Queen of the World: Elizabeth II: Sovereign and Stateswoman

by Robert Hardman

  PRINCE CHARMING

  Ahead of that 2018 summit, some political commentators and critics of the Prince of Wales had warned that the Commonwealth nations would not take kindly to the British Crown interfering in its future leadership arrangements. One newspaper claimed that the Prince of Wales had not shown enough interest in the job; that he had not done enough to deserve it. Yet, those making these arguments, like generals fighting the previous war, had not noticed that the world takes a different view of the Prince of Wales these days. The old narratives – that he is either a restless royal meddler or half of the most famous marriage breakdown in history – are both well out of date as the Prince enters his eighth decade. He is as busy as ever, but contented and, increasingly, seen as an extension of the Queen, a de facto head of state without in any way being a replacement. He can stand in for his mother without encroaching on her dignity or treading on her toes. That is because all this has happened with her blessing.

  A few months before the London summit, a distinctive new type of royal tour unfolds in Asia – the semi-state visit. In the space of a fortnight, the Prince and the Duchess of Cornwall will undertake more than fifty different engagements in four Commonwealth countries. The idea has been to create extra momentum ahead of the summit and to secure the enthusiastic involvement of the most important Commonwealth nation of all – India.

  Day One kicks off in a sweltering Singapore, with the Prince and the Duchess setting the pace from the outset. In the first few hours the Prince meets the President and Prime Minister of Singapore, pays his respects at the country’s Cenotaph, attends an inter-faith event at a local mosque. He then visits a nature reserve which is going to provide the photo of the day, but the Prince wisely keeps his distance when a game warden plucks a snake from a nearby tree. It looks suspiciously as if it might have been put there for his benefit and is a harmless bronzeback. Even so, the Prince is content just to look. As the royal tour doctor, Professor Charles Deakin, later explains: ‘On the whole, it’s best not to touch snakes on tour.’ The Duchess peels off for a separate engagement devoted to one of her key concerns, improving child literacy.

  Every day of this tour, and every other tour, will involve this blend of bilateral schmoozing, princely passions, a couple of photo-opportunities (seldom enjoyed) and a small element of sightseeing, plus the occasional grand set-piece event. Whenever possible, lunch will be omitted from the schedule. The Prince takes a dim view of lunch. ‘I’m like a camel,’ he is fond of saying, often to the chagrin of those in the entourage who do not feel very camel-like by the time they get to lunchtime. The Duchess of Cornwall clearly disagrees, too, having become the proud patron of a charity dedicated to food and friendship that calls itself The Big Lunch. The Prince prefers a very small lunch, if there must be lunch at all, usually a quick egg sandwich in the back of the royal car.

  Day One concludes with a presidential dinner of wagyu beef and fried lobster, at which the Prince talks at length about Singapore’s part in the Commonwealth story. He points out that the very first Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting was held here and talks of old links with Britain. He also recalls being entertained on one of his first visits to the country, in the days of Lee Kuan Yew, the father of the current Prime Minister. ‘I seem to recall it was described as “a small lunch” in the programme, but it turned out to include over twenty courses!’ he says. Therein, perhaps, lies the key to the princely dislike of big meals in the middle of the day. It’s an engaging speech, gently reminding the audience that the Prince’s local connections go right back to the man revered as the founder of modern Singapore.

  The following day includes a visit to a wet-fish market, inner-city gardening projects and a tour of a major research centre established by the British entrepreneur, James Dyson, who employs more than a thousand people here. The Prince poses for the photographers as he brandishes a Dyson vacuum cleaner, and is taken into an acoustic test centre lined with rather alarming sound insulation. ‘Oh Lord,’ he jokes. ‘The eggbox treatment!’ There’s a lunchtime visit to a restaurant that employs young people from troubled backgrounds (mineral water only for the guest of honour) and then a tour of the grand old buildings that used to house Singapore’s Supreme Court and its government. These have been converted into a civic centre and the country’s new National Gallery. Unlike its namesake in London, this one has no ‘monstrous carbuncle’ – as the Prince famously described the proposed extension of London’s National Gallery in 1984 – and its French architect turns out to be a fan of the Prince’s views on architecture. To cap it all, he is shown the room where his favourite uncle, Lord Mountbatten, took the Japanese surrender in 1945. It would be hard to contrive an engagement that ticks more princely boxes. The Duchess, meanwhile, is touring a community centre where she turns her hand to art, flower-arranging and cookery and drops in on a yoga class for senior citizens. They all obediently freeze in position as she walks in. She spots a ‘back brick’ and tells her guide that she never travels without one. ‘Healthy ageing – that’s what we all need!’ she says cheerfully.

  The British High Commissioner’s residence is packed on two floors for an evening reception of several hundred people, all of whom will get a royal handshake and a chat. Again there is a big Queen-and-Commonwealth dimension to the evening. The royal couple meet a local Queen’s Young Leader, a winner of the Queen’s Commonwealth Essay Prize and Dr Anthony Yee, chairman of the local branch of the Royal Commonwealth Society. His organisation virtually disappeared, he says, when British foreign policy switched its focus from the Commonwealth to Europe. Now, after Britain’s Brexit referendum, it is thriving again.

  From Singapore, the Prince’s RAF Voyager (the newish fuel tanker that doubles up as a VIP aircraft for British government use) flies on to Brunei, home of the staunchly Anglophile Sultan of Brunei. This is home to 750 members of the British Armed Forces – many of them Gurkhas – who help protect the Sultan’s borders. After a parade and a trip to the British High Commission, the couple are due at the Sultan of Brunei’s Palace, the gold-domed Istana Nurul Iman. Visitors walk through a series of fountain-filled courtyards into a densely carpeted cross between a luxury hotel and a university campus. Unseen is the Sultan’s famous car collection in the voluminous underground garages below. The two royal families are old friends. ‘You don’t look a day older,’ snorts the Prince as he is greeted by the Sultan. The Duchess disappears for separate talks with the Raja Isteri, the Queen consort. Later, they all meet up with the extended Royal Family for what is on the itinerary as ‘tea’, but is closer to a state banquet. In the octagonal dining room, beneath an eclectic art collection including a Picasso, the fifty guests sit at round tables. The royal staff have just been through with a ruler, measuring a gap of precisely 10 inches between the armrests of every royal chair. Umpteen courses, including lobster dumplings, beef floss and banana in coconut cream, are served on gold plates. The Sultan has arranged a similarly extensive spread in an adjacent courtyard for the rest of the British entourage, right down to the bag-carriers and camera crews. There are few takers for the RAF’s Dundee cake as everyone climbs back on board the Voyager to fly on to Kuala Lumpur.

  Malaysia is a major Commonwealth economy – and a monarchy to boot – which has never been visited by the Prince before, partly because of the country’s mercurial bilateral relationship with Britain. However, the Prince’s reputation has preceded him at the Islamic Arts Museum. Everyone is well aware of his long track record in promoting links between Islam and the West, and he has even brought along a senior academic, Dr Afifi al-Akiti, from his Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. There is big applause when the Prince unveils his own signature in Arabic (he was practising it the night before) and then makes a speech about the contribution of Islamic scholars to geometric understanding. From eternal truths about cosmic patterns, he moves swiftly on to drains and road-building at a conference on town planning. He is equally in his element here, too, and has brought along Jeremy Cross from hi
s Prince’s Foundation for Building Community, although the Prince does most of the talking. ‘I’ve been trying for years to persuade the utility companies to put their cables and everything else in one trench so that they don’t keep digging up the road,’ he tells one group of town planners as he goes on to outline his philosophy. ‘We should always start by putting the human being – the pedestrian – at the centre of things so that you have a walkable, liveable area that’s attractive.’

  He is soon out of the capital, Kuala Lumpur, and on his way to a university campus run by the University of Nottingham. It is staging the first ever Commonwealth Youth Summit, and the Prince is welcomed like a rock star as he appears on the balcony of the main building and then works his way through to the main hall. On to a research centre and another engagement that could hardly be more him. The research centre runs the ‘Forgotten Foods Network’, dedicated to creating new food sources from neglected crops that were used by the Mayans, Aztecs and other ancient cultures. The Prince, who has signs banning genetically modified crops at his Highgrove home, is thrilled. He tastes experimental dishes such as dragonfruit tortellini with turmeric yogurt and a curry-flavoured crisp made from desert weed. ‘I’m waiting for an explosion,’ he says excitedly.

  Next stop is tea at the Agong’s Palace with the King of Malaysia, Sultan Muhammad V (the throne rotates between the country’s nine royal houses). They have plenty to discuss. They last met in 2015 when the King visited the Prince’s Islamic centre in Oxford, a side of his life that is becoming quite a theme on this tour. Few Western VIPs come here with this depth of knowledge about Islamic and Malaysian culture. It helps to explain why there is such a big turnout for the main event of the tour. The UK has organised a series of events around the sixtieth anniversary of independence for the former Federation of Malaya. It has been a turbulent six decades – at one point Malaysia had a ‘Buy British last’ trade boycott – but now relations are thriving. The Prince is the host at a black-tie UK banquet for 550 leading national figures, among them Jimmy Choo, the Malaysian-born shoe legend who moved to Britain as a struggling student. He has never forgotten that he was only able to start his shoe empire thanks to a £40-a-week grant from the Prince’s Trust. No wonder he remains eternally grateful to the Prince, whom he proudly refers to as his ‘godbrother’.

  Most unusually, to the delight of British diplomats, all nine of the country’s extremely competitive royal houses are in the same room tonight, along with the Prime Minister and most of the government. The turnout far exceeds a recent dinner for President Hollande of France. The Malaysian press are drawing comparisons with the last visit of a similar magnitude – that of President Obama. It is clear that, as far as Malaysia is concerned, the Prince is a state visitor in all but name.

  The British High Commissioner, Malaysian-born Victoria Treadell, has organised a suitably bilateral menu of Scottish smoked salmon with Malaysian lime and ‘Rendang beef Wellington’. Two Irish Guardsmen have just been extracted from a jungle training exercise in Thailand and flown up here in ceremonial uniform and bearskins to lend an extra royal flourish to the proceedings.

  In his speech, the Prince hails Malaysia as a ‘powerful model’ to the region and talks up its close ties with Britain in defence, education and business, as well as its importance to the Commonwealth. He reminds his audience of what can be achieved by motivated young people, pointing to the example of a beaming Jimmy Choo. Many in the room had no idea of the key role that the Prince has played in helping one of Malaysia’s most famous brand names get off the ground. The evening has exceeded Foreign Office expectations.

  There will be several trips into the depths of this large nation of states and sultanates. The Prince flies north to extend birthday greetings to the Sultan of Perak, an Oxford-and Harvard-educated ex-banker who lives in another gold-domed palace, and thence to a wildlife conference in Royal Belum State Park. Afterwards he is taken for a boat ride to look for wildlife in the rainforest around the lake. Thanks to the armed guards combing the forest for anything resembling a security threat, there isn’t a creature to be seen.

  There is also a visit to a Commonwealth cemetery in Taiping. Wherever they go in the world, the Royal Family will first consult the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which honours 1.7 million Commonwealth war dead in 23,000 locations across more than 150 nations and territories. In this one cemetery alone lie 864 Commonwealth troops who died fighting the Japanese in the Second World War. A lone piper, in Malaysian uniform, plays a faultless lament. The Prince pauses at the grave of Squadron Leader Arthur Scarf, VC, who died in 1941 as the Japanese were advancing on Singapore. Having taken to the skies in the RAF’s only airworthy Blenheim bomber, he was mortally wounded but managed to get his crew home unscathed. Among the medical team working on him was his pregnant wife, who gave blood in a desperate but hopeless attempt to save him and then lost her baby soon afterwards. His headstone reads: ‘His love of life was only exceeded by the courage encompassing his death.’ The cemetery is beautifully maintained, as these places always are, a source of profound solace to loved ones far away. As the nearby headstone of Warrant Officer Class 1 James Ednie of the Black Watch puts it: ‘Unforgotten. A little plot for ever Scotland.’ The Prince is momentarily speechless, as moved as everyone else as he walks down the rows of those who fell in the service of King and country.

  This tour should also have included Burma, but that has fallen off the schedule following the recent persecution of its Rohingya Muslim minority. So the Prince and the Duchess fly home via India and a meeting with the most powerful man in the Commonwealth, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Of the thousands of handshakes on this tour, this is the most important. It was India that led to the creation of the modern Commonwealth and that today accounts for half its population. Delhi has rather lost interest of late, seeing the Commonwealth as a diminished entity with some awkward colonial baggage. It has been nearly a decade since an Indian Prime Minister last attended a Commonwealth summit. On behalf of the Queen, the Prince formally invites Modi to London – an invitation that would not have been offered unless the Prince was expecting a ‘Yes’. It is a coup for both the British government, as hosts, and for the Commonwealth.

  The Prince and the Duchess return home in time for Remembrance Sunday at the Cenotaph, where the Prince will stand in for the Queen once more. There has been no diminution of the Queen’s immense global stature. Yet the aura around the Prince has unquestionably changed in recent years. He is no longer regarded as an understudy, a substitute, a probationer. World leaders now see him as one of their own.

  APPRENTICE

  The Prince’s first overseas tour would come at the age of five, when he and three-year-old Princess Anne sailed off in the brand-new Royal Yacht Britannia to meet the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh on the homebound stage of their great Coronation tour of the Commonwealth. Thereafter there was little travelling further than Scotland or the Isle of Wight until the Prince reached the age of seventeen. He was then despatched to spend two terms at Timbertop, the Outward Bound arm of Australia’s prestigious Geelong Grammar School. Though it involved a lot of rough living under canvas and some memorably unpleasant insects, the Prince would look back on it as the happiest part of his education. Compared to the spartan conditions at his Scottish public school, Gordonstoun, it was delightful, as he informed family and friends – including the Prime Minister’s wife. Lord (Robin) Butler, who served as Private Secretary to Harold Wilson, says there was some confusion in Downing Street when Mary Wilson received a letter from Australia with no address, but clearly from someone who knew her well enough to sign off as ‘Yours, Charles’. ‘The staff went to Mary and she at once realised it was from Prince Charles,’ says Lord Butler. ‘The very fact he felt warm enough to write to her says something.’

  The Prince would retain a lifelong bond with Australia, and returned in 1967 on his first official overseas visit in order to represent the Queen at the funeral of former Prime Minister Harol
d Holt. Having been invested as Prince of Wales at Caernarfon Castle in 1969, he would now begin travelling in earnest. Although his finals were fast approaching at Cambridge University in May 1970, the Prince was still expected to accompany his parents and sister to Australia and New Zealand on that lively tour during which the ‘walkabout’ entered the English language. He would return alone, via Japan, to attend Expo 70 in Tokyo and have dinner with Emperor Hirohito and the Imperial Family. No sooner had he graduated from Cambridge than the process of moulding a future Head of the Commonwealth began in earnest.

  On 23rd June 1970, the Prince was invited to spend a day at Marlborough House, the home of the Commonwealth Secretariat. Files in the Commonwealth archives show that it was no mere courtesy visit. ‘The Prince does not particularly need to meet young people during his visit,’ said an internal memo. He had clearly been well briefed in advance – perhaps even by the Queen – because no sooner had he sat down for lunch than the Prince began grilling the Secretary-General, Arnold Smith, on the upcoming Commonwealth summit in Singapore the following year. He was especially keen to find out whether a decision had been made on the Queen’s attendance. Given the Queen’s eternal displeasure at not being asked, it is more than tempting to regard this as a planted question. Smith diplomatically replied that ‘no decision had been taken’.