by Andrew Marr
Prince Philip, meanwhile, ignored his defeat and began the most vigorously successful years of his life as consort, a time when he was regularly voted the most popular member of the royal family and seemed quite likely to turn his role into a much bigger one. He threw himself into promoting the cause of efficiency in business or scientific managerialism. He was president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science; and in a series of speeches through the 1950s and into the 1960s, he poked the stodginess of British industry in the eye, mocked the dead hand of trade union conservatism and demanded more vigour. In 1961 Prince Philip famously asked why British industry was in decline and suggested it was a national defeat ‘comparable to any lost military campaign . . . Gentlemen, I think it is about time we pulled our fingers out.’
It was an analysis widely shared by worried economic observers. Nearly a decade before, one of the founders of the Institute for Economic Affairs, Oliver Smedley, had warned that Britain could not survive ‘in an intensely competitive world if our energies, enterprise and adaptability continue to be fettered by the outmoded trappings and controls of the centrally planned economy’.21 Popular criticism of inefficient trade union practices and restrictive cartels had been a rising issue through the decade, hitting the cinema screens from the Ealing comedy of 1951, The Man in the White Suit, to the 1959 Boulting brothers’ I’m All Right Jack starring Peter Sellers, who in his Goon days had been a favourite of the Windsors. In the press, in thoughtful magazines and among free-market academics, the need for a brisker, more aggressive attitude to wealth making was heard again and again: these years of consensual ‘Butskellism’ and declinism always had their dissidents.
Prince Philip’s speeches led to a popular conviction that he was a vigorous stirrer-upper and modern man, and he was. His unhappiness over the loss of the Mountbatten surname did not make him pause in testing the old verities of the Palace, and relishing outsiders’ challenges about the point and purpose of monarchy. It is safe to speculate that these matters did not trouble his wife, more instinctively conservative (with a small c) than him, and with a much clearer public position. What Prince Philip lacked was a mechanism, a powerful lever or organization of his own which could have given his energy some kind of wider grip. He was condemned by the job he had taken on to be forever a commentator, a speech-maker (and he is a good one), occasionally a chairman – but never an executive. It is a dilemma his oldest son wrestled with too.
There is a sense of ‘battle joined’ in his speeches of the later 1950s and 1960s. It was not obvious that Britain was going to continue her industrial slither downwards. The giant Unilever was successfully importing American industrial and commercial techniques; ICI was spending more on research and development by the end of the 1950s than all British universities together; ruthless tycoons like Hugh Fraser and Jack Cotton were cutting a swathe through commercial property and retail; both the steel and car industries had formed major alliances on the ‘bigger is better’ principle, and the first motorway was about to open. The City was stuffy, but on the move towards reasserting an international role that would soon result in the Eurobond market. From Alec Issigonis’s radical Mini of 1959 to Christopher Cockerell’s hovercraft, which the former radar developer had invented in 1956, Britain had not lost her inventiveness. Prince Philip became a representative voice for rising concern and anger about the poor industrial and scientific performance of Britain generally, something apparently forgotten in the later brouhaha about his tactless ‘slitty eyes’ remark and similar. Even Harold Wilson’s Labour Party seized the fashionable enthusiasm for efficiency and better management as a major theme. Prince Philip, in his first two decades as consort, was relevant, pungent and popular.
Not all critics of fustiness, however, nor all modernizers, were welcome. Two figures, one the relatively obscure John Grigg, later Lord Altrincham, and the other the wrinkled celebrity Malcolm Muggeridge, both took pot shots at the monarchy during this period. In an obscure journal picked up by the mainstream press, Grigg attacked the Queen’s speech-making abilities, complaining that she sounded like ‘a priggish schoolgirl, captain of the hockey team . . .’ and her way of speaking was ‘a pain in the neck’. Muggeridge attacked the royal ‘soap opera’ in an American magazine in 1957, just ahead of the Queen and Duke’s visit, complaining about the dreary and conservative aristocrats surrounding them. His thrust was more against the knee-jerk and sugary monarchism of the British media than the royal family itself; but it was published under a headline questioning the need for a Queen: the self-same media quickly whipped up the story. What is odd, looking back, is not what the men said. They may have been rude, robustly articulating a minority view, but it was a free country. What was really remarkable was the fury of public reaction. Grigg and Muggeridge were threatened, abused, screamed at, pilloried and assaulted. To criticize the Queen was still beyond the pale.
Yet the country was on the turn. Old habits of deference and respect were fraying – a social change which was accelerated, at least, by the disastrous premiership of the Queen’s second prime minister. Personally Eden, who had fought gallantly in the First World War, as well as acting as Churchill’s anti-appeasement lieutenant and wartime foreign secretary, was well known to the royal family. He had first met the Queen as the seven-year-old Princess Elizabeth in 1934, when he was appointed Lord Privy Seal. George V was at his most choleric; furious at anti-monarchist comments by the socialist Stafford Cripps, who had claimed his attack on ‘Buckingham Palace influence’ was not meant to refer to the King himself. The King confided in Eden, as a good royalist: ‘What does he mean by saying, Buckingham Palace is not me? Who else is there, I should like to know? Does he mean the footmen? D’you see the fellow says there is going to be a general election in August? Who is he to decide that? Damned cheek, I call it.’22 Later, in 1947, during the worst of the austerity years, Eden had been a vocal supporter of the monarchy in the Commons against those calling for a slimmed-down Scandinavian style.
By 1955 he had become another of the elephant-premiers, though a younger, more dashing tusker than Winston, his succession so widely agreed that there was little danger of the Queen being drawn into this handover. He had been at the top of government throughout the war and was hugely admired in the country. Though his would be one of the shortest and worst premierships in modern British history, drawing the Queen into the most potentially dangerous politics of her entire reign, as he entered Downing Street there was no reason for Elizabeth not to view him with respect and affection. In private Churchill and other Tories had worried about his frail health. Had the Queen taken widespread soundings in the Conservative Party she might have found a surprisingly strong groundswell of support for another candidate, Rab Butler.
This is not the place for another reprise of the Suez affair, one of the most trawled-over episodes in post-war British history. The key facts were that the Suez Canal, through which much of Europe’s oil and other commodities arrived, had been nationalized by Egypt’s new leader Colonel Nasser after the fall of a pro-British puppet king. The British government connived with the French and Israelis to provide an excuse to evade international law and invade Egypt. Eden’s ruse, which had been cooked up at a cloak-and-dagger meeting in a villa on the outskirts of Paris between French, British and Israeli ministers, was an Israeli attack. This would allow Britain and France to intervene to ‘separate the combatants’.
Crucially, the United States was kept out of the loop and would prove a ferocious and deadly critic of the British. Eden saw Nasser as a lesser, Arab version of Hitler, a demagogue who must be confronted. In Egypt and across the Arab world Nasser was seen as a visionary and liberator; but in Britain, at least to begin with, Eden’s case was overwhelmingly accepted. He was the anti-appeaser, after all, a voice much of the country instinctively trusted. Yet soon hard questions were being asked: Was this not an act of outdated imperialism? Should things not be left to the world’s new policeman, the United Nations? Was the governm
ent telling the whole truth? Was this not, in fact, a British act of aggression? These questions began to bubble from liberal newspapers and the Labour benches in the Commons, to foment mass demonstrations in the streets. Britain was divided.
Even at the time, many suspected Eden’s account. To maintain the ruse, he had to lie to Parliament and conceal the truth even from some of his own ministers. The reason this was potentially so dangerous for the Queen is that she presumably saw, and carefully read, the private papers from Number Ten, the Foreign Office and the secret services. Did they reveal what was happening? Maybe, maybe not. Senior members of MI6, many cabinet ministers and most of Whitehall had been carefully kept out of the loop. It is possible, as most historians think, that Eden with the help of his officials concealed the truth from the Queen in his audiences with her, and there were two in the crucial month. This would have been outrageous for a properly functioning constitutional monarchy, if humanly understandable to save himself embarrassment and to protect the Queen. Alternatively she was one of the select few to know the dangerous truth and was silently drawn into his lie. Which was it?
The Queen’s own private office was split about Suez. Her private secretary Michael Adeane, a traditional conservative in the mould of his grandfather Lord Stamfordham, was pro-Eden and pro-Suez. But the two assistant private secretaries, Martin Charteris and Edward Ford, who had both served in the Middle East during the Second World War, were anti. Over the years there have been persistent rumours that the Queen and Prince Philip were also hostile to the invasion. These surfaced in their clearest form in a book by the historian Robert Lacey for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977. Lacey, a Sunday Times writer, had excellent access, eased by Lord Mountbatten, who wanted such a book to be published, and who in deepest privacy gave Lacey a lot of help. Lacey wrote that: ‘Elizabeth II appeared to friends and relatives genuinely surprised by what had been carried out in her name in October and November 1956.’ Either she ‘went along with the strategic deception of the rest of the world – including the United States [and of course Parliament] – or else she was taken in by it, like everyone else’. When the manuscript began to circulate, and Eden discovered that Lacey had concluded the Queen did not know the full truth about Suez, he was furious, fully understanding the gravity of the accusation that he had deceived his monarch.
Eden concluded Lacey must have been told this by Mountbatten or by Prince Philip and insisted to Lacey that the Queen ‘understood what we were doing very well’.23 Ill with cancer, the former prime minister was staying at Eton and decided to confront Mountbatten, a man he now described as ‘gaga’ and ‘a congenital liar’. Mountbatten, who had come over from Windsor, said in his diary that, ‘I didn’t attempt to deny it . . . It was the author himself who had put the question and I thought I had answered it sufficiently tactfully not to produce the particular statement that had appeared.’24 Lacey came under heavy pressure from Eden and his former foreign secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, to change the story. He did not. It can now be said that Mountbatten was indeed Lacey’s source and had told him clearly that the Queen did not know about the deception involving Britain, France and Israel on which the Suez attack had depended. The question then is, did Mountbatten really know this? Had the Queen told him? Or the Duke?
A significant factor not known at the time was that Mountbatten actually tried to resign as First Sea Lord and was ordered by the politician in charge of the Admiralty, Lord Hailsham, to stay at his post. That was news that would surely have been known by the Queen at the time and gives strong credence to the belief that she knew about Eden’s plot, or at least that something very strange was going on. At all events, when Eden, stricken by illness, went to Sandringham in January 1957 to tell the Queen that he was resigning, she expressed deep personal sadness and offered him an earldom. She wrote to him almost immediately afterwards:
My Dear Anthony,
You know already how deeply I felt your resignation last week, and how much I sympathize in the tragic turn of fate which laid you low at the moment our country is beginning to see the possibility of a brightening in the international sky . . . much has been said and written in the past week about your record in the House of Commons and as a Statesman; I am only anxious that you should realise that that record, which has indeed been won in tempestuous times, is highly valued and will never be forgotten by your Sovereign.
He replied in emotional terms:
It is the bare truth to say that I looked forward to my weekly audience, knowing that I should receive from Your Majesty a wise and impartial reaction to events, which was quite simply the voice of our land. Years ago Baldwin told me that the post of Prime Minister was the most lonely in the world . . . that I have not found it so is due to Your Majesty’s unfailing sympathy and understanding.
These are not the words of a Queen outraged about being kept in the dark, or a statesman embarrassed about keeping her there. The two had had longer than average audiences while Eden was prime minister and after he had gone – most unusually – the Queen accepted the Edens’ private hospitality. In 1994 Charteris, himself on the anti-Suez side, added more to the jigsaw in a recorded interview with Peter Hennessy. He said the Queen was deeply concerned about Suez, about ‘the fundamental dishonesty of it all, the collusion of France and Israel . . . and also she was very concerned about the effect of this action . . . on Commonwealth opinion and United States opinion’. That Charteris describes the ‘collusion of’ France and Israel, as opposed to ‘with’, is interesting. Mountbatten, Eden and her own private office would all have wanted to protect her, as well as understanding that she had an ultimate constitutional right to know what her government was doing.
My belief is that the Queen knew the essential story but that Eden had deliberately held back the most embarrassing part of his plan from her, precisely in order that she should not be contaminated if it went wrong, as it certainly did, and that, saying nothing directly, she appreciated this. In any event the Suez crisis showed how easily a monarch could be drawn into disastrous plans hatched by a prime minister. It implies that then, at least, the audiences were more about the Queen listening and sympathizing than about her actively questioning or warning. If so, that would fit with her cautious character. It is possible to imagine her grandfather or indeed her son insisting on more information and thus becoming more closely entangled, for good or bad, with such a plot.
The Queen’s political education by her early prime ministers was next tested by the succession to Eden. Naturally the Queen would appoint the Tory she was advised the party would most rally behind, and thus the politician with the best chance of parliamentary success; but in 1957 the question was not entirely easy to answer. Who could say whom the party really wanted? The newspapers, including those well connected to Conservative circles, assumed the prize would go to R. A. Butler. Eden himself preferred Butler and, according to his own private papers, signified ‘my own debt to Mr Butler’. But Harold Macmillan was also considered to be a sound candidate. Nor was it just a case of appointing any leading Conservative and assuming that the government would continue. Suez had left deep wounds in Parliament and the country. The Tory Party was divided, embarrassed and angry about how things had turned out, with many blaming – variously – the Americans, the media, Eden himself or anti-Suez voices, which had included Butler’s. This time, Buckingham Palace could not simply stand aside and wait.
Two men became critical. One was Sir Michael Adeane, the Queen’s private secretary. The other was Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, the fifth Marquess of Salisbury, Leader of the Lords, a friend of the royal family’s, grandson of Queen Victoria’s last premier, and himself a long-serving Conservative minister who had resigned over appeasement in 1938 and later served under Churchill. The Cecils are one of the ancient political dynasties of England. No grandee was grander than he. Though the Queen did not formally ask Eden for his advice, she did ask him how the view of the Conservative Party should be canvassed. Eden suggested using Salisbury. Ade
ane, a long-serving courtier and grandson of Stamfordham, who had been working at the Palace since 1936, was also old-school in his instincts. He was wry, recessive and loyal. Before serving George VI he had been aide-de-camp to Lord Tweedsmuir, the former novelist John Buchan, in Canada (and his son later became private secretary to Prince Charles). Now Adeane called Salisbury, who had just been shooting with the royal family for three days at Sandringham, and asked him to take soundings. Salisbury then roped in Lord Kilmuir, the Lord Chancellor. Between them they decided the neatest solution would simply be to ask members of the cabinet one by one which man, Butler or Macmillan, they favoured. This poll would then be supplemented by advice about the mood of the Tory backbenchers, delivered by the then chief whip, a young man called Ted Heath, and the party grassroots, through its chairman, Oliver Poole. Neither Heath nor Poole did any polling of their own. Was this quite kosher? Apparently so: Kilmuir told Salisbury that the Queen could take any advice she liked ‘and that she did not have to wait – indeed, ought not to wait – for the result of a Party meeting and election’.25
This led to one of the most famous and repeatedly described vignettes in Britain’s post-war parliamentary history, with the cabinet members being led in, one by one, to see Salisbury in an anteroom at the Privy Council Office to be asked, in his lisping voice, which it was to be, ‘Wab or Hawold?’ With only two or perhaps three exceptions, they voted for Harold Macmillan. He was also the favoured candidate of Heath, speaking for the backbenches, and of Poole, speaking for the party members. Meanwhile the Queen had asked Eden whether she should also consult Churchill. Despite his fondness for Butler, when the Grand Old Man arrived at Buckingham Palace with Salisbury, a Union flag rug draped over his knees, he too plumped for Macmillan. The whole process had been remarkably fast. On Tuesday 8 January 1957, Eden had been down at Sandringham to tell the Queen he was going. By lunchtime two days later Macmillan had been to Buckingham Palace and was prime minister.