by A. N. Wilson
In times when nothing stood
But worsened, or grew strange,
There was one constant good:
She did not change.75
Philip Larkin’s quatrain for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977 neatly encapsulated two contrasting phenomena. First, for conservatives such as Larkin, the great thing about the monarchy was its permanence, its unchangeability. Against this fact, there lay the uncomfortable truth that, although the monarchy did not change, the times had changed.
The Silver Jubilee itself surprised the pundits, both the republicans who believed, and the monarchists who feared, that the game was up for crowns and thrones. It was an outburst of collective merriment. It was not a celebration which specifically focused on the Queen’s character, still less on the charms of her family.
In the earlier part of that year, there had seemed every reason to suppose that the Silver Jubilee would be a muted celebration, if not an actual flop. There was talk of planned street parties being cancelled for lack of enthusiasm. A political row had blown up following the passage of the 1976 Companies Act, which enabled companies to require disclosure of the true owners behind nominees’ holdings in their capital. Section 27 (9) of the Act provided that a person exempted by the Secretary of State for Trade would not be obliged to comply with a notice from a company requiring disclosure.76 An unintended consequence of the Act was that it could apply to the Queen, whose vast personal holdings could now be revealed. That is to say, the Queen’s wealth – a bone of contention for many – threatened to cloud the sky. ‘The exemption widens still further the gap between the Head of State and her poorest subjects,’ said the director of the Child Poverty Action Group, Frank Field.77
The issue of poverty in Britain was a real one. So was the issue of the monarch’s ‘image’, in particular the extravagance of her family. These would undoubtedly be matters which have remained throughout her reign, and which had to be addressed.
In 1977, however, something much simpler was demonstrated. Did the British public want, or not want, a monarchy?
It happened to be a spectacularly bright summer in 1977, after a cold, miserable spring. Soon, the street parties, which were rumoured to have been cancelled, were rescheduled. Bunting was hung from lamp-posts all over England. All over the United Kingdom, people prepared for a beano. Tony Benn attended Parliament to hear the Queen’s Silver Jubilee Speech ‘to remind myself of how totally undemocratic British democracy is’.78 But what does democracy mean if it does not include in its definition – a system of government which people actually want?
On 6 June, the Queen climbed Snow Hill near Windsor Castle, and lit a fire as a signal for the lighting of a hundred such fires at beacons all over the kingdom. The next day, she rode in a state coach with her husband for a service of Thanksgiving at St Paul’s Cathedral. More people flooded into the Mall than at the time of the Coronation. Over a million. Wherever she went during that summer, the crowds poured out into the streets. The jubilation was palpable, and the street parties were a spontaneous demonstration – not of the kind of ‘monarchism’ which might have appealed to right-wing theorists, such as T.S. Eliot, but of the kind of popular monarchism which was perhaps first demonstrated by Queen Victoria and Disraeli. This was not North Korea. No one was forcing us all to set up trestle tables in the streets, and to plunder our mother’s cookbooks to see how to make Coronation Chicken; it simply happened, because so many of us wanted it to happen.
This was one of the very obvious facts about the monarchy which was grasped during those years by the higher echelons of the Labour movement. Harold Wilson, who had first become Prime Minister in 1964, was an instinctive politician; elected as the leftist candidate to become the Labour Leader, he was sometimes seen as a mere wheeler-dealer who knew how to keep the warring factions of the Labour Party together. A fairer judgement would be that he was an intelligent populist, with more sense of how Britain was changing, and ought to change, than his enemies credited. He struck up a warm relationship with the Queen from the first. His wife Mary (still alive aged 100 on the Isles of Scilly at the time of writing) even wrote a poem about the Queen. ‘Brenda’ and ‘Harold’ were on some levels appropriate allies. Though he was an Oxford don of modest Yorkshire origins, and her recreations included deerstalking and going to the races with aristocrats, they were both Cincinnatuses, happy with a simple manner of life, and unpompous. Both were often mocked by Auberon Waugh, in his Private Eye diary, the most scabrous, the cruellest and also the funniest commentary on those times. Wilson – invariably referred to as Wislon in Private Eye – shared with the acerbic journalist Waugh one passion which might have been the clue as to why both, in their different ways, were more in tune than many others with political mood and change: they were both keen fans of Gilbert and Sullivan. Gilbert and Sullivan made fun of British national institutions, such as the Law, Lord Chancellors, the House of Lords and, in The Yeomen of the Guard, the monarchy. But by no stretch of the definition were they satirists. They were essentially conservative. They saw that you can enjoy institutions and their semi-ridiculous ceremonial trappings while also revering them. ‘When a great lord dies we are all diminished,’ Auberon Waugh wrote in his Private Eye diaries. Most of his readers would have guessed this was meant as a joke, but it was not.
‘I have a great respect for tradition,’ Wilson told a reporter, ‘I like the real ceremonies of the Monarchy… the Opening of Parliament, the Coronation. All that.’79 There were elements in the relationship between Wilson and the Queen which were reminiscent of that between Queen Victoria and Disraeli. Dizzie harnessed the new, popular ‘villa’ conservatism, which had come about as a result of widening the franchise; Victoria saw that the monarchy would become more popular if she became a one-nation Tory, and an Imperialist. The symbiotic friendship between Dizzie and the Fairy enhanced both the political life of a party and of the monarchy. Similarly, the Wilson ‘white hot technology’ Britain did not want to discard the monarchy; it wanted the old monarchy, but one which was prepared to reform, and Elizabeth II saw this. True, Wilson was a wily man who knew that at least half his support came from the group in society which it would still make sense to call working-class Tories. There nonetheless seems every evidence that he believed this, and, moreover, that he believed in constitutional monarchy as the best possible democratic method of government. In 1966 Wilson had called a snap election, and increased the Labour majority in Parliament from four to ninety-six. The poet Christopher Logue wrote:
I shall vote Labour because
deep in my heart
I am a Conservative.80
Wilson was succeeded by James Callaghan, the most Conservative Prime Minister since Baldwin. Callaghan confided in his friend, the Labour Party member Elizabeth Longford, ‘The Queen has a deep sense of duty and responsibility in this [the political] area and also sees it as a means of preserving the Royal Family as an institution. If her Prime Minister liked to give the Queen information and gossip about certain political characters, she would listen very attentively, for she has a real understanding of the value of constitutional monarchy… I think the prestige of the monarchy would deteriorate if she did not work so hard at it… She really knows how to preserve the monarchy and how to conduct herself on public occasions.’81
It was Callaghan who suggested to the Queen that Prince Charles should work in Whitehall. They tried to make the Prince sit on the board of the Colonial Development Corporation, but he did not turn up to meetings. The notion that he would actually work as an intern in some Government department to see how Whitehall operated was abhorrent to the young man. ‘He wasn’t interested – he wanted to be a dabbler,’ said one prophetic minister.82
The Queen’s approach to her office – dutiful, inclusive, unfussy and punctilious in attention to detail – had more in common with her Labour Prime Ministers than it did with either her son’s scatter-gun ‘dabbler’ approach to public issues or the highly divisive ideas of the monetarist ‘econ
omic liberals’ who took over the Conservative Party after the fall of Edward Heath.
It was the ‘conservatives’ who heralded the two most radical political changes to British political life in the late twentieth century; the two changes which might most have imperilled the monarchy. The first was the Government of Edward Heath, which took Britain into the European Economic Community at the beginning of 1973. In her Christmas broadcast before this event, the Queen uttered what Ben Pimlott (the most politically astute of all her biographers) called a cri de coeur. ‘One of the great Christian ideas is a happy and lasting marriage between man and wife, but no marriage can hope to succeed without a deliberate effort to be tolerant and understanding…We are trying to create a wider family of nations’.83 In other words, what about the Commonwealth? The Queen evidently worried that membership of the European experiment, whose member states quite manifestly wanted ‘ever closer union’, would make it harder for Britain to maintain its links with the Commonwealth nations all over the world; and it would also have an immediate and deleterious effect, for example, on British trade links with the dominions. As the European butter-mountains grew, who would be buying Anchor butter from New Zealand? Pimlott tells us that the Queen, in common with the rest of the human race, found relations with Edward Heath difficult. ‘Harold was fine,’ a courtier recalled, ‘because he loved her and treated her marvellously. But Ted was tricky – she was never comfortable with him.’84
What is more, the Queen’s constitutional position was surely now, at the very least, questionable. If British sovereignty were to be surrendered in the interest of ‘ever closer union’, did this not mean that the person most affected would be the British sovereign? As things stood, in 1972, no legislature in Britain had validity until it had been signed and sealed by the Queen. All laws, passed through the two Houses of Parliament, went to the Queen for ratification. This was no longer to be the case. No one could be more aware of this than the Queen, who for twenty years had patiently worked her way through her red boxes every day, in season and out of season, overseeing the administration of the British ‘thing’ – whatever that was. The Queen knew more than anyone how much the sovereign was involved with the administration of Britain, even if she exercised no political sway. The removal of the uniqueness of the sovereign was not something which made much impact on public debates about European membership. Heath, however, would have been aware of it. He was an egomaniac who was intent upon stamping his image on Britain. He it was, for example, who gratuitously reordered county boundaries which had been in existence since the Middle Ages. He abolished the Assize Courts. Neither in attitude nor in deed was he ‘conservative’ at all, even though, when he won the leadership of his party, he had stood as the ‘right wing’ candidate. The further to the ‘right’ you are in the Conservative Party, the less conservative you are likely to be. Heath in turn was defeated by another ‘right winger’ – the Member of Parliament for Finchley, Margaret Thatcher, who became Conservative Leader in 1975 after Heath’s humiliation at the polls. Thatcher was another non-Conservative, with absolutely no ‘feel’ for what made Britain British or England English. Unlike Heath, whose first job had been a reporter on the Church Times, she did not even belong to the Church of England. She had no experience of the country, little feeling for London, though she lived there for most of her life, no taste for Gilbert and Sullivan, almost no humour, no apparent knowledge of or pride in British industrial achievements, such as shipbuilding, glass-making, silverware, pottery, steel production – all of which declined to the point of near-extinction or actual extinction under her watch. Though she came from Lincolnshire, Tennyson’s county, she never suggested a sense of place, which is something almost all British people show. In her abrasive interviews, she praised globalization and the destruction of manufacturing industries. She liked shopping malls and motorways. The old Britain, in which each town boasted its own butcher and baker and candlestick maker in the high street, was replaced by a spivs’ paradise in which chain stores predominated all over the kingdom. In the election which defeated Heath, the Conservative Party had asked ‘Who governs?’ – meaning, should it be weird, asexual Heath, or the miners, with whom he had picked a quarrel? A grateful nation, which could remember the miners’ contribution to the Industrial Revolution, and which knew that it was the miners during two world wars who had fuelled the country’s power, voted out Heath. Within a decade – by 1984–5 – Thatcher had branded the miners ‘the enemy within’. British soldiers, disguised by Thatcher in the uniform of the police, literally waged war on the working classes.
Admittedly, the National Union of Mineworkers now had a leader, Arthur Scargill, who was intent, as Thatcher was, upon class warfare. The Duke of Edinburgh called him ‘a shit’.85
The Thatcher years posed a strange time for the monarchists, as for the monarch. There had been periods in history before when Prime Ministers had been more colourful characters than the King or Queen. Palmerston obviously overshadowed Queen Victoria as a ‘character’ who had caught the public imagination, just as Churchill was plainly a more theatrical figure than King George VI. Nevertheless, the monarch remained the monarch. When Mrs Thatcher announced that her appalling son Mark had become a father by telling the waiting reporters, ‘We have become a grandmother’, there must have been those who wondered what was passing through her mind.
Thatcher behaved on the political stage like a President. By now, the question of Britain’s sovereignty vis-à-vis Europe had been fudged; only crazed pedants like Enoch Powell or Tony Benn bothered about it. Though in old age she became a ‘Euro-sceptic’, it had been Thatcher who forced through British membership of the European Union. (Just as it was the ‘conservative’ Thatcher, as Secretary of State for Education, who had abolished more grammar schools than the Labour Party.)
Thatcher, when finally booted out of office by her own Cabinet whose detestation of her appeared to have reached pathological levels, Britain saw its industrial base ruined, its Trade Union movement neutered, the wealth of the country dependent upon the City of London. ‘Globalized’ Britain meant, in essence, Americanized Britain, with Americanized values. The 1980s was a decade noted for consumerism and the polarization of society. As well as the Miners’ Strike, which looked at times like a civil war, with armed police riding in charges against the strikers, whose families were quite literally going hungry, there were riots in the streets. Brixton in London and Toxteth in Liverpool erupted in flames, as discontented black youth protested, primarily because of the clumsiness of the police, but in general because of the obvious unfairness of society. In March 1990, the Poll Tax riots in London forced the Thatcher government to withdraw a proposed tax which had been forced upon the Scots, and which we can now see to be the greatest single driving force in the boosting of the Scottish Nationalist position.
Thatcher was the sort of quasi-revolutionary figure who actually needed conflict in order to succeed. Old Lady Mosley, widow of the 1930s fascist leader Sir Oswald, once said to me, ‘I know one should not approve of Mrs Thatcher – because of her “monetarism” [the Fascists were keen Keynesians] – but I can’t help rather liking her. She is so just the sort of person who joined up with us in the [British ] Union [of Fascists] before the war.’86
You could hardly find a more direct expression of why the Queen and Mrs Thatcher were poles apart. Thatcher was not a fascist, but she had the fascist love of a fight, and the belief that confrontation and even violence were good ways of pressing home political advantage. All the Queen’s instincts have been unifying ones.
The matter over which Thatcher directly clashed with the Queen was the Commonwealth. In 1979 the Commonwealth Heads of Government Conference was due to be held in Lusaka, Zambia, and the main topic for discussion was to be Rhodesia. For fourteen years it had been impossible to resolve the future of this, the most fertile country in Africa, which had made a Universal Declaration of Independence (UDI) in the time of Harold Wilson’s premiership. Thatcher decre
ed that Robert Mugabe, President of the Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front, and Joshua Nkomo, President of the rival Zimbabwe African People’s Union, were both ‘terrorists’. She initially refused to attend the conference, and she did her best to make it impossible for the sovereign to attend. The Queen went and, in the words of the British Guyanan lawyer Sir Sonny Ramphal, ‘brought to Lusaka a healing touch of rather special significance’.87 The Lusaka Accord paved the way for the establishment of Zimbabwe as an independent African nation.
The Queen also clashed with Thatcher over the question of South Africa. When Her Majesty’s advisers and minders want the rest of us to avert our gaze, they become a building; we are not told that the monarch’s Private Secretary or her Press Secretary are embarrassed by the latest piece of tomfoolery by a royal Prince, or the newest political embarrassment. Rather, they say that ‘Buckingham Palace’ has taken a view upon itself. It is as if the old house, expanded to a grandiose palace, at the end of the Mall, like a little house in a children’s story, has become animate, its windows winking eyes, its gateways a reproving mouth. ‘Buckingham Palace’ always assured us that relations between Thatcher and the Queen were of the most respectful and proper nature. Thatcher made courtiers and political colleagues giggle by the depth of her obsequious curtsies to the Queen. It was quite obvious, at the time, both that Thatcher, as power went more and more to her head, conceived of herself as the Head of State. Equally obvious was the fact that the Queen personally deplored the attitude of the Thatcher Government to South Africa.