carrington, and the Prime Minister himself. As well as not wanting to offend other countries, there was also the question of culpability. ‘An accident in a foreign aircraft would be blamed on us for permitting the flight but also, however unreasonably, on the foreign authorities.’ However, the wily Sir Alec believed that he might have found a possible way through the impasse. For the Palace had broken its own precedent once before, during a visit to North America. ‘I am advised that the Queen flew in an aircraft of the [United States] Presidential Flight,’ the Foreign Secretary noted. The Ministry of Defence had also done its homework, sending the British Defence Attaché in Paris to fly with the President’s personal pilot, a Lt-Col Dezier, who had already clocked up 970 hours on the Caravelle alone. When all this was presented to Edward Heath, his mind was made up. On 17th March, the Palace was informed that the Prime Minister would be formally advising the Queen to fly in M. Pompidou’s plane. Therefore, she could not refuse. The French and the Foreign Office had outwitted the Palace.
If there was relief at the British Embassy, there were still plenty of other matters to be resolved. With just two months to go before the visit, President Pompidou suddenly announced that France would hold a referendum on whether it wanted Britain to join the Common Market after all. Staff at the Foreign Office were astonished. It was certainly unorthodox, if not extremely rude, to vote on the reliability of a close ally just weeks before a state visit. But the President explained that if a ‘new Europe’ was to embrace the ‘oldest democracy in the world’, then the decision should be ‘ratified by every French man and woman.’ It was pure showmanship by M. Pompidou. Neither he nor anyone else had any doubt about the result. The latest French polls showed that 61 per cent of people believed Britain would be a ‘loyal partner’ in Europe, while just 5 per cent thought Britain would ‘torpedo the market’. In the event, M. Pompidou’s referendum duly endorsed Britain’s entry, but on such a poor turnout that the whole exercise backfired. The President had shown poor political judgement – and rather poor manners, too.
FAMILY BUSINESS
At the British Embassy, Sir Christopher Soames had something else to worry about. He had received a message from the Palace that the Queen wanted to set aside some time to visit her uncle, the exiled Duke of Windsor, at his home outside Paris. But she did ‘not wish anything to be said or done about it for the time being’. This was one aspect of the visit beyond the control of either government. Relations between the Palace and the former King Edward VIII were a matter of great delicacy for the Royal Family themselves. His abdication in 1936, in order to marry the American divorcee Wallis Simpson,
had created the gravest royal crisis of modern times. The Duke’s subsequent arguments with his younger brother, King George VI, over money, status and the King’s refusal to make the Duchess ‘Her Royal Highness’ had been neither forgotten nor forgiven by the Queen Mother. She still held the Duke responsible for the strains that, in her view, had led to the King’s early death at the age of fifty-six. The Queen, however, had always sought to keep relations correct, and maintained regular contact via Sir Christopher Soames. His son, Sir Nicholas Soames, MP, recalls the evening when he and his father accompanied the Prince of Wales on his first visit to the Duke’s house in the Bois de Boulogne in 1971. ‘It had to be arranged with the Foreign Office and the Queen had to give her permission. It was diplomatically very complicated for all sorts of reasons,’ he says. ‘But it was a quite extraordinary moment to see the two of them together – two Prince of Waleses. I’ll never forget it. It was rather touching. We all sat away from them and they had a great pow-wow.’
Prince Charles would record that ‘tragic’ and peculiar evening in his diary. He observed that the Duke was ‘in very good form’ as he lamented his strict upbringing and ‘talked about how difficult my family made it for him for the past thirty-three years’. The Duchess, meanwhile, ‘kept flitting to and fro like a strange bat . . . a hard woman – totally unsympathetic and somewhat superficial’.
The following year, as the Queen’s visit drew closer, the Duke’s health was declining rapidly and he was virtually confined to bed. This would almost certainly be the Queen’s last opportunity to see her uncle. President Pompidou, however, was terrified that the Duke might die before or during the state visit, and wanted assurances that this would not curtail the royal tour. Another urgent telegram was despatched from Soames to the Foreign Secretary, reporting the President’s concerns and making it clear that ‘cancellation would rankle’. There was little that anyone, except the Duke’s doctor, Dr Jean Thin, could do about it, however. So Soames called him. Warning of the grave threat to ‘the outcome of the Queen’s mission’, he dropped some heavy hints. As Thin would later recall to the biographer Michael Bloch: ‘The Ambassador came to the point and told me bluntly that it was alright for the Duke to die before or after the visit but that it would be politically disastrous if he were to expire in the course of it. Was there anything I could do to reassure him about the timing of the Duke’s end?’ The doctor, who by all accounts was somewhat appalled by this line of questioning, replied that there was not.
The episode not only illustrates the fragility of diplomatic nerves in the run-up to Britain’s entry into Europe, but is also eerily reminiscent of the death of the Duke’s father. On the night of 20th January 1936, George V’s doctor, Lord Dawson of Penn, gave the King a lethal dose of morphine and cocaine. It meant that his passing could be formally announced by The Times the following morning, and not by the less respectable evening newspapers later in the day. It must go down as the most extreme example of royal news management in history (when the details were finally revealed in 1986, one historian called it ‘murder’). Was the British government seriously suggesting that the Duke might care to perform one final service to his country? That might be going too far. However, the diligent Soames arranged for the doctor to give him a nightly bulletin throughout the visit.
PRICKLY PORTRAITS
In those final weeks, the Foreign Office began drawing up its briefing papers for the Queen. Whether they told her anything she did not know already, the confidential policy briefs sent to the Palace offer a very useful sense of British government thinking at the time. Looking back on the era of General de Gaulle, the FCO’s considered view was that his ‘grandiose vision showed itself to be an illusion’, but ‘its afterglow lingers on’. By contrast, de Gaulle’s successor was more of a realist. ‘President Pompidou’s eye is not focussed on the far horizon,’ continued the FCO summary, adding that the current occupant of the Elysée was notably more pro-British than his predecessor. ‘The Anglophobia which was so fashionable in French official circles is on the wane.’ There could be no complacency, though. Just four years earlier, anti-capitalist student riots had led to general strikes and such serious civil upheaval that President de Gaulle had briefly fled the country, fearing revolution. The FCO paper – approved by Sir Christopher himself – became positively poetic: ‘The danger remains of an explosion like that of 1968. Frenchmen glance apprehensively over their shoulders from time to time, especially in May when ghosts walk.’
Even more colourful were the confidential FCO pen portraits of the main players on the French side. Had some of them leaked out ahead of the visit, the Queen might never have made it across the Channel while Britain’s application to join the Common Market could have been torn to shreds there and then. The Foreign Office did not hold back. The French Prime Minister, Jacques Chaban-Delmas, received a vitriolic review: ‘His charm and panache (cultivated almost as a fetish) are offset by his vanity and touchiness in the face of criticism. Age and hard work are combining to diminish his notoriety as a womaniser but he still has a keenly roving eye. He was divorced from his first wife. His second was killed in a car accident. Nothing daunted, he is expected to remarry the lady with whom he is currently in love, the wife of an elderly doctor.’
Even Maurice Schumann, France’s Anglophile Foreign Minister and a good friend of Edward Heath, was not spared. The FCO briefing of the time noted that he had been ‘deeply marked’ by his wartime experience in London alongside General de Gaulle. ‘His belief that Europe is incomplete without Britain dates from this time.’ However, he suffered from a ‘reputation for political weakness and time-serving . . . He likes to be liked and it is easier to like him than respect him.’ Madame Schumann, it added, was ‘attractively quiet and unassuming but has a lively intelligence and is a pleasant companion’.
There was a double-edged compliment for Roger Frey, Minister of Administrative Reform. While he might be ‘too carefully dressed and presented’, he also had a certain James Bond quality: ‘There is something about the softness of his manner and the cold blue of his eyes which inevitably recalls the more sinister visions of the Ian Fleming novels. He does not inspire trust.’
Of the French Cabinet line-up, however, one stood above all the rest – Finance Minister Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. Known as ‘the cactus’, his ‘cold and calculating character’ and ‘large measure of social arrogance’ had made him ‘insensitive to other people’. The report continued: ‘He is capable, as his career well shows, of serious errors of political judgement, in particular of timing. With these handicaps it is remarkable that he now occupies one of the key positions in French politics. This is almost entirely due to his combination of quick intelligence, energy and practical ability.’ In terms of Giscard’s clear ambitions for the presidency, it seemed that he had little competition. ‘On the intellectual level, he has no peers and few rivals,’ the authors noted, praising his capacity to deliver the most complex budget speech without notes. The FCO summary concluded icily: ‘Married to a rich and pretty wife to whom he is not always very kind’. Four years later, Giscard and his wife, Anne-Amoyne, would be guests of the Queen, making a state visit of their own to Buckingham Palace.
But what of the Queen’s hosts on this occasion? The Foreign Office papers reveal an equally clinical analysis of the French President and his wife. ‘M. Pompidou’s father was the son of a peasant who became a village schoolmaster,’ began a profile dripping with old-style FCO snobbery. ‘He mixes the cunning and mistrust of the Auvergnat countryman with the suavity of the Rothschild director.’ Of his wife, Claude, apparently happier in the company of contemporary artists than politicians or when restoring old farmhouses, the document noted that her life had been plagued by ‘gossip and innuendo’. ‘Mme Pompidou is shy with somewhat bohemian tastes,’ it went on. ‘In recent years, her life has diverged from that of her husband. She has loyally supported him in his new role, living perhaps not very happily in the confines of a gilded cage.’
If her Parisian debut back in 1948 had been in sweltering heat, the Queen was almost underdressed as she arrived in the French capital at noon on 15th May 1972. Chilly intermittent rain made her grateful for the brown belted coat over her sleeveless brown-and-white Hardy Amies dress. The public lining the streets to see her pass by in her state limousine – a Citroën-Maserati hybrid – would not get a decent look until the convoy reached Les Invalides, whereupon the rain had eased enough for the roof to be pulled back. The crowds were neither as large nor as chaotic as those that had greeted her on her previous visits. That was of little concern to commentators like Charles Hargrove of The Times. This state visit would not only be a ‘historic milestone’ for President Pompidou, but would also ‘swing the British people firmly behind the new Europe and jog them out of their concern for the price of butter’. As far as The Times was concerned, it made the Queen’s 1957 state visit almost incidental, even if the crowds had been larger. ‘The context is quite different,’ declared The Times, ‘and the significance immeasurably greater.’ Most of the press, British and French, echoed the sense that this state visit was history in the making, rather than a mere exercise in elegant bilateral back-scratching.
The British Embassy in the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré had seldom, if ever, looked more regal. Following his victory at Waterloo in 1815, the Duke of Wellington had actually turned down what would become the Elysée Palace in favour of this stupendously grand residence, for use as his Paris headquarters. To this day, it still contains a throne room – complete with throne.
Queen of the World: Elizabeth II: Sovereign and Stateswoman Page 36