by Andrew Marr
The stamps saga may be trivial, but it was not meaningless and it remains telling. A clever politician trying to take on the fuddy-duddy Palace found it subtle and just as political in its response. The Queen clearly had a strong objection to Benn’s proposal and one can see why. Once her image begins to be removed from stamps, then it could equally well go from coins and public buildings; and the iconography of monarchy starts to blow away. This was not a small matter for her. The problem returned in 2010 when it became clear that the coalition government’s plans for privatizing the Royal Mail had not included formal guarantees about the Queen’s head. Symbols matter. Benn understood that, which was why he persisted so hard. As his contemporary diaries make clear he did have a republican agenda, if not a full-throttle one. Like his son and wife, he admired American republican democracy and had seen stamps as a probing line of attack that might have led to other things, beginning with the honours system.
Yet in person, mindful of her constitutional role, the Queen showed no sign of having a view – indeed, denied that she had one. She refused to be backed into a corner or held publicly accountable for any decision. Instead the well-oiled, rarely noticed cogs of the British state revolved on her behalf – the private secretaries at Buckingham Palace, Number Ten and in Benn’s own office, connected in turn to the Stamp Advisory Committee and lowlier civil servants in the Postmaster General’s Office, blocked Benn so effectively that he ended up confessing that he was knocking his head against a brick wall. Trying to be charming, and using all his skills of media handling and irrefutable-sounding logic, Benn was simply outplayed. Meanwhile other Labour ministers with republican instincts kept their comments for their diaries and displayed only the tiniest signs of rebellion, such as small bows and curtseys, or small delays for meetings. The Queen notices a lot, so she surely noticed these minor discourtesies.
Of all the cabinet ministers privately offended by the duties required by the Palace, none was more outspoken in his diary, published after his death a decade later to much tut-tutting, than Richard Crossman, the irreverent intellectual. He wrote down more about the Queen than any other public diarist of that era. His own journey was from near-apoplexy about the flummery of court ritual (noticeably more formal in 1964 than it is today) to growing admiration for the Queen and her deft use of silences and confidences. On the way, he was a shrewd observer of the uneasy relationship between the Queen and her first socialist ministers. He began in October 1964 expressing outrage about the ritual of kissing hands to become members of the Privy Council: ‘I don’t suppose anything more dull, pretentious, or plain silly has ever been invented. There we were, sixteen grown men. For over an hour we were taught how to stand up, how to kneel on one knee on a cushion, how to raise the right hand with the Bible in it, how to advance three paces towards the Queen, how to take the hand and kiss it . . .’
When eventually the ceremony (now gone) happened for real, Crossman found ‘this little woman with the beautiful waist’ who had to go through ‘this rigmarole’ for forty minutes: ‘We were uneasy, she was uneasy.’9 At that stage Crossman was housing minister, but from August 1966 until 1968 he was leader of the Commons and Lord President of the Council. In this latter role he was the prime link between Parliament and the Queen, expected to attend all Privy Council meetings and present a large number of decisions for royal approval. Crossman had a long and deep interest in the British constitution but found these duties onerous and irrelevant.
On 20 September 1966 he travelled to Balmoral, noting that the Grampian mountains were not as beautiful as the Scottish west coast, and finding the building ‘a typical Scottish baronial house, looking as though it had been built yesterday, with a nice conventional rose garden and by the little church, a golf course, which nobody plays on except the staff’. His ill-temper and mild contempt were not diluted by the formal meeting with the Queen during which ‘I read aloud the 50 or 60 titles of the Orders in Council, pausing after every half dozen for the Queen to say, “agreed”.’ It was, he felt, two and a half minutes ‘of the purest mumbo-jumbo’ which had required four ministers, ‘all busy men, to take a night and day off to travel to Scotland’. Once the official business was over, however, Crossman’s irritation evaporated and his diarist’s observation took over:
I noticed this time even more than last how shy she can be . . . If one waits for her to begin the conversation, nothing happens. One has to start the talk and then suddenly the conversation falters because both are feeling, ‘Oh dear, are we boring each other?’ She has a lovely laugh. She laughs with her whole face and she cannot just assume a mere smile because she’s really a very spontaneous person . . . she finds it difficult to suppress her emotion. When she is deeply moved and tries to control it, she looks like an angry thunder-cloud. So, very often when she has been deeply touched by the plaudits of the crowd she merely looks terribly bad-tempered.10
Sir Godfrey Agnew, the long-serving clerk of the Privy Council, told him a story about an earlier meeting which had gone badly wrong because the four ministers, coached by the then cabinet secretary Sir Edward Bridges, had been kneeling on the wrong side of the room; when they crawled round they knocked a book off a table, which the Queen picked up, looking ‘blackly furious’. Later, Bridges had gone back to apologize, and the Queen told him, ‘You know, I nearly laughed.’ He had realized that ‘when she looked terribly angry it was mainly because she was trying to stop herself laughing’. It is a truth about the Queen that perhaps too few journalists and photographers have understood.
Later on the Queen became genuinely cross with Crossman when he missed a Privy Council at Balmoral because of the Labour conference: ‘I made a little explanation and a half-apology about the misunderstandings between the Party and the Court . . . She didn’t relent, she just listened and I thought that was that.’11 The Balmoral incidents rankled, and he was soon complaining again about the absurdity of having to travel north, at a dinner with Jeremy Thorpe and the writer Kenneth Rose. One proposed Privy Council date had been judged unacceptable by the Palace because the Queen was out for lunch that day and so could not entertain her ministers: Crossman had replied that he would eat instead in the servants’ hall. ‘Not very agreeable for the servants, perhaps,’ said Rose, dryly. Crossman’s encounters with the Queen continued at Sandringham, which he characteristically dismissed as ‘an extremely dull, Edwardian baronial house’ where there was more ‘mumbo-jumbo’. It was here that Benn’s successor, Ted Short, presented the Queen with more acceptable postage stamp designs than Benn’s ‘awful ones’ and the Queen, apparently ‘said she would be pleased, and she was’ – rather giving the lie to the notion that she did not mind.
By now Crossman felt that he himself was getting on better with her, because ‘every time you see her, she tends to like you better simply because she’s got more used to you’. He had once asked Agnew whether she preferred the Tories to Labour ‘because they were our social superiors and he said, “I don’t think so. The Queen doesn’t make fine distinctions between politicians of different parties. They all roughly belong to the same social category in her view.” I think that’s true.’ Again, it is an observation that has been repeated by later civil servants and politicians. It does not, of course, mean that she regards the social category as a particularly exciting or elevated one.
The following year, in February 1967, Crossman again came across a harder edge of the Queen. A fairly obscure Labour backbencher, Emrys Hughes, who represented famously radical South Ayrshire, had introduced a bill into the Commons the self-explanatory title of which was ‘The Abolition of Titles Bill’. As a private member’s bill without government backing, it had zero chance of success. Crossman, as leader of the Commons, like the home secretary Roy Jenkins, regarded Hughes as ‘a jester’ and thought any attempt to stop his bill being debated would look foolish. The Queen clearly disagreed. She was worried about this apparent assault on her prerogative. Her private secretary Sir Michael Adeane approached Wilson, who in t
urn contacted the Lord Chancellor and chief whip to quash the bill. Crossman recorded: ‘Ha, ha, there it is. I shall have to arrange it. This is a good example of the Queen and the PM hobnobbing together, the kind of stuffiness I don’t take seriously.’12 Crossman and Jenkins later did stand up to Wilson and insisted no action should be taken to stop Hughes’s bill which, when it was finally debated on a Friday in March, attracted just three or four other MPs into the chamber. It was the dampest of damp squibs, emitting no spark or sputter. Crossman visited the Palace, where ‘The Queen said that she’d looked through all the papers on Saturday and found nothing there.’ Crossman corrected her: there had been reports in the Guardian and The Times, which had both called it a flop. He could not resist gloating that he and Roy Jenkins had been right to take no action: ‘It was a mistake to say this, since she didn’t reply.’
Like the story of Benn and the stamps, the Hughes incident is interesting because it throws a rare light on the Queen acting behind the scenes to protect her role; being excessively nervous about a political flea bite; and putting down an uppity minister by merely staying silent. This latter technique is famous among those who have said something inappropriate, or with which she disagrees, or have merely out of nervousness burbled on too long in front of her. ‘She never argues, she just looks at the person very blankly. The corners of her mouth don’t turn down. It’s not a hostile look. It’s just a complete blank – and it’s devastating,’ says one who has watched it happen. Crossman got on better with the Queen as time passed, or thought he did, though he never stopped slightly pushing things. On a later Balmoral visit, when the Queen was late for the Privy Council by twelve minutes, she explained that at the furthest part of her ride, her horse had got a stone in his shoe – ‘one carries one of those pen-knives, doesn’t one, as an instrument for taking out stones, but today was the one day I didn’t have it’.13 (The horse had been given to the Queen by the Soviet Communist minister Bulganin: she found ‘those Russian horses are very obstinate’.) That evening, perhaps inspired by the Soviet theme, Crossman asked the Queen if she had followed the unfolding saga of the traitor Kim Philby and was briskly put in his place: she did not read about such matters, and clearly would not dream of talking about them.
Later on, Crossman had another falling-out with the Palace over his detestation of grand public events: this time, he was trying to get out of attending the State Opening of Parliament in October 1967, pleading a ‘diplomatic illness’. The Duke of Norfolk, in charge of the ceremony, appealed to Harold Wilson, whose office replied that Crossman ‘suffers from a phobia about public occasions of this sort which make him unable to attend’. The Duke was not put off, but wrote to Crossman saying he was alarmed and disturbed and that only the Queen could allow him not to go. Wilson was by now ‘flustered’ and so Crossman went by night to see Adeane, who said he could have cleared it with the Queen, and could still do so. He then added: ‘Of course, the Queen has as strong a feeling of dislike of public ceremonies as you do. I don’t disguise from you the fact that it will certainly occur to her to ask herself why you should be excused when she has to go, since you’re both officials.’14 Crossman, of course, went, though the experience inflamed his republicanism and he thought it ‘like the Prisoner of Zenda but not nearly as smart or well done as it would be in Hollywood . . . far more comic, more untidy, more homely, less grand’. The Queen’s speech, for which he was responsible himself, was ‘appalling’. It may be doubted whether the Queen really dislikes ceremonial occasions – it would make her life a long torture and there is plenty of counter-evidence of the great interest and attention to detail she displays. Yet Crossman, grand man that he was, was instantly disarmed by Adeane’s implied comparison of two simple state workhorses trudging together in harness.
But would anything actually change? Crossman was self-knowing enough to understand that real republicans inside the Labour government were a small minority of middle-class intellectuals while ‘working-class socialists . . . are by and large staunchly monarchist. The nearer the Queen they get the more the working-class members of the Cabinet love her and she loves them.’15 There is a wider truth here, which can be thought of as Cheltenham Gold Cup syndrome. At that famous race meeting, and indeed most race meetings, there is a social compact between working-class punters, including of course Irish ones, and the remnants of the aristocracy, all drinking similar amounts though of different beverages, and most of them dressed with cheerful exuberance. The middle classes, particularly those portions of the middle classes which are industrious, sober and serious, are absent. CGCS applies to monarchism in politics too, with rare and interesting exceptions, one of which we shall meet shortly.
In the 1960s, radical republicanism was growing stronger on the fringes of politics but was nowhere near the centre of power. There were however issues which could create an impermanent coalition of newspapers, backbench MPs and many voters; and they included the Queen’s finances.
Towards the end of this first Wilson government, in 1969, the royal finances had been catapulted into the headlines by none other than Prince Philip, who used an American television interview on 9 November to complain that ‘the Firm’ would ‘go into the red’ the following year because the Civil List allowance was inadequate. He told the broadcaster NBC that the royal family might have to move into smaller premises and give up playing polo. As the predictable media storm blew in, Wilson proposed that the whole matter be investigated by a parliamentary select committee, but only after the 1970 election. Though this takes us into the time of Heath’s government, it is right to discuss it now, not least because the star role in defending the Queen was played by none other than that recently rejected royal servant, Harold Wilson. The Select Committee on the Civil List, to give it its full title, was one of the most important investigations into the monarchy of the Queen’s reign. Its membership included Tory grandees such as Norman St John-Stevas but also Wilson, the former home secretary Roy Jenkins, and the working-class Labour republican Willie Hamilton. Crossman, no longer in the Commons but editing the then-influential New Statesman, kept up a barrage from outside. The new Tory chancellor, Tony Barber, chaired the select committee.
The big problem was inflation, which had roared ahead since the money agreed for the Queen’s public role had been settled at the time of her accession in 1952. The wage bills in particular had far outstripped her budgets. It was an age of militancy and the Civil Service Union proudly told the committee that it had managed to get average wages for Royal Household staff up by 200 per cent since 1953, against 126 per cent for the country as a whole. Even with that, said the union, there were recruitment problems since ‘the long and irregular hours are often regarded as outweighing the “glamour” of the background of the job’. It meant ‘foreigners’ were now being recruited into the kitchens and housemaids’ department which, suggested the union, might pose problems of security. The monarchy was indeed dipping deeply into its reserve funds, which were about to run out. Something had to be done. But it was impossible to separate this entirely from the great mystery of the Queen’s private wealth.
In tough times, could she not be making more of a personal contribution, given her palaces, artworks, investments and estates? We will look in more detail at this later on, because in 1970 the truth was mostly hidden from view. ‘Rich lists’ had been popular in American journalism for years and were now appearing in British papers. The Queen regularly appeared close to the top. This was easy to achieve by guessing the capital value of the royal family’s historic accumulation of buildings, land and goods – but how much was genuine personal wealth was harder to work out. She might live in gorgeously decorated rooms but they belonged to the institution of the monarchy, not to her. She could not sell the furniture, buildings or paintings and spend the proceeds on something else. Her personal tastes were modest. All her life she has preferred simple food to fancy and the odd Dubonnet and gin to fine wine. She travelled for duty, not fun, and, apart from horses, had
few indulgences outside the ritual of the royal year. Her wardrobe was statecraft, not pleasure. So what of the wealth was hers? How much ought to be taxed? These appeared as new and interesting questions, and the committee proved a tough investigator. A figure of £100 million, fabulous in those days, was widely touted. Lord Mountbatten realized what damage an exaggerated view of the Queen’s wealth could do her, and urged Prince Philip to help sweep away some of the traditional secrecy. Eventually Jock Colville, the former courtier who was now a senior member of Coutts, the royal bankers, suggested £12 million was more accurate.
The committee was not entirely impressed. A draft report, which it rejected, even described the Palace request for a review as ‘the most insensitive and brazen pay claim made in the last two hundred years’, while one of its Labour members, Douglas Houghton, suggested that the Royal Household should simply become a government department, answerable directly to Parliament. This would have removed the direct connection between Palace staff and the Queen, and would have been completely unacceptable to her, said Lord Cobbold, then the Lord Chamberlain: ‘It is almost an item of principle that the Queen regards these people as her own servants and they regard themselves as her servants.’ Other ideas included removing Prince Philip’s separate household and radically cutting back those members of the royal family getting state money. Princess Margaret, it was suggested, should be content with free accommodation, while the Duke of Gloucester, being ‘very remote from the throne’, should have his payments abolished.