by Andrew Marr
His eventual departure was even messier than Eden’s, though at least quicker than Churchill’s. By the summer of 1963 Macmillan’s government was struggling under the embarrassing blow of the Profumo spying, lying and sex scandal. Macmillan was facing a growing rebellion inside the party he had led with guile and brutality. In October, unable to urinate and in growing pain, he was diagnosed with a benign tumour of the prostate and informed that an operation was essential. He took the gloomiest medical view possible of his condition and determined that because of the risk that he might have cancer, and because of the length of time he would need to recuperate from the operation, he must immediately resign. This time round, however, there was a real choice of successors.
They included, yet again, Rab Butler, but also the popular Lord Hailsham; three new stars, Reggie Maudling, Edward Heath and Iain Macleod; and a man who seemed the outsider, Lord Home. Since Macmillan’s illness coincided with the Conservatives’ annual conference at Blackpool, some kind of contest in front of the party faithful was inevitable. Macmillan wanted to stop Butler, who was probably the favourite choice of the cabinet. Lying in the King Edward VII Hospital for Sick Officers, he called Home to his bedside to persuade him he might have to stand and then used him as his messenger to the Tory conference, carrying news of his resignation. In Blackpool, meanwhile, Hailsham made something of an ass of himself with what Conservative grandees thought vulgar self-promotion. Home, with the status of Macmillan’s man, began to mobilize support. This left the problem of stopping Butler. And at this point Macmillan’s manoeuvring drew in the Queen.
‘Soundings’ were taken of the party (now generally regarded as fixed) which showed a surprising surge on all sides for Lord Home. He too had been at one time tarred as a member of the appeasement camp but by now was known as a likeable moderate, and gentle aristrocrat. Macmillan, through Adeane, arranged that the Queen should visit him at his bedside – passing in front of television cameras and the world’s press – so that he could tender his resignation in person and offer her advice about his successor. That advice, read to her from his bed, was that she should summon Home to Buckingham Palace and ask him whether he could form a government. This was a clear and obvious ‘bounce’ which gave Home a royal stamp of approval before full or systematic advice had been taken from the party. When they heard what was happening, some of the most talented Tory ministers, including Enoch Powell and Iain Macleod, were inclined to rebel on Butler’s behalf and refuse to serve under Home. But Butler, seeing the prize snatched from his hands for a second time, flinched and, perhaps too loyally, declined to join the protests. Macmillan had fixed the succession, rather more successfully than Eden had. The Queen of course had only taken her prime minister’s advice. But had she allowed herself to be used? We must remember that this was a still a young woman, trained to receive the advice of older men – men her father’s age. According to Ben Pimlott, a later biographer, ‘When she got the advice to call Alec she thought, “Thank God.” She loved Alec – he was an old friend. They talked about dogs and shooting together. They were both Scottish landowners, the same sort of people, like old school friends.’27
Alec Douglas-Home, who now had to renounce his title and stand as an MP for the Commons, had thought he would be the unity candidate but found there were many puzzled and angry colleagues he had to persuade – and some he could not. By the 1960s it was no longer obvious that a straightforward, benign but clearly aristocratic Scottish laird, who loved his salmon fishing and grouse moors, was an electoral asset. Douglas-Home was indeed a close friend of the royal family – particularly of the Queen Mother’s family, the Bowes Lyons. Courtiers too would have seen him as ‘one of us’. The Queen herself was not at the time blamed directly for her part, but there was fury in much of the Tory Party, and more widely in the country, about the fix; and the choice of Douglas-Home in 1963 may well have made possible Harold Wilson’s squeak-home election victory the following year.
The most cogent attack came by Iain Macleod in the Spectator, when he attacked Macmillan for presiding over an Old Etonian ‘Magic Circle’ which had plotted to deny Butler the premiership, and the episode came to symbolize all that was wrong and fusty about British political life. Macmillan, wilier than the Queen, had used her ruthlessly as cover to achieve his ends. Douglas-Home had been summoned under the unquestionable authority of the Queen’s Prerogative, endlessly invoked by Macmillan before and afterwards in his explanation of these events. Any possibility of Butler refusing to accept what was going on was dashed by her involvement. In truth, of course, the Queen had had nothing personally to do with the succession. Neither she, nor Adeane, nor anyone at Buckingham Palace, had taken personal soundings or had personal debates about the possible candidates. They too were presented with a fait accompli masquerading as obsequious advice. Here was the final example of a still relatively young Queen being used by her politicians rather than protected by them. The storm was violent if short and nothing quite like this ever happened again. Parties would in future choose their leaders by more conventional means. Politicians would display more genuine care for her reputation. And the Queen would grow wilier.
Interlude
Britannia and the Waves
It is 16 April 1953. Sir Winston Churchill is still in Downing Street, Stalin has recently died, the first James Bond novel has been published, Crick and Watson have announced the double helix structure of DNA, Hillary and Tenzing are heading towards the summit of Everest . . . and the Queen is at John Brown’s Shipyard on the Clyde in a downpour. She is armed with a bottle of something unpleasant-sounding called ‘empire wine’ to name a new ship, Britannia. The vessel will be the eighty-third Royal Yacht, going back in an unbroken line to the reign of Charles II, a family tree of wooden Dutch-style boats, gorgeously decorated miniature warships, paddle steamers and steel-clad steam ships. This new one looks nothing like most people’s idea of a yacht. It is more like a child’s drawing of a ship, with simple lines, a single big funnel, and three masts. As the rain falls, the Queen tells 30,000 Scottish shipyard workers, their families and their bosses how much the building of the ship had meant to her father: ‘He felt most strongly, as I do, that a yacht was a necessity and not a luxury for the head of our great British Commonwealth, between whose countries the sea is no barrier but the natural and indestructible highway.’ Whack goes the wine, hooray go the crowds and the national anthem wafts up into the mirk.
So from the very first Britannia’s fate and the Commonwealth’s were said to be closely interlinked. As Prince Philip later pointed out, she was the first Royal Yacht to be genuinely ocean-going. The need for a new vessel to replace the last of three Victoria and Alberts had been discussed before the war and was revived by George VI in 1951. By then Britain was under two shadows, the shadow of post-war austerity and the new shadow of the Cold War. So the original pre-1939 plans were trimmed – the King himself asked for a smaller ship – and the new Royal Yacht was designed so that it could be converted into a floating hospital in any future war. At nearly 6,000 tons, with two steam turbine engines providing 12,000 horsepower, she was relatively underpowered. Despite post-war shortages, the construction was rushed forward partly because it was hoped that the sick King might be helped by sea voyages, such as his post-war visit on a battleship to South Africa. He died long before Britannia was ready.
For anyone interested in the Queen’s personal taste Britannia, now moored at Leith docks in Edinburgh and open to the public, is well worth a visit. In her palaces and castles the Queen inherited the furnishings. These she chose, with the Duke’s enthusiastic assistance. What they preferred will be familiar to millions of middle-class people of the 1950s, a clean-lined, light, unfussy Scandinavian style of decoration with comfortable, simple chairs and beds. It is a response to the heavier, more ornate styles of the previous generations. There is no dark red, no gilding, no heavy oak or strong patterns, but instead cream, light grey, simple lamps and light wood desks. The Queen’s working
desk is small and businesslike. The Duke’s bedroom has the male simplicity of a naval officer’s taste. By the time the yacht had ended her long service, she was also filled with gifts and oddities picked up on the way, from whalebones lifted from a beach by Prince Philip to presentation swords from Arabia, spears from the South Seas and carved sticks from everywhere. But the effect is of comfort and calm, not of monarchical splendour. There are flashes of grandness, including a special bay for the royal Bentley, which would be unloaded by crane, and the almost Venetian elegance of the Royal Barge; but this feels more like a large Home Counties detached house loaded onto a ship than a floating palace. It has little of the gold-leafed and marbled swank of the vast gin-palace cruisers the super-rich stable at St Tropez or Cannes or in the Caribbean. One politician who travelled aboard her felt ‘there was a homeliness about Britannia which fits in with the Queen’s personality. It’s not a grand place. It’s not a place for thinking grand thoughts.’
The Royal Yacht would be critical to the story of the new Queen’s reign. Most of it, anyway. For we fast-forward to 11 December 1997. Not Glasgow, this time, but Portsmouth. Cold, clear weather. Tony Blair is Labour prime minister and after a decision taken by the former Conservative government Britannia is being decommissioned. A dozen members of the royal family are there, and the Queen is the last of them to leave the ship she has called home for forty-four years. Britannia still looks good, with her deep blue hull, flags fluttering and brass gleaming. The Royal Marines Band plays ‘A Life on the Ocean Wave’. The Queen seems to be in tears. The ship has taken her and other members of her family on 968 official voyages across the globe. A staggering range of presidents, prime ministers and other notables have been entertained on board. She has travelled a total of 1,087,623 nautical miles, calling at over 600 ports in 135 countries. On Britannia the Queen has scampered around barefoot, gossiped endlessly late at night after visits, mimicking foreign guests, and held family-like dinners for bickering Commonwealth leaders. For those with her the last hour of the day aboard ship was often particularly fascinating. ‘She would kick her shoes off, have a whisky, and it was “Did you see? Did you see? that chap was looking a bit wobbly.” ’
Britannia was indeed an ocean-going refuge. The Queen has said that while Buckingham Palace is for work, Windsor Castle for weekends and some state visits, Balmoral and Sandringham for holidays – albeit interrupted with a lot of work and entertaining – the Royal Yacht was where she could fully relax. One royal servant recalls her saying it was her only true break of the year: ‘I walk on at the end of a long summer season, I am absolutely exhausted and you won’t see me for a couple of days . . . and at the end of a fortnight I can get off at Aberdeen with a spring in my heels, ready for another year.’
The atmosphere on board reflected this. The crew were naval recruits who had volunteered to become Yachtsmen, and who learned a new routine, including the importance of moving around in plimsolls while the royal family were aboard, so as not to disturb them, and how to keep their eyes off the Queen as they worked. In turn, she knew almost all of them by their first names and took a keen interest in their welfare and families. She would become alarmed if any took unnecessary risks. As to who was accepted, one officer says, ‘There were only two questions: have you got a prison record; and have you got a sense of humour? And if they laughed at the first, there wasn’t any need for the second.’ In this close atmosphere, the Queen would go ashore on remote islands for long private walks. If she turned round during the first minute or two, it meant she would like company and someone would join her for a privileged, frank gossip; otherwise she went on alone.
Her children have honeymooned on board, and she and her husband have used the yacht to range through some of the most remote areas on the planet, visiting tiny island members of the Commonwealth otherwise inaccessible for state visits. ‘Wherever you went,’ says one senior officer, ‘everybody came out to look at her and the national dailies were full of it, and the TV news too. There was just an extraordinary aura she carried.’ The state visits would typically start at 8 a.m., because of the importance of getting the ship neatly at rest before the morning winds. The Royals would disembark at 10 o’clock, for a round of official visits, lunches, teas, dances, speeches and openings, returning to the yacht at 5 p.m. to prepare for a formal dinner two hours later. Fifty-eight guests would be seated, the Queen presiding at an oval table with two long tables named Victoria and Albert below her. Then at 9 p.m. another 250 people would arrive, each one greeted individually, for the reception, which would continue until the Marines Band beat the retreat at 10.30 p.m. At five to eleven, the president or local leader would go ashore and at 11 p.m. the vice-admiral commanding would signal down the old voice-pipe for the engines to take her slow ahead. This routine could be used to visit a remarkable number of countries in a short time: once, for instance, Prince Philip managed eight state visits in the Caribbean in eleven days.
The official side of the Royal Yacht’s work produced plenty of memorable cameos. Nobody present has forgotten the banquet the Queen threw aboard her for President Yeltsin of Russia at St Petersburg. The wine served at such dinners is generally excellent, if poured into dispiritingly small glasses. Yeltsin was notably insistent on plenty of refills and began to harangue the Queen about the problem of whether or not he should stand for re-election. Normally, she is meticulous about avoiding political comment, but finally she turned and looked hard at him: ‘Mr President, from what you have been saying, you will certainly stand again.’ He roared with delighted laughter.
By tradition there are no speeches at such banquets, but soon afterwards diners spun round in shock at what appeared to be a grenade going off, with a huge bang and a splinter of glass. It was Yeltsin’s fist slamming onto the table before he rose to his feet to deliver a long speech in Russian. The Queen was eloquently expressionless. After the last guests had staggered into the night, Britannia made her way for two miles downriver past sunken submarines and cargo ships. There was no proper illumination, except for what had been described by the Russians as a ‘firework display’, in which the explosions were provided by out-of-date howitzer shells. It was a notably tricky exit to the open sea, not helped by the fact that the chain-smoking Russian pilot was unsure whether ‘port’ or ‘starboard’ meant left or right.
On the other side of the political divide, the Queen hosted a banquet on Britannia for all the living US presidents. Ronald Reagan caused surprise by saying loudly as he arrived that he had an announcement to make. He now had Aids. He then tapped each large ear – ‘one for each’. Other Britannia evenings included ribald and rivalrous conclaves of Commonwealth leaders for the heads of government meeting off Cyprus, and riotously successful visits to the Caribbean. On one of these, Prince Philip was solemnly shaking hands and making polite enquiries of hundreds of guests coming aboard from Antigua. One was a giant local man, looming over the Duke, accompanied by his short but sturdy wife. ‘What do you do on the island?’ asked the Duke. The man eyed him coldly: ‘Cocaine.’ Prince Philip, though rarely lost for words, was taken aback and questioned loudly how it could have happened that a drug dealer had been invited on board. The wife overheard him: ‘No, no, Dook. Not cocaine. Cookin’. We got a restaurant.’ These are the small incidents that, according to one close observer of the Duke, make his official life bearable. ‘The immense tedium of much of his work means that he gropes at anything that can be made into a joke, or a story.’ Like the Queen, he has seen most of it before.
Sans Britannia, many smaller members of the Commonwealth may never see another major royal visit again. None of that will have had much impact on the hard-faced money men of the Treasury, particularly in difficult times. Britannia, with her crew of 260 sailors, 178 of them permanent, and her twenty-six bandsmen, eventually became a mild embarrassment to the navy. In 1953 when she was launched, the Royal Navy was the world’s third-largest surface fleet; by the time she was decommissioned, it had around thirty ships. She stoo
d out more, and was going to cost more to keep going. Yet her cost–benefit ratio was easy to work out, even if you put all the Commonwealth and other political roles completely to one side. From 1990 onwards Britannia was used more and more aggressively to promote British trade. In the following five years she was doing around sixty such missions a year. Overseas CEOs and company presidents, from the Middle East to the US, would be invited on board for presentations by groups of British companies, often in electronics, engineering and finance.
‘We’d go twenty miles off the coast, so their mobile phones wouldn’t work, and we’d got them,’ recalls an officer. Though companies such as BAe and Racal had good reason to know the effectiveness of the work, it is hard to put a clear cash value on them. But one careful estimate found that in a three-year period tax collected for the Treasury, after deals done by British companies aboard Britannia, was running at around £700 million a year. Given that the yacht was costing the government around £100 million a year, it would seem a good deal. Not everyone agreed, even in the Royal Household. One official says that although the ship was a wonderful refuge, ‘my personal view was that it had to go, and you can get the same benefits from hiring a ship for a week or two. It was a very expensive operation, with red boxes being helicoptered out every day from London, containing quite routine stuff; and the Marine Band and so forth.’ The same source adds, however, that the Queen’s need for occasional privacy was poignantly clear even aboard: ‘Until you’re there, you don’t realize the lack of her human rights in being in that job: even on Britannia there was a certain amount of nervousness that another boat was going to come alongside.’ In the end, filled with photographs of the royal children and childhood memories, ‘it was like anybody else’s holiday cottage . . . except that it was a ship’.