Queen of the World: Elizabeth II: Sovereign and Stateswoman

by Robert Hardman

  The welcome would be no less effusive in Botswana, where the President, Sir Seretse Khama, was an Anglophile with a British wife and two sons enjoying a British education. Years later, Botswana would become a much-loved destination for both Prince William and Prince Harry; the latter would woo the future Duchess of Sussex there, and even chose a Botswanan diamond for her engagement ring. The Foreign Office, however, had wanted to omit this leg of the tour altogether, in order to free up more time elsewhere. That idea was scrapped when word reached the Foreign Secretary, David Owen, a great admirer of Sir Seretse Khama. ‘Outwardly easygoing, he is shrewd and level headed,’ Britain’s High Commissioner, Wilfred Turner, wrote from the capital, Gabarone. Khama, he went on, was ‘devoid of personal vanity’ and ‘believes firmly that multi-party democracy of the Westminster model is the right system for Botswana. A firm believer in the Commonwealth connection.’

  The Queen should also expect to be grilled about the royal farms, however. ‘Cattle is an unfailingly successful topic of conversation,’ Turner added. ‘The President is probably the largest owner in the country and all Ministers own cattle. It is not polite to ask how many cattle are owned but almost any other aspect of a beast can be discussed.’ So far, so good. It would be the fourth and final destination, Zambia, that would be the problem.

  At the end of April 1979, William Heseltine and his Palace colleagues set off for Africa. In Tanzania, they were warmly received by President Nyerere in person. He was thrilled to learn that the Queen and Prince Philip would be bringing Prince Andrew, too. In Malawi, the ‘recce’ party were astonished by the opulence of the Life President’s palatial residences. They were also charmed by the two sisters who seemed to control every aspect of the unmarried Banda’s life. Tall and stately, Miss Kadzamira rejoiced in the title of ‘Official Hostess’. Her sister, Miss Mary – ‘short and full of giggles’, in the words of one member of the British party – was Dr Banda’s Private Secretary. Tanzania and Malawi were clearly well prepared for the Queen. Ditto Botswana. Zambia was a very different story.

  Back in Britain, the Conservatives had just won the general election and Margaret Thatcher’s era as Prime Minister had begun. At the very moment her new government was being sworn in before the Queen at Buckingham Palace, the Palace guinea pigs were arriving in Lusaka. The omens were not encouraging. Though no one had fired any missiles at his RAF Andover of the Queen’s Flight, Air Commodore Archie Winskill was formally detained by the military on arrival, on the grounds that he had lacked official clearance to land. This was a novel experience for the double DFC-winning Battle of Britain veteran. The Palace team found a city in chaos, with a nightly curfew imposed, due to recent raids from Rhodesian special forces. As Heseltine reported back to London: ‘Everyone has to be indoors by 8.00 p.m. and as the stories of shootings, lootings and general misbehaviour of the troops mounting the road blocks multiply, you are not disposed to quibble.’ To make matters worse, half the people he needed to talk to were not in the country.

  Soon after landing in Zambia, Winskill received a secret telex from the office of the Assistant Chief of the Air Staff in London. It warned him that British intelligence had just learned of three new SA-7 missile attacks on aircraft in the area, though none had hit its target. It read: ‘Although risk has marginally increased since you departed UK, consider flight can continue; nevertheless, believe threat from SA-7 would be reduced if aircraft remained above 15,000 feet in controlled airspace whenever possible.’ Whether Winskill chose to share that alarming piece of news with the rest of the Palace team is unclear. The following day, as the party flew to inspect the Queen’s itinerary through Zambia’s copper belt, he deployed the same Spitfire-style evasion tactics he had learned during the war, approaching the runway in what Sir William Heseltine remembers as a ‘perpendicular dive’.

  Though the plane landed safely, Winskill then found himself under arrest once more, along with his entire crew. Again he was accused of landing without permission – a ludicrous situation, given that the entire mission had been arranged with the President’s office. What was most alarming was not the general level of incompetence, but the fact that the Zambian government and the Zambian Defence Force did not appear to be talking to each other. The next day, Heseltine and the High Commissioner, Len Allinson, had a meeting with President Kaunda, who ‘immediately expressed his regrets’ that the Queen’s personal pilot had twice been arrested for landing his plane where he had been supposed to land it. However, there was one upside to this embarrassing shambles. Knowing how sensitive Kaunda could be to criticisms from the British side, London was still reluctant to voice the true extent of its security concerns. Yet when Heseltine gently suggested that the British would like to send a senior military official to ‘check everything over’ just before the Queen’s arrival, Kaunda positively welcomed the idea. By now, Heseltine had other things to worry about, not least the Queen’s accommodation. She was due to stay at State Lodge, a government guest house. ‘Considerable work is in progress on extending the kitchens and bedrooms,’ he noted. ‘I found it incredibly pongy, but I hope this will not be noticeable when the workmen have left. It is in a most attractive setting.’

  ENTER THE IRON LADY

  Now that Mrs Thatcher had been elected, white Rhodesia and its network of allies wasted no time in trying to persuade the Prime Minister and her new Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, to be more sympathetic. With any luck, they thought, they might still be able to scupper the Queen’s visit to Zambia, and thus undermine a Commonwealth summit that would not play well for white Rhodesian interests. The Rhodesian leader, Ian Smith, wrote to the new British Prime Minister declaring: ‘All Rhodesians thank God for your magnificent victory.’ Within days, Carrington had received a ‘secret memo’ from Harry Grenfell, a well-known British businessman with influence and connections all over Africa. His mother had known Cecil Rhodes, the colonial founder of Rhodesia, and he himself was friendly with Malawi’s President Banda; Grenfell was now urging the British government to get the Commonwealth summit moved from Zambia to the relative safety of Kenya. Lusaka, he warned, was now at the mercy of rogue Zimbabwean nationalist guerrillas, and Zambia’s President, Kenneth Kaunda, could do nothing about it. ‘Kaunda does not have the forces to control Joshua Nkomo’s undisciplined forces,’ wrote Grenfell. Playing on Western fears of Soviet influence, he reported ‘Joshua Nkomo is virtually under the control of the KGB in Lusaka.’ He included a graphic account of Nkomo’s reprisals against white civilians living in Zambia not far from the Queen’s guest house. Grenfell reported that, just two weeks earlier, Nkomo’s guerrillas had attacked a white family a mere 12 miles outside Lusaka. ‘The mother was raped in front of the family, the father and mother were tortured in front of the children, then all murdered,’ wrote Grenfell. ‘It would be unthinkable to hold [CHOGM] in Zambia or Zimbabwe/Rhodesia whilst they are at war.’

  While FCO officials had been all in favour of sending the Queen to Lusaka while Labour had been in power, they were now less enthusiastic under the new Tory leadership. James Paterson of the Commonwealth Coordination department concluded that Grenfell had made some ‘good points’. However, Britain could not be seen to be demanding a change of summit venue when so many African nations were adamant that the summit should take place in Lusaka. It would be better for the British to lie low and leave it to others to make trouble.

  New Zealand’s Robert Muldoon was more than happy to step forward. On 22nd May, he told his Cabinet that ‘there are a lot of surface to air missiles in the area. If we do fly into Lusaka, I will certainly be on the edge of my seat.’ With so much else to deal with during her first month in office, the subject was still not uppermost in Mrs Thatcher’s mind. That changed on 1st June after she received a long secret memo from the Cabinet Secretary, Sir John Hunt, laying out the situation. He was certainly not glossing over the dangers: ‘There is cause for real concern at the possibility of an attack on the Queen’s aircraft as it approaches or leaves Lusa
ka from anti-aircraft missiles held by the Zambian forces and, more particularly, from those held by ZAPU [Nkomo’s Zimbabwe African People’s Union]. There have been several instances of missiles being fired within Zambia on civilian or Zambian airforce aircraft in the nervous belief that they were Rhodesian. There can be no great confidence that the risk of similar inadvertent attack on The Queen’s aircraft would be removed by the issuing of official Zambian instructions.’

  Presented with this bleak report from her most senior civil servant about the potential assassination of the Queen during her first few months in office, it is not entirely surprising that Mrs Thatcher began to have reservations about Lusaka. A staunch monarchist representing an avowedly royalist party, she would be appalled at any suggestion that she might be endangering the Queen. Should the visit go ahead and anything go wrong, it would be the instant end of her prime-ministerial career. For Sir John was clear about the options. The Queen was going to Lusaka wearing two hats. For the first few days she would be paying a state visit to Zambia as Queen of the UK and would, therefore, be ‘solely dependent’ on Mrs Thatcher’s advice for that part of the trip. However, others were entitled to advise her when it came to the Commonwealth summit: ‘It would be open to Prime Ministers of her other realms to give their views on the advisability of her presence in Lusaka as head of the Commonwealth.’ Ultimately, he asserted, the final call was Mrs Thatcher’s: ‘In the last resort, the UK Prime Minister must have the ultimate duty (as Prime Minister of the country where the Queen resides) to tender advice on the matter.’ This was a bold constitutional claim by the British government – namely, that its own advice outweighs that of the Queen’s other realms. To this day it is one with which constitutional lawyers in Canberra or Ottawa, or any of the Queen’s other realms, might well disagree. For it challenges the sacred notion of the divisibility of the Crown. And that claim was about to be put to the test.

  On the very same day, the Foreign Office sent all its central African missions an alarming new report about another VIP flight that had recently come under attack in Zambian air space. In gripping minute-by-minute detail – which reads more like a film script than an official report – it detailed the fate of a Falcon jet from Gabon, which had been flying an official delegation, including a senior Gabonese minister, from Botswana to Lusaka a few weeks earlier. The report was written by the captain of an Air Botswana aircraft who witnessed the entire episode from above. The pilot of the VIP Falcon jet had reported fuel trouble and had requested emergency permission to land at Livingstone, a Zambian town close to the Rhodesian border. The Zambian air-traffic controller insisted that, emergency or not, he would still have to get diplomatic clearance first. After a frantic few minutes, the pilot was told that although diplomatic clearance had been granted, the air-traffic controller was still unable to contact the ground troops surrounding the airport. ‘The pilot was now extremely agitated and expressed fear for the safety of his passengers and demanded permission to land,’ said the report. ‘It was ten seconds after the Falcon was cleared to land that the next transmission came from Livingstone. In the background could clearly be heard rapid fire of heavy guns and a very distressed controller shouted: “For God’s sake climb quickly, quickly! You are being shot at by the ground troops, steer on 057 radial and continue to Lusaka, I cannot give you permission to land. I have no communication with these soldiers. Climb, quickly climb.” ’

  Panic had broken out on board the ministerial jet, as a ‘very distressed’ female voice came on the airwaves shrieking that the President of Gabon, no less, was on board the aircraft. Seconds later the pilot reported that his plane had been hit and could not possibly make it to Lusaka. Whereupon the captain of Air Botswana flight A2-ABY, who knew the area well and had been listening in, saved the day. He quickly contacted air-traffic control at nearby Victoria Falls, just over the border in Rhodesia, obtained emergency clearance for the Gabonese jet and directed the Falcon to safety. ‘Is this not in Rhodesia?’ the Falcon pilot asked as his bullet-scarred plane descended towards the hated pariah state. ‘In your position,’ his saviour from Air Botswana replied, ‘you cannot be choosy.’

  By early June, the Queen’s safety had become a major talking point in the British press. Now the ‘will she?/ won’t she?’ debate was joined by Sir Douglas Bader. Writing in the Daily Express, the great fighter ace, famous for his wartime heroics despite losing both legs in a pre-war accident, declared that the Queen should not travel to Zambia. A week later, the New Zealand Prime Minister, Robert Muldoon, was in London for a lunch meeting with Mrs Thatcher and held a press conference reiterating his worries about the Lusaka summit. ‘If it’s held, I’ll go. No question about that. The concern is for the safety of the Queen,’ he said, adding that Mrs Thatcher was of the same view.

  Previously classified minutes of the lunch meeting reveal how the politicians were a great deal more worried than the Queen herself. Lord Carrington, it was noted, feared that ZAPU guerrillas ‘might resort to some act of desperation’ against the Queen. As the Prime Minister noted: ‘The Queen is determined to go to Lusaka and Kenneth Kaunda is determined to have her.’

  Though two of her prime ministers had grave doubts, neither the Queen nor her officials were giving any thought to cancellation. Rather, they were already planning their packing. The British High Commission was bombarded with questions. What would Prince Andrew need for his safari? Back came the reply: ‘Normal bush wear and stout shoes. Mosquito nets will be provided.’ The Master of the Royal Household wanted to know the precise dimensions of the plates that he hoped to use at his state banquet. He would also require twelve dozen bottles of tonic water and six dozen of soda (the Queen would bring her own spirits to go with it). Like the Queen, the Commonwealth Secretary-General, Sonny Ramphal, was extremely anxious to see the summit go ahead. If it was derailed, he feared that the entire Commonwealth might fall apart. Looking back, he believes that the Queen felt much the same. He knew that winning round Mrs Thatcher was essential.

  Ramphal feared that Mrs Thatcher might be about to recognise the result of the recent Rhodesian election, following which the rebel colony had renamed itself ‘Zimbabwe-Rhodesia’. A black prime minister had been installed, Bishop Abel Muzorewa, but all state controls were still in the hands of the white minority. The two Zimbabwean liberation movements had boycotted the election entirely. The United Nations, the USA and most of the world had refused to recognise the result. If Britain endorsed the vote and granted independence to this regime, there might be full-scale war in a country where up to 500 people were already being killed each week. Ramphal went to see Mrs Thatcher a week after her lunch with Robert Muldoon – whom he still refers to by the nickname that his opponents liked to use. ‘Piggy Muldoon was poking the fire,’ he says. ‘He was trying to sabotage the meeting.’ In his memoirs, Ramphal recalled that he was expecting trouble. He found that Mrs Thatcher was a ‘good listener to well-marshalled argument’, though she would not be swayed when he urged her to stop referring to the two liberation movements as ‘terrorists’. Could she not acknowledge that they were just like Tito’s partisans fighting the Nazis in the Second World War? Might she, he begged, call them ‘freedom-fighters’? Not a chance. ‘Of course they are terrorists,’ Mrs Thatcher replied. ‘They are just like the IRA’. However, Ramphal was also able to remind her of one crucial factor that was not lost on the new Prime Minister. Oil-rich Nigeria had just announced that it would refuse all future trade with British companies until Britain ‘clarified’ its position on Rhodesia. As a result, British firms had just been prevented from bidding for a £100 million port development. Ramphal assured her that if she came to Lusaka in a positive frame of mind, there would be ‘no ganging up on her’. Her mind was still not made up, however, on what advice she would be giving the Queen.

  The summit was now six weeks away. With each passing day, the tension mounted. On 21st June, Len Allinson reported from Lusaka that another plane – from Mozambique – had been shot at by
Robert Mugabe’s guerrillas. In the same week a plane carrying Lord Harlech, Mrs Thatcher’s special envoy to the region, had been detained by the Zambian authorities, just like Archie Winskill’s RAF Andover the previous month. By now, Britain had appointed its senior military expert to travel there to inspect royal security arrangements, under the agreement that President Kaunda had reached with William Heseltine. Except that when Air Vice-Marshal Henry Reed-Purvis arrived to see Kaunda on 25th June, the President was not available. Reed-Purvis was informed by an assistant that the President had no recollection of any such agreement about security. As it happened, on the same day Rhodesian special forces decided to launch an audacious assault on a guerrilla base in Lusaka itself, just a mile from the Commonwealth conference venue. With a battle raging on his doorstep – literally – President Kaunda quickly changed his attitude. The next day he agreed to meet the Air Vice-Marshal after all.

  In the British media, the mood swung between concern for the Queen and praise for her sangfroid, for it remained abundantly clear that she was not wavering in her enthusiasm. On 28th June, The Daily Telegraph quoted an ‘informed source’ saying that ‘the Queen is accustomed to visiting countries where there is some danger’, adding: ‘It is not in the Queen’s nature to shirk responsibility.’ The Daily Mail, on the other hand, was reporting fresh security warnings under the headline ‘Queen’s Life in Danger’. It called for cancellation. A few years later the Queen’s relationship with Mrs Thatcher would reach crisis point over allegations of disagreements on both social and Commonwealth policy. Even in those early days of the new Tory government, however, there were signs of friction. One guest at a Palace garden party in the run-up to the summit was struck by the almost theatrical way in which the Queen and her officials would say: ‘When we go to Lusaka . . .’ He adds: ‘There was no question of “if”.’