But no one in the inner royal circle has admitted to hearing the Queen express any sort of unease, let alone criticism, about Mrs Thatcher. ‘It’s just so not her,’ says one who knows her well. Inside Buckingham Palace, the Private Secretary Sir William Heseltine was trying to find out why The Sunday Times was so confident in putting words into the Queen’s mouth. It gradually emerged that the ‘sources’ were just one ‘source’, namely Michael Shea. Despite his protestations that he was not to blame, he was named the following weekend by The Observer, on the same day that The Sunday Times made further accusations against the Palace. If the Royal Household objected so strongly to the story, it asked, why had they not intervened when they learned that it was about to appear?
The following day, Sir William had a letter published in The Sunday Times’s stablemate, The Times. In it, he acknowledged that Shea had spoken to Freeman of The Sunday Times. He also accepted that Freeman had read some of the material back to him, but said that none of it bore any relation to the thrust of the article. This, in turn, prompted the paper’s editor, Andrew Neil, to reveal that Shea had been informed of the whole lot. He added witheringly: ‘Those at the Palace who knew about The Sunday Times articles before their publication were playing with fire and did not have the wit to blow it out before it burned them.’
The big mystery was over. Shea had taken it upon himself to discuss, hypothetically and with no basis in fact, what the monarch might or might not feel on some particularly sensitive contemporary issues. The lesser mystery was: why? Shea died in 2009, but those who knew him well say that he was of a liberal, centre-left persuasion and had overstepped the mark while talking up his employer’s neutrality during a period of political turmoil; that in trying to present the Queen merely as someone who was not pro-Thatcher (or pro-anyone else), he had ended up painting her as being anti-Thatcher. ‘He was a victim of hubris,’ says Sir William Heseltine. ‘He got a bit carried away with himself.’ The former Foreign Secretary, David Owen, knew Shea well. ‘People say he was put up to it by the Queen but I don’t believe a word of it,’ says Owen. ‘I’m certain she didn’t like a lot of the flak she was having to grapple with over the Commonwealth. I’m sure she was critical of it, too, but I don’t believe she put Shea up to that story. He may have felt something needed to be done. I think it was clear she would drop him – and she did drop him.’
The timing of this entire episode was no coincidence, as The Sunday Times editor gleefully admitted later on. Not only was there a wedding on, but those troubled Commonwealth Games were about to begin, followed swiftly by the special Commonwealth summit on South Africa. It was a perfect media storm. The Queen, the Commonwealth and Mrs Thatcher would be lumped together in the spotlight for days on end. On the same weekend that Shea was named as the source of The Sunday Times stories, the Queen was at her Edinburgh residence, the Palace of Holyroodhouse, for the Commonwealth Games. Among the guests was the Prime Minister. As they all sat down for dinner, Michael Shea’s appetite can hardly have been helped by the discovery that he was being seated between the Queen and Mrs Thatcher. The press secretary offered the Prime Minister an apology, to which she replied: ‘Don’t worry, dear.’ The damage had been done, however. Later that evening, Denis Thatcher admitted to one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting that his wife was ‘very upset’ by it all.
One person who was not upset was the Secretary-General of the Commonwealth. As far as Sonny Ramphal was concerned, the whole episode had reinforced Mrs Thatcher’s isolation from the Commonwealth consensus. To this day, he believes that The Sunday Times story was a true reflection of the Queen’s inner thoughts at the time. ‘I thought it was genuine, I knew it was genuine,’ he says. ‘I wouldn’t have wanted it to go any further because if it got out of hand then the Queen’s role would be diminished.’ The story might have helped neither the Palace nor the British government, but Sir Sonny is in no doubt: ‘It helped the Commonwealth.’
It did not, however, help the Commonwealth Games, the organisers of which were up against mounting debts and ever-dwindling competitors. The Games actually involve more nations than the Commonwealth has members, since they include Crown dependencies and overseas territories like Jersey and Gibraltar. Yet by the opening ceremony in 1986, more than thirty of the fifty-nine original teams had announced they were boycotting the event because of Mrs Thatcher’s policies. Things had reached the point that British diplomats in some of the Commonwealth capitals were warning their Foreign Office masters that countries such as Zimbabwe were on the brink of cutting off diplomatic relations with Britain altogether. The daily bulletins – always included in the Queen’s red box – must have made excruciating reading for the Head of the Commonwealth.
The situation was so chaotic that Bermuda’s team took part in the opening ceremony, complete with their flag, panama hats and Bermuda shorts, only to be informed the very next day that they were, in fact, boycotting the event. The Bermudian athletes protested, hanging sheets out of their windows with the message ‘Bermuda wants to stay’. It was to no avail. Sonny Ramphal was very sorry for the Scottish hosts. ‘The Edinburgh folk were staunchly with the Commonwealth and I did everything I could but I did not have from Mrs Thatcher the help I needed,’ he wrote in his memoirs. Shortly before the opening, he had appealed for her assistance in finding a solution that might rescue the Games. He well recalls her ‘sharp’ response. ‘They’re not my Games,’ she told him. ‘They’re yours.’ To make matters worse, the owner of the Labour-supporting Mirror and Daily Record newspapers, Robert Maxwell, had stepped in as self-styled saviour of the Games. As with so many of his other financial pledges, his promised rescue package would prove to be a bare-faced lie, but he greatly enjoyed the adulation of the moment. It was one more low moment for the Head of the Commonwealth as the leaders prepared for yet another showdown over South Africa. ‘It wasn’t just rather embarrassing for the Queen. It was a hundred per cent embarrassing,’ Sir Malcolm Rifkind reflects. ‘Much as I admired Margaret Thatcher, that could all have been avoided if she’d been more emollient without conceding on basic principles. Someone else would have done it in a much more emollient way.’
‘WORKING’ DINNER
Now all eyes were on the Marlborough House summit. Would Mrs Thatcher feel more conciliatory after The Sunday Times affair and the boycott of the Games in Edinburgh? An interview with Graham Turner for The Sunday Telegraph, shortly before the summit, provided the answer. Asked if she was not threatening the break-up of the Commonwealth with her intransigence on sanctions, she replied sternly: ‘It is their Commonwealth. If they wish to break it up, I think it is absurd. What sort of relationship is it that . . . this thing that we have created is not strong enough to take a difference of opinion? Good Heavens, look what it has had to withstand to date!’
Taking things as far as she could, the Queen fixed her get-together for the eve of the summit. Furthermore, it would not be called a banquet or even a dinner, but a ‘working dinner’, perhaps the first in Palace history. This showed that the Queen meant business. The dress code would be lounge suits, not black tie (let alone the white-tie rig expected at a state banquet) and she would not even be accompanied by the Duke of Edinburgh. As Sonny Ramphal argues, it was not a question of offering hospitality to the Commonwealth leaders. It was a cool, calculated move by the Queen to stop Mrs Thatcher and the rest of the Commonwealth from retreating to their bunkers. ‘Mrs Thatcher was alone and the danger always was that if she remained isolated, damage to the Commonwealth could have ensued,’ he says. ‘The Queen was recognised by everybody to be of a different hue.’
Shortly before the dinner, Mrs Thatcher’s press secretary, Bernard Ingham, wrote a memo to his boss distilling the general view: ‘The media’s interest can be summarised: is the Lady for turning? If not will the Commonwealth crack up?’ He warned that the other leaders ‘will play everything for TV kicks’ and told her not to stop and talk to stray television cameras: ‘Decline to be doorstepped. The media are seldo
m, if ever, in the business of helpful quotes. Their business is conflict.’
As the six other chosen leaders arrived in London, they came for one-on-one meetings with Mrs Thatcher ahead of the main meeting. The Cabinet files show that Canada’s Brian Mulroney was perhaps even more cynical about the Commonwealth than Mrs Thatcher. ‘He shared her view that a lot of cant was talked by some of its members,’ says a Number Ten minute of the meeting. ‘His impression was that “no one would jump off the bridge if the Commonwealth took a walk” in either Canada or the UK. The Prime Minister interjected that she would, in fact, be very upset if that happened.’
There was a less cordial meeting with the Zambian President, Kenneth Kaunda, emotional as ever as he tearfully waved his white handkerchief. The files note that he warned that South Africa would ‘explode’ without sanctions and that ‘God would not forgive us’ if there was no action on that front. Mrs Thatcher said they had better leave that debate for the summit. By now, she would have received the latest Foreign Office personality notes on the visitors. Of Kaunda, it was noted: ‘He sets the tone of the government and the country and is better for it . . . His weaknesses are that he is emotional, impressionable and a confused thinker . . . His feelings for Britain might be described as a mixture of love and pain. He admires the Queen. His threat to withdraw Zambia from the Commonwealth may be more emotional outburst than real intent.’
The Cabinet briefing notes, as candid as ever, show that the Queen was in for a lively dinner, not that she needed any notes on these guests. She knew them all very well of old. Of Bob Hawke, the Australian prime minister, the FCO remarked: ‘Intelligent, industrious, shrewd and articulate . . . charming in private and very rude in public when it suits him. Not very well disposed towards Britain . . . Increasingly doubtful of the relevance of the monarch to Australia . . . A well-known drinker and womaniser in his ACTU [Australian Council of Trade Unions] days but is now a reformed character.’
Canada’s Brian Mulroney was a ‘shrewd politician, though he can give the impression of being glib and superficial. Easy to underestimate . . . Good looking with a great deal of Irish charm.’¶
British ministers were advised to tread warily when discussing the education of the Indian Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, who was still ‘very sensitive’ about his failure to complete his degree at Cambridge. Sir Lynden Pindling, host of that Nassau summit was ‘an extremely active and intelligent man.’ But it was hardly surprising he had attracted demonstrations. ‘He has acquired a Rolls-Royce and a mansion on Millionaires’ Row and has become as guilty as the rest of the PLP leadership of the sins of arrogance and intolerance.’ The final member of the mini-summit group was Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, by now regarded as a wise and mellowing presence in a Commonwealth from which he would later be ostracised. ‘A Marxist Leninist but concedes that his philosophy needs to be adapted . . . Not anti-white as such but prone to making ill-considered statements. Devoted to his wife Sally who is the only person with any real influence over him.’
Such was the guest list for the Queen’s first ‘working dinner’. Brian Mulroney later recorded in his journal that the monarch arrived ‘in excellent cheer’, full of anecdotes about the Edinburgh Games, and ‘chatted easily with all’. The Queen was evidently concerned about Kenneth Kaunda, at one point asking Rajiv Gandhi: ‘How is the emotional one?’ Despite his awkward meeting with Mrs Thatcher earlier, Mulroney noted that ‘KK’ seemed in good spirits, not least since he ‘adores the royal family’. The Zambian leader even interrupted the proceedings at one point to raise a toast to the Queen Mother, who was about to celebrate her eighty-sixth birthday.
Sir William Heseltine was one of a handful of officials present and remembers sitting next to Mugabe. ‘I have to say I found him quite charming,’ he says. ‘However, I did note that the atmosphere was quite tense. It wasn’t an easy time for Mrs Thatcher, who found herself at odds with virtually all the other members.’
There were no speeches and no agenda. All were acutely aware that the mere fact that the Queen had come down from Scotland to host this strange, one-off evening – a kitchen supper, by royal standards – was a statement in itself. Sonny Ramphal wrote in his memoirs that it had been entirely the Queen’s idea and was designed to ‘break the ice’ before the hard bargaining over South Africa: ‘The Queen’s message was simple: the Commonwealth must not be in discord on this matter. It was a call for unity at a critical moment.’ Geoffrey Howe, then Foreign Secretary, later described it as a ‘deliberate act by the Queen to remind us all of our commitment to get on with each other.’
Summing up the Palace position, Sir William Heseltine explains: ‘I don’t think we were trying to get involved in the nuts and bolts. But the Queen wanted an atmosphere in which some solution might be reached. And I thought that, in her exemplary fashion, she managed to send them off in a much better mood than when they arrived. The atmosphere at the end of dinner seemed much better than at the beginning.’ As Sir William would tell the BBC many years later: ‘In terms of political initiatives, it was perhaps the boldest initiative of the decade – and a successful one.’
Sonny Ramphal recalls the subtle way in which the Queen steered the discussion on to the theme of unity. ‘This was the conversation that she led around the table and the promise she drew from everyone there,’ he says. The entire exercise, in his view, was a coded exhortation aimed at a single guest: ‘It was a plea to Mrs Thatcher, in the company of everyone else, to fall in line. It was a plea for unity. It was a message to her Prime Minister which might have been harder to deliver privately.’
Brian Mulroney, however, recalls that the royal warning extended to everyone around the table. ‘There was no doubt that Her Majesty sided with the Commonwealth,’ he told biographer Sally Bedell Smith. ‘But she couldn’t speak out. You had to understand the nuances and body language. At the dinner, she was a great moderating influence on everyone. She led us through an elevated discussion of human rights.’ Perhaps she had been rereading Desmond Tutu’s letter to her. Mulroney’s personal journal also includes an intriguing footnote to the evening. ‘We left, all except Mrs T. and Sir Geoffrey [Howe], whom I spotted in confidential conversation with Her Majesty as the rest of us were escorted out.’
By the time the leaders signed their communiqué on 5th August, there had been progress of sorts. Six of the seven leaders had agreed a range of sanctions against South Africa, including a ban on air links, investment and food. What’s more, all had agreed to set an important precedent. From now on, the Commonwealth could have a less consensual consensus; it could move forward on a key issue without unanimity, stating that it had agreed to proceed without Britain. Crucially, it had not broken up. For that, as Sonny Ramphal has said, credit should again go to the Queen. Echoing Nehru’s original words about the foundation of the Commonwealth, he praised her for ‘a much-needed touch of healing.’
Brian Mulroney was in no doubt that the Head of the Commonwealth had been pivotal. ‘What saved the day was that Margaret was aware Her Majesty certainly wanted some kind of resolution,’ he told Sally Bedell Smith. ‘So we were able to put in there three or four financial things that Margaret accepted’.
‘It could have gone much worse,’ says Chief Emeka Anyaoku, the Commonwealth’s future Secretary-General, imagining what would have happened had the Queen not played her part. ‘Mrs Thatcher would have said she wanted nothing to do with it and the consensus in the Commonwealth would have broken down.’ He is in no doubt that here, and in Lusaka, the Commonwealth had never been closer to self-destruction. In both cases, the Queen had come to the rescue. ‘Her message was crystal clear: you mustn’t allow the Commonwealth to fail,’ he says without hesitation. ‘This was what saved the organisation.’
GOODBYE, MARGARET. HELLO, NELSON
Having established that the Commonwealth and the British government could be at odds without terminal consequences, the last two Commonwealth summits of Mrs Thatcher’s period in office were less combati
ve. Sonny Ramphal has written that they were ‘just as unpleasant but mattered less’. Yet the traditional left-wing vilification of Mrs Thatcher as a ‘heartless’ apologist for the status quo in South Africa seems both simplistic and misleading. If she was exasperated by many Commonwealth nations and by what she regarded as posturing hypocrisy, she was still determined to help secure change in South Africa, in her own way. Though she would continue to describe the ANC and their ilk as ‘typical terrorists’ and ‘communists’, she was equally convinced that the release of Nelson Mandela was central to a solution. She would also draw a distinction between the ANC’s brand of terrorism and that of Irish republican groups like the IRA, pointing out that the IRA were in the business of attacking a democratic nation, whereas black South Africans were fighting a state that denied them their basic human rights.
As Professor Chris Richards of the University of Cape Town and President of the South African Historical Society has pointed out, Mrs Thatcher’s role in Mandela’s eventual release has often been overlooked. It was only thanks to her that the ‘Eminent Persons Group’ was able to enter South Africa and develop the negotiating strategy through which Mandela was eventually freed. Richards reiterates the point that no international organisations had actually been calling for Mandela’s release until the Eighties. Even Amnesty International had refused to classify him as a ‘prisoner of conscience’ in the early years of his captivity, because of his refusal to renounce violence. In the December 2017 issue of the Commonwealth’s very own in-house journal, The Round Table, Professor Richards delivered a fascinating verdict on Mrs Thatcher’s role throughout that turbulent decade. It is one that many on the left and old Commonwealth hands like Sonny Ramphal would, doubtless, regard as heretical: ‘On the specific question of the release of Mandela it may indeed be said that Thatcher, with her own firm ideas of how best to try to end apartheid, did do more than any other Commonwealth leader in the 1980s to try to get him released.’
Queen of the World: Elizabeth II: Sovereign and Stateswoman Page 50