The Diamond Queen

by Andrew Marr

  Interlude

  The Queen in the World

  Sixty years on, her staying power has given the Queen a personal knowledge of global leaders unmatched by any other person alive. She has had, as house-guests, such near-mythic figures as Emperor Haile Selassie, General de Gaulle, Lech Walesa and Nelson Mandela; controversial twentieth-century monarchs such as the Shah of Iran, Emperor Hirohito of Japan and King Faisal of Saudi Arabia; tyrants such as Ceauçescu of Romania and Mugabe of Zimbabwe; key first-generation African leaders such as Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere, Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, Mobutu Sese Seku of Zaire and Daniel arap Moi of Kenya; and central figures in Russian history such as Marshal Bulganin, Nikita Khrushchev (who took tea with her and found her to his surprise ‘completely unpretentious’) and Vladimir Putin. A short book could be written just about her relations with US presidents from Truman and Eisenhower, through to Kennedy, Nixon and Reagan, to the Obamas today.

  ‘Reader No. 1’ has seen every significant secret Foreign Office cable or telegram, and much of the MI6 advice, about international crises and problems from the 1950s onwards. As head of state of fifteen nations other than the United Kingdom, she has taken her overseas queenships very seriously. As Head of the Commonwealth, she has had a ringside, inside seat for the epic stories of the Indian subcontinent, African decolonization and the transformation of Asia. If she ever picked up her pen for something longer than a sweeping regal signature . . .

  The assumption must be, however, that she would not. The Queen does keep a diary, but sadly not in the Pepys or Crossman or Alan Clark way. Most of her intercourse with world leaders has been at the level of the polite and uncontroversial exchange of expressions of goodwill. Her job is to meet, to listen but not to interrogate. She is Britain’s Department of Warmth, the Secretary of State for Friendship. The records of her long and frequent visits to other countries contain endless pictures of singing groups of children, cheering crowds, banquets and march-pasts. A gorgeous cavalcade of dresses, often by Norman Hartnell or Hardy Amies, and hats, dresses or bags, shows the care taken to reflect local sensibilities. The presents received, paintings, silver- and goldware, jewellery, strange carved crocodiles and thrones and the rest, would fill a warehouse.

  It is a curious business, this endless exchanging of gifts. Around the world, the corridors and studies of presidents, prime ministerial offices, and anterooms of official headquarters are stuffed with glass cases containing ceremonial swords, strangely ugly ceramics or models made of silver. They are grand clutter which always need dusting. Hardly any provide pleasure. There are exceptions: Nelson Mandela gave Prince Philip a hand-painted chess set of African figures which would make anyone smile. Some are particularly ugly and pointless: who would want a gilt model oil-rig on a stand in a glass box from Saskatchewan? But this is to miss the point. Gift-giving goes back to the earliest recorded human civilizations. It is a ritual to confirm lack of hostility, lack of war. Today the exchange of gifts is oil to smooth negotiations, balm for disappointing answers or grease to elicit better ones.

  The Queen’s travelling has been close to the centre of her own idea of what she is for. She has never seen herself as just, or even perhaps mainly, the British Queen. Though most of the trips have been tiring but not difficult, with predictable and reliable welcomes awaiting her, some have been tricky. She has been booed by French-Canadian nationalists and emerged from a church service in Dresden, bombed to pieces by the RAF during the war, to confront a sea of stony-silent and not entirely friendly faces. She has waited in the sweltering heat of the desert, while a panicking King of Morocco tore up the preparations for lunch and offered her only cognac. She has overridden the fears of ministers to visit potentially dangerous places in Africa and Asia. She has dealt calmly with inebriated Russians.

  Head of the Commonwealth is a role she owes to the founders of modern India above all. After the Second World War, the Americans were campaigning against the British Empire as the prime example of clapped-out imperialism, getting in the way of their world-dominating commercial ambition. Even inside the British ‘family of nations’ there were serious strains. Burma became the first country to leave since the loss of the American colonies. On Easter Monday 1949 the Irish Republic went too. South Africa was already engaged in a debate about seceding. During the war the Australians had toyed with forming their own defensive alliance with the US. The formation of India and Pakistan as independent nations robbed George VI of his title ‘Rex-Imperator’. What kind of international arrangement might winning-side but financially exhausted Britain make with her former colonies? What would the role of the Crown be?

  Meetings in London produced various ideas, including a standing ‘Commonwealth Conference’ of which the King would be not King, but president. His private secretary, Sir Alan Lascelles, was derisive, telling King George that kingship was ‘an ideal for which men are prepared to work, to fight, and to die; but nobody is going to die for a Conference’.1 Under Nehru, however, India seemed keen to stay inside some kind of Commonwealth. So did the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. How could republics be accommodated to a monarch-led institution? With the Labour prime minister Clement Attlee taking the lead, negotiations led to a classic British compromise. India was not prepared to recognize the King as head of state, or have any truck with British royalty in patronage, oaths, honours or policy. But the Republic of India would recognize the King as Head of the Commonwealth. Eight countries – Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, Pakistan and Ceylon – duly attended a conference in London in April 1949 and proclaimed after it that the King would be retained ‘as the symbol of the free association of independent member nations’ which would be united ‘as free and equal members of the Commonwealth of Nations, freely cooperating in the pursuit of peace, liberty and progress’.

  This declaration, which embodied an idea the now-departed Irish republicans had argued for years before, would become the founding document of the modern Commonwealth. It meant that, as the Empire was wound up, newly independent states could reject the British monarch as head of state and choose republicanism, yet stay inside the old grouping. This was the idea that made the expansion of the Commonwealth possible while, of course, limiting its practical power. Of the fifty-four members today, only sixteen retain the Queen as head of state. They are mostly in the Caribbean or are small Pacific island nations, though Canada, Australia and New Zealand remain major examples. The existence of the Commonwealth is one of the features that separates the British monarchy from those of Scandinavia or Spain and makes it more than a tiny geographical remnant. No wonder that the Queen’s first major act after her Coronation was to embark on a gigantic six-month tour of her wider authority.

  The trip of 1953–4 was both the ultimate introduction to the life she would lead and an unrepeatable time of triumph for the Queen and the Duke. Britain’s real power might be hollowed out and she might be heavily indebted but her post-war prestige was at its peak. She was the newest member of the atomic club, her fighting services had won great victories and across the former Empire there was optimism. South Africa was a problem, but Australia and New Zealand were seen almost as British versions of California, sunlit lands where graft was rewarded and a new world could be built far away from the class distinctions of Britain. In turn Australians and Kiwis had a seemingly unreserved enthusiasm for the British connection untinged by rising nationalism. The death of George VI had given Britain an unexpectedly young and beautiful head of state who was already a well-established international star (she had first featured on the front of Time magazine aged three). And this was just ahead of the real television age. If you wanted to see the Queen for yourself, you would have to go and stand and wait. The combination of national prestige and personal novelty would never come in quite the same way again.

  It was a mammoth trip. The Queen flew across the Atlantic to visit Bermuda and Jamaica and then went aboard a hired commercial liner, the Gothic, because the Royal Yacht was not
yet ready. Prince Charles and Princess Anne were left behind, as the Queen and Princess Margaret had been when their father made his pre-war overseas tours. On the Gothic the royal party passed through the Panama Canal into the Pacific, visiting Fiji and Tonga and arriving in New Zealand for Christmas. The Queen was the first reigning monarch to visit New Zealand and the welcome was rapturous; it was described by one writer as ‘a national delirium’. From there she went to Australia, which was the most triumphant but also most exhausting section of the tour.

  As in New Zealand, the Queen of Australia was the first reigning monarch to visit. She spent two months travelling 2,500 miles by train, 10,000 miles flying, and 900 miles by car; she made more than a hundred speeches and listened to twice as many. She heard her national anthem played an estimated 162 times.2 It has also been estimated that three-quarters of the entire adult population of Australia turned out to see her. The result was a personal triumph which tested her resilience, her ability to keep a fixed smile in place for hours and her patience – she protested privately about long speeches from local politicians and must have finally realized just what a lifelong programme of listening would be like. The travelling was exhausting, there was little privacy and the Queen did not have much time off, endlessly changing clothes for public display and re-doing her make-up surrounded by curious ladies. Yet it was worth it: when she returned to Australia in 2011 for what is likely to be her last visit there, there would be plenty of people who remembered that 1954 tour as a one-off moment in their post-war history – who had stood at roadsides or in squares or beside schools, and waited and cheered and waved.

  The Queen and the Duke then went on to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), the Cocos Islands, Uganda and Aden before arriving in the Mediterranean, where they at last went aboard the spanking new Britannia and sailed home again, to be greeted by ships and crowds when they finally sailed up the Thames, 173 days after they had left. It had been a crash course in stamina and organization for the new Queen which must have reassured her greatly about the monarchy’s continuing hold over people’s imaginations. It provided a template for many other tours to come – the meticulously planned wardrobe, sending subtle compliments to different audiences, the grind of long, hot car journeys at slow speeds, the tweaking of similar speeches for local conditions. Yet in 1954 the press was far easier to handle than it would later become; royal news was still news about what the Royals said and did during public engagements. Patriotic feeling was at its most fervent. There were none of the diplomatic dilemmas or local political protests which came later; so, apart from the physical strain, this had been easy. In the long run, did it change anything? Without it, surely, the Queen would not have been quite as popular in her further-flung dominions as she stayed. Doing her bit for the monarchy, she strengthened emotional and sentimental links in a way which could not have been done without her physical presence. And that has stayed true throughout her reign. Even in the age of television and the internet, queens have to be seen if they wish to matter. Woody Allen once said that 80 per cent of success is showing up; for monarchy the percentage is perhaps even higher.

  Abu Dhabi, 25 November 2010

  Back home in Britain, great swirls of snow are blanketing the north and east of the coun try. Here, on a sweltering patch of grass and sand, with old Arab dhows bobbing offshore, hundreds of Britons in cream suits, sunglasses and hats are waiting for the Queen. Lines of Arabs in traditional dress are there too, waving sticks in a traditional greeting while girls in shocking pink and lemon dresses vigorously swirl their hair. Incongruous is one word for it. Out of a gold-coloured Range-Rover come the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, greeted by Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the ruler of Abu Dhabi. Off they go to view a modernist pavilion, unveil a rather dull-looking plaque and then walk in a circle past the grinning, waving crowds. Bouquets are thrust and accepted. A sophisticated expat teenager screams: ‘She looked at me! She’s looovely . . .’ The Queen is nodding, smiling, looking interested, making small talk and keeping to time.

  She had touched down late at night and been whisked straight off to the gigantic Sheikh Zayed mosque, to pay her respects at the tomb of the late ruler of the United Arab Emirates and watch children recite the Quran. That had been quite a scene too: the Queen was in stocking soles and wearing a strange headdress that made her look like a Russian boyar’s wife – or a beekeeper, thought some of the watching photographers – as she walked across the world’s largest hand-woven carpet and under the world’s largest chandelier, so big that when it’s cleaned they have to lower a man inside it. After her outdoor walkabout she will change into a grand evening gown and decorations for a state luncheon to meet all the sheikhs of this confederation of emirates. Sheikh Khalifa will give her (and her husband and son) the Order of Zayed, the United Arab Emirates’ highest civil decoration. In return she will make him a Knight Grand Cross of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath. There is an investiture for the vice-chairman of Emirates Airline and a doctor specializing in diabetes. The Duke of Edinburgh will watch a fly-past of jets. The Queen will meet children and business delegations.

  Then they will be off again, this time to the neighbouring state of Oman, whose Sultan Qaboos deposed his father in 1970 and has become the longest-serving ruler in the region. Some of us travelling in the Queen’s wake are by now beginning to pinch ourselves. Sultan Qaboos, we are told, studied A levels in England, went to Sandhurst, trained at Suffolk County Council and is a passionate fan of classical music, particularly organ music. He has the world’s only bagpipe-playing camel-mounted soldiers, some of whom can also parachute and play the bagpipes simultaneously. He is a notable religious liberal and has been almost Prince Charles-like in his keenness to preserve his country’s old buildings, mainly Portuguese and medieval forts. He seems to be – though nobody quite says so – gay. His country is the same size as Britain with a population of only around 3.5 million. Again, the Queen and the Duke are flung into a round of parades, banqueting, receptions and a horse display to celebrate the fortieth year of the Sultan’s reign, moved to accommodate the Queen’s schedule. In a land of shark’s-tooth peaks, broiling sand and turquoise-topped minarets, the original source of frankincense, we seem to be in a world somewhere between Narnia and Brigadoon. What is it all for? What is this about?

  These are the eighty-seventh and eighty-eighth overseas state visits the Queen has undergone in her reign. They have taken her from fjords and frozen northern palaces to tiny islands and the world’s busiest, dustiest capitals. They have been made to dictators and elected presidents, old tyrants and courageous reformers, communists and nationalists. They have happened by royal yacht, aircraft and train. Very different, they have each involved similar rituals, some of them so archaic they go back to the embassies and diplomacies of old Egypt and ancient China: the gifts, the elaborate feasts and the speeches fluffed up with tactful evasions and courteous euphemism. In the old days the monarchies of Europe could spend years preparing for royal visits. These days they have been thrashed out – two a year, normally – by the royal visits committee of the Foreign Office, Buckingham Palace, overseas embassies and host governments. The Queen travels with a couple of ladies-in-waiting, her personal staff and whatever ministers and others are needed. There will be military men and diplomats there, a few security people and a raggle or taggle of journalistic camp-followers, generally confined to battered late-night buses and airport lounges as they try to keep up. The Queen has no more choice about where she goes than they do. If ‘her’ government says she should go to Bulgaria or Tanzania, that’s where she heads. Because, underneath the gilded icing of 24-gun salutes, exchanged Grand Crosses, dancing displays and elaborately exchanged compliments, this is a cold-hearted, contemporary and wholly serious business.

  Take that original scene, with Arab dhows and stick-waving welcome party. What was actually happening was the unveiling of the British architect Norman Foster’s winning design for a new national museum for the UAE. It features five
fin-like triangles of glass and will be built on an island off Abu Dhabi, an ambitious plan to make this corner of the Gulf a world artistic centre. There will be a Performing Arts Centre by Zaha Hadid too. Thanks to Lord Foster and the British Museum, whose director Neil Macgregor is also present, Britain has a slice of this huge, oil-funded investment. That vast, glittering mosque the Queen visited had brought work to the British consulting engineers Halcrow Group and Hill International, the lighting company Speirs and Major and the British artist Kevin Dean. The agreement in Abu Dhabi, the world’s seventh-largest oil producer, committed both governments to a further massive rise in bilateral trade to £12 billion by 2015. The oil companies BP and Shell have been in the UAE since it started, but these days, design and construction are becoming as important. Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, who attracted press criticism while Britain’s business ambassador, and later withdrew from the role, told me that though the UAE was Britain’s largest market in the Middle East, ‘the rest of the world has woken up to its potential . . . we have to find ways of increasing our penetration of the market . . .’ He is right. More than 4,000 British businesses are working in the UAE, and around 100,000 Britons live there. On the other side of the coin, investments from the UAE include the London Gateway project, a port and ‘logistics park’ in Essex, whose footfall is twice the size of the City of London and which, if it hits its target of 36,000 new jobs, will make it the largest job-creation project in the UK, during tough economic times. Everything from London hotels to football clubs, including Manchester City, is owned from here.