Queen of the World: Elizabeth II: Sovereign and Stateswoman

by Robert Hardman

  At least ninety nations had sent delegations of one sort or another to witness the historic moment. Beforehand, they were invited to a state banquet of kingclip fillets and chicken supreme, given by President-elect Canaan Banana. Among those present was the UN Secretary-General, Kurt Waldheim. He was in a dreadful mood long before he arrived, having been subjected to a ‘disrespectful’ security search during his flight connection in London. He was equally furious that he and his wife had been given an ‘intolerable’ dinner placement (ie., not on the top table with the Prince of Wales). Waldheim duly lodged a formal complaint with the British mission at the UN.

  The VIPs arrived at Salisbury’s Rufaro Stadium in time for the midnight ceremony. Pumped up by the pre-handover entertainment – led by the god of reggae himself, Bob Marley – some sections of the crowd were already out of control. While Andrew Parker Bowles monitored the ceremonial, his wife sat with the Governor’s daughter, Emma Soames. ‘Emma said to Camilla: “Look at all these people crying”,’ says Parker Bowles. ‘And it was tear gas!’ He was still keeping a close eye on his watch to ensure that, on the stroke of midnight, the Union flag came down for the last time and the Zimbabwean flag was hoisted for the first.

  ‘The people of this country have shown great courage, determination and adaptability,’ the Prince told the crowds, even trying a little Shona, before reading out the message he had brought from the Queen: ‘It is a moment for people of all races and all political persuasions to forget the bitterness of the past.’ In the same spirit, Robert Mugabe urged his compatriots to move on: ‘The wrongs of the past must now stand forgiven and forgotten.’

  The global response was overwhelmingly favourable. ‘Rhodesia may now become another Kenya. It almost became another Angola,’ wrote the Chicago Tribune. ‘The world owes thanks to the British that it did not.’ Still in her first year in office, Mrs Thatcher was delighted by this early diplomatic coup and was on the runway to welcome the handover team back to London. It was certainly a more joyous occasion than the Prince’s final flag-lowering experience, which would take place seventeen years later in a Hong Kong downpour.

  MARRIAGE

  The following year (with Parker Bowles and his Household Cavalry Escort riding alongside their carriage), the Prince and Princess of Wales were married in a wedding ceremony beamed around the world to what was then the largest live television audience for a royal event. They were the most celebrated and closely studied young couple on Earth and every nation – even closed, authoritarian ones – wanted to see them. The couple had yet to undertake any official international tours when the Princess learned that she was expecting Prince William in the summer of 1982. The next spring, all three of them travelled to Australia and New Zealand, the first time that a royal baby had joined a royal tour. For the Prince of Wales, who had by now undertaken more than fifty international tours, it was a familiar ordeal. For the Princess it was exhilarating but, at times, bewildering to be the focus of so much attention from the press and the public. Countries all over the world were keen to extend invitations.

  One royal ritual that involves the whole family is the Queen’s annual Diplomatic Reception. Known as ‘The Dip’, it is the largest indoor event in the Palace calendar, with high commissioners, ambassadors and senior embassy staff, plus spouses from every legation in London, invited to a buffet dinner followed by dancing. First, they all line up for a handshake and a brief chat with the Royal Family. Understandably, everyone wanted a word with the Princess when she made her debut. Malcolm Rifkind, then a junior minister, met her at an event the next day and asked if she had enjoyed her first ‘Dip’. ‘I made a terrible mistake,’ she told him. ‘I was making small talk and all these ambassadors said “You must visit”. I said “I’d love to”. Then, this morning, my office got six calls from embassies saying “The Princess of Wales wants to come. Can we discuss dates?” I won’t do that again!’

  Not long after the Australian triumph and a subsequent Canadian tour, the Princess was expecting Prince Harry, and it would be 1985 before the Prince and Princess toured together again, this time to Italy. The trip included a meeting with the Pope and the embarrassing cancellation of a plan for the Prince and Princess to attend (but not celebrate) Mass at the Vatican. Their staff had neglected to consult the Queen until the last minute. It emerged that she had grave concerns about the constitutional implications for a future Supreme Governor of the Church of England. Here was a reminder that all official foreign tours are ‘on behalf of the Queen’, and there could be no question of representing her at an event that she would not have attended herself.

  The Italian tour established a template for the couple’s tours over the next few years. There would be manic interest in the Princess, her every piece of clothing, her every item of jewellery, her every utterance. As for the Prince, there would be polite curiosity. The Italian tour would also introduce an engagingly eccentric, old-world dimension to princely tours for many years to come. The Prince had invited the portrait painter John Ward to make an artistic record of the Venice leg of the tour, and to give him some lessons in sketching. It was such a success that for many years afterwards, the Prince’s tours would include a travelling artist in the entourage.‡

  As far as the Foreign Office was concerned, the couple were diplomatic gold dust of the highest calibre. The grandest US publications and their high-minded commentators found themselves devoting pages to the Waleses’ 1985 tour of America. Arriving directly from a tour of Australia, the Prince himself could barely think straight, confiding to his diary: ‘We arrived feeling very jet-lagged indeed.’ Even in his befuddled state, however, he retained his sharp eye for the absurdity of these situations. His official biography includes his original take on a very familiar scene, as he described the couple’s arrival on US soil: ‘Great batteries of photographers and TV people rose up like the Philharmonia Chorus mounted on white-painted scaffolds and made a noise like a giant sneezing as all the apertures went off in union.’ It was as eloquent a summary as anything written by the armies of reporters that day.

  The tour is remembered chiefly for two moments: President Ronald Reagan’s absent-minded after-dinner toast to ‘Princess David’ at the White House banquet, and the Princess being spun around the White House dance floor by John Travolta. In fact the President was not the only one being forgetful. As the Prince noted in his journal, he had been so sleep-deprived that he delivered a speech of ‘unutterable nonsense’, forgot to toast the President, sat down and then had to stand up again and raise his glass. As for his own dancing companion, he ended up with a ‘very good American ballerina whose name I forget’. He was sorry not to see an old friend from his bachelor days. ‘I had been rather hoping that Diana Ross would be there,’ he admitted.

  The Prince was, increasingly, beginning to stamp his own mark on these tours. There would be the standard formalities – all these trips were on behalf of the Queen and at the behest of the Foreign Office – but there would be a greater emphasis on princely passions, particularly the environment. In the Eighties he was mocked for talking to plants and for speaking in alarming detail about sewage systems. By the early Nineties, as green issues had evolved from the crankier fringes of political discourse to the cross-party mainstream, the Prince was regarded as a significant international figure in this field, pulling together key players in places like Brazil and Eastern Europe. Most of the media were preoccupied with what the Princess was doing and wearing – and with any signs of strain on the royal marriage. The Foreign Office, meanwhile, would cheerfully have had both of them touring the world non-stop.

  ‘The Prince and Princess of Wales came together in May 1990 and there was terrific excitement because they were a real glamour couple,’ Sir John Birch, former Ambassador to Hungary, told the British Diplomatic Oral History Programme. ‘Everyone took a shine to them. Although at that time things were really on the rocks for them, I didn’t spot it at all. They spent a lot of time with us. We were entranced with her.’ />
  A royal tour can be both a magnifying glass and an amplifier for the central cast, for better or worse. There is an intensity of interest that is seldom experienced at home. It is certainly the worst place to endure a personal crisis. Surrounded by strangers in an unfamiliar setting, on permanent display in front of a travelling media circus, it can be a lonely place. No plane will leave without you, no bag is going to go astray and there will seldom be a traffic jam. Nonetheless, the stresses of the Waleses’ 1992 visits to India and South Korea meant that these would be their last tours together.

  It has now entered public mythology that, during the couple’s tour of India, the Princess made her famous solo trip to the Taj Mahal as some sort of cry for help, a signal to the world that her marriage was in crisis. In fact it was standard practice for the couple to pursue different programmes on a non-ceremonial day. The Taj Mahal had long been in the diary for the Princess. Lynda Chalker, then the Foreign Office Minister for Overseas Development, was accompanying the Prince that day. She sensed that he knew what was coming but was determined to stick to the FCO schedule. ‘The Princess went off and sat in front of the Taj Mahal,’ she recalls. ‘I was with the Prince in the back of the old white Rolls Royce touring health projects that day and he was quite nervous I think. But he was remarkable – mind over matter.’

  Baroness Chalker recalls that there was a certain atmosphere later on, back at the High Commission, after the media impact of the Princess’s visit to the Taj Mahal became apparent. The Princess, she says, was ‘quite silent’ while, as the minister in attendance, she found herself intervening between the Prince and the diplomats. ‘The High Commissioner wanted to give him some advice and I thought it inappropriate,’ says the Baroness, herself a former diplomat. ‘In that world you have to make a very subtle judgement.’

  Even though the royal couple were delivering major dividends for British business, the media narrative was beyond redemption. The publication of Andrew Morton’s portrait of a broken marriage, written with the Princess’s assistance, had made any semblance of normality impossible. The Korea tour was the last straw. When the couple appeared side-by-side looking sad, British papers talked about ‘The Glums’. The fact that they happened to be at a wreath-laying ceremony for those who had died in the Korean War made no difference. ‘They were in a cemetery,’ one exasperated member of the entourage told an accompanying reporter. ‘What did you expect? Cartwheels?’ Soon afterwards, Prime Minister John Major told Parliament that the couple were separating.

  A NEW DIRECTION

  From then on, the Prince and Princess would travel the world apart. While they would no longer deliver quite the same diplomatic impact as they had when together, they would end up covering twice the territory. The following year, before embarking on a trip to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, the Prince made a speech in Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre, which would become a major plank of his foreign policy objectives for decades thereafter. Called ‘Islam and the West’, it was a plea for greater understanding and mutual appreciation between both cultural traditions. He acknowledged the cruelty of the Western invasions of the Crusades and the Napoleonic Wars and the vital contribution of Islam to Western society and science. Western views of Islam, he warned, had been ‘hijacked by the extreme and the superficial’. When he arrived in the Gulf some days later, he was embraced as both bridge-builder and friend. His speech was played and replayed on television networks – as would still be the case when he returned on future tours. There would be many visits to this part of the world.

  ‘Charles is very good in the Arab world,’ says one senior Foreign Office figure who worked with the Prince in the Middle East. ‘It is mainly the continuity thing. They are always complaining to ministers: “But I only just got to know your predecessor”. They like continuity. That is the number one draw with the Prince.’

  The Prince’s track record as a patron of Islamic foundations – even having lessons in Arabic – gives him an added eminence in the region. ‘I don’t think he’s given the credit he deserves,’ says Jack Straw, the former Foreign Secretary, who sits on the strategy advisory committee of the Prince’s Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. ‘There is that unsung side of Prince Charles which is very important in helping to give British Muslims and those around the world the sense that people understand their religion and respect it.’ Tom Fletcher, author of The Naked Diplomat and a former British Ambassador to Lebanon, says that the Prince was very much an asset in the region, even in postings – like his own – which were deemed too dangerous for a royal visit. ‘I popped in to see the Prince a couple of times at Clarence House. He was stunning on the interfaith stuff,’ says Fletcher. ‘To see him debate the obscure aspects of Islam with a Sunni cleric was extraordinary.’

  For many years, the Prince would be something of a royal pathfinder. Before the Queen’s historic state visits to places like Poland, Hungary and Russia, the Prince went first, acting as a test pilot for the monarch. Sir Brian Fall, British Ambassador to Russia, entertained the Prince when he became the most senior member of the Royal Family since the Russian Revolution to visit St Petersburg. As Fall soon discovered, the Prince could be surprisingly outspoken, as when he was shown a new development in the city. ‘He went around saying “What an ugly building” and “How could it be allowed in a great city like St Petersburg?” and it then turned out that the main people like the quantity surveyor and the engineers involved were Brits. So it wasn’t the best trade promotion.’

  As ever, the pace of the Prince’s visit was frantic. Delmar Fall, the Ambassador’s wife, recalls a familiar hiccup in the arrangements. ‘We had a problem when Prince Charles suddenly cancelled lunch!’ she recalls. Her remonstrations with the Prince’s Private Secretary about the needs of the rest of the entourage fell on deaf ears. ‘I said: “But you’ve got thirty people here who aren’t going to get lunch. You can’t just expect them to go to McDonald’s”.’

  ‘He’s not the most enthusiastic traveller and he likes to travel in some style so his visits are quite serious events when they happen. He has quite strong views,’ says a senior Foreign Office mandarin. ‘But he can be very good in difficult situations. At a time when we were having a problem with the Saudis in the early years of the Cameron government, the relationship with the King of Saudi Arabia was not in a good state. There was a problem over arms deals and a kind of misunderstanding. Prince Charles did a very good job of picking up the pieces there.’

  The Prince does not travel light. He is a firm believer that if there is to be a royal visit somewhere, it must be done to an appropriate standard. His critics ask why he needs to travel with a team that includes two valets, two typists and a chef; his supporters point out that he and the rest of the Royal Family are fairly modest compared to many world leaders. The French President, for example, flies around in a customised presidential airliner purchased by former premier Nicolas Sarkozy and equipped with a bespoke £65,000 baguette oven. In 2017, it emerged that President Emmanuel Macron’s administration was looking to replace the President’s Airbus A330 with a new Airbus A319 (though the baking arrangements have yet to be finalised). The Queen, by contrast, is the only head of state of a G7 nation without her own designated plane. She, the Prince of Wales and the rest of the Royal Family share a range of aircraft with the chiefs of the Armed Forces, the Prime Minister and other government ministers.

  One senior ex-member of the Prince’s team says that diplomats would often be surprised by the size of his entourage. ‘The first thing every embassy would ask was the size of the royal party – which could be around twenty people – and then they would always say: “Why does he need so many people?” I would say: “Let’s defer that conversation until after the visit and see if you still think it’s a problem.” And we would never have any complaints because he always delivered. There was always a charisma when he arrived. He never under-performed. No one was dissatisfied.’

  All the Prince’s visits are orchestrated via the Royal Visits
Committee at the Foreign Office, which includes the most senior civil servants and royal Private Secretaries. Its members know to expect a certain amount of haggling from the Prince’s team. Like the Queen, he must follow ministerial advice. Yet, he still enjoys some leeway in arranging the itinerary. Before one visit to Japan, for example, the Prince was keen to explore parts of the country he had not seen before. As he told one of his Private Secretaries: ‘I’ll do it if I can spend 70 per cent of the time outside Tokyo.’

  There was some similar bartering in 1996 when the Prince was despatched on a tour of Central Asian republics which had been part of the old Soviet Union. Though some of his hosts had a deeply suspect record on human rights, there were important commercial opportunities for British companies in this newly emerging market. The Prince’s staff proposed a schedule that seemed closely aligned to the old Silk Road between China and the West. ‘I suspect it was his own determination to see Samarkand,’ says the Foreign Secretary of that time, Malcolm Rifkind, with a knowing smile. Sure enough, the ancient Uzbek cities of Samarkand and Bukhara featured prominently on the final itinerary.

  What some of his office called ‘The Stans Tour’ was another groundbreaking royal mission to places like Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, nations that had never seen a royal visitor before. Perhaps the most challenging leg of the visit was in Turkmenistan, where the Prince was invited to spend the evening at the pink palace of the country’s horse-obsessed dictator, President Saparmurat Niyazov. As well as banning dogs and pop music, he was in the habit of presenting visiting dignitaries with horses, a source of repeated diplomatic problems. Sir Brian Fall, the acting Ambassador, and his staff were left to sort out the mess after Niyazov gave a horse to the British Prime Minister during a stopover in 1993. John Major then flew home, leaving his gift in Turkmenistan. The French Embassy was in the same position as it wondered what do with the horse given to President Mitterrand. Fall arranged for both animals to be taken by train to Moscow (their grooms were robbed of all their money and tickets en route) and then flown to Britain. ‘The French horse bit the British horse, of course,’ he recalls. Even then, there was no obvious role for Major’s highly-strung stallion.§ ‘Typical bloody military,’ laughs Fall. ‘We knew perfectly well these horses were not fit for military duty and we told London. There was a big to-do.’