Like the rest of the world, Britain refused to recognise Rhodesia’s new rebel administration and helped impose international sanctions. Yet Ian Smith’s whites-only regime in Rhodesia could still depend on the support of the whites-only regime in neighbouring South Africa. It also managed to circumvent most sanctions. By the mid-Seventies, however, two black nationalist guerrilla movements were operational in the Rhodesian countryside. One was led by the Marxist ex-school-teacher Robert Mugabe, from his base over the border in communist Mozambique. Newly independent from Portugal after a bloody struggle, Mozambique became the only country in the world to incorporate the Kalashnikov AK-47 rifle in its national flag. The other guerrilla army was led by former trade unionist Joshua Nkomo, from his base in Lusaka in neighbouring Zambia. Whereas Mugabe was largely supplied by China, Nkomo enjoyed military support from the Soviet Union.
Rhodesia’s ‘bush war’ would last for years, with massacres and executions on both sides. It was both a vicious interracial war and a proxy version of the Cold War. Those white ‘settlers’ – who had rallied to Britain’s side in two world wars – still enjoyed support and sympathy from relatives abroad, from the Conservative benches at Westminster and throughout the ‘old’ Commonwealth. That sympathy would grow with each new report of missionaries or white families being raped and murdered in their homes. The black ‘freedom-fighters’, on the other hand, were avenging years of colonial oppression and capitalist exploitation – heroes to socialists everywhere, and to the worldwide movement of non-aligned states. If apartheid was ever to be dismantled in South Africa, then white Rhodesia would have to be toppled first. As the war intensified, the USA attempted to help broker a peace deal, without success. It was now an issue that threatened to split the Commonwealth on both ideological and racial lines: majority black communists versus minority white capitalists. And as the Commonwealth approached its next summit, the time had come to resolve it.
This was the backdrop to a meeting that, decades later, many people still regard as the Queen’s finest hour. But why on earth did it have to be held on the edge of a war zone?
It has long been part of British – and Commonwealth – political folklore that it was Margaret Thatcher who endeavoured to scupper the 1979 Lusaka summit, using security fears as an excuse to undermine the unity of the organisation. Given all the battles that she would have with the Commonwealth over southern Africa during her years in office, it is a convenient narrative. But in fact those same fears were already causing deep concern at the highest level, long before she first planted that famous handbag on the desk at Number Ten.
It was not renegade white Rhodesian forces the Foreign Office was worried about so much as poorly trained, undisciplined guerrilla movements. With every fresh atrocity in the bush war came renewed appeals to keep the Queen away. In October 1978, Jim Callaghan received a letter from the Conservative MP Ian Lloyd, reminding the Prime Minister of the fate of passengers on Air Rhodesia Flight 825, just weeks earlier. ‘Terrorists who consider it legitimate to butcher the survivors of an air disaster, missionaries and countless thousands of their own people could not be expected to have many inhibitions about their targets, particularly if they happen to be Europeans,’ wrote Lloyd, before circulating his letter to the press. Downing Street received many similar letters.
There were more practical worries, too. In the same month the British High Commissioner, Len Allinson, sent a telegram to London warning about standards of hospitality. ‘Violent crime is rampant and the problem of ensuring security will be exacerbated by scattered accommodation,’ he wrote. ‘A German colleague has given us a horrific account of the official visit of the German Chancellor last July.’ While the German entourage lost most of their luggage, the recent visit by the British Minister of Overseas Development, Judith Hart, had not been without incident. ‘We even had to chivvy the hotel to make Mrs Hart’s bed!’ Allinson reported.
A month later, he had much more alarming news to report. The new Commonwealth Secretary-General, Sonny Ramphal, had just been to inspect Lusaka and had given Allinson a very frank appraisal. ‘Ramphal told me that, in his view, Zambia was on the verge of collapse. Even the smallest things were not working. He believes Kaunda to be worried about the possibility of an Army coup.’
By January 1979, a note of gentle panic was starting to permeate Foreign Office correspondence. Roger Barltrop, head of the Foreign Office’s Commonwealth Coordination department, wrote to his colleagues asking what advice they should be giving the Foreign Secretary to pass on to the Queen. Balancing the deteriorating security situation with a desire not to alienate African members of the Commonwealth, Barltrop’s considered view was that ‘the right decision would appear to be to advise the Queen to accept President Kaunda’s invitation, at the same time informing her that her Ministers would keep the security situation under constant review’. He continued: ‘The Zambians have made it clear that they expect the Queen to be present; and they and other Africans might well take it as a slight if she did not attend the first regular CHOGM to be held in Africa.’ To compound the problem, the Queen was not simply planning to visit Zambia. There were three other important African nations – all former British colonies – on her itinerary, too. They would all be furious if the British government spoiled their big moment.
Barltrop also reminded his colleagues about the damage caused by the Queen’s no-show when the Commonwealth had met in Singapore in 1971. ‘Non-attendance at Lusaka,’ he wrote, ‘could affect invitations to future Commonwealth Heads of Government Meetings in some countries, especially republics.’ No one needed to be reminded what the Queen would think about that. On top of that was the possibility that some of her other prime ministers might offer conflicting advice on the subject. ‘It would seem best not to stimulate the governments of the Queen’s other Realms on this point,’ Barltrop warned. But one of those other realms was getting ready to cause trouble.
DIVISIONS
Britain was a matter of weeks away from a political milestone: the election of its first female Prime Minister. For now, however, Margaret Thatcher was still in opposition and Jim Callaghan, successor to Harold Wilson, was in Downing Street. His young and energetic Foreign Secretary, David Owen, planned to use the Lusaka summit to engineer a Rhodesian peace deal and had discussed his plans in some detail with the Queen. To this day, he remains in no doubt about her determination to attend. Indeed, he goes so far as to say that the Queen was looking forward to seeing the Rhodesian problem resolved once and for all, as was he. ‘That was going to be a very important conference and we had engineered it,’ he says. ‘She knew what I wanted to do. She understood.’
Owen had devoted a great deal of effort to brokering a deal between the warring factions in Rhodesia. He had travelled around Africa, meeting white Rhodesia’s Ian Smith – ‘a difficult bastard’ – and many of the key African leaders. He had watched one attempted peace conference, involving all the main players in Geneva in 1976, collapse in bitter disagreement. Owen hoped to organise another one in London in 1978, but had been warned by his ablest advisers on the subject that it was too soon; that the Rhodesians would play for time, in the hope of a Conservative victory in the forthcoming British election. With a heavy heart he concluded: ‘No more Genevas.’ So he had deferred the idea of fresh negotiations until after the 1979 election. Rhodesia would soon be holding an election itself and, this time, the black majority would be allowed a vote of sorts. Given that the white minority would still retain control of all key state apparatus, including the judiciary, the leaders of the black liberation movements called for a boycott. Most of the world denounced the election as a sham. But white Rhodesians still hoped that if Mrs Thatcher was elected in Britain, she might be more sympathetic to their cause. Knowing that he could achieve nothing until after the election, David Owen could merely pin his hopes on a Labour win. In the meantime, he accompanied the Queen to the Persian Gulf for the start of her first major tour of the Middle East. During quiet moments ab
oard the Royal Yacht, he talked her through his Rhodesia strategy. ‘In February 1979, when we were in Kuwait and Saudi, I really filled her in,’ he recalls. ‘I told her: “Everything was geared to the Commonwealth meeting. There’ll be an election by then, and obviously we think we’ll win it. That’s the time when we’ve got to get Zambia and Kenneth Kaunda to step up to the plate”. She was fascinated by it.’
As for her personal relations with the summit host, Kenneth Kaunda, and the other black African leaders, Owen is clear: ‘There’s no question. They were very good, very warm.’
If David Owen still had high hopes for the summit, some of Whitehall’s most important figures were becoming seriously concerned. Over the years, historians and commentators have asserted that there were no serious threats to the Queen’s safety. In fact there were. Government papers, newly released under Freedom of Information legislation, reflect the level of genuine concern. On 19th March, the Cabinet Secretary, Sir John Hunt, wrote to the head of the Foreign Office, Sir Michael Palliser, with serious worries. Sir John began by quoting the latest Joint Intelligence Committee Report, which warned: ‘In Zambia, the concentration of air-defence equipment at Lusaka International Airport and the proximity of trigger-happy ZAPU [Nkomo’s guerrilla force] personnel whom the Zambian authorities are unable to control will continue to make the use of the airport hazardous. There is a considerable risk of further mistaken attacks on civil (or Zambian military) aircraft.’ Sir John continued: ‘If this assessment is accepted, it looks as though we may have to give rather careful thought to The Queen going to Lusaka. I know you are keeping it under review but wondered if you could tell me when you expect it to have to come to the crunch.’
Most white Rhodesians did not want the Lusaka summit to happen, knowing that it would only result in greater Commonwealth pressure to end white rule. They also had considerable support in New Zealand, where many had family connections. The Prime Minister of New Zealand, Robert Muldoon, had recently alienated many black African leaders with sympathetic remarks towards both Rhodesia and South Africa. Memories were still fresh of the 1976 Montreal Olympics, where twenty-five African countries had announced a last-minute boycott in response to a South African tour by the New Zealand rugby team, the All Blacks. Muldoon was already voicing public fears about the safety of the monarch in Zambia. After all, she was Queen of New Zealand, too. ‘He will almost certainly raise the subject with the UK Government,’ Britain’s High Commissioner to New Zealand warned his bosses on 6th April. Other prime ministers were starting to worry about their own safety. According to the Foreign Office, Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew was beginning to wobble. He had just asked the British High Commissioner for a frank security assessment, purporting to be concerned about the possible assassination of Muldoon.
‘He asked whether the Zambians really thought they could prevent an attack on Mr Muldoon,’ the High Commissioner, John Hennings, told Sir Anthony Duff. ‘What were we doing? Were we offering Zambia an SAS regiment?’ Hennings added: ‘Lee has a high concern for his own security.’ Like a growing number of other people, both Muldoon and Lee Kuan Yew wanted the Commonwealth summit moved to the relative safety of the Kenyan capital, Nairobi.
Things were getting worse. On 12th April, the Foreign Office’s Central Africa department received an urgent call from the Ministry of Defence. A crew from the Queen’s Flight were about to undertake a ‘proving’ flight – a trial run – to Lusaka. The Ministry of Defence official, a Mr Perry, insisted that the flight should be cancelled. He warned that there was ‘a serious risk of the aircraft, which is conspicuous in colour and markings, being shot down’. By now, however, the Ministry of Defence’s increasingly alarmist talk was starting to annoy Foreign Office officials like Assistant Under-Secretary Derek Day. A former Olympic hockey player, who had recently served as Ambassador to Ethiopia, Day knew Africa well and sensed that the Chiefs of Staff were trying to scupper the whole royal tour: ‘The action that is being taken in respect of the proving flight seems to be the first shot in their campaign to get the visit called off.’ While the Queen herself had no such qualms, she was now worried that all the nervousness about Zambia might affect her proposed tours of the three other African nations on her schedule. She certainly did not want those to be curtailed and her Private Secretary, Philip Moore, made her views clear to the Foreign Office.
GUINEA PIGS
Over at Buckingham Palace, there was certainly no appetite for cancelling the ‘proving’ flight, let alone the Queen’s visit. Indeed, many of her staff – from her chef and her personal detective to her most senior officials – were about to head for Lusaka. Zambia would be her fourth nation during this, the most wide-ranging African tour of a reign that had started in a Kenyan treehouse in 1952. And she was so looking forward to it that nineteen-year-old Prince Andrew would be coming along, too.
As with every royal tour, a ‘recce’ team would go out in advance to check everything from the bedding arrangements to the state banquet, via every stretch of red carpet in between. Leading this particular recce would be William Heseltine, the Queen’s deputy Private Secretary. Known for being calm under fire, it appeared that he might need to display that quality in its most literal sense, as he assembled a party that included the Queen’s personal protection officer and her chef, Peter Page.
As the Royal Household team were preparing to depart, the Cabinet Secretary himself, Sir John Hunt, asked all the main players to a meeting in his office on St George’s Day, 23rd April. Those present included Heseltine as well as the Queen’s principal Private Secretary, Sir Philip Moore; the British High Commissioner to Zambia, Len Allinson; the Prime Minister’s Private Secretary for foreign affairs, Bryan Cartledge; and the Captain of the Queen’s Flight, Air Commodore Archie Winskill.† It was finally agreed that the ‘proving’ flight should go ahead. Having twice been shot down over enemy territory during the Second World War (and having twice escaped capture), Winskill was perfectly happy to act as a guinea pig. Heseltine, however, would have to be ‘very careful’ not to upset the Zambians by overstating British safety concerns. Rather, he was to ask subtle questions and pass the answers back to London for further scrutiny by the Joint Intelligence Committee. Only favoured allies would be privy to the results: ‘The JIC assessment could be sent to the Americans and Old Commonwealth countries but external distribution should be considered on a case by case basis.’ In other words, the nations of the ‘new’ Commonwealth were not to be trusted.
Even after more than twenty-five years on the Throne, this was exciting new ground for the Queen. All four nations on her itinerary had been British colonies at the start of her reign and all were now republics, led by authoritarian founding fathers. They had all had bitter quarrels with the former colonial power, but all these leaders had forged a close personal rapport with the Queen herself. The Foreign Office started to prepare its briefing notes for the Queen and her team. First to welcome her would be Julius Nyerere, the ex-schoolmaster in charge of Tanzania and known by all as ‘Mwalimu’ – a term of address for an important teacher. As the British High Commissioner, Peter Moon, wrote to his masters in London, Nyerere might have had endless fights with the British government – even breaking off diplomatic relations at one point – but he had nothing but the deepest respect for the Queen. To him, the Queen was an emissary of Britain’s people, not of its government. ‘For the mass of village people in Tanzania, there is still only one Queen in the world, the British Queen,’ Moon assured the Foreign Office. ‘The sight of the Queen being welcomed in Tanzania will serve to demonstrate to a world audience that whatever differences there may be over the grave problems of southern Africa, both countries attach the highest importance to their bilateral relations’.
The personal connection ran deep. ‘The Queen had a particularly good relationship with Julius Nyerere,’ says Frank (now Lord) Judd, the former Foreign Office minister who went on to be director of Oxfam. Having known Nyerere well enough to be at his deathbed,
Judd sees many similarities between the two leaders. ‘He was a serious guy and that was one basis of his friendship with the Queen. He was a very sincere Catholic which was another. And one of his pastimes was translating Shakespeare into Swahili!’ Looking back, Sonny Ramphal reiterates that the reason men like Nyerere got on so well with the Queen was that she had been finding her way as a new monarch in parallel with their own struggles for independence. ‘She was a young woman when the Nyereres and Kaundas were young men,’ says Ramphal. ‘She understood their aspirations in the way an old grandee never would.’
The tour would also include Malawi. The Queen had grown very fond of Dr Hastings Banda, its ‘Life President’, though in his case there was a considerable age gap. Officially born in 1906, and therefore twenty years older than her, he was believed by some to have been born in 1898, making him a Victorian. Having led the former colony of Nyasaland to independence, Banda had been dreaming of a visit from the Queen since it was reborn as Malawi in 1964. After having worked as a medical doctor in Scotland for many years, he was something of an expert on British history. He was also fiercely anti-communist, anti-pop culture, pro-Commonwealth and one of the few black African leaders to maintain diplomatic relations with South Africa and Israel. Seldom seen without his black homburg hat, sunglasses and fly-whisk, he was rigorous in balancing the economy and repaying international loans. Though in favour of technological progress, he disliked other facets of modernisation. Journalists covering the royal tour would be warned that a jacket and tie were expected at all times, and that flared trousers were not permitted ‘if the bottom of the trouser is one-sixth more than the narrowest part of the leg’. As for political opposition, Banda liked to describe any would-be opponents as ‘food for crocodiles’. In his personality notes for the royal party, the British High Commissioner Mike Scott summed him up thus: ‘One of the most remarkable figures in Africa. In some ways he is like an African chief and draws on the respect due to his age . . . With advancing years, he shows increasingly an old man’s weakness for rambling on about the heroic past but his grip and ruthlessness have in no way diminished.’ The Queen’s decision to visit Malawi, said Scott, had given Banda ‘the greatest pleasure.’ Indeed, the President’s Private Secretary admitted that on giving the President the news, he ‘could at that moment have asked for anything and got it’.
Queen of the World: Elizabeth II: Sovereign and Stateswoman Page 40