by Andrew Marr
During the outbreak of the Falklands war in April 1982, Vice-Admiral Sir Paul Greening, then commanding Britannia, argued strongly that she should go to the conflict as a casualty evacuation ship. He was overruled, partly because of the unusual type of fuel oil she burned and partly in case she was too tempting an Argentine target: the liner Uganda went instead. This undermined part of the historic case for the Royal Yacht, and a decade later the vultures were hovering. She was too old to be fully modernized and strengthened. One senior former courtier says that by the 1990s she was ‘on her last legs, full of asbestos, with old turbines; it was like trying to run a [Rolls-Royce] Silver Ghost in today’s world. It was lovely, it was beautiful but it was basically over.’ The navy offered John Major’s government a deal: they would pay for the half of the yacht’s costs, the £5 million needed for the crew’s pay, if the two most relevant departments, the Foreign Office and the Board of Trade, shouldered the rest. The ministers concerned, Douglas Hurd and Michael Heseltine, declined.
Heseltine came aboard at Helsinki just after the Yeltsin visit in October 1994 and by one account asked Rear-Admiral Sir Robert Woodard, commander of Britannia, how long it would take the two of them to walk to their rendezvous with the Queen. One and a half minutes, he replied. Then, said Heseltine, you have one and a half minutes to justify the Royal Yacht. Woodard said there was no point, since the cabinet had obviously already decided to get rid of her, but he could not resist adding that she was a goose laying golden eggs, and, if you had such a creature, it did seem stupid to argue about who was paying to feed it. ‘That’s rather clever,’ said Heseltine; but he did not save Britannia. Douglas Hurd, later Lord Hurd, said later that he blamed himself mainly for not getting the ‘New Labour’ politicians on board Britannia while in opposition, well before the 1997 general election, as a result of which Tony Blair’s government had no substantive debate about replacing her.
There were lengthy and detailed discussions in Whitehall and Buckingham Palace about a replacement, which would have been a ‘national yacht’ able to combine business promotion with royal tours – ‘a perfectly sensible piece of kit we could have produced’, according to one of those involved – but not enough support was expressed by private sector sponsors. ‘The Queen and Prince Philip’s hearts weren’t really in it for a replacement,’ says an official who was there at the time. They loved the old ship, but did not have the appetite for a fight with ministers for a new one. Prince Philip has said bluntly the decision was wrong: she was ‘sound as a bell’ and with new engines could have gone on for half a century.1 But he bowed to the politics. So, goodbye, Britannia. The goose still looks good, but it is all clever taxidermy. She is a gleaming, motionless museum, tethered at Edinburgh’s port, Leith, and almost as popular with foreigners as when she was alive.
Part Four
OFF WITH HER HEAD!
The Queen in the Sixties
For the Queen, Harold Wilson was not quite an unknown quantity when he arrived in Downing Street in 1964. In 1948, while visiting Russia for trade talks, he had refused the offer to stay on to dine with Stalin by explaining he was due at Buckingham Palace to meet Princess Elizabeth and her fiancé.1 When he became prime minister the Queen had already encountered him as Opposition leader. The word was that he was a keen monarchist, despite the strands of republicanism evident in Labour in the mid-1960s. Richard Crossman, the Labour minister and diarist, noted acidly that Wilson was ‘devoted to the Queen and is very proud that she likes his visits to her’.2 But Wilson made a small point early on by refusing to go to kiss hands wearing a tail-coat, but only a regular black jacket (oddly combined with formal striped trousers).
Later this would be described as a ‘modernizing’ gesture but on all the real issues, from the Queen’s interests as Head of the Commonwealth to the royal finances, Wilson would back her strongly. His Tuesday audiences became steadily more important to him – or so his staff felt – in both his 1964–70 and 1974–6 governments. They crept up in length from twenty minutes, to half an hour, to an hour and, at least once, to two hours, with the Queen offering him drinks afterwards. His staff described him as being ‘euphoric’ after audiences and thought she had changed his views on some subjects. They worried that he was too besotted.3 He later said he enjoyed the audiences because they were the only times when he could have a serious conversation, which would not leak, with somebody who wasn’t after his job. By now her technique was being described as ‘Socratic’: she would not venture opinions herself but by careful and persistent questioning, could get a prime minister to reflect again on the issues of the week. When he resigned, the Queen gave Wilson a photograph of them in the rain together, which he kept by him for the rest of his life.
If this sounds insufferably cosy, then what was talked about during those audiences cannot have been. Like Macmillan and Douglas-Home before him, Wilson was dealing in a world perched on the edge of nuclear annihilation. Some of the grimmest messages a monarch has had to read were the secret protocols for Britain’s slide towards nuclear war with the Soviet Union, which were presented to her during Wilson’s first full year in office, 1965. The grisly game-playing had gone on long before, but it was only during Wilson’s first administration that it became clear that Buckingham Palace possessed no copy of GWB, or the War Book. The historian Peter Hennessy, who uncovered the story, wrote: ‘The Queen did not fully know either the drill that, should the stage of a nuclear exchange be reached, would leave her kingdom largely a smoking and irradiated ruin or the plans for carrying on her government in its aftermath.’4
Whitehall planners had decided that she did not need the detailed picture. She was sent a summary of the stages to war. These included, for example, ‘Military Vigilance’ or ‘Orange’ for an expected enemy attack within one or more hours, and ‘State Scarlet’ for ‘an enemy attack within a few minutes’. Shakespearean code words followed for the preparations to mobilize the armed forces and the removal of key members of the government to a village-sized nuclear bunker outside Bath (which, it later turned out, the Russians had known about for ages and would have quickly obliterated). As to the Queen herself, just as with her father ahead of a likely Nazi invasion, there had been discussions about evacuating the royal family to Canada. In the case of Soviet threat, no final decision had been taken but early on in any crisis she was to board Britannia. The plan seems to have been for the Royal Yacht to be sent to a Scottish sea loch, where she would be partly protected from Soviet missile attacks.
On board, the Queen would be joined by the home secretary, who in 1965 was Roy Jenkins. He had to be there because since Prince Philip and the Queen’s private secretary are both members of her Privy Council, she would then have enough of a quorum to appoint a new prime minister after the previous one had been killed. Peter Hennessy says the Royal Yacht’s wartime purpose as a hospital ship was always a cover story: ‘It was her floating nuclear bunker . . . it would lurk in the sea lochs on the north-west coast of Scotland; the mountains would shield it from the Soviet radar and at night it would go quietly from one sea loch to another. It wouldn’t be static, as I understand it.’ Ashore, her kingdom would be broken down into a dozen mini-kingdoms but from the ship she could create new governments, ‘so the British constitution was taken care of, even unto Armageddon, and that’s what the Royal Yacht was for . . . with that little group of Privy Councillors, ready to do the business, when her kingdom is a smoking and irradiated ruin; dreadful thought’.5 The Queen knew about all this: released official files show that Churchill briefed her in 1954 about the decision to go from atomic bombs to the far more powerful hydrogen bomb; she was a close reader of secret intelligence throughout the Cold War, the so-called ‘Red Book, copy number one’. The world of the 1960s, remembered now as the decade of social revolt, looser morals and ‘liberation’, was for those at the top of the power structure a much more serious and frightening place.
It was also the decade when the royal family seemed to give up trying to c
hange with the times, sticking firmly with the hats, tweed jackets, polished brogues and cut-glass accents of the immediate post-war era. The Queen had observed the spirit of the age. In 1962 she had gone to see Beyond the Fringe satirize Macmillan and had been much amused. But at this point, she was also withdrawing more into family life, with the birth of Prince Andrew in 1960 and Prince Edward in 1964. Both boys spent more time with her than had their older siblings. By then perhaps it was becoming apparent that the tougher upbringing of the heir to the throne, who had been sent to his father’s school, Gordonstoun, had not been an unqualified success.
Prince Philip was an active and hard-working parent. His children recall his reliable reading of bedtime stories, his enthusiasm for chasing and running games and his steady presence. He was genuinely the head of the family, away from the public gaze, and largely too the person who ran the complex royal estates. Yet nobody could say his relationship with his oldest son had been smooth. He had wanted Charles to be a man’s man, in his own image; but the two were very different. By now perhaps he had realized that his son’s temperament was simply not suited to the rough and tumble of Gordonstoun, an extroverts’ and sporty institution: he had enjoyed himself more in the remote setting of an Australian outback school, Timbertop, in 1966. Later Prince Charles would go to Cambridge and get a degree in history, a first for any member of the royal family. Even there, his image was as a rather nervous ‘square’ young man, instinctively out of sympathy with the rebellious and exhibitionist times.
Every generation reaches a moment when the changes of style and attitude among younger people become bewildering. It was during Wilson’s premiership, with student protests and a collapse of the old deference, that the Queen began to seem slightly bewildered. ‘The Sixties’ has become a phrase rather than a decade, and it was in fact in 1972 that the Queen herself came across bottle-swigging, fist-clenching republican student protestors, during a visit to Stirling University. But by the later 1960s the monarchy was confronted by left-wing dissent unlike anything George VI had faced. Wilson’s royalist instincts were important in the Queen’s reign, because he stood atop a party which had real strains of republicanism in it.
Labour was influenced by communist-dominated trade unions, which were, at least in theory, republican. Its left-wing factions, though not nearly as extreme as the Trotskyists who infiltrated the party later on, contained strong anti-monarchists. Cromwell, the Levellers, Tom Paine and the Victorian radical Charles Bradlaugh, who had refused to take the Oath of Allegiance when elected an MP in 1880, were among the heroes of Tribune Group socialists. All this was diluted by the mainstream, pro-monarchy beliefs of the vast majority of Labour voters and MPs, and Labour at no point posed a serious threat to the institution. Still, it is perfectly possible to imagine an alternative leader to Wilson who would have been less sympathetic to the Queen and whose government might have clipped and reduced the monarchy, starting a trend. As it was, Labour republicanism expressed itself only in irritated asides in politicians’ diaries and the smallest of symbolic protests. Of these, the case of Anthony Wedgwood Benn, as he then was, and the Queen’s head, was the most memorable and telling.
Well ahead of the 1964 election, Benn had been planning to change the design of British postage stamps as part of a cultural campaign against the older order. He told the Oxford Labour club in May 1963 that a new Labour government should introduce ‘mood changing measures . . . like no dinner jackets for Labour Ministers at Buckingham Palace, mini-cars for official business and postage stamps without the Queen’s head on them’. Benn added in his diary, that ‘this last suggestion was the most popular thing in the speech. Republicanism is on the increase.’6 Benn’s soft republicanism at this stage included plans to abolish the honours system, removing from the Crown all traditional lists and substituting a system under which people would be ‘thanked’ by the House of Commons, after which they might be invited to a reception in Parliament and given green ribbons to wear, with the title ‘PC’ (standing of course for ‘Parliamentary Citation’ not ‘politically correct’). He planned ‘certain grades of gratitude: “high commendation”, “special thanks”, and so on down to “general thanks” ’, thus mirroring the OBEs, MBEs and knighthoods. Thus republicanism was creeping ahead stealthily, closely connected to left-wing resentment at the class-bound, Lords-influenced tradition of the British state. Hereditary power was a big issue more generally for Benn since he was in the middle of renouncing his hereditary peerage. His nine-year-old son Hilary, later himself a Labour cabinet minister, whipped up a small storm by telling American broadcasters Britain should have an elected president, not a Queen.
When Benn arrived to take the oath of admission to the Privy Council after Labour’s victory, he found it ‘terribly degrading’ and made a point of chatting during the rehearsals: ‘We then went up to the Queen one after another, kneeling and picking up her hand and kissing it, and then bowing. I made the most miniature bow ever seen . . . I left the Palace boiling with indignation and feeling that this was an attempt to impose tribal magic and personal loyalty on people whose real duty was only to their electors.’7 As postmaster general, Benn then set to work to get the Queen’s head off commemorative stamps. He wanted more modern, better-drawn pictures of today’s world, and felt the original portrait of the Queen, by the artist Dorothy Wilding, was too fussy. He was tampering with a purpose, fiddling – with an agenda.
Unlike the stamps of almost every other nation in the world, those of the UK nowhere mention the country’s name. The Queen’s head is enough. Working with the famous designer and artist David Gentleman, Benn eventually got permission to put the issue to her directly, which he did on 10 March 1965. His diary account is a drawing-room comedy of misunderstanding and circumlocution. Benn had shrewdly picked his battlefield, commemorative stamps for the Battle of Britain, about as patriotic and unquestionable a project as it would be possible to imagine. If the Palace accepted that the Queen’s portrait would spoil the excellent drawings prepared for these stamps, Benn thought, he would have opened up a gap through which he could push through his wider plan. Queenless stamps might then lead to many other Queenless initiatives. Dust down those scarlet banners!
Benn put his Battle of Britain argument to the Queen in person, arriving with a box of designs. She alternately smiled, frowned, seemed embarrassed, denied she had any personal feelings about her head being on all stamps, and later allowed Benn to spread out a range of Gentleman’s designs on the floor. For forty minutes or so, Benn seems to have done almost all the talking, and left the Palace believing the Queen agreed with him, or at least would not confront him. He was now ‘convinced that if you went to the Queen to get her consent to abolish the honours list altogether she would nod and say she’d never been keen on it herself and felt sure the time had come to put an end to it. Of course when you do that you have to be terribly charming and nice . . .’8 Many people have left the Queen’s presence, before and since, having mistaken her cautious politeness for agreement. In this case, any smiles or nods were tactical. The Queen had not agreed. As Benn beavered away to commission and publicize headless stamps to be shown to the Queen, her private office went quietly to work on Harold Wilson and the civil service. Benn’s own civil servants more or less ignored his plans. In July the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Michael Adeane, told Benn she was ‘not too happy’ about a set of six Battle of Britain stamps with her head missing from five and Benn made a small tactical retreat, ‘in view of the bad press I’m getting and the delicate political situation’. The loyalist press celebrated a Buckingham Palace victory.
Benn, however, was not finished. The delicate verbal fencing went on. Benn congratulated himself on charming Palace officials and mused, ‘I’m sure the Palace is a lot more frightened of me than they have reason to be.’ He developed a better relationship with Adeane but eventually realized that Wilson was never going to back him because ‘he finds the Queen a very useful tool . . . in the long run his atti
tude simply strengthens the reactionary elements in our society’. Number Ten ordered Benn to stop commissioning headless stamps. He tried a final line of attack, proposing to write to the Queen and get her verdict on the record. Either she would be shown to be rejecting, personally, the advice of one of her ministers, himself as postmaster general, or the subterfuges of her private office would be exposed. Benn’s own private secretary was aghast and told him that this was going too far and would bring the Queen into public controversy. By this point, Benn did not have the support of his prime minister, of the Stamp Advisory Committee, or his own civil servants and had to back down. The Queen’s head stayed. Benn wrote that he was putting his ‘palace vendetta . . . on ice’.
For the Royal Mail, the main outcome was the commissioning of a new portrait of the Queen by the artist Arnold Machin. A conscientious objector who had been imprisoned during the war, Machin was from the Potteries town of Stoke-on-Trent, where he had trained in ceramic sculpture. In 1964 he had produced the semi-sculpted silhouette of the Queen that would be used on the new decimal coins first circulated in the mid-1960s and now he did something similar for stamps. His portrait was clear and small enough to sit at the edge of commemorative stamps, as well as filling the regular ones, allowing a much wider range of designs. Originally Machin wanted the Queen’s image to be cut off at the neck. She, perhaps understandably sensitive, did not wish to be cut off at the neck. A rather fuller dress neckline was used, and a modest design classic appeared – the same portrait still seen on every British stamp nearly half a century later. When Benn left as postmaster general, the Queen said she was sure he would miss his stamps. Benn thanked her for being supportive: ‘She gave me a rather puzzled smile and I bowed and went out backwards.’ Much later, by which time Benn had become the snow-headed grandpa of British socialism, the Queen was urged to invite him to the Palace to reminisce. She paused: ‘No. He doesn’t like us.’