by Andrew Marr
The Gulf oil states, from Qatar, which will provide much of Britain’s imported gas for the next generation, through to Bahrain and Dubai, have become an economic battleground where European countries can no longer take anything for granted. Britain’s oil and gas bonanza in the North Sea is now over and will not be quickly replaced by wind farms or new nuclear plants. Britain now depends on imports and rightly fears too great a dependence on Russia. Its very future as an advanced economy is in play. The cultural links matter, as they always have done: part of the political message of the new museums and galleries, which will display works by Manet, Cézanne and Ingres, is that they display Western values and aesthetics in the middle of the Arab world. Here, as almost everywhere, the new rising powers – and above all China – are challenging hard for influence and investment. And influence matters as much as the money. The UAE and Oman have strong defence links with Britain – lots of Sandhurst-trained officers, kit and shared intelligence. (Dubai’s Crown Prince won the Sword of Honour at Sandhurst.) Both countries look across the water at Iran and south at Yemen, where al-Qaeda is again organizing. Without them, fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq would have been almost impossible. Without their help, the struggle against Islamist terrorism becomes much, much tougher. The Gulf is rich – a source of oil, gas and money – but is also surrounded by danger and political instability. The Queen knows very well this is not Narnia. It is one of the switchboxes of modern capitalism.
So can it really matter that an eighty-four-year-old lady with her eighty-nine-year-old husband arrives by aircraft and does a lot of walking, nodding, smiling and talking? In this day and age? Well, it seems to. The UAE and Oman are monarchies themselves, and in Oman’s case an absolute monarchy. In this modern version of the ‘great game’, nations must play the cards they have; and Britain can play the Queen. Few of her rivals have a long-serving, internationally famous monarch in whose company sheikhs seem comfortable, talking horseflesh and architecture. In the case of the UAE, the Queen knew its founder, Sheikh Zayed, who died in November 2009. Her visit to him in 1979 is still remembered locally, not least because each schoolchild’s history book has a picture of it. Three decades on, her arrival had been preceded by the visit of the Indian president. Given how many Indians work in the Gulf, and how closely the UAE follows Indian affairs, this might have been reckoned a more important meeting. The Queen’s visit was a vastly bigger event, with large crowds and signs across Abu Dhabi, and much more local media coverage. In Oman, Sultan Qaboos regards her with almost filial affection. He moved the celebration of his national day so that it could match her timetable. Here, British influence is still seen almost everywhere. Bordered by both Yemen and Saudi Arabia, the moderate and relatively plural (though religiously conservative) version of Islam practised in his country is immensely valuable. Qaboos has been in close touch with Prince Charles too, and keeps a home in England.
Consider all the contracts, long-term deals, expressions of friendship, media coverage and personal links restored or established in a visit of just a few days’ duration. Then remember that, with a couple of such expeditions every year (at least) and the same again of inward-directed state visits, such as the one from President Zuma of South Africa, this is only part of the endless monarchical diplomacy. Remember the similar visits to Malaysia, the Baltic states and the Balkan ones, to the United States and United Nations, to India, Turkey, South Korea. Add it up and ask again if it matters. We see the Queen in action overseas doing her trademark walkabouts, or standing straight and silent while soldiers march past her, or sitting with other heads of state. These are such familiar images that most of us barely register them. Really, though, she is operating much more like a door-opener, or perhaps a human assault vessel. She goes first, ushered straight to the centres of power wherever she is, and behind her, in an eager V-formation, come the ministers, civil servants, the military and the salesmen. Of course, it is not always the same. There are plenty of countries less interested in British royal visits, or where less is at stake. But every visit has its agenda. The parades and the dinners look impressive enough. But the story behind the story they want us to see is the story that counts.
Part Three
THE QUEEN AT WORK
The British constitution, like almost all constitutions, is played out as an endless mutter of meetings. So much ‘chatter’, so carefully recorded – Parliament, cabinet, cabinet committees; and then the endless meetings inside government offices. Outside Westminster are courts, tribunals, quangos, city halls, local government, police committees. One way or another, an outside observer might think that the British, when not in bed or watching television, are mostly in meetings.
There is one weekly meeting that is not recorded, reported, filmed, minuted or even discussed. It is the old meeting, described by an old word – the ‘audience’ between the Queen and her prime minister. Neither the Queen nor any premier has discussed with outsiders what is talked about, except in the most blandly general terms. She has audiences, too, with the most senior military men, and with retiring cabinet ministers and chancellors. These audiences are the last dark little box in the middle of Britain’s maze of meetings. What are they for? Have they, in any way, changed the lives of the British?
Walter Bagehot, the nineteenth-century journalist who audaciously tried to explain the British constitution (and, mirabile dictu, largely succeeded), said the Queen had the right to be consulted; to advise; and to warn. He was talking about Queen Victoria but reading Bagehot was part of Queen Elizabeth’s own training for her job and his little list is so generally accepted that we may assume she agrees with it. Even in relatively recent times British monarchs have used all three rights vigorously.
The Queen’s father expected to be consulted about the detail of wartime operations, insisting Churchill kept him fully informed even during the most frantic and stressful periods of fighting (something Churchill never complained about). George VI is also widely credited with warning Clem Attlee, the post-war Labour prime minister, to appoint Ernest Bevin foreign secretary, rather than Hugh Dalton, a man detested by the Windsors. If so, it was a good nudge, since Bevin became one of the greatest foreign secretaries Britain has ever had. But it was the Queen’s grandfather, George V, who was the last truly interventionist monarch. His advice, complaints and warnings were familiar to successive prime ministers from Asquith to Baldwin, and covered everything from the future of the aristocracy, creeping ministerial socialism, the response to the General Strike and the rise of the dictators. George V, founder of the dynasty, was a bridge between the assertive monarchism of his grandmother and the very cautious approach of his granddaughter. He was an obedient constitutional monarch but not a silent or uncomplaining one.
The Queen’s role is harder to gauge. Though her first prime minister was Churchill, she grew up during the most vigorous dose of socialism ever administered to the British, and with an acute awareness of the need to tread carefully. She has repeatedly been challenged and tested over royal finances and has always been aware of a vocal minority of republicans at home and abroad. Her disposition has been quieter and more cautious. We are not even sure what she really thought of her prime ministers. The least discreet of them, Harold Macmillan and Tony Blair, have been pretty discreet. There have been rumours of favouritism, that she liked Harold Wilson best of all and detested Margaret Thatcher. But this is mere gossip and in the case of Lady Thatcher at least, wrong. Sadly for writers, the Queen has been the soul of discretion.
Even so, the story of her relationships with the eleven men and one woman who have served as her prime minister is central to the meaning of her reign, and can be told in surprising detail through public documents, diaries, recollections and the observations of those around them. Some general points can be made about those audiences. First, by general agreement of civil servants and politicians who have worked with her, the Queen has an extraordinary memory and is very sharp. She enjoys political gossip, remembers detailed precedents
and, as she has grown older, has acted more and more as a kind of human library upon which younger premiers can draw. She is ‘the fount of honours’ but it may be more important that she is a ‘fount of memories’. Though we do not know what was said at her audiences, except in a very few and marginal cases, it is known – for instance – that Wilson’s got longer and longer as he struggled to hold his Labour governments together, while Blair’s were comparatively short.
Piecing together hints and using obvious logic, we can also assume that the most interesting part of the Queen’s audiences is when prime ministers talk to her about the problems they are having with their own colleagues. The historian David Cannadine argues that ‘separating out the functions, as it were – a chairman of the board and chief executive – is actually rather a good idea, and that’s what we have in this country; whereas in America you have a President who is both chairman of the board and chief executive; and that is actually quite a lot harder’.1 Prime ministers have plenty of people with whom to discuss the awfulness and treachery of the Opposition. They have Number Ten staff, other ministers, even journalists. There are far fewer people with whom they can candidly discuss problems inside their own governments.
Wilson became most enthused about his royal audiences as he felt most besieged by ministers from left- and right-wing factions of the Labour Party. Ted Heath was simply a lonelier man. Margaret Thatcher had her troubles with ‘wets’: the Queen had a royal-box view of those cabinet battles, and reassured Mrs Thatcher in 1986, after Michael Heseltine walked out from her government over the Westland affair, that there had been worse moments. John Major struggled with Eurosceptic ‘bastards’ and in 1995 would have had to discuss with the Queen in some detail his unusual decision to step down as Tory leader, while remaining prime minister, in order to provoke a fight. At a leaving dinner, Tony Blair wryly remarked that the Queen was the only person with whom he could expatiate on the fine personal qualities of his colleagues.
The highest elected office is a lonely place. An experienced, shrewd and above all reliably discreet confidante is one of the advantages of constitutional monarchy, when it works, a blessing that other parliamentary systems rarely offer. The audiences are not primarily for the Queen’s benefit, however much she might enjoy hearing at first hand what is happening. It is her job to support and get along with her prime ministers. Some, like Alec Douglas-Home, a Scottish landowner, or David Cameron, who went to school with one of her children, Prince Edward, may be more obvious social pairings than others, such as the Presbyterian minister’s son Gordon Brown or the grocer’s daughter from Grantham. But the challenge of learning about and developing relationships with people from less familiar backgrounds is interesting too.
Lord Butler, who was cabinet secretary during the Thatcher and Major periods, says he thinks that first of all, ‘all prime ministers have felt that they could talk to her in absolute confidence. That it wouldn’t go any further. They also felt, I think, that she gave them sympathy because she was a figure in the public eye and had been for so long, and so they could talk about some of the agonies that you get from that . . . I think a session of therapy is a rather good phrase.’ Sir Gus O’Donnell, his latest successor, says something similar: ‘She’s seen it all before – the ups and downs, the wars, the recessions, the recoveries, the good times, the bad times – and she’s seen the way different governments respond to these events . . . and she gives sound advice, I’m sure.’ He had once asked John Major exactly what she said and was quite properly slapped down: ‘I don’t know what she says but all I can say is, the impact looks rather good from the outside.’ Everyone who works with the Queen, and who has been interviewed for this book, says she has been a good judge of character. Human judgements about the character of a premier – liking, admiration, puzzlement – have mattered more than class.
The new Queen was still making her way back to England from Kenya when, on 6 February 1952, Winston Churchill’s cabinet was meeting in the House of Commons. Ancient precedents and modern conditions collided. The last time a monarch had been proclaimed while abroad was in 1714, when the German George of Hanover succeeded Queen Anne. A different age, but not an entirely alien one: Anne’s reign had seen two-party politics properly emerge and the Union of Scotland and England. She had not really had a prime minister, though Churchill’s brilliant ancestor and general the Duke of Marlborough had been a prime mover at court. Then, as in the 1950s, questions of the titles, status and political reach of the Queen were much debated: Anne was the first sovereign of a United Kingdom of Britain, but was also separately Queen of Ireland and, with arcane arrogance and a fine disregard for the facts on the ground, called herself Queen of France too.
The new Queen, at twenty-five, was in a very different position, but her politicians agonized about titles. The cabinet thought phrases such as ‘the Crown Imperial’ could ‘cause difficulties’2 in the post-war world, and substituted ‘Head of the Commonwealth’ into the recital of titles. Among the countries of which she was now head of state, Pakistan and Ceylon were not Christian, still less Protestant, so ‘Defender of the Faith’ seemed wrong for all her realms. That would have to be fudged. She was no longer Queen of ‘Ireland’: it would have to be Northern Ireland. And so on. Ministers argued hard and passionately, citing historical precedents with vigour. From the very first moments of her reign, the Queen’s politicians were entangled with difficult and emotive questions of protocol.
All of this may seem arcane; but Britain was a country soaked in monarchical history. In 1952 the war had been over for only seven years. It loomed large. Contemporary British films included The Wooden Horse, about an escape from Stalag Luft III, They Were Not Divided, about the Guards Armoured Division, The Cruel Sea, about the Battle of the Atlantic, and Angels One Five, about the Battle of Britain. Audiences who came to watch them stood to attention for the national anthem. Regimental reunions and British Legion clubhouses were busily attended. The monarch’s picture hung everywhere, from town halls to pubs. National Service had almost a decade still to run. Historical consciousness was stronger; from the films about Captain Hornblower, Queen Victoria or the Scarlet Pimpernel to the patriotic histories of H. E. Marshall’s Our Island Story (serious) and Sellar and Yeatman’s 1066 And All That (less so). British children were still taught the traditional kings-and-queens-and-famous-battles version of history; British comics imagined the British invading space wearing moustaches and RAF-style caps and theatre audiences accepted the censorship of plays by the Queen’s Lord Chamberlain.
Monarchy was sewn through almost every aspect of public life, from the words used by hanging judges to the deferential caution of the BBC and newspapers to every mention of the former King and now the Queen. Monarchy was for most people the holy of holies, a national religion. No British monarch more recent than Queen Victoria was permitted to be impersonated by actors in films or plays. The fierce Commander Richard Colville, a former naval officer who regarded the media with contempt and was the Buckingham Palace Press Secretary, ordered that the Queen could not even be filmed without his express permission. Broadcasters cringed before him. Newspaper editors, muttering about ‘the abominable no-man’ nevertheless ensured that only the most anodyne of references to royalty appeared.
As a moving spirit in the world, the British Empire had gone but its body remained sprawled across the earth. The loss of British India and its partition into two independent states had been a shock to many in the United Kingdom, and those who understood the figures knew Britain could not afford imperial pretensions; but the great pull-out from other parts of the world had not yet begun. Empire Day, 24 May, was still celebrated with marches and pageants. Much of sub-Saharan Africa was British. So were Cyprus, Malta, Aden, the Gulf States, Somaliland, the West Indies and Hong Kong. British troops sweltered in a vast camp in Egypt; British companies treated Persia as virtually their own property. There was an intense bond with what was known as the White Commonwealth. The term ‘British race�
� was used without embarrassment or raised eyebrows. (Except for highbrows.) Though the Empire Windrush had arrived with 500 West Indian workers four years beforehand, in 1952 mass immigration had not yet begun to alter the shape of the country, which still looked white, merely tinged with exotic incomers at its edges. Just two years earlier the British Empire Games had been held in New Zealand; the next games would be called ‘Empire and Commonwealth’.
The Royal Navy, though it was already being scuttled and broken up in shallow seas and at shipyards, was still seen as the great steel fist of British power. Many thought a renewed age of British glory, based on new technology and old standards, was just around the corner. There were plenty of older people who could remember Queen Victoria’s reign, and who had not yet realized the immensity of the new power of the United States. So it was hardly surprising that questions about the new Queen’s titles were debated so seriously by the old men of her first cabinet. Lower down the tree, others were making lesser verbal adjustments – for senior barristers, King’s Counsel, to become QCs; for the words of the national anthem to change; for new stamps, banknotes and coins to be printed and minted; and for freshly cast pillar boxes and new photographic portraits.
Harold Macmillan reflected that ministers were preparing for the Accession Council, one of the last remnants of the Anglo-Saxon Witan, ‘this strange and ancient body’. The following day Churchill broke into his familiar prose-poetry in a broadcast: ‘I, whose youth passed in the august, unchallenged, and tranquil glare of the Victorian Era, may well feel a thrill in invoking once more the prayer and anthem, “God Save the Queen”.’ These were men who had lived through two world wars as members of the ruling class and who knew full well that Britain’s place in the world was falling but who were flushed with optimism about the prospects for a different, better one under a fresh, new Queen.