Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch

by Sally Bedell Smith

  The press secretary’s colleagues, none of whom had known about Shea’s dealings with the Sunday Times reporter, concluded that Andrew Neil, the newspaper’s editor, had cooked up a provocative story line, that Freeman had used a combination of cajolery and flattery, and that Shea had gone overboard in a burst of ego and vanity. Even Rupert Murdoch told Times and News of the World columnist Woodrow Wyatt, “I think he has megalomania.” Shea was also venting his own liberal views that friends had heard him express at dinner parties. “He personally didn’t go for Margaret Thatcher,” said Elizabeth II’s friend Angela Oswald. “He put words in the Queen’s mouth that she never said. She was brought up never to get involved in party politics. She would never imply that she favored one politician over another.”

  A week after the story was published, the Queen and her prime minister were at Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh, where Shea was seated between them at a luncheon. He apologized to Thatcher, who simply said, “Don’t worry, dear.” Later that day in a phone conversation, Woodrow Wyatt told Thatcher that the Queen should fire Shea or force him to resign. “Well, I can’t do anything about that,” she said. “It’s up to her. But we will have to see whether new arrangements are made to prevent such a thing happening again. I think they will be.” In a matter of months Shea left his job at the Palace to work in private industry.

  On August 4, 1986, Elizabeth II hosted the first “working dinner” of her reign when she gathered the seven Commonwealth leaders at Buckingham Palace after their first round of mini-summit meetings at 10 Downing Street. Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe called it a “deliberate act by the Queen … to remind us all of our commitment to get on with each other.” Earlier that day, Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda had strenuously attacked Thatcher, unfairly accusing her of sympathizing with apartheid. Deploying remarkable sangfroid, Thatcher calmed him by taking his arm and saying, “Now Kenneth, we must get ourselves lunch before we have another vigorous discussion this afternoon.” That night at dinner, the Queen glanced at Kaunda and said with a twinkle to Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, “How is the emotional one?”

  “There was no doubt that Her Majesty sided with the Commonwealth,” said Brian Mulroney. “But she couldn’t speak out. You had to understand the nuances and body language. She did it by allusion and by indirection. At the dinner she was a great moderating influence on everyone. She led us through an elevated discussion of human rights. I don’t know how much opinion she expressed, but she would nudge everyone in a certain direction.” By the end of the conference, Thatcher joined the other six leaders on a set of recommendations to be presented later to all forty-nine Commonwealth members. “What saved the day,” recalled Brian Mulroney, “was that Margaret was aware Her Majesty certainly wanted some kind of resolution. So we were able to put in three or four financial things that Margaret accepted, which allowed us to move on to the next meeting without rupture.”

  AFTER THEIR ANNUAL Balmoral holiday, the Queen and Prince Philip traveled to the People’s Republic of China in mid-October, the first time a British monarch had visited the Chinese mainland. The planning had begun several years earlier. The Queen read extensive briefs on history and culture, as well as on the habits of Deng Xiaoping, the country’s eighty-two-year-old leader, including his bridge playing and incessant smoking. The royal couple’s itinerary took them from Beijing to Shanghai, Kunming, and the ancient city of X’ian, where they walked among the vast army of life-size terra-cotta warriors that had recently been unearthed by archaeologists.

  Elizabeth II charmed Deng when they were having lunch and she detected that he was becoming restless. Turning to Geoffrey Howe, she said, “I think Mr. Deng would be rather happier if he was told he was allowed to smoke.” Recalled Howe, “I’ve never seen a man light up more cheerfully. It was a very human touch and he appreciated it.” When the Chinese leader let fly into a spittoon several feet away, the Queen “didn’t move a muscle,” said Michael Shea.

  The trip was going smoothly until Philip encountered a group of British students in X’ian and cautioned them that they would get “slitty eyes” if they stayed in China much longer. The tabloid pack howled with glee and filed stories about the duke’s insult to the entire Chinese nation, sweeping aside all the positive coverage of the Queen’s diplomatic bridge building.

  “The British press went nuts,” said one of the Queen’s advisers, “but we couldn’t figure out why after the slitty-eyed remark there was no comment in China.” The courtiers assumed their hosts didn’t want to spoil the visit, but senior officials in the Chinese government said later that they had scarcely noticed because they used the term privately among themselves.

  For Philip, it was the latest in a long line of gaffes attributed to him by the press when he was trying, in the view of his friend Sir David Attenborough, to “puncture the balloon” during earnest royal rounds. “I don’t know why he has the gift of trying to think of something funny that ends up offending,” said one of the Queen’s former private secretaries. “There is a degree of insensitivity, and once the press gets hold, it looks for further examples and ignores everything else.”

  Philip’s wisecracks masked the considerable intellect and surprising dimensions behind his brusque personality, as well as the substantive role he played at the Palace. As chancellor of both Cambridge and Edinburgh universities, he encouraged innovation, especially in technology. “My only claim to fame is that I’m the most experienced visitor of technological facilities,” he once said. “I’ve been doing it professionally for forty years. I can claim to have petted the first microchip on the head.” The thousands of books in his library included substantial collections devoted to religion, wildlife (with a particular passion for ornithology), conservation, sports, and horses as well as poetry and art. His little recognized artistic talent ranged from his oil painting to a flair for designing jewelry, including a gold bracelet entwined with E and P and set with diamonds, rubies, and sapphires that he had given to his wife on their fifth wedding anniversary.

  By 1984 he had written nine books—anthologies of speeches, essays on religion, philosophy, science, and conservation, as well as the complete rules for competition carriage driving. He had also appeared on the documentary series Nature to plea for the preservation of rain forests in Brazil—a cause his son Charles would take up decades later. In 1982 he began driving a Bedford Smith electric van around the Sandringham estate, and the solar panels he installed there were among the first to be used in Britain—an “energy saving,” he conceded, rather than a replacement for other sources.

  “Sometimes I would take an idea to the Queen—not a constitutional issue, because she would ask her private secretary for that,” recalled one of her former courtiers. “She would say, ‘What does Philip think?’ She would make it clear that she wanted you to take the idea to him first, rather than clutter her time with him talking about routine business.”

  In his discussions with his wife’s advisers, “Prince Philip would ask for lots of lines of inquiries,” the courtier said. “She might say, ‘Have you thought of x or y?’ It would not be the same way you would engage with Prince Philip. It is not that the Queen does not have the mind for it, but there is a lot that comes across her desk, and she is not the sort to zero in and peel the skin of the onion away every time until you get to the heart of it. He has a sort of Defence Staff rigor, the ability to pull an idea to bits, find the good parts and the parts that need work. You take it back to the Queen once you know that Prince Philip’s view is there, and then you go over it. You know if he is happy with the idea, she will probably be too.”

  A crucial issue facing the Queen in the mid-1980s was an unprecedented top-to-bottom review of the administration and expenses at Buckingham Palace conducted by David Airlie, who became her Lord Chamberlain on December 1, 1984, at age fifty-nine after retiring as chairman of Schroders, the venerable merchant banking firm. As a lifelong friend, he was a known quantity. One of his favorite photographs shows Ai
rlie with five-year-old Princess Elizabeth on his fifth birthday after his parents had given him a shiny pedal car. When his father suggested he let the princess ride in it, David resisted mightily until he finally yielded. In the picture, she is happily steering the car while the future 13th Earl of Airlie is pushing it with a furious scowl on his face.

  The Queen knew that Airlie was due to retire from banking at the end of November, the same time that Chips Maclean was retiring from the Lord Chamberlain post after thirteen years running the household at Buckingham Palace. Maclean, who had served in the Scots Guards with Airlie, asked if he would consider taking on the job. Soon afterward Airlie was at Sandringham on a shoot when the Queen said, “Do you really want to be Lord Chamberlain?” That was the extent of his job interview with his future boss, but in fact a good deal of thought had been given to his recruitment.

  Airlie was known as a tough and highly successful businessman as well as a debonair aristocrat—just the sort who had the credibility and expertise to bring a fresh eye to Palace operations. He was struck immediately that Elizabeth II was “enormously practical” and “extremely businesslike.” If he wrote her a memorandum requiring an answer, she would invariably return it within twenty-four hours. If not, he would know that she hadn’t made up her mind and wanted “to sit on it and think about it.” Although he had been in her company socially for years, Airlie discerned for the first time her powers of observation during public engagements. “The reason why she moves slowly is that she wants to absorb what’s going on in the room and the people in the room,” he said. “You can see her looking around the room as she walks in and taking it all in and my goodness me what she takes in never ceases to amaze me.”

  After he had spent six months looking and listening, he advised her to hire an outside consultant for an internal review, to ensure that the result would be evenhanded and unassailably professional. With the Queen’s backing, he brought in thirty-five-year-old Michael Peat, a fellow Old Etonian who had graduated from Oxford and received an MBA from the prestigious INSEAD business school in France. Peat had worked for more than a decade at his family’s accounting firm, KPMG, the auditor of the Palace books, and Airlie had gotten to know him while he was at Schroders.

  Under Airlie’s supervision, Peat spent more than a year preparing a 1,393-page report with 188 recommendations for streamlining the household and instituting the “best practices” that were being adopted by many businesses. These included setting up a more professional personnel department and creating the Royal Collection Department to oversee the monarchy’s artistic holdings as well as the retail shops and other commercial enterprises. Among the suggestions were personnel cutbacks, but at the Lord Chamberlain’s insistence to be achieved only by natural attrition rather than by actually firing people.

  Airlie kept both Elizabeth II and Philip informed as the review was under way, although not in detail. The Lord Chamberlain understood that the Queen distrusted change for change’s sake, but was open to well-reasoned argument. By the time the report was issued in December 1986, the Queen accepted everything, and within three years, 162 of the reforms were put into effect.

  WHILE THE MODERNIZERS at the Palace were making progress, they were incapable of controlling the antics of the Queen’s children, three of whom made fools of themselves when they participated in a television game show. The idea came from twenty-three-year-old Prince Edward, who was trying to make his mark in the entertainment business. After graduating from Gordonstoun and earning a degree at Cambridge, he had obediently followed his family’s military tradition by enlisting with the Royal Marines. He was a keen athlete who competed vigorously at court tennis, but temperamentally was shy and sensitive.

  Shortly before finishing the Marines’ six-month training course in January 1987, he unexpectedly announced that he was resigning his commission. His reservations about a military career were more mental than physical, and the press reported that his father had reacted angrily to Edward’s decision. But a letter to the Marine commandant—later leaked to The Sun—showed that Philip had in fact been understanding and sympathetic. “They always try to make him out as a brute,” the Queen Mother told Woodrow Wyatt. “In fact he’s extremely kind to his children and always has been.”

  Edward instead decided to pursue his interest in theater and television. For his first project he proposed a variation on a popular show called It’s a Knockout that pitted contestants dressed in silly costumes against each other in equally ludicrous games. His idea, titled It’s a Royal Knockout, was to raise money for royal charities by featuring his siblings vying with celebrities. Charles declined to participate, and vetoed his wife’s appearance as well, but Anne, Andrew, and Fergie signed on.

  Because of the proposed involvement of family members, Edward needed the approval of his mother. She was dubious. William Heseltine expressed concern that the show could cast the royal family in a poor light, and he and her other top advisers urged her to veto the project. But she succumbed to her impulse to indulge her children and gave Edward her permission. The only caveat was that her children appear as “team captains” rather than participants in the games.

  Televised live on June 19, 1987, the program featured Edward, Anne, Andrew, and Fergie dressed in faux royal costumes. They hopped around shouting on the sidelines while an assortment of British and American actors including John Travolta, Michael Palin, Rowan Atkinson, Jane Seymour, and Margot Kidder engaged in mortifying stunts such as pelting each other with fake hams. During interviews with the royal participants, the show’s hosts lampooned deference with exaggerated bows that made the group look even sillier. The spectacle was more undignified than the courtiers feared, eclipsing the £1 million raised for the World Wildlife Fund, Save the Children Fund, Shelter for the Homeless, and the Duke of Edinburgh International Award for Young People.

  Princess Anne in particular should have known better, having spent the better part of a decade rehabilitating her public image. When she began taking on more royal duties in the early 1970s she had appeared supercilious and short-tempered, particularly with journalists, whom she couldn’t abide. While she was riding in the Badminton Horse Trials, she famously told reporters to “Naff off!” They responded with the nickname “Her Royal Rudeness.” She couldn’t shed her prickly temperament, but she eventually earned widespread respect if not affection for her tireless efforts on behalf of her charities, particularly Save the Children. Just six days before the Knockout program, the Queen had rewarded her daughter’s hard work and professionalism by designating her “The Princess Royal,” a title reserved only for the eldest daughter of the monarch.

  Edward compounded the embarrassment at a press conference after the show. “Well, what did you think?” he asked, prompting laughter among the more than fifty reporters. He was so annoyed by their reaction that he stalked out, and the press called him arrogant as well as foolish. The show not only managed to trivialize the participants, but the institution of the monarchy itself. The consensus at the Palace and among the Queen’s friends was, in the words of Michael Oswald, “It was a disaster and should never have been allowed.”

  Given the family tensions that summer, it was probably a blessing that Britannia was out for a complete refit and unavailable for the annual Western Isles cruise. Instead, the Queen traveled north to spend two nights at the Castle of Mey—the only time she ever stayed overnight—for some quiet time with her eighty-seven-year-old mother. The Queen Mother relinquished her own bedroom, with its views of her prize Aberdeen Angus cattle and North Country Cheviot sheep out in the pastures, and moved into “Princess Margaret’s Bedroom,” which had never actually been slept in by her younger daughter, who dismissed Mey as “cold, drafty, and expensive.”

  The two queens took walks through the nearby woods and down to the sea, and attended the village of Mey’s version of the Highland games on a muddy football field. In the evenings, the Queen Mother hosted jolly dinner parties with friends from the area, including t
he local minister, who brought his guitar. After dinner he played Scottish songs and everyone, including the Queen, sang along with gusto.

  Several months later, Martin Charteris told Roy Strong that the younger generation of the royal family had been “stripped naked” and needed to “put the mystery back.” The faithful former courtier couldn’t have anticipated how much worse the Queen’s problems with her children would get.

  BY THE LATE 1980s, all three marriages were showing signs of strain. In 1985 Diana had taken up with one of her bodyguards, Barry Mannakee, who had a wife and two children, and in November of the following year, over dinner at Kensington Palace, she began an intense romance with Captain James Hewitt of the Life Guards, who had been her riding instructor. Charles, meantime, had resumed his affair with Camilla in 1986 for her “warmth … understanding and steadiness.”

  The tabloids didn’t yet know about these infidelities, but they periodically reported rumors about troubles in the Wales marriage after they stayed in separate bedrooms during a state visit to Portugal and then took a number of holidays apart, even on their sixth anniversary. While the Queen was unaware of the extent of their estrangement, the tension was obvious enough in the autumn of 1987 that she invited them to meet with her one evening in Buckingham Palace shortly before they were due to leave for an official tour of West Germany. She urged them to pull themselves together, and for a time thereafter they seemed to heed her advice.