Blair made a memorable appearance at Buckingham Palace for “kissing hands” on May 2, 1997. After receiving his instructions from the Queen’s equerry, he tripped on the edge of the carpet and fell upon the Queen’s outstretched hand he was supposed to brush with his lips. Scarcely missing a beat, Elizabeth II told him that he was her tenth prime minister. “The first was Winston,” she said. “That was before you were born.” Their conversation turned up with some dramatic embellishment in the film The Queen, which also accurately conveyed Blair’s extreme nervousness. “I got a sense of my relative seniority, or lack of it, in the broad sweep of history,” Blair recalled in a 2002 interview. “But it was immediately apparent, even at that meeting … she was someone who took every care to try to make sure that you were put at ease.”
After some twenty minutes of “general guff” about Labour’s legislative plans, a Palace aide brought in Cherie, a militant republican often derided for her failure to give the monarch adequate respect. “I can’t remember not curtsying,” Cherie vaguely recalled, “so I probably did.” The two women discussed the practical logistics of moving a family—the Blairs had three children at the time—into 10 Downing Street, the Queen “generally clucking sympathetically.” Elizabeth II “kept the conversation going for just the right length of time,” the prime minister recalled, until “by an ever so slight gesture, she ended it and saw us out.”
Elizabeth II had quietly celebrated her seventy-first birthday eleven days earlier at Windsor Castle. She went riding, entertained her ninety-six-year-old “mama” at lunch, and contemplated the beauty of the garden at Frogmore in the “hot spring sunshine,” as she described the day to Nancy Reagan.
At an age when most in her generation had settled into comfortable retirement and narrowing views, the Queen’s unique position required her to broaden her perspective to keep abreast of changes in the culture. On March 6, she had switched on the first royal website, containing 150 pages of information on the monarchy. She remarked that the Internet “opens the door to a huge range of knowledge which has no national boundaries.” Still, in other respects, as Blair observed, “there’s a bit of her that is very strongly unchanging”—mainly regarding traditions that preserve “the mystery and the majesty of the monarchy.”
One of the new prime minister’s ticklish early decisions had to do with the forty-three-year-old yacht Britannia. In a cost-cutting measure, the Major government had decided three years earlier to end the royal yacht’s service in 1997. The Tories had been reluctant to finance the necessary £11 million upgrading as well as escalating yearly maintenance costs. “A lot of people thought Britannia should be kept,” said a former senior Palace official. “A lot of people in the street thought it was important. It was a wonderful symbol of the monarchy.” Some argued that the yacht helped promote British trade around the world with its “Sea Days” for businessmen that brought some £3 billion to the Treasury from 1991 to 1995. But in the end, Britannia had come to symbolize politically incorrect extravagance and privilege at public expense, and the Queen told the government she was prepared to give it up.
Despite the political sensitivity, the Major government had nevertheless considered building a new state-of-the-art royal yacht that would be less expensive to operate, and the Ministry of Defence developed plans with an estimated cost of £80 million. When Blair attended the ceremonial handover of Hong Kong’s sovereignty to the People’s Republic of China on June 30, 1997, he was impressed with the value of having a floating embodiment of Britain. After the Union Jack was lowered at midnight, Blair watched the floodlit yacht dramatically sail out of Hong Kong harbor. “What an asset,” he said. But his government soon scuttled any successor to Britannia—a decision that seemed small-minded compared to Blair’s own misguided construction project, the £750 million Millennium Dome, which came to symbolize pointless big-government excess.
That August the royal family took Britannia on its final Western Isles cruise on their way to Balmoral, a sentimental journey with the usual stop at the Castle of Mey. “Lilibet” and “Philip” put their signatures in the Queen Mother’s guest book commemorating Britannia Day for the last time, followed by Andrew and his two daughters; Anne and her second husband, Tim Laurence, with her son and daughter; Edward and his girlfriend Sophie Rhys-Jones; Margaret’s daughter, Sarah, and Sarah’s husband, Daniel Chatto; as well as Margaret’s son, David Linley, and his wife, Serena. The traditional luncheon was “somewhat melancholy,” but they all rose to the occasion with their usual ship-to-shore exchange of doggerel as Britannia, accompanied by two destroyers, steamed past the coast twice before disappearing over the horizon.
The Queen Mother’s verse was written by her friend Ted Hughes, Britain’s poet laureate, and said, in part:
With all our memories of you, so happy and dear
Whichever course your captain takes,
You steer into this haven of all our hearts, and here
You shall be anchored forever.
The Queen’s sixteen-line reply from Britannia to the Queen Mother’s “castellated pad” marveled:
Oh what a heavenly day, happy glorious and gay
Delicious food from the land
Peas shelled by majestic hand
Fruit, ice cream from foreign lands
Was it India or Pakistan?
AS THE QUEEN, her family, and friends fell into the leisurely pace of Balmoral life, they were confronted each morning with a display of newspapers on the drawing room table carrying stories of Diana’s escapades. Since the divorce, the princess had presented a brave face to the world, taking on important new causes such as banning the use of land mines. But her emotional life was more turbulent than ever as she attached herself to men who were increasingly unsuitable. She doted on William and Harry and tried to expose them to everyday life as much as possible, giving them, as she said in her Panorama interview, “an understanding of people’s emotions, people’s insecurities, people’s distress, and people’s hopes and dreams.” Yet she also began to burden her sons—William in particular—with too much information about her boyfriends and her problems.
She hit a new low in mid-July when she took up with Dodi Fayed, the son of Egyptian tycoon Mohamed Fayed, who had been repeatedly denied British citizenship by the U.K. government. Mohamed Fayed had befriended Diana as a generous benefactor of several of her charities. He appealed to her, according to Andrew Neil, a sometime consultant for Fayed, “by cultivating the idea that both were outsiders and had the same enemies.”
Diana met Dodi while she and her sons were staying at the ten-acre Fayed estate in Saint-Tropez. At age forty-two, Dodi was a classic case of arrested development: spoiled, ill-educated, unemployed, rootless, and irresponsible, with a taste for cocaine and fast cars. He showered Diana with extravagant gifts, including an $11,000 gold Cartier Panther watch, and sybaritic trips on his father’s plane and yachts. From the moment the story of their romance broke on August 7, the tabloids covered the couple’s every move with suggestive photographs and lurid prose. William and Harry, who were at Balmoral with their father, mistrusted Dodi, and they were embarrassed by their mother’s exhibitionistic behavior.
At around 1 A.M. on Sunday, August 31, a call came through to Robin Janvrin at Craigowan Lodge from the British embassy in Paris with a chilling message: Diana and Dodi had been in a horrific car crash in the tunnel underneath the Place d’Alma. Janvrin immediately hustled to Balmoral Castle for urgent conferences with the Queen, Philip, and Charles. Shortly after 4 A.M. they received word that Diana was dead at age thirty-six, along with her lover and the driver of the car.
They decided to let William and Harry sleep, and the Queen wrote a note to be shown to her mother when she awakened. At 7:15 A.M. Charles told his sons, then aged fifteen and twelve, about the tragedy. From that moment on, Elizabeth II alternated between consoling her two grandsons and working with her senior advisers to make arrangements for honoring their mother.
Robin Janvrin st
ayed with the Queen at Balmoral while her other courtiers set up a makeshift command center at Buckingham Palace in the Chinese Dining Room overlooking the Victoria Memorial. David Airlie called off his trip to Italy, Lieutenant Colonel Malcolm Ross, the comptroller of the Lord Chamberlain’s office, flew in from Scotland, and Robert Fellowes came down from Norfolk. At the same time, Tony Blair and his top aides began managing what they perceived as a “global event like no other” and a fast-moving crisis for the monarchy.
By the time Blair spoke with Elizabeth II that morning, the Palace had issued a terse statement: “The Queen and Prince of Wales are deeply shocked and distressed by this terrible news.” She told the prime minister she had no plans to say anything further about the deaths. Blair found her to be “philosophical, anxious for the boys, but also professional and practical. She grasped the enormity of the event, but in her own way, she was not going to be pushed around by it.” When Blair told her he planned to make a comment before church, she raised no objection. Reading from some scribbles on the back of an envelope, he indelibly called Diana “the People’s Princess,” described how he felt the public’s pain, alluded to “how difficult things were for her from time to time,” and applauded those who “kept faith” with the deceased princess.
His words were meant to be placatory, and in some respects they were, simply by filling a vacuum and crystallizing inchoate feelings of affection and loss. But the royal family thought that Blair’s choice of “People’s Princess” helped stir up rather than pacify public feeling. George Carey worried that the description might “encourage the temptation of some to make her an icon to set against the royal family. Those fears were to be realized that week.”
The Queen and her family attended the regular Sunday service at Crathie. No mention of Diana was made in the prayers, which is customary in the Church of Scotland, where the ministers “don’t pray for the souls of the departed, because God has discharged them,” said a former senior official in the church who has often preached at Balmoral. But the press chose to portray the omission as an insult to Diana’s memory, and criticized the Queen for taking William and Harry to church only hours after their mother’s death. “They handled it like ostriches,” said Jennie Bond of the BBC. In fact, the princes wanted the comfort of religion at that moment. By one account, William said he wished to “talk to Mummy.” Everyone including the boys behaved as the royal family always does, with stiff stoicism in the face of emotional pain, which prompted still more criticism for their seeming insensitivity.
At that point, the family withdrew from the public gaze. The Queen’s intentions were pure from the outset—the kind of “unstoppable mothering” she had shown Timothy Knatchbull after the Mountbatten bombing in 1979. She believed William and Harry should be kept in the Highlands for as long as possible, surrounded by those who loved them. Like their father, the boys had been imbued with an enjoyment of the countryside. The Queen made certain the princes could stalk and fish with their cousin Peter Phillips, and gather with the family on the hills for barbecues. “To take them away to have nothing to do in Buckingham Palace would have been horrible,” said Margaret Rhodes.
The Queen secured a Royal Air Force plane to fly Prince Charles, along with Diana’s sisters, Sarah and Jane, to Paris to bring back the princess’s body. Elizabeth II also asked that Blair meet the plane at RAF Northolt airport on Sunday afternoon. In recognition of the Queen’s wish that the late princess be treated like a member of the royal family, Diana’s coffin was draped with her own Royal Standard, an adaptation of the sovereign’s heraldic banner in red, gold, and blue.
Elizabeth II initially yielded to the wish of the Spencer family that Diana’s funeral be private, but after conferences with her advisers, she recognized the need to do something akin to a royal ceremonial funeral at Westminster Abbey—although not a full-blown state funeral. She was helped by Robert Fellowes, who brought his wife, Jane, and the rest of the Spencers around. The funeral plans for members of the royal family are not only exhaustively planned in advance, they have code names: London Bridge for the Queen, Tay Bridge for the Queen Mother, Forth Bridge for Prince Philip. But there were no plans in place for Diana’s funeral because she was no longer technically a member of the royal family. “We can’t look at the files,” David Airlie told his colleagues. “We have to do it de novo.”
Working throughout Sunday and long into the night, the courtiers at Buckingham Palace planned a funeral for the following Saturday that combined elements of the traditional and the modern: Diana’s coffin on a horse-drawn gun carriage (primarily so it could be seen better than in a hearse) with twelve pallbearers from the Welsh Guards, followed by five hundred workers from Diana’s charities instead of the standard military procession, which she would have disliked. “We wanted the people who had benefited from her charities, not the chairmen and trustees,” said David Airlie. “It was also important to bring a cross-section of the public not normally invited to the Abbey—the people Diana associated with.” Rather than a lying-in-state at Westminster Hall, the courtiers came up with condolence books for the public to sign at Kensington Palace and St. James’s Palace, where Diana’s body would rest privately on a catafalque in the Chapel Royal until the funeral.
Airlie phoned Janvrin at Balmoral early Monday morning to relay the outlined plan. By 9 A.M. the Queen had given her approval. “She was very happy with the charity workers,” recalled Ross. It would be “a unique funeral for a unique person,” the Palace announced.
The Lord Chamberlain supervised a series of meetings with all interested parties including the police and military as well as several of Blair’s key operatives specifically invited by Airlie. They hammered out the details for what the press was now calling the “people’s funeral,” including such unconventional touches as a solo by Elton John and a reading by the prime minister, while excluding such traditional fanfare as trumpeters and drums. By Tuesday afternoon they had written everything down and transmitted it to Balmoral so the Queen could “see the totality.” Again she approved their proposals readily and without discussion. “She is much better with paper, especially for something long and complicated,” said Ross. “She speed reads. She is very quick with paper.”
Contrary to popular mythology about hidebound courtiers, the Queen’s men showed flexibility and ingenuity that week. Airlie had been at the vanguard of modernizing Buckingham Palace operations for more than a decade. Robert Fellowes proved surprisingly “shrewd and savvy,” in Tony Blair’s view. Robin Janvrin was “completely au fait with where it was all heading,” Blair recalled. Even Alastair Campbell, the prime minister’s antimonarchist press spokesman, remarked that the courtiers “encouraged creative thinking and even risk-taking.” The Queen trusted them and responded decisively to such suggestions as doubling the route of the funeral procession to give greater access to the crowds and putting giant video screens in Hyde Park to televise the funeral.
But she dug in her heels over what she considered unreasonable demands from the press and public that violated deeply embedded traditions as well as her family’s wish to deal with the tragedy privately. By Tuesday it was clear that Diana’s death had triggered an unprecedented display of mass grieving by mourners who poured into London, by one estimate “at a rate of 6,000 per hour.” They heaped flowers, stuffed animals, signs, balloons, condolence notes, and other tributes along the railings of Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace, and they camped out in the parks, hugging and weeping as if for a close relative or intimate friend. By Wednesday night some three quarters of a million people had stood in line, some for more than ten hours, to sign the condolence books that multiplied rapidly from four to thirty-four in two days. It seemed as if Diana’s own displays of raw emotion—leading “from the heart not the head,” as she said in her Panorama interview—had prompted the citizenry to abandon the dignified restraint they had shown after the deaths of King George VI and Winston Churchill.
The crowds at first had vented agai
nst the tabloids, inflamed by Diana’s brother, Charles, Earl Spencer, who said hours after his sister’s death, “I always believed the press would kill her in the end.” Outside Kensington Palace on Sunday, mourners had shouted at a group of reporters, “Happy now?” But by midweek, the anger turned against the Queen for remaining sequestered in the Highlands and failing to acknowledge the pain felt by her subjects in London. “If only the royals dared weep with the people,” said The Independent in a critical editorial on Wednesday. “The media were circling, looking to blame someone other than themselves,” said one of Elizabeth II’s top advisers. “They needed to direct it at the other target,” Blair observed. “And to be fair, they were releasing genuine public feeling.” As a symbol of the Queen’s apparent indifference, the press focused on the empty flagpole above Buckingham Palace and demanded that a flag be flown at half-staff to honor Diana.
By centuries of custom, the only flag to fly at the Palace was the Queen’s Royal Standard, and only while she was in residence. It could never be flown at half-staff because once a monarch dies, the heir immediately takes the throne in an unbroken chain of sovereignty. But the crowds had no patience for such distinctions, and their mood verged close to mutinous. “I think the thing that impressed me most was the silence, which I found worrying,” said David Airlie, who took several walks outside the Palace.
On Wednesday the Queen’s London advisers suggested that she put aside tradition and fly the Union Jack at half-staff, but she was unyielding, as was Philip. “Robin had to describe the feeling in London,” said Malcolm Ross. “It was a torturous process because she felt so strongly. Robin said he metaphorically had blood pouring down his face because she had scratched his face metaphorically. He had to come back to her again and again.”
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