The Diamond Queen

by Andrew Marr

  For my mother, Anne Valerie Marr,

  sometimes mistaken for . . .

  Contents

  Preface and Acknowledgements

  What the Queen Does

  Part One

  DYNASTY IS DESTINY:

  How the British Monarchy Remade Itself

  Part Two

  LILIBET

  Interlude

  The Queen in the World

  Part Three

  THE QUEEN AT WORK

  Interlude

  Britannia and the Waves

  Part Four

  OFF WITH HER HEAD!

  The Queen in the Sixties

  Interlude

  Money

  Part Five

  INTO THE MAELSTROM

  The Future

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Picture Acknowledgements

  Index

  Preface and Acknowledgements

  The Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II will make millions of people reflective. It will give the British, and the Queen’s subjects overseas, a chance to look back at sixty years of changing politics, fashions, dramas, successes and failures. As she has grown from the willowy dark-haired young mother of the 1950s into the shrewd great-grandmother of today, so we have all grown older, watching her, hearing her, thinking about her. Her family’s ups and downs are reflected in the stories of millions of families. Her record of service is rather more unusual. For many people, the Queen still stalks their dreams; frank conversations with her are the stuff of reverie and fiction. This book is an attempt to tell her life story, looking at the influences on her, and trying to explain why she does what she does. Though the well-known tales of her children’s trials and tribulations are included, as they have to be, this is not a particularly gossipy life story. I am more interested in trying to explain what monarchy now means; why the Windsor dynasty behaves as it does; and what having a Queen for all these years, rather than a succession of presidents, might mean.

  The book was written while writing and filming a three-part BBC television series about the Queen, which will be broadcast for the anniversary of her accession, in February 2012. It is not, however, ‘the book of the series’ but a separate endeavour. Nor is it in any way officially authorized. The text has been read by the Palace to correct errors of fact but there has been no access to the Royal Archive, nor any restrictions about what I could say. I would, however, like to record my profound thanks to the Queen’s helpful, sensible and friendly staff at Buckingham Palace who have opened doors and corrected mistakes. I would like to thank members of the royal family, past and present royal servants, family friends, Whitehall officials, many politicians and journalists for their candid help too. Many of them did not want to be identified by name and I have tried to respect all promises of confidentiality. I have not splattered the text with knowing asterisks and the irritating footnote ‘private information’. What follows is based on my best efforts to record facts and views given to me by people in a position to know, and based as well, of course, on some of the vast pyramid of books about the Queen, her reign and her family that already exist. (Published sources are referenced in the endnotes.)

  I could not have written this without the help of the London Library, which is the nearest thing I have to a spiritual home. Nor without the expert help of Gilly Middleburgh or the help and encouragement of the BBC team, including Nick Vaughan-Barratt and Sally Norris. Of the many people who have been particularly kind, I would like to mention the team at the Buckingham Palace press office who have been unfailingly pleasant and helpful; Lord Janvrin and Lord Fellowes, the Queen’s former private secretaries; the Earl of Airlie, Lord Luce, Charles Anson; Peter Hennessy, friend and pinnacle of modern British history-writing; Sir Gus O’Donnell, Lord Wilson, Lord Armstrong of Ilminster, Lord Turnbull, Mary Francis, Philip Astor; my terrifyingly successful agent Ed Victor; my wife Jackie Ashley; Philippa Harrison, who expertly edited the rough manuscript; and the team at Macmillan headed by Jon Butler and Georgina Morley.

  Many years back, I would have confidently described myself as a republican. This was mainly because I thought it would make me seem clever. As a strategy it was doomed. ‘Get over yourself,’ I thought, and long ago jettisoned the elitism of anti-monarchism in a profoundly pro-monarchy country. The majority are not always right, God knows; but when they raise a glass or a mug to the stability and reassurance Queen Elizabeth II has brought during difficult decades, they express genuine common sense. I have followed the Queen during some of her many duties, and talked to those closest to her, from ladies-in-waiting to friends of the family and members of the royal family too. And honestly, the more you see of her in action, the more impressed you are. She has been dutiful, but she has been a lot more than dutiful. She has been shrewd, kind and wise. Britain without her would have been a greyer, shriller, more meagre place.

  Andrew Marr

  September 2011

  What the Queen Does

  She is a small woman with a globally familiar face, a hundred-carat smile – when she chooses to turn it on – and a thousand years of history at her back. She reigns in a world which has mostly left monarchy behind, yet the result of her reign is that two-thirds of British people assume their monarchy will still be here in a century’s time. She is wry and knowing, but she feels a calling. All this is serious. She can brim with dry observations but she seems empty of cynicism. She is not a natural public speaker.

  But there she is, in May 2011 and dressed in emerald green, arriving for her first visit to the Republic of Ireland. Aged eighty-five, she makes one of the most politically significant speeches of her life. ‘It is a sad and regrettable reality that through our history our islands have experienced more than their fair share of heartache, turbulence and loss. These events have touched many of us personally . . . To all those who have suffered as a consequence of a troubled past I extend my sincere thoughts and deep sympathy.’ This is a highly emotional trip, recalling the murder of her relative Lord Mountbatten by the IRA in 1979, and centred on a visit to Croke Park, the stadium and headquarters of the Gaelic Athletic Association where, in 1920, fourteen innocent people were shot by police and auxiliaries loyal to the Crown – to her grandfather – at the beginning of the bloody struggle for Irish independence.

  It had been a long time coming and security bosses on both sides of the Irish Sea had been pale-faced with worry. The visit had been announced well in advance, and the Queen does not cancel. As it happened, the vast majority of Irish people welcomed the visit; the Queen even shook hands with a representative of the diehard republican Sinn Fein. So this was a small but significant page-turn in history, recognizing that by 2011 what mattered to Irish and British were their family, business, emotional and sporting links, not the bloodied past. The Queen impresses on the Irish prime minister, the Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, that this is a visit she has waited much of her life to make; what he calls ‘a closing of the circle’. In private she sits under the portrait of the Irish military leader Michael Collins. In public she bows her head in memory of the Irish rebels who died fighting the Crown.

  Nobody else from Britain could have made such a visit of high-profile reconciliation, covered by more than a thousand journalists and reported all round the world. No British politician has been around for long enough, or been personally touched so closely, or could claim to speak for Britain itself. Ireland’s President Mary McAleese speaks for her people warmly and well, the first Northerner and the second woman to serve in the job. But no Briton other than the Queen could speak in that way for the British.

  There she is again, just a few days later, welcoming President Barack Obama to stay at Buckingham Palace. In the gusty sunshine overlooking the lawn there is p
icture-postcard pomp – a guard of Household Cavalry, marching soldiers, bagpipes, national anthems, the reverberations of artillery salutes. On the eve of his visit, speaking in Washington, Obama had gone out of his way to praise the Queen in lavish if not entirely politically accurate terms as ‘the best of England’. His earlier visit had gone spectacularly well. Even so, this is a relationship which is also, in a gentler and more personal way, about friendship and reconciliation.

  For when Obama first became US president there had been unease in London. Here was a man who seemed cool about the (exaggerated) ‘special relationship’ with Britain. He had no personal ties – or rather, just one, which was unhappy and about which he had written himself. His grandfather had been arrested, imprisoned and tortured in Kenya. The early years of the Queen’s reign had been marked by a brutal war against the nationalist Mau Mau there. Obama is a supremely professional politician, very unlikely to allow personal history to influence his decision-making, but the unease was there. Once the pomp was over the Queen did her level best to make him and his wife Michelle feel especially welcome, showing the couple to their bedroom.

  There was on show a very shrewdly chosen selection of memorabilia from the Royal Archive – as there always is for a state visit. These are worth dwelling on. There was a note in George III’s handwriting, from around 1780, lamenting ‘America is lost! Must we fall beneath the blow?’ but going on to speculate about a future of trade and friendship. There were letters from Lincoln, Obama’s hero, and from Queen Victoria to his widow; and diary entries by Victoria showing her sympathy for black slaves, recording her excitement in meeting one, Josiah Henson, who she said had ‘endured great suffering and cruelty’ before escaping to British Canada. There were records of a visit by the then Prince of Wales to Obama’s home city of Chicago in 1860, and a handwritten note by the Queen Mother to the then Princess Elizabeth recording their visit to President Roosevelt in 1939 when they ate under the trees ‘and all our food on one plate . . . some ham, lettuce, beans and HOT DOGS too!’ Homely – but a reminder of the vital wartime alliance which followed King George VI’s most important overseas visit. There were details and a flag from Hawaii, Obama’s birthplace.

  This is worth mentioning at the start of a biography of the Queen because in a small way it contains the essence of the case for monarchy. First, this is a constitutional job but it is also a personal one. From American independence, through the story of slavery and places of particular interest to Obama, the job was to make an emotional connection – to find points of contact. In return, Obama gave the Queen a book of photographs of her parents’ 1939 visit, on the eve of war. He would set off for important and potentially tricky talks with Prime Minister David Cameron about Libya, Afghanistan and their different approaches to economics in the warmest possible mood. This is what the Queen is for. As with the Irish visit, nobody else could do it. Second, though, she can only work effectively because plenty of other people (such as the Royal Librarian Lady Roberts) work very hard behind the scenes, unknown to the public. This is their story too.

  But it is hers first. The best antidote to weariness or hostility about the Queen is to try to follow her about for a few months. From trade-based missions overseas to visits to small towns and hospitals, it is a surprisingly gruelling routine. It includes grand ceremonial occasions and light-footed, fast-moving trips to meet soldiers, business people, volunteers and almost every other category one can imagine. It eats up evenings, where at one palace or another thousands of people have been invited to be ‘honoured’ for their work or generosity. It involves the patient reading of fat boxes of heavily serious paperwork, oozing from the government departments who work in her name. In Whitehall, where they assess the most secret intelligence as it arrives, the Queen is simply ‘Reader No. 1.’

  It has been a life of turning up. But turning up is not to be underestimated. The Queen has a force-field aura that very few politicians manage to project. There is an atmospheric wobble of expectation, a slight but helpless jitter. When she turns up, people find their heart-rate rising, however much they try to treat her as just another woman. Somehow, despite being everywhere – in news bulletins, on postage stamps, cards and front pages – she has managed to remain mysterious. Her face moves from apparently grumpy to beaming, and back. Her eyes flicker carefully around. She gives little away.

  After the rapids of family crisis and public controversy, she is in calmer waters. British royalty has become surprisingly popular around the world. She watched with great interest and some pleasure a recent film about her father’s struggle against his stutter and the man who helped him, the Australian Lionel Logue. She remembers Logue very vividly. Her father was played by the actor Colin Firth. She herself was the subject of a blockbuster film, starring Helen Mirren. Her illustrious ancestress Elizabeth I was potrayed by Judi Dench in a film about Shakespeare. Firth, Mirren and Dench all won Oscars, as one of the Queen’s children wryly notes.

  She is not an actor. But the popularity of the monarchy owes a lot to the way she performs. Life has taken her around the world many times and introduced her to leaders of all kinds, from the heroic to the monstrous; and to seas of soapy faces; and to forests of wiggling hands. Since she was a small girl, she has known her Destiny. All the accounts of her childhood agree that she was a calm, thoughtful child, with a passion for animals. Though shy, she regards being Queen as a vocation, a calling which cannot be evaded. She has borne four children, seen three of them divorced, has eight grandchildren and – take a bow, Savannah Phillips – one great-granddaughter.

  Like any eighty-five-year-old she has been bereaved and suffered disappointment as well as enjoying success. She has lost a King, a Queen and Princesses – her father, mother, sister and the remarkable Diana – as well as friends. Yet she can be satisfied. She knows that her dynasty, unlike so many others, is almost certain to survive. Her heir and her heir’s heir are waiting. With her, and her kind of monarchy, most of her people are content.

  Those who can remember her as a curly-headed little girl are now a small platoon. On 12 May 2011 she became the second-longest-serving monarch in British history, having reigned for 21,645 days, beating George III’s record. In September 2015, if she is still alive, she will outlast even Queen Victoria’s record too. Her husband, now ninety, still has the gimlet stare and suspicious bearing of a man’s man cast adrift in a world of progressives and wets. He could have scaled most ladders. He chose to spend his life as ‘Consort, liege and follower’.

  The Duke’s life and the Queen’s life have been lived in lock-step, through an annual circle of ritual and tradition, swivelling from palace to palace as the seasons change; dressing up, often several times a day, for lunches, openings, speeches, military parades, investitures and dinners. The Queen’s mornings begin as they have for most of her life, with BBC radio news, Earl Grey tea, the Racing Post and the Daily Telegraph and, while having breakfast toast with her husband, enjoying the music (ignorant people would call it noise) of her personal bagpiper in the garden. Near her are the last truly dangerous members of the British monarchical system, the Queen’s dogs – four corgis and three dorgis (a dachshund–corgi cross).

  A discreet, protective staff she calls by their first names come and go; a typed diary sheet of engagements is waiting; soon the first of the boxes of official papers, containing everything from minor appointments to alarming secret service reports, will arrive. There may be a visit upstairs to the domain of Angela Kelly, her personal assistant and senior dresser, who has rooms off a narrow corridor just below the Buckingham Palace roof. A genial and down-to-earth Liverpudlian, she is one of the people closest to the Queen, family apart. She works with huge bolts of cloth, dummies and scissors to create many of the Queen’s outfits. Before overseas or long domestic visits, she has planned in detail the dresses, hats, bags and shoes with the Queen. Outside designers are brought in from time to time. One Scottish designer insisted on a full personal fitting. As she crouched down ne
rvously with a tape-measure, the Queen exclaimed: ‘leg out! Arm out! Leg out!’ and giggled as the measurements were taken. A floor below Angela Kelly, the old-fashioned leather suitcases and trunks for a Royal progress, each stamped simply with ‘The Queen’, are waiting. They have had a lot of use; the monarch is not a fan of the throwaway society.

  Down in her office, the contents of the various official boxes have been sorted out by her private secretary and carried upstairs to be scrutinized. She alone reads these; the Duke maintains a careful constitutional distance from some parts of her life, though he runs the estates and remains a very active nonagenarian, still often weaving through the London traffic at the wheel of his own, usefully anonymous taxi. She is the longest-lived monarch in her country’s history. Like anyone who has followed routines for so long, she hopes there will be a surprise today; just a small one. Now what? What will happen today?

  The Job

  Today, the Queen will dress, and go out and do her job. Angela Kelly will have laid out clothes which will, they both hope, make the Queen stand out in a crowd and will be appropriate to whatever jobs lie ahead that day. At certain times of the year, of course, she will not be working. There are quiet family weekends and a long summer break, mostly at Balmoral in Scotland. But if you totted up the hours she puts in, the European health and safety people would itch to prosecute – well, who? There is the problem. There is no trade union or employment contract for a Queen. The expectations of civil servants and politicians, tourists, presidents and the passing crowd are so great that her duties never end.

  Take a breath. As head of state, Queen Elizabeth is the living symbol of nations, above all that of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland – though another fifteen besides, including Australia, Canada, New Zealand and smaller countries, down to Tuvalu. She is not like most other constitutional monarchs. The British state has no single written constitution nor any founding document. About a third of the Dutch constitution, by contrast, explains what the Dutch monarch’s duties are. Spain’s king is part of one of Europe’s oldest and grandest royal houses, the Bourbons; but his job is strictly limited in the careful prose of the Spanish constitution.