Queen of the World: Elizabeth II: Sovereign and Stateswoman

by Robert Hardman

  The Queen had chosen an appropriately neutral white dress made by her own dresser, Angela Kelly, for the engagement that was to follow. The public had been kept at least 300 yards away from Dublin’s Garden of Remembrance, for the most meaningful moment of a tour already laden with symbolism. The distant protests of a small republican demonstration in O’Connell Street and the clatter of news and security helicopters were briefly drowned out by a sound that would have kick-started civil disorder just a few years earlier: ‘God Save the Queen’ ringing out over Ireland’s answer to the Cenotaph. The Queen then placed her wreath against the memorial to ‘all those who gave their lives in the cause of Irish freedom’, took three steps back and bowed. It was no perfunctory nod of the head – as might be expected from a courtier at the Palace. This was a very clear and pronounced leaning forward from the waist up. The monarch who bows to no one was bowing to the heroes of Irish nationalism. She had still not been heard to utter a word. Few people had actually seen her in the flesh. Yet a bumper daytime television audience had been glued to it all, and the papers had their story. ‘Job done,’ once more.

  The small republican demonstrations had dwindled to nothing the following day as the royal convoy made for Croke Park. This equally momentous engagement had been so thoroughly trailed and dissected that it almost felt scripted. It is hard to convey a grand sense of occasion – indeed of genuine history – in an empty stadium; all the harder when the stadium is one of the largest in Europe. The Queen emerged from the players’ tunnel to be greeted by a group of children and was shown a video about Gaelic football. The president of the sport’s governing body made a dignified speech, which did not gloss over the atrocity of 1920 but did not labour the point, either. Everyone knew why the Queen was here, and it was not through a love of Irish football. ‘In our shared history, there have been many tragic events that have hurt us all – including those who died in this place,’ said Christy Cooney. But there was magnanimity, too: ‘Your Majesty, your presence does honour to our association, to its special place in Irish life, and to its hundreds of thousands of members. Today will go down in the history of the GAA.’

  The big surprise of the day would come not at the football stadium, but later. The superior power of a stateswoman’s wardrobe over that of any statesman was amply demonstrated as the Queen arrived at the state banquet at Dublin Castle. Angela Kelly, something of a specialist in diplomatic embroidery, had designed her a dress hand-stitched with 2,091 shamrocks. Unlike those grand entrances in Germany or Russia, it was not a night to bring out the grandest specimens in the jewellery box but, rather, the most appropriate ones. Along with a new Irish harp brooch, designed specially for the occasion, the Queen wore the Girls of Great Britain and Ireland Tiara. It had been a wedding present to Queen Mary in 1893 who, in turn, had made it a wedding present to Princess Elizabeth.

  As the Queen rose to address the guests in the onetime citadel of British power in Ireland, there was intense interest in the content and tone of one of the most important banquet speeches of her reign. Any overseas speech by the monarch is delivered on government advice, usually with her Foreign Secretary in attendance. For this one, very unusually, her Prime Minister had come along, too.

  The Ambassador had done some extensive homework. ‘We spoke to some well-known Irish writers and historians about what images it might mean for them,’ says Sir Julian King. Ultimately, though, it had to be personal for it to work. ‘It was done very closely with the Household and with the Queen. Not a lot of time was spent with bureaucrats in the Foreign Office.’

  Very few knew what was coming next. ‘A Uachtaráin agus a chairde,’ the Queen began. Her words – ‘President and friends’ – were properly pronounced and greeted with an instant round of applause. Pop-eyed President McAleese’s repeated mouthing of ‘Wow!’ would become as much a part of the story as the Queen’s debut in Gaelic. The gesture almost – though not quite – upstaged the definitive statement of the tour. After a pointed reference to the ‘importance of being able to bow to the past, but not be bound by it’, the Queen was frank: ‘It is a sad and regrettable reality that, through history, our islands have experienced more than their fair share of heartache, turbulence and loss. These events have touched us all, many of us personally, and are a painful legacy.’ That would be as close as she came to mentioning Lord Mountbatten.

  ‘To all those who have suffered as a consequence of our troubled past, I extend my sincere thoughts and deep sympathy. With the benefit of historical hindsight, we can all see things which we would wish had been done differently or not at all.’ For a sovereign who is so often called upon to apologise for things she hasn’t done – and for which she cannot apologise without ministerial instruction – this was, nonetheless, the closest to an apology that anyone was expecting. There was praise for her speech across the Irish media. Perhaps the most notable reaction was a single word from the Sinn Fein President, Gerry Adams. Amid a predictable demand for a full apology from the British monarch, he managed to acknowledge that her words had been ‘genuine’. Praise indeed.

  From then on, the rest of the tour would be a stroll, a wholly good-natured celebration of those same human connections that the Queen regards as the greatest strength of her Commonwealth. Ireland’s love of Guinness and horseracing were saluted with a visit to the original Guinness factory and a trip to the Irish National Stud. Instead of a return banquet for the President, which could not have been anything other than an anticlimax, the Queen laid on a concert. Among the star turns was local boy-band, Westlife. Sir Julian King acknowledges that a dinner would have been considerably cheaper for the taxpayer, but insists that the effect was worth it. After the sterile security arrangements up to that point, it was, he says, electrifying when the Queen escorted the President onto the concert stage: ‘I don’t think anybody quite anticipated the roar of approval that came from the crowd. That was almost a heart-stopping moment.’

  As so often happens on a state visit, the atmosphere and tempo changed completely outside the capital. Security was significantly less paranoid in the second city of Cork, where large crowds were finally allowed near the royal visitors as they toured the English Market. The Queen struck up such a rapport with garrulous fishmonger Pat O’Connell## that he later received an invitation to a royal reception in London.

  When she passed through the ancient town of Cashel, its Sinn Fein mayor, Michael Browne, was in the greeting line and became the first member of his party to shake the monarch’s hand. ‘I just said to her: “Welcome to Cashel, Your Majesty and I hope you enjoy your stay”,’ he said afterwards. ‘No more, no less.’ Browne was terminally ill with just a few weeks to live, yet his party hierarchy were furious. In a sorry footnote to the tour, he was later suspended from the party for his courtesy. It would prove to be a serious misjudgement. ‘Sinn Fein recognised that they hadn’t caught the mood because there were some huge approval ratings for the visit – 80 or 90 per cent,’ says Sir Julian King. ‘Among Sinn Fein supporters there was a massive majority too.’

  The visit would resonate at many levels, its impact felt long after the Queen’s departure. From the opening of the first British Irish Chamber of Commerce to the invitation to the Irish Ambassador to Britain to lay a wreath at the Cenotaph on each Remembrance Sunday, that green dress, that bow and those few words of Gaelic had been a catalyst for so many fresh initiatives, large and small, on either side of the Irish Sea. Once again, it had been at a human level that the tour had its greatest effect. ‘Some people can be cynical about large staged state occasions but this definitely caught a moment’ says Sir Julian. ‘An Irish friend said to me that it was “OK to feel good about the Brits”.’

  Even after a life spent making and being history, it had been a genuine thrill for the Queen. ‘This was like a big door opening up to her that had been locked for so long,’ said the Duke of Cambridge. ‘And now she has been able to see what’s behind the door.’

  The following year, King would find h
imself on the other side of the border as Director-General of the Northern Ireland Office. He was there to welcome the Queen yet again, this time as her Diamond Jubilee tour of the United Kingdom took her to Northern Ireland. There were many more happy landmarks during the visit, including the Queen’s first big Northern Irish walkabout. Held in the grounds of Stormont, it involved such a large crowd – more than 20,000 people, plus picnics – that she eventually had to meet them in an open car. Shortly before the visit, says Sir Julian, he received an extraordinary call. Sinn Fein, it transpired, would not be so hostile to this visit. Having punished the late Mayor of Cashel for having the temerity to meet the Queen, the Sinn Fein leaders were now wondering if there might be any chance of a royal introduction after all. ‘They realised they had misread the public mood,’ says Sir Julian. ‘Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness reached out – to say would it be possible to meet the Queen at some point?’

  In 2012, one of the defining moments in Irish history took place as McGuinness, the former terrorist and IRA capo-turned-politician, finally shook the Queen’s hand. Many people who have been introduced to the Queen at some point in their lives will keep a framed photograph of that moment in pride of place. On his own desk, Sir Julian King keeps a photo of the Queen meeting Martin McGuinness instead.

  In this isle of sometimes fratricidal symbolism, it was the Queen’s handshake with McGuinness that was the definitive illustration of the new normal. And it was all because of that state visit the year before. This harmonious mood could not continue indefinitely at a political level, of course. There would be plenty of bilateral setbacks, not least the issue of the UK-Irish border in a post-Brexit era. Even so, the Queen’s visit has recalibrated the relationship permanently. There will always be rows but henceforth, they will be conducted at a different pitch.

  ‘I think it was the most transformative bit of diplomacy I have seen. It was amazing,’ says David Cameron. Tellingly, he adds that the Queen was faintly embarrassed by the adulation. ‘She was, as ever, not sure what all the fuss was about.’ Cameron remembers talking to the Queen about her historic handshake with the leader of an organisation that had once been hell-bent on exterminating her entire family. The Prime Minister remarked that her encounter with McGuinness had been a very great milestone of modern diplomacy.

  The Queen’s reply sums up her modest, no-nonsense approach to a job she has been doing longer than most people can remember. ‘What was I meant to do?’ she replied. ‘Of course I shook his hand. It would be awkward not to.’

  * It has become received wisdom that Kennedy’s grammar was incorrect and that he should have said ‘Ich bin Berliner’. As a result, he was describing himself as a jam doughnut, known as ‘ein Berliner’. Pure pedantry, say German linguists, pointing out that everyone in the 450,000-strong crowd knew exactly what he meant.

  † The Duke’s three surviving sisters were all married to German aristocrats who had served in German uniform during the war. Another sister, Cecile, had been killed in a 1937 plane crash, while the Duke’s father had died in exile in Monte Carlo in 1944. His mother, Princess Andrew of Greece, had been the only immediate member of the family at his wedding in 1947.

  ‡ Patrick Plunket, 7th Baron, was the Queen’s Deputy Master of the Household, an unflappable source of courtierly common sense and one of her closest confidants until his early death from cancer in 1975.

  § Though the Queen is seldom accused of ‘spin’, she had done her prospects of positive coverage no harm by holding a reception for the media at the start of the tour. ‘The most exciting party,’ declared Bild. It was the first time any head of state had done such a thing in Germany. ‘I do not think that they had ever been shaken hands with before, certainly not by their President,’ the Queen’s Private Secretary, Sir Michael Adeane, wrote afterwards.

  ¶ One of five members of the Chinese politburo, Deng was not officially head of state, but ‘Chairman of the Central Advisory Commission of the Chinese Communist Party’. Although by now semi-retired, he still remained the de facto head of 1.4 billion people.

  # Just three years later, the world would see a very different side of Chinese military discipline, as democratic protests were brutally suppressed on the same spot.

  ** In 1986, en route to meet the Queen in Australia, Rear Admiral John Garnier was taking Britannia through the Red Sea when civil war erupted in Aden. As the nearest Royal Navy vessel, the Yacht was diverted to pick up British nationals. Amid shooting and shelling between government and rebel forces, Lieutenant Robert Easson’s rescue party ended up evacuating 1,082 people of fifty-five nationalities, plus one French dog.

  †† Following the 1905 assassination of her husband, Grand Duke Sergei (Tsar Nicholas II’s uncle), Elizabeth Feodorovna founded Moscow’s Convent of St Martha and St Mary in 1909. She was among a group of royal relatives arrested in 1918 and pushed down a mineshaft near Alapaevsk. Simon Sebag Montefiore’s The Romanovs describes her final moments as she led a chorus of ‘Lord Save Your People’ while a Chekist death squad rained grenades and burning wood on her. Lenin welcomed her death, saying that ‘virtue with the crown on it’ was a ‘greater enemy’ than ‘a hundred tyrant tsars’.

  ‡‡ There are still two BAe 146 aircraft operated by the RAF’s 32 (The Royal) Squadron. Despite the squadron’s name, they spend most of their time flying government ministers and senior military personnel.

  §§ On July 20, 1982, twin bombs in Hyde Park and Regents Park killed a total of 11 men and seven horses. Parker Bowles sought to erect a memorial to his dead men but came up against ministerial opposition. ‘The politicians didn’t want another memorial. So I went to the Queen Mother – who went to the Queen,’ he says. ‘If you stop in Hyde Park, it’s there.’

  ¶¶ Knighted before his fiftieth birthday, Sir Julian went on to become Ambassador to Paris. In 2016, after the Brexit vote, he was appointed Britain’s last European Commissioner.

  ## The Queen much enjoyed O’Connell’s reference to the unlovely monkfish as a ‘mother-in-law fish’.

  Chapter 12

  THE PRINCE OF WALES

  ‘Man-eating spiders and acid-squirting caterpillars’

  KING IN WAITING

  Years of delicate diplomacy and hard graft have led up to this moment. All those meetings and receptions and dinners that the Prince of Wales has had with thousands of politicians and tens of thousands of officials in dozens of countries over half a century are about to be put to the test. All the walkabouts, the interminable speeches, the voyages, the long flights, the reluctant photocalls, the funny hats, the remorseless menus and the considerable dangers (including near-misses with both elephant and buffalo) have all, ultimately, been aimed at this morning’s meeting. No one is taking anything for granted as the leaders of the fifty-three nations of the Commonwealth gather for their ‘retreat’ at Windsor Castle. It comes the day after the Queen’s frank, heartfelt appeal to the heads of government to endorse her son and heir as the next Head of the Commonwealth. She has given the politicians the run of both Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle for their summit. Yet she knows, from long experience, that there can be no complacency in matters involving a querulous organisation with opaque, imprecise rules.

  A few hours later the issue is resolved in gloriously anticlimactic fashion. There is no puff of white smoke, no Oscars-style ceremonial opening of an envelope. Instead, a two-sided ‘Leaders’ Statement’ is handed out to the media. Paragraph three states simply: ‘The next Head of the Commonwealth shall be His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales.’ It is hardly a surprise that his name is there. There was never any other candidate anyway. The key word, though, is ‘shall’. There is no ambiguity. An organisation that is usually much happier voicing nebulous aspirations, rather than concrete results, could not be clearer on the issue. This has been a topic so delicate that royal officials have refused to discuss it in public for decades. Now it has just been resolved in a sentence. Whenever the time comes, King Charles III will be the first
monarch to be automatically proclaimed Head of the Commonwealth. It is a very big deal – a landmark in the modern royal story. Yet the eventual official Commonwealth communiqué on the 2018 summit would actually devote more words to a modest new funding initiative for small island economies than any mention of the future Head.

  Almost any other international organisation – be it sporting, political or economic – can expect plenty of infighting each time it goes through a change of leadership, particularly if there has not actually been any change at the top for more than sixty-five years. Yet here is the future leadership of an organisation comprising 2.4 billion people and it has apparently been resolved with the sort of 100 per cent agreement that we might expect from a people’s congress in North Korea. At the prime-ministerial press conference that follows, there is only one line of questioning from the media: surely there must have been some sort of argument? This is the Commonwealth, after all. But no. Theresa May describes the decision as ‘unanimous’.

  It is by far the most significant step to date in the Prince’s gradual evolution from Heir to the Throne to King-in-waiting. It is also a very robust validation of all that the Queen has done for this organisation over the years. In recent years Palace officials have talked of the ‘Team Windsor’ strategy, of the Queen’s desire to have a synchronised royal operation across the generations. The monarchy has not worked like this since the reign of Victoria. It has always been designed to run as a two-tier organisation, with the sovereign running the main show and the Heir to the Throne running a self-sufficient support act.* In recent years it has been run as a three-tier operation, with a gradual transfer of duties – though not of powers – from the Queen to the Prince of Wales. Royal commentators, inevitably, look for differences between the respective modus operandi of mother and son. The two unquestionably have different tastes, different styles and different outlooks shaped by different childhoods. The Queen likes her menus in French, her horses on the flat and her papers in red boxes. The Prince prefers food in English and horses that jump, while his boxes are green. However, to view them as an either/or is to miss the point. While the Queen is comfortably the longest-reigning monarch in British history, the Prince is easily the longest-serving Heir to the Throne. He has been a fulltime figure in public life since leaving the Royal Navy in 1976 – longer than almost any British politician. Between the two of them, they have well over a century of experience on which to draw. That the Queen has made such an impact on the world is in no small part down to the Duke of Edinburgh, their children and now their grandchildren, along with her mother, her sister and her cousins. That the Queen views the Commonwealth as her ‘family of nations’ is because her dealings with it – and with the rest of the planet – have so often been conducted through her own family.