The Diamond Queen

by Andrew Marr

  There were parts of him strikingly like his father. Prince Philip’s interest in science is not shared by his son, but they both painted. They were both passionate about the natural world – the Duke of Edinburgh through his lifelong association with the World Wildlife Fund and worries about overpopulation, and his son through his equally strong concern for the world’s wild spaces and rainforests. They had been at the same school, and served in the same navy, and were both close to Lord Mountbatten, and shot and stalked; and both read poetry, and took a close interest in things military; both wanted do to something practical for young people. Is there such a gap in philosophy between the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Scheme and the Prince’s Trust?

  Prince Philip had endured half a lifetime of being bored at ceremonials, of being maliciously misquoted (though sometimes accurately quoted, which could be bad enough) and of having to bite his tongue. His son was by now experiencing the same tribulations. The difference was that Prince Charles was complaining, quite loudly, though at this stage only to friends and to staff. Despite this, during these years the royal family was at its most united. The Queen began to sound more relaxed. Her role as ‘head of our morality’ fitted well with a new motherliness and she had a very strong team around her.

  The key non-family position around her is that of private secretary. One of those who has followed the court all his working life describes it as ‘the only appointment in the Royal Household that really matters a damn’. Adeane, Lord Stamfordham’s son, and a personal link to the court of George VI, finally retired from the job in 1972. The obvious man to replace him had been Martin Charteris, who had been the Queen’s private secretary when she was Princess Elizabeth and had been with her in Kenya when she heard her father had died. But the Lord Chamberlain, Lord Cobbold, had introduced a rival, Philip Moore, a pilot who had been shot down during the war and risen through the civil service. In 1966 he became the Queen’s assistant secretary. He was somewhat stiff and over-talkative, according to one who knew and partly admired him, who says, ‘She got frightfully impatient with him at Balmoral. She wanted to rip through the papers and select the most important ones; Moore would plod slowly through everything.’ Charteris realized that there was a plan to give the job to Moore and did what was, in the circumstances, rather a brave thing. He went to the Queen and confronted her. Who did she want as her next private secretary? ‘You, of course,’ replied the Queen. Charteris then in effect told her to get on with it. Moore did succeed, later on, in 1977, but the appointment of Charteris gave the Queen one of the wittiest and shrewdest senior advisers she has ever had, during a harder time ahead

  There was, for a start, a further toughening of attitude in the British press. Ann Leslie, one of the great reporters of her time, covered her first royal tour for the Daily Express in 1968, when the expected style of reporting was simply to note the colour and style of the Queen’s clothes and make some anodyne remarks. From the first, she says, the press were not made welcome: ‘Mao Tse Tung in China used to classify his enemies in various gradations and journalists were the ninth stinking category of enemies, and in a way the Court feels that about us, and I don’t blame them, really.’25 But the press were getting stroppier. Leslie says the journalists and photographers found that 1968 tour, which was to the Caribbean, ‘stunningly boring and tiring’ because of the transport problems of always trying to get ahead of the Royal Yacht. In Dominica, Prince Philip was opening a hospital, and, when the matron told him about the terrible mosquitoes, he replied along the lines of, ‘Well, you have mosquitoes, we have the press.’ The reporters and photographers revolted. Leslie remembers: ‘We ordered him to apologize . . . We pointed out to his horrified press secretary that actually he needed us more than we needed him . . . and if he didn’t behave and stop insulting us we would snap our notebooks shut, put our cameras down on the ground – or we’ll start photographing close-ups of tropical flowers.’ The Duke succumbed and came over to apologize, after which, says Leslie, ‘he was rather unnervingly charming to us. We’re not used to that.’ Leslie was working for a keenly royal newspaper, the Daily Express, and went on to write for another, the Daily Express, and went on to write for another, the Daily Mail, and describes her readers as ‘definitely the “knit your own Royal” and “Royal biscuit-tin” types; to begin with, there was no danger that the irritation of reporters would spill into hostile news stories.’ But, she adds, ‘then along comes Murdoch, who is of course a republican’.

  Harry Arnold, one of the reporters who caused many teeth to be ground at the Palace, says he believes the Queen’s reign saw a revolution in attitudes. Asked what had caused it, his reply echoes Ann Leslie: ‘In two words – Rupert Murdoch.’ Arnold was there on the day the Australian tycoon bought the Sun in 1969 and he became the paper’s first royal correspondent seven years later; he says that it was clear from early on that Murdoch, who had developed classic Australian republican views, wanted the Royals to be treated as just another story and given no special favours. It was more, says Arnold, about selling papers than republicanism and arguably the Royals have done more for Fleet Street than Fleet Street has done for them. For a long time this shift would not directly affect the Queen, who was generally regarded as so popular as to be untouchable. More often, it was focused on her husband, her sister and then her children. Arnold recalls, with some glee, a gaffe the Duke made during the first royal visit to China where he told some students they would be ‘slitty-eyed’ if they stayed too long there; the fact that the Queen seemed angry with him the next day was regarded as a further coup.26 What happened in the British popular press was simply that Murdoch’s less reverential, cheekier, chancier attitude to the Royals, along with his page-three girls, shorter stories and terrible punning headlines, proved a winning formula; and one by one his critics became his imitators.

  At this time the worst problem the Royals faced was that they seemed increasingly out of touch with the times. It was impossible to associate the Queen and her immediate family with the new mood and trendy culture of the Sixties and Seventies. They sought solace in Scottish glens and mountains, with guns and rods. They dressed formally and traditionally. They were more comfortable with dogs, horses and military types than with rock music, film stars or designers. The Queen Mother retained a lively, if unadventurous, interest in the arts but the same could not be said for her daughter, who had giggled at Wagner, quite enjoyed farces and drew the line at serious literature. The monarchy was loved and in some sense represented a broad swathe of middle-class and working-class traditional Britain – the churchgoing, prudent, self-disciplined and patriotic people who still formed a majority.

  The royal family did not represent the new social forces, both heroes and villains, reshaping the country. Despite the odd OBE lobbed at a pop star, and sometimes lobbed back again, the monarchy during the Queen’s middle years was out of touch with the times. Charles grew his hair a little longer. There were half-hearted attempts to suggest that Princess Anne was trendy in her mini-dress and beehive. But it was never convincing. The Queen, with her corgis and headscarf, was the antithesis of the age’s signature tone, a brittle metropolitan trendiness tinged with revolutionary utopias and self-analysis. Most monarchists would say, ‘and a good thing too’, but there were dangers when Elizabeth’s court seemed even older than its years. There was a culture war going on, and a generational conflict, and the House of Windsor was all on one side.

  Not quite true: there was also Princess Margaret. She had struggled to recover from the shock of the destruction of her love affair with Peter Townsend. She had emerged as the funniest, most open and theatrical of the Windsors, though she shrewdly understood the role she was being forced into. She told the writer Gore Vidal, one of her many intellectual friends, that where there are two sisters, one being the Queen and the source of all honour and goodness, the other ‘must be the focus of the most creative malice, the evil sister’.27 To begin with, she was merely the wild one, the one who went dancing into the
small hours in London nightclubs, who had a series of romances, who defied convention by smoking in public. If her sister and mother expected anything particular of her, it was that she might marry one of the wealthy heirs in whose company she was often seen, partying at Windsor or in London. She had royal duties of her own. She was colonel of a dozen regiments in Britain and other Commonwealth countries and was a keen patron of charities, particularly concerning children and the disadvantaged, playing something of the role that Diana would later on. But these did not amount to a life.

  She lived with her mother in Kensington Palace. Because of the long saga of the Townsend love affair, by the time she was free again most of the obvious suitors were already married and she came to think she would always be single. This changed when she met Anthony Armstrong-Jones, the later creator of the Caernarvon investiture, but to begin with a young photographer with royal connections. They clicked quickly and managed to conduct a romance in semi-public without Fleet Street noticing, something that would have been unthinkable later on. But it was only when Margaret was told by Townsend in December 1959 that he was about to marry a Belgian woman that she accepted Armstrong-Jones. The following day she told him ‘yes’. Before the wedding, he was moved from his bachelor pad in Pimlico Road to Buckingham Palace. The marriage took place in May 1960, the first big royal television event since the Coronation. Before the birth of their first child, Armstrong-Jones was raised to the peerage as Lord Snowdon.

  They then began a life which, though by no means wicked, was certainly a startling contrast to the home life of our own dear Queen. Snowdon worked hard to do his bit as a royal worker, learning the duties of consort from Prince Philip. He even learned to shoot, a skill that was, and still is, expected of people who mix with the Windsors. But he and Margaret moved in a very different set. She stopped travelling in a stately Rolls-Royce and took to a Mini or rode pillion on Armstrong-Jones’s motorbike. Their circle included Peter Sellers and his wife Britt Ekland, Greek shipping tycoons, the Aga Khan, the ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev, rock stars like Mick Jagger, actors such as David Niven, trendy journalists, the hairdresser Vidal Sassoon and the designer Mary Quant, alongside the more predictable rich aristocrats. They holidayed in Sardinia, Venice and the Caribbean. Princess Margaret became, as we saw, an easy target for Labour republicans who did not quite dare snipe at the Queen but found they could call her sister extravagant and lazy – and worse – and get away with it.

  For better or worse, here was one part of the extended Windsor family that seemed connected to the more relaxed spirit of the times. Snowdon and Princess Margaret brought a sense of style and a fizz of fun. Unfortunately they were also of the age in not working very hard at their marriage. Both were soon having affairs, gleefully pursued by the paparazzi. At the centre of what seemed a glamorous and hedonistic world, there was coldness, sadness and mutual humiliation. Lord Snowdon and Princess Margaret began to spend more and more time apart, often leaving their two children in Britain – though both grew up to be thoroughly normal and well-balanced adults.

  One place the photographers could rarely reach was the small Caribbean island of Mustique, where the couple had honeymooned. It was owned by one of Margaret’s long-time friends, Lord Glenconner, Colin Tennant, whose family had been influential in the industrial revolution in Scotland, and who was fabulously rich after selling the family business. He had bought Mustique as a hideaway but then turned it into a very upmarket holiday resort, frequented by rock stars and the super-rich. He offered Princess Margaret some land to build a house there. It would become her favourite hideaway and a place British newspaper readers associated with exotic but mysterious naughtiness. Tennant played up to it all: on his fiftieth birthday party, attended by Princess Margaret (Princess of Misrule), he was crowned king of the island, while local youths paraded around wearing gold-painted coconut shells as codpieces. This was as obvious an ‘anti-kingdom’ to the decorum and seriousness of her sister’s court as is possible to imagine. The Princess was surrounded by a little misrule court of flatterers and hangers-on, who adored her wit but whom she would often flatten with a swipe of Hanoverian hauteur. Snowdon pursued his own life, working ever harder, and seen with other women.

  When she was forty-three, in 1973, Margaret was introduced by Glenconner at lunch in Edinburgh’s Café Royal to a twenty-five-year-old Welsh charmer, whose life had been a muddle and a struggle up to then, called Roddy Llewellyn. Their affair would last eight years and scandalized many because of the gap in their ages and Llewellyn’s poverty. This is the story that really opened the floodgates in the press. In 1976 the News of the World covered its front page with a story about Princess Margaret and a young Welshman. The dying marriage was killed by the affair and the couple divorced two years later. Arnold and his rivals spent their first years also in pursuit of the ‘Who will Prince Charles marry?’ mystery, and Arnold was the man who revealed Lady Diana Spencer to be the winning answer.

  This second phase was dominated by the love affair between Diana and the public, with the press as panting middle-men; and it ended, of course, in disaster. Robert Lacey, the journalist and pioneering biographer of the Queen, puts it like this: ‘I think the reign of Elizabeth II will be looked back on above all in terms not of the particular political crises but of the way in which the monarchy adapted to the media, was nearly brought crashing down by the media – I’m thinking of what happened at the time of Diana’s death – and has since emerged into calmer waters.’28 He argues, rightly, that one can see the entire history of the twentieth-century monarchy in terms of its struggle with the media, from George V’s rebranding exercise in 1917, through the abdication crisis, George VI’s struggle to master radio broadcasting and the emergence of a more critical, then impertinent press in the post-war period. (Now we have an octogenarian Queen whose office has adapted with vigour to the world of Facebook and Twitter; it would be a surprise if she began a blog, but it cannot be entirely discounted.)

  Princess Margaret, like her father and grandfather, was a heavy smoker. She was also, like many of her generation, a heavy drinker. The combination, and an accident which left her with badly scalded feet, produced a dramatic deterioration of her health in later years. She was admitted to hospital with alcoholic hepatitis and had part of her left lung removed. She suffered strokes and lived in seclusion at Kensington Palace before dying aged seventy-one in 2002. The men in her life all remarried; even the apparently doomed Llewellyn became a successful television gardener and inherited the family baronetcy. Often the butt of cruel humour and dismissive abuse, Princess Margaret’s life showed how hard it is to cope with the pressure of royalty without a strong work ethic and an abnormal amount of self-control. She was badly treated when it mattered most and struggled to find a way to live happily. Her sister’s words about the importance of duty and marriage uttered so long ago seem poignant. The Queen has been a paragon of duty and determination; but in her marriage and the security of her role she has been lucky too.

  One of her quiet successes has been that the more journalists observe her at work, the more they admire her phlegm and grit. Ann Leslie, a woman who rarely takes posh prisoners, says she gapes at the Queen’s readiness to affect an interest in aero engines and foreign leaders when she would much rather be talking about horses or simply resting. On one sweltering day in Bangkok, she says, ‘I was watching the jet engine parts makers and they were glowing because they got the impression somehow that, although she was very dignified, and she’s not going to gush, because gush is not her default mode, that she really did care about them and their engine parts. And I thought, this woman is bloody brilliant.’ That experience, multiplied, is the real explanation as to why the Queen has weathered the prejudices of newspaper proprietors and the storms of newspaper wars so successfully.

  Friends and Foreigners

  If ‘the Sixties’ were not, for many people, the reality of life in the actual 1960s then ‘the Seventies’ did not feel like the 1970s as actually e
xperienced by those leading Britain. It is hard to imagine anyone less trendy, unbuttoned and at ease with himself than Edward Heath, who won his election victory in June 1970. The Queen was at the Ascot races and it was not until 7 p.m. that he was summoned to the Palace. Previous Tory prime ministers had been grander figures. Here was a man from the lower middle class, who had been elected by his party and who had no interest in grouse moors, horse-racing or indeed country life generally.

  This was a different kind of Conservative. Immediately, he had a favour to ask: there was a party at Windsor that night for Lord Mountbatten and the Queen Mother, both seventy. Would she mind if he was late? ‘She threw back her head and laughed, saying that all the family had been discussing whether or not I would still be able to come . . .’29 But the relationship developed and, like later premiers, Heath found his weekly audiences, at 6.30 p.m. on Tuesdays, had the omertà of the therapist’s office: ‘It was always a relief to be able to discuss everything with someone, knowing full well that there was not the slightest danger of anything leaking.’ He would talk about politics but also the personal affairs of fellow politicians and foreign leaders. Northern Ireland and his attempt to ‘join Europe’ were early topics. Afterwards, he would stay for a drink with her private secretary – Sir Michael Adeane, and then Martin Charteris.

  Heath already knew the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh from informal lunches, though he was as socially awkward with royalty as with any other branch of the human family. In his memoirs, he recounts an early lunch when he was sitting next to Princess Margaret, who spent the first two courses talking to another guest. ‘She then turned to me. I had always been taught not to initiate a conversation with a member of the royal family. So while awaiting her opening gambit I just looked back, and remained silent. So did she.’ On the third go, he asked her whether she had been busy and got the acid reply, ‘That is the sort of question Lord Mayors ask when I visit cities.’30 It gives a clue to the difficulties the Queen must have had with Heath: ‘She did not find him easy,’ says one former civil servant, ‘But who did? That was Ted.’ Yet she worked hard at the relationship, paying her first formal visit to Chequers in October 1970 to see Heath and President Nixon, who was there for talks. At Balmoral, Heath was politely asked about his latest yacht-racing exploits and answered at considerable length.