Blair scarcely knew the Queen at that stage, so during the week after Diana’s death there had been fewer direct interactions between prime minister and monarch than was generally believed. Blair and his aides did not overtly stage-manage Elizabeth II and Philip, as depicted in the film The Queen. But they did help guide the family’s thinking through close coordination with receptive Buckingham Palace courtiers.
In part because Blair had come to know Diana personally, he understood her character and had more quickly grasped the impact of her death than either the Queen or her advisers. Sensing that the outpouring of grief was turning into a “mass movement for change,” Blair decided his job was to “protect the monarchy.” It’s impossible to gauge the degree to which his “People’s Princess” comment, however well-meaning, contributed to the volatile atmosphere. But had he been standoffish or negative, the monarchy would doubtless have sustained greater damage. Instead he tried to channel popular anger and recast the Queen’s image in a more positive way. The Queen’s courtiers were pivotal, but it also took Blair’s behind-the-scenes prodding, including his use of Prince Charles as an intermediary, to push the Queen into acting in a way that went against her grain. In her eighth decade, Elizabeth II had come to understand that she needed to loosen the grip of tradition to keep the monarchy strong.
“Time is not my dictator,” said the
Queen Mother. “I dictate to time.
I want to meet people.”
The Queen with her sister, Margaret, and her mother on the Buckingham Palace balcony during the celebration of the Queen Mother’s hundredth birthday, August 2000. Press Association Images
EIGHTEEN
Love and Grief
IN THE AUTUMN, WHEN THE QUEEN RETURNED TO LONDON, SHE could look forward to celebrating a happy occasion for a change: the opening of the magnificently restored state rooms at Windsor Castle in time for her golden wedding anniversary on November 20, 1997, five years to the day from the devastating fire. The prime movers behind the restoration were Philip and Charles, who worked together on a project that reflected their common interests in art, architecture, and design. They shared a passion for painting, and both favored landscapes. Charles worked in watercolors on a small scale in a soft palette with delicate brushstrokes, while Philip painted in oils, using vivid colors and bold strokes with a more contemporary feel.
Both men appreciated the sort of traditional approach to architecture and exacting standards of craftsmanship required for the ornate rooms at Windsor. Philip chaired the overall advisory committee for the massive project, which included restoring five state rooms to their previous splendor. Charles was in charge of a design subcommittee that focused on reimagining rooms in areas that had been destroyed. The Queen offered ideas to her husband and her son, and she made all the final decisions.
To replace the gutted private chapel, Charles supervised the neo-Gothic design of an octagonal Lantern Lobby and adjacent private chapel in medieval style. Philip’s sketches inspired the creation of the chapel’s new stained glass windows with images of a salvage worker, a firefighter, and St. George stabbing an evil flame-breathing dragon. When Philip disagreed with the proposal for a decorative floor in the Lantern Lobby that he thought would be too noisy and slippery, Charles came up with a compromise calling for a carpet woven with the Garter Star to be used when necessary. Charles also oversaw a “modern reinterpretation” of a medieval hammer beam roof in the majestic St. George’s Hall.
Originally scheduled to be completed by the spring of 1998, the restoration was finished six months ahead of time and came in £3 million under the estimated £40 million budget. The Queen marked the completion with a party in the restored rooms on November 14 for 1,500 contractors who worked on the project. During the reception, a Pakistani carpenter approached her and said, “Your Majesty, Your Majesty, please come with me. I want you to meet someone.” He took her over to his brother for an introduction. As she was chatting with someone else, the carpenter returned and again said, “Your Majesty, please come with me.” He then introduced her to a second brother who had helped carve the castle’s woodwork. Rather than being offended, she was amused by his enthusiastic audacity. Recounting the story to a senior Indian diplomat several years later in a flawless South Asian accent, she laughed and said, “I began to worry that he might have 12 brothers!”
The wedding anniversary commemoration reflected a reverence for tradition as well as a new openness adopted by the royal family after Diana’s death. On Wednesday, November 19, Philip paid tribute to his wife and family in a speech at a luncheon for the couple hosted by the Lord Mayor of London at the Guildhall. With the Queen seated next to him, Philip observed that “tolerance is the one essential ingredient of any happy marriage.… It is absolutely vital when the going gets difficult.” His wife, he said, “has the quality of tolerance in abundance.” Mindful of the family’s recent “tribulations,” he also singled out his children for praise, saying they “have all done rather well under very difficult and demanding circumstances.”
On the 20th, Elizabeth II and Philip attended a service of thanksgiving at Westminster Abbey, where they had walked down the aisle fifty years earlier. In addition to their four children and six grandchildren, the royal couple was honored by seven kings, ten queens, a grand duke, twenty-six princes, and twenty-seven princesses, as well as fifty other couples, all ordinary citizens, who were also married in 1947. With memories still fresh from Diana’s funeral eleven weeks earlier, there was an added undercurrent of solemnity, especially when William and Harry arrived with their father. In a “throat-catching moment,” George Carey blessed the Queen and Philip as they knelt before him. “I found myself wondering if our nation was actually worthy of their devotion and unflagging sense of duty,” the archbishop recalled.
The nod to modernity came afterward at a “people’s banquet,” a luncheon orchestrated in New Labour style and hosted by Tony Blair. Rather than having the royal couple at a head table on a dais surrounded by luminaries, the prime minister invited 350 guests from all walks of life and placed them at round tables without regard for rank or privilege. Dining with the Queen were an autoworker, a policeman, a jockey, and a maintenance worker, and she was seated next to a twenty-four-year-old leader of the Girl Guides.
In a speech at the luncheon, Blair thanked Elizabeth II anew for her conduct during “the terrible test” of Diana’s death when “hurtful things” were said. He understood “how moved you were by the outpouring of grief.… You sought, at all times … to help and do the best by the boys, and that is the way it should have been and was.” He affirmed his support for “a strong and flourishing monarchy” led by a Queen representing “those values of duty and service that are timeless.” It was on this occasion that Blair memorably hailed Elizabeth II as “a symbol of unity in a world of insecurity where nothing stays the same. You are our Queen. We respect and cherish you. You are, simply, the Best of British.”
In her speech, the Queen not only praised her husband but expanded on the notion of “lessons to be drawn” that she had first broached in her remarks about Diana. Surveying her five decades of married life, she remarked on such innovations as television, mobile telephones, and the Internet, which “to be honest” meant in her case that she had “listened to other people talking about surfing the Net.”
She reflected on the “huge constitutional difference between a hereditary monarchy and an elected government,” both of which depend on the consent of the people. “That consent, or lack of it,” she said, “is expressed for you, Prime Minister, through the ballot box. It is a tough, even brutal, system but at least the message is a clear one for all to read.”
For the royal family, “the message is often harder to read, obscured as it can be by deference, rhetoric or the conflicting currents of public opinion. But read it we must.” She said she had done her best “with Prince Philip’s constant love and help to interpret it correctly” and assured her audience that they would “tr
y together to do so in the future.” She expressed gratitude for the support she received after Diana’s death. “It is you, if I may now speak to all of you directly, who have seen us through,” she said, “and helped us to make our duty fun.”
She closed with a frank but tender homage to Philip, who “all too often, I fear … has had to listen to me speaking.” She acknowledged his help in crafting her speeches—expressing his views “in a forthright manner.” Admitting his unwillingness to “take easily to compliments,” she said he had, “quite simply, been my strength and stay all these years, and I, and his whole family, and this and many other countries, owe him a debt greater than he would ever claim, or we shall ever know.”
The Queen’s marital milestone inevitably prompted speculation in the press about how much her celebrated tolerance had been tested. For years there had been rumors that Philip had a roving eye, and in 1996 author Sarah Bradford had stated flatly in her biography of the Queen that “Philip’s obvious flirtations and his affairs” had made “no difference to a marriage as firm and indeed fond as theirs.”
Philip had been linked to women in high aristocratic circles—usually close friends of the couple such as Jane, the Countess of Westmorland, who had been a great beauty; Penny Romsey, who often rode with the duke in carriage driving competitions; his (and the Queen’s) cousin Princess Alexandra; and Sacha Abercorn, wife of the 5th Duke of Abercorn, a contemporary of the Prince of Wales. In none of those cases was there any evidence of an affair.
Martin Charteris sought to put the gossip to rest shortly before the golden wedding anniversary in an interview with the Daily Mail’s Anne de Courcy. “I simply don’t know of anyone who has claimed to be his mistress or to have had a particularly close relationship,” he said in early November 1997. “If anybody had enjoyed such a relationship, do you think for one minute we wouldn’t have heard about it? He’s a man, he likes pretty girls, he loves fun. But I am absolutely certain there was nothing that would in any way have shaken that marriage.”
Patricia Brabourne, the royal couple’s Mountbatten cousin, subsequently explained Philip’s relationship with her daughter-in-law, Penny Romsey, by saying that she is “Philip’s great friend. The friendship there is largely based on their carriage driving. She goes and is visible.” Brabourne was also “absolutely certain” that he had been faithful to the Queen. “He would never behave badly,” she said. “He has always loved the Queen.… He wouldn’t want to do anything to hurt her.”
Sacha Abercorn spoke out as well, with the same objective of shooting down the rumors. She told author Gyles Brandreth that she and Philip had become friendly in the 1970s through their mutual interest in the writings of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, about whom they had “riveting conversations.” When Brandreth asked why she was seen holding hands with the duke on the island of Eleuthera, she explained, “It was a passionate friendship, but the passion was in the ideas.… I did not go to bed with him. It probably looked like that to the world … but it didn’t happen.… He isn’t like that.… He needs a playmate and someone to share his intellectual pursuits.”
The Queen, according to her cousin Pamela Hicks, “doesn’t mind when he flirts. He flirts with everyone, and she knows it means absolutely nothing.” She recalled the time Philip “bitterly said to my sister that he has never had an affair since he has been married.” He vehemently added, “The way the press related it, I had affairs with all these women. I might as well have and bloody enjoyed it.” Even biographer Sarah Bradford eventually backed off, telling The Times, “quite honestly, what real evidence is there? … The Queen relies on him tremendously. Through all those troubles they certainly did get closer. They are very close. They understand each other.”
THE ROYAL COUPLE said goodbye to one of the most visible emblems of their partnership when Britannia was decommissioned on December 11, 1997, in Portsmouth. (The yacht would later be made into a museum in Edinburgh.) Before the service, the royal family and courtiers went aboard for a last luncheon in the State Dining Room, with its long mahogany table, Hepplewhite chairs, and travel mementos, among them a narwhal tusk, a Sioux peace pipe, and a whalebone Philip had retrieved from a beach on Deception Island in Antarctica. The Queen and her entourage walked around her “country house at sea” and bid farewell to the ship’s company. “It was awful and she cried,” said one of her courtiers.
The quayside service, conducted by naval chaplains and attended by 2,200 former Britannia officers and yachtsmen, was seen by a television audience of millions. As the band of the Royal Marines marched away, they played “Auld Lang Syne” and saluted the yacht one final time. The Queen, dressed in red, raised a black-gloved hand to her eye and wiped away a tear. Some commentators in the press criticized her for weeping over a mere ship. But to the Queen and her family, Britannia held decades of memories. “It had not just been for work,” said a lady-in-waiting. “It had been their floating home.” More than anything, the royal yacht “represented freedom to her,” said one of the Queen’s relatives.
BY EARLY 1998 the royal household had begun to take concrete steps toward applying some of the lessons from the era of Diana. After support for a republic peaked in the days following her death, it dropped to 12 percent after the Queen’s televised speech, and in the following month it returned to around 19 percent, where it had been for three decades. But the volatility of opinion during that period sent deputy private secretary Robin Janvrin to visit Robert Worcester, the American expatriate professor who had founded the MORI poll.
Since Michael Shea’s appointment as press secretary to the Queen in 1978, her advisers had been periodically meeting with Worcester over lunch in London to pick his brain about trends in public opinion toward the monarchy. Now Janvrin told Worcester that he had a budget for private polling and wanted to hire MORI. In briefings at the Palace, the pollsters assessed support for the monarchy versus a republic by region, gender, age, social class, and other demographic characteristics. Through focus groups they also developed a list of ten attributes (promoting Britain abroad, importance to Britain, highly respected, supporting and promoting charitable institutions, hardworking, in touch with lives of ordinary people, well advised, good value for money, up to date, relevant) and assessed their relative importance to the public.
The two main concerns among the Queen’s senior counselors at the outset were that the monarchy was losing support among the young, and that the royal family was perceived to be “too myopic and inward looking.” In general, the research, which included some focus groups as well as traditional surveys, established that support for the monarchy is a stable and enduring value for the British people, transcending the headline of the moment—knowledge that gave the Palace greater confidence and enabled it to take a long view. The results of the private polling over the first several years also confirmed that while support for a republic among people in their twenties ranged from 28 percent to 35 percent, by the time they reached their mid-thirties, they would “revert to the mean” of 19 percent. “People start thinking about the future, about raising kids, living in a decent country,” said Robert Worcester. “That is why the monarchy is such a deep value and so consistent.” The most conspicuous area of weakness for the royal family was the perception that they were out of touch, which was held by more than a third of the British people when polling began in the late 1990s.
While Palace officials found much of the research reassuring, they began to develop strategies to respond to public opinion and show that the royal family was “in touch.” Surveys helped the Palace choose places the Queen should visit and themes for events she sponsored. They upgraded the press secretary’s job to “communications secretary” and recruited a public relations professional from British Gas, thirty-nine-year-old Simon Lewis, on a two-year secondment, with half his salary paid by his corporate employer. He first met the Queen and Prince Philip on a Friday afternoon at the end of May 1998.
“My abiding impression was how remarkably open t
hey were,” Lewis recalled. “We had a discussion of what I would do and what the challenges were. It was more discursive than I had anticipated.” Lewis was struck “by the interaction between the two of them, how comfortable and easy they were, and how they had both thought about this role together. It was a very balanced discussion.” Philip in particular “had thought carefully about the communications area. The probing discussion was led by him. He was very interested in the nascent website, and he was pushing the idea of direct contact with the public. He had given up on the traditional media, which he thought was unwinnable. In his view, the only way was direct communication. I was impressed by how farsighted he was.”
The royal family began to manage its public duties more closely as well. In late 1994 David Airlie had started the Way Ahead Group to bring together the Queen, Prince Philip, their four children, and senior advisers twice a year to coordinate their plans. Now they focused on shaping the family’s activities to incorporate some of the best of what Diana had done, lessening the formality (instructing people before meeting members of the royal family that the bow and curtsy were optional), and consistently taking a more unassuming approach to public engagements—sitting down for tea in public housing projects, or walking around a classroom rather than peering in the door. “It is not heart on the sleeve or contrived,” explained one courtier. “But showing more empathy.”
The watchword became “imperceptible evolution,” based on an analogy that Robin Janvrin called “the Marmite theory of monarchy.” The salty food spread found in British cupboards for over a century has a distinctive red, yellow, and green label that is comforting in its familiarity. But only by comparing a fifty-year-old Marmite jar with one on contemporary shelves is it possible to see pronounced differences. The jar evolved so gradually and slowly that the changes were imperceptible. By Janvrin’s theory, the monarchy needed to change the same way—incrementally over time, small steps rather than large steps, so people were reassured that the institution was staying the same while adapting.
Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch Page 45