The Diamond Queen

by Andrew Marr

  The Court Party fought back. The payments to Royals were not simply fees for public duties. They were an acknowledgement that, because of their birth, these were mostly people who could not simply go out and earn their living in the ordinary way. (The consequence of ‘Royals for hire’ became clear much later on, and was not pretty.) In essence, the committee’s argument was between radicals who wanted the monarchy brought firmly under the thumb of the Commons, on a year-by-year basis – mild Cromwellians – and the monarchists who thought a strong measure of independence was essential for the Queen. Not surprisingly, the monarchists won. The radicals were in the minority, and did not include Wilson: the inclusion of Houghton and Willie Hamilton, the monarchy’s most unrelenting foe at the time, now looks like a classic piece of establishment window-dressing.

  The committee did its best to itemize the Queen’s work, from the ceremonial duties, the reading of state papers and the endless visiting, to her private meetings with ministers and ambassadors and her work managing the palaces. She of course did not answer questions herself. That job was taken by Adeane, who emphasized in long and detailed evidence how hard she worked, including unprecedented numbers of foreign visits, and how much of a strain being constantly on display really was. With Wilson playing a leading role in defending and protecting her role, the committee eventually mended not cutting back, but more than doubling the Queen’s state income, from £475,000 a year, to £980,000. These were difficult times for the British economy, and many Labour and Liberal MPs thought the proposals far too generous. In the end, most Labour MPs abstained and in the Tory-dominated Commons of the early 1970s the settlement passed easily, with a majority of 121 votes. Yet 47 MPs voted against, and there were eloquent speeches in favour of the Queen paying tax on her private income, and a cutting-back of the size of the monarchy. Princess Margaret in particular came in for some sharp criticism for her lack of involvement in official duties.

  Overall, it was a pyrrhic victory for the Queen’s forces. First, the legislation created a system of parliamentary review of the Civil List. Admittedly, this was only envisaged as happening every decade. But it meant the Queen would in effect have to explain and justify royal housekeeping to the Commons for the rest of her reign. Second, the row over tax and her unknown private wealth would not go away. It had been a subject barely mentioned during the previous two decades. Now it was referred to again and again in the press and by critical MPs. Not until 2010, forty years on, did the Palace win back this ground and re-establish some financial independence.

  Willie Hamilton became the public face of anti-monarchism in the 1970s and 1980s. Unlike Crossman, he was no middle-class intellectual. Hamilton was the child of a Durham miner who had grown up ‘in spitting distance of the pit’ and in appalling poverty, a life of cockroaches, insanitary outdoor toilets, grime and growing anger. Born at exactly the moment in 1917 when George V was creating the House of Windsor, Hamilton vividly remembered that, aged ten, he had been lined up outside the school gates to wave at ‘some royal personage’ who was to go past in a car. It was cold. The wait was long. The car flashed past. ‘That day, a little revolutionary was born.’16 After wartime army service and a job as a schoolteacher, Hamilton fought communists in Fife and became a Labour MP in 1950.

  In some ways, he was a dangerous enemy. He was dogged, hard-working, uncorrupt and entirely fearless. After his experience on the select committee, he went on to write a controversial and bestselling book, My Queen and I, which lambasted the institution, the Queen herself and her family. He saw the monarchy as the ermine coat covering a rotten system. He focused particularly on the cost, the tax question, the large number of ‘minor royals’ and the absence of any real political role for the Queen. Yet Hamilton was in other ways the Queen’s ideal foe. He was a vinegary and vituperative man who took delight in the number of chips on each of his shoulders, and he did not shrink from personal attacks on the monarch, describing the Queen as a clockwork doll. A flavour of the Hamilton style comes from a Commons debate at the time when he mocked those who liked the Queen Mother for her pleasant smile – ‘My God, if my wife got that pay, she would never stop laughing’ – and said of Princess Margaret, ‘Why, oh why, are we giving this expensive kept woman [£35,000] for doing what she does?’17 This made him easy for the newspapers to caricature, and for some of his colleagues to dismiss. Unfashionably dressed, pinched-looking and rarely understated, he was soon among the most unpopular politicians in the lounge bars and Conservative clubs of Middle Britain.

  The Rogue Royalists of Africa

  Wilson’s reluctance to engage with Labour republicanism was temperamental, but he also had more urgent issues to confront for which he needed the Queen’s help. None was more dangerous for the Commonwealth or more embarrassing to London than the defiance of the white minority rulers of Rhodesia. With just one sixteenth of the total population, they had been aggressively fending off any move towards black majority rule and were close to breaking with the rest of the Commonwealth. The authority of the Queen was a central part of the dispute because, paradoxically, hardly anyone was more naturally royalist to their bones than a treason-plotting white of Rhodesia. The Rhodesian story is tangled and became truly tragic after Robert Mugabe took over as ruler of the country and turned Africa’s breadbasket into an economic wilderness of thuggery, theft and malnutrition. The Rhodesia/Zimbabwe story throws up hard questions about Britain’s role in Africa, the decolonization project, and the Queen’s own position as Head of the Commonwealth.

  In the 1890s, a huge area north of South Africa had been invaded and colonized by British settlers. What is now Zimbabwe and was then called Southern Rhodesia was the richest and most British-dominated part of the northwards push. It became a self-governing colony. To its north was a protectorate, Northern Rhodesia, with far fewer whites but large mineral deposits. Alongside this was a smaller protectorate, Nyasaland, with sparse, mainly Scottish settlement. In 1953 London brokered a deal to join these three into a single Central African Federation, a ‘federal realm of the British Crown’. For ten years this unlikely union, with the Queen’s head on its coinage and postage stamps, and its flag incorporating the Union Jack, survived. It stitched together the self-consciously white-colonial south with territories likely to become black-ruled much more quickly. Arguments about the future of colonial Africa crackled through Whitehall – not about the eventual end of white rule, regarded as inevitable, but about the timescale and conditions. London’s overriding policy was that no former dominion or colony could be granted independence without majority rule. For the CAF the hope had been to find some middle way between the apartheid and white-supremacist South Africa and emerging Marxist black independent states. But the independence movements of what became Malawi and Zambia forced the pace. When they triumphed, the whites of Southern Rhodesia opted to go it alone, and reject any early steps towards majority rule.

  They were led by Ian Smith, a pugnacious farmer. During the war he had been an RAF Hurricane and Spitfire pilot and, after being shot down over Italy, had helped Italian partisans fight the Germans. Rugby- and cricket-playing, blond and intensely patriotic, he thought of himself as a ‘Britisher’ and was about as passionate a monarchist as any Home Counties Conservative could imagine. He was a most unlikely rebel and much of Tory Britain, including many newspapers, was cheering for him. Smith was essentially asking for Wilson to accept his word that one day, eventually, Rhodesia would move to majority rule – but only after a long period of education and the final defeat of any communist guerrillas and rebels. Wilson and his advisers did not believe Smith and thought his plan was to continue white minority rule for ever. Trust quickly broke down on each side, and some of the behaviour on the British side was petulant, or plain petty.

  When Sir Winston Churchill died in 1965, Smith was invited to the state funeral but somehow his invitation for lunch with the rest of the leaders and the Queen went missing. Smith was eating with the South African ambassador when, as he reca
lled, ‘a gentleman in a splendid uniform came up to our table. He informed me that he was the Queen’s equerry, and as the Queen had noticed that I was not present at the lunch, she had asked him to make enquiries . . . The Queen was concerned, the equerry said, and had sent him post-haste to the hotel to express apologies and ask me to accompany him.’ Smith left for Buckingham Palace where the Queen left her group and immediately went over to express her sorrow that his invitation had not arrived. Prince Philip joined her: ‘I was touched by the genuine interest they showed in Rhodesia, and also by how well informed they were. I was impressed too by the amount of time they devoted to talking with me, and by their sincere hope that our problem would be solved amicably.’18

  It was not. Smith’s break with Britain, his Unilateral Declaration of Independence, ended with the flourish, ‘God Save the Queen’. He sent word of UDI to Wilson to arrive at exactly 11 a.m. London time on 11 November 1965, the moment of wartime remembrance, as a barbed reminder of Rhodesia’s role in two world wars. Elizabeth II was proclaimed ‘Queen of Rhodesia’, a title she never acknowledged. In the early years of UDI, at least, many of the trappings of monarchy remained. Rhodesian soldiers and airmen kept the uniforms and traditions of the British. The ‘Royal Rhodesian Air Force’, with RAF-like roundels on its aircraft, continued until 1970, and the country’s flag incorporated the Union flag until 1969. The Queen’s portrait stayed in government buildings. She was on Rhodesian banknotes and coins, and indeed on the un-Bennish postage stamps of the country rebelling against her.

  The rebels seemed more monarchist than the old country itself. When the RAF was sent to Zambia, ostensibly to protect its power supplies against a possible Rhodesian attack, RAF officers were soon fraternizing in Rhodesian messes. When, in 1966, Wilson invited Smith aboard the cruiser HMS Tiger for further talks, the ship’s petty officers invited the rebel Rhodesian leader for drinks, toasted him, and promised the ship’s company were entirely on his side. The notion that Britain could have declared war on Rhodesians, many of whom had fought for her during 1939–45, was fantastic. By such slight indications as her insistence that he join a lunch, the Queen suggested that she was at least unhappy about Wilson’s attitude to Smith. With his sporting record, down-to-earth interests and service background, he seemed just the kind of man who in other circumstances would be a welcome guest at a Windsor dine-and-sleep; it is hard to imagine Prince Philip preferring the company of a Nkomo or Mugabe.

  But Smith had become a pest. The conflict between traditional ‘kith and kin’ patriotism and the Queen’s legal position was expressed most starkly in the figure of Sir Humphrey Gibbs, the governor of Southern Rhodesia. Though a farmer and friend of Ian Smith’s, his loyalty to the Queen meant that he refused to accept UDI and formally dismissed Smith and his cabinet. Flying the flag from government house in Salisbury (later Harare), Gibbs hung on surrounded and isolated, refusing to accept the legality of Rhodesia until, in 1969, a referendum finally declared the country a republic. The Queen made her views clear by making him a GCVO – a Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order. This is her personal order, much more personal than the KCMG (Order of St Michael and St George) which Gibbs would have expected (and also got) because of his Commonwealth role. Sometimes it is only through such subtle distinctions that the Queen can show her true feelings.

  Wilson was well aware that military and personal loyalty to the Queen had been one of the few cards he could play with Smith. At one point he flew to Balmoral to suggest to the Queen that Mountbatten might be used as a go-between. That never happened, but Wilson’s psychological thinking was not daft. The Rhodesian whites found rebellion against their monarch almost – though not quite – as painful as contemplating black rule. They wanted to keep as much of the form of their British origins and loyalties as possible. Yet for the Queen to acquiesce in any way would have outraged the black-majority members of the Commonwealth and, in all probability, have split or even ended the institution. When push came to shove, the scale and inclusiveness of the Commonwealth mattered more than the painful rebellion of people who had stood by Britain and considered themselves to be British.

  For their part, Smith and many Rhodesians felt bewildered and betrayed by their monarch, who seemed to be siding with Marxist despots and left-leaning United Nations politicians against their own. As they lost most of their remaining supporters, even ingenious sanctions-busting actions and a ferocious ‘bush war’ against black nationalists failed to hold back the tide of change. But the game was not finally up for some time, until Margaret Thatcher came to power. So it was another British prime minister who oversaw negotiations that led to the creation of Zimbabwe in 1979. The horror of what followed, for blacks as well as whites, sheds an unsettling light on the simple 1960s faith in progress and democracy. The story also shows, of course, that when it comes to protecting its position as linchpin of a worldwide Commonwealth, the ‘family firm’ is hard-headed and unsentimental.

  Sometimes, too much so. The grim history of Britain’s entanglement with the bloody regime of Idi Amin in Uganda shows how dangerous sentimental Commonwealth attachments can be. Amin ousted the Ugandan leader, Dr Milton Obote, in 1971, when the latter was at the Commonwealth conference in Singapore. The official British reaction was approval, since Obote had been a threatening and ‘unhelpful’ figure. When the then prime minister Edward Heath was told about it by his private secretary he said he was ‘not wholly displeased’: the Foreign Office knew little about Amin but a Ministry of Defence official had remembered him from his days in the King’s African Rifles and had found him ‘the best sergeant he ever had’.19 Other officials described him simply as ‘a splendid type’. Amin flattered British susceptibilities. He had fought against the Mau Mau in Kenya, had risen through the native, British-officered KAR, and was an accomplished rugby player. Better still, he made an early request to come to London and meet the Queen. Heath duly arranged this, a visit that took place on 12 July 1971. At Downing Street they were impressed by his smart and military appearance, though when Amin left, the foreign secretary Alec Douglas-Home suggested the new leader might be mad: Amin had told him Uganda was about to be invaded by the Chinese navy and wanted military support.

  Amin went on to supervise a murderous tyranny that is estimated to have killed 100,000 Ugandans and included the expulsion of Uganda’s Asian population, around 30,000 of whom came to Britain. Revulsion spread as stories of his cannibalism and torture squads emerged; but he remained the leader of a Commonwealth country, able to play on his British connections in an increasingly deranged mix of menace and humour. Uninvited to the 1973 Commonwealth meeting in Ottawa, he wrote to the Queen’s private secretary demanding she send a Boeing 747 to Kampala to ferry him and his party to Canada, and arrange a band of Scottish pipers to greet him. The Queen’s staff consulted Heath, who decided it would be too extravagant, and declined. Amin shrugged and went on murdering political foes and friends – churchmen, bank and business leaders, playwrights, journalists and many more – whose bodies were dumped in crocodile-infested rivers. He awarded himself the Victoria Cross, declared himself King of Scotland and apparently wrote to the Queen in 1975: ‘I would like you to arrange for me to visit Scotland, Ireland and Wales to meet the heads of revolutionary movements fighting against your imperialist oppression.’ He also sent her a Telex inviting her to come to Kampala if she wanted to meet a real man.

  This produced much tittering in the British press, but Amin was the very worst of bad jokes. His taunting and inversion of what the Commonwealth was meant to stand for, and the reluctance of that organization to antagonize its black members, damaged both it and the Queen. His antics implied that the successor to the British Empire had no clothes. It has plenty, but the sad story of the African rebellions points to its lack of muscle. Countries are suspended – Pakistan after a military coup, for instance – and leave, as Fiji and Zimbabwe did. But there are few real sanctions. It is a club. Though today, with fifty-four members, it comprise
s around a third of the world’s population, the vast majority of that figure, around 94 per cent, is in Asia and Africa; India by herself accounts for more than half. So the Commonwealth straddles some of the world’s richest and the world’s poorest countries. On trade talks, attitudes to regional politics and much else, they are often at loggerheads. The Commonwealth boasts some proud examples of successful democracy among the ‘old Commonwealth’ countries, including India and Britain herself. But it also includes, and always has included, corrupt and despotic regimes, despite the high and principled language of its founding documents and successive secretaries general. It gives Britain extra heft at other international bodies when the Commonwealth is speaking as one voice but – sadly and wrongly, perhaps – most Britons barely notice its existence.

  Enter the Film-makers . . .

  It was perhaps no surprise that, buffeted by inquisitive MPs over the money and with the Commonwealth no longer easy to handle, the Queen and her advisers began to take risks in the late 1960s in trying to project a fresher image. Since the Coronation the fortunes of the Windsors and the influence of television had become intertwined in ways neither the Queen nor the BBC could have predicted. On the one hand, television had meant that for the first time the Queen could be entertained privately and nightly in much the same way as her subjects. She has never been big on Wagner operas or Pinter plays. She likes the same middle-brow comedies, soap operas and sporting coverage as do most of her fellow Britons. For better or worse, television has democratized taste and given the Queen a window on her country earlier monarchs did not have. On the other hand, the television cameras have intruded and caused the Queen difficulties in policing her privacy. These are not always the obvious problems of access or eavesdropping.