by Andrew Marr
But Heath was prepared to offer unwelcome advice if necessary. In 1971 the Commonwealth heads of government conference, a biennial event the Queen cares passionately about, was due to be held in Singapore. And the Canadian prime minister had established the expectation that the Queen would go to Commonwealth heads of government meetings even when they were not held in the UK. Meanwhile the Commonwealth was at war with itself because of the confrontation between Rhodesia and the ‘front-line’ black African states. Heath felt she should not go. The Queen put up a counter-argument, that if the conference had been in London, as until then it had been, she would have been present and the situation would have been just as explosive. The fact of it being in Singapore was not a reason for her failing to attend. Heath retorted that London simply had a different atmosphere. The grand buildings and the proximity of Buckingham Palace and Windsor would make it likelier that people would be on their best behaviour. In Singapore she would meet each one of the warring leaders at a time when it was almost impossible to arbitrate between them.
This was a key example of the limits of the Queen’s ability to knock heads together at the top of the organization. She cannot go against a British prime minister who has dug his heels in. On 15 October 1970 he wrote advising her formally not to go and, however reluctantly, she agreed. Adeane, her private secretary, wrote back five days later conceding defeat: since her only interest was to help the Commonwealth and ‘as it seems probable that her presence on this occasion might well lead to controversy and embarrassment, she agrees that it would be better to stay away’. In the event, it was a rough conference and Heath thought he had saved her from ‘political and personal unpleasantness’. Later she got in some gentle verbal revenge. In 1992 Heath, long retired, was at Buckingham Palace discussing the first Gulf war with the Queen and the US Secretary of State, James Baker. A real row bubbled up between the men, since Heath had been to see Saddam Hussein himself in a much criticized visit, when he warned him to get out of Kuwait. Heath told Baker he should have done the same. The Queen intervened and said Baker could not have gone to Baghdad. Why not, Heath asked the Queen. He had been able to. ‘ “I know you could,” said the Queen; “but you’re expendable now.” ’
Heath’s greatest political work during his three years in office had been Britain’s entry into the European Community. This might be thought to have huge implications for the Crown, since Britain was joining a supranational organization many of whose members assumed they were on a motorway towards political union. The sovereignty of the sovereign, never mind the nation, was at least in question. Constitutional opponents of the project in Britain saw the entire structure of the ‘Crown in Parliament’ under attack, a historic surrender of a thousand years of proud independence. Yet there is not the slightest sign that the Queen or other Royals objected. Far from it. In speeches the Queen dutifully lauded her government’s achievement, and she suggested in her 1972 Christmas broadcast that somehow the Commonwealth family of nations was now joining hands with another extended family. This was pious but, given the rivalries, implausible.
When Heath celebrated Britain’s formal membership in January 1973, with a ‘Fanfare for Europe’ gala concert at Covent Garden, followed by a dinner at Lancaster House, the Queen and Prince Philip were guests of honour and Heath recorded that ‘my heart was full of joy . . . at the recognition which Her Majesty the Queen had given to our country’s great achievement’.31 By ‘our country’s’, Heath of course meant ‘my’, and this may have simply been another example of a Crown-bedazzled politician’s self-delusion. Yet the Queen did seem to be comfortable with British membership of the EEC, despite the unease it caused to some members of the Commonwealth concerned about their agricultural trade and her own role. Perhaps she reflected that the Swedish, Dutch and Danish monarchies had managed perfectly well in the new bloc, never mind the reviving Spanish monarchy.
When Heath’s crisis-stricken government, exhausted by its battles with the trade unions, finally gave way and he called the first of the 1974 elections, the Queen was at the other end of the world, enjoying a February tour of the South Seas. As the election campaign raged at home, she travelled through Pacific island territories, New Zealand and finally Australia, before flying back to London for the close of polling. There she faced a new dilemma, not this time a question of party leadership but of parliamentary arithmetic. The voters had returned a hung Parliament, in which Wilson’s Labour Party, not Heath’s Conservatives, had the largest single bloc of seats. As when Gordon Brown faced a similar outcome in 2010, the Palace stuck by the constitutional doctrine that the prime minister remained prime minister until he or she had resigned. Just as Brown hung on until it was clear that Labour could not form a workable coalition with the Liberal Democrats, so Heath spent an agonizing weekend trying to stitch together a deal with Jeremy Thorpe, the Liberal leader, before finally resigning on the Monday. The Queen had the power in theory to invite anyone else she liked to try to form a government, but it was so overwhelmingly obvious that the right choice was to invite Wilson back that there was no real decision to take. There were several exchanges of messages between Buckingham Palace and Number Ten but no sense of constitutional crisis, still less the dangers of the Macmillan or Eden successions.
For the Queen, the more serious mid-1970s political challenge came not in Britain but in Australia. The crisis played out there in 1975 boosted republicanism and demonstrates the dangers of the Queen’s theoretically political role when others try to exploit it. Australia’s prime minister was the intellectual and fiery Labor politician Gough Whitlam. His government had introduced numerous reforms but was in deep trouble, scandal-hit and struggling with an economic crisis. He had a majority in the lower house, but not the upper house, the elected Australian senate. His Liberal Party opponent, Malcolm Fraser, decided to use the senate to block Whitlam’s budget bills, thus bringing government to a standstill and forcing a general election. The Queen became involved because her representative in Australia, the governor general Sir John Kerr, then intervened. He abruptly sacked Whitlam and appointed Fraser prime minister.
Whitlam wanted to appeal to the Queen directly but his dismissal was so fast he was unable to use this constitutional right – because he was no longer prime minister. Kerr, who Whitlam believed was acting in concert with Fraser to ditch a properly elected Labor government, was using the same ‘reserve’ powers of the monarchy that at least allow the Queen, in theory, to sack British prime ministers. The words that matter are ‘in theory’. Kerr was not, it should be emphasized, a grandee governor general sent out from St James’s with a plumed hat, fine command of ancient Greek and long family tree in the West Country. He was a tough Australian lawyer from a working-class Sydney family, who had risen through the law, specializing in trade-union cases. Kerr had spent the war in Australian intelligence and then wanted to be a Labor politician himself, though he later drifted to the right. He had been appointed by the Queen but had actually been chosen by none other than Whitlam.
The Queen was so little involved in his decision to sack her Australian prime minister that Kerr did not even tell her until he had done it. He wanted to protect her from controversy, he said later: a governor general was expendable but a Queen was not. Still, he had acted using her authority and in a way that infuriated many Australian socialists. Whitlam emerged from the parliament building to greet an angry crowd and began his speech, referring to the official proclamation calling an election: ‘Well may we say “God Save the Queen” because nothing will save the Governor-General’, and telling his supporters to ‘maintain your rage and enthusiasm’ for the election ahead. The Queen was asked to intervene, presumably by sacking her governor general and reinstating Whitlam, on the grounds that the sovereignty of her people had been infringed. That would have been an even more provocative reassertion of personal authority, and she declined to get involved.
What would have happened had Whitlam won the election, instead of – to his great surpris
e – losing it? He had been lukewarm about the monarchy from the start, earlier introducing a bill proclaiming that in Australia the Queen would not be known by her full British title, but only ‘Queen of Australia’. There had long been a republican strain in Labor politics, fuelled by Irish anti-monarchism and the huge distance between Australia and the ‘mother country’. Shared wartime memories still counted for a lot, but immigration from Europe and Asia was beginning to gently erode the Britishness of the nation. So it is perfectly possible that Whitlam’s next Labor government might have cut the link in the 1970s. Even as it was, Australian republicanism became stronger.
Nothing dramatic has happened. The 1986 Australia Act formally severed any rights of the UK to interfere in Australian politics and five years later the Australian Republican Movement was formed. References to the Queen were removed from the Australian Oath of Allegiance. Australian barristers ceased to be Queen’s Counsel. In 1991 a new Australian Labor prime minister, Paul Keating, who had served under Whitlam, called for the Australian flag to be redesigned, dropping the Union flag from its edge, and began moves to prepare for a republic. The Queen watched almost silently, though in Australia a pro-monarchy organization was formed. When she arrived for her 1992 visit she invited Keating aboard Britannia and before he could deliver a pre-prepared speech told him that she was the last person who would stand in the way of Australia becoming republican. Now, she said, I gather you have fifty-four nationalities in Australia today. There must be a time when I am completely redundant; you will let me know, won’t you? Keating, according to those present, was both silenced and disarmed. Later on the same trip, he fell foul of the British media by committing the solecism of putting an arm round the Queen; but that was a more protective gesture than she might have expected.
The following year Keating set up a Republic Advisory Committee, which led to a Constitutional Convention to thrash out the fine detail of how a ‘resident for president’ might actually be chosen. After a change of government, the referendum was finally held in 1999 and the Australians, to general surprise, stuck with the Queen by a 55 per cent majority. Yet if one of the major realms of which she is sovereign is ever to reject her, or her heir, Australia is the likeliest candidate. Julia Gillard, the country’s prime minister in 2011, is a republican (though hard-liners are suspicious that she is ‘soft’ on the subject) and so was her predecessor, Kevin Rudd. Both suggested that she should be the last monarch of their country – a poignant thought, given her visit to Australia just months before her Diamond Jubilee year for the Commonwealth heads of government meeting. Yet opinion polls are unclear and Prince William is one of the most popular royals in Australia since his mother. You never can tell.
Canada, which replaced a Union-dominated Red Ensign with a national maple-leaf flag in 1965, was going through a similar re-evaluation. It, however, had the large French-speaking and increasingly separatist minority in Quebec to complicate matters. During the 1960s and 1970s the rise of the Parti Québécois had given an angrier and more urgent edge to republicanism, though cementing the monarchy more strongly in English-dominated provinces of Canada. The Queen had an early, first-hand experience of the problem during her 1964 visit to Quebec when there had been protests, including long lines of people silently turning their backs to her. After she left, fights with the police and arrests led to the day being dubbed ‘Truncheon Saturday’. There had also been reports of assassination plots against her. She was back in Quebec, however, for the opening of the 1967 Expo fair, and again in 1976 for the opening of the Montreal Olympics. She also had to deal with the impish, charismatic and unpredictable Pierre Trudeau, Canada’s independent-minded premier during 1968–79 and 1980–84.
Trudeau is a fascinating case-study in early rebels who metamorphose into mildly conservative figures. He had been an anti-conscription protester during the Second World War, a French-Catholic intellectual interested in Marxism, and a persistent enemy of Mackenzie King, Canada’s pro-British wartime leader. As prime minister, he became known for stunts such as sliding down the banisters at Buckingham Palace, doing an impromptu dance behind the Queen and meeting John Lennon on his world peace tour. With his background, it was soon being asked whether he was also a republican. Yet in office Trudeau had to confront not only Quebec separatism but also extremist groups; he developed into a tough operator, determined to keep Canada united, if by now bilingual. He denied being republican and continued to invite the Queen to Canada. When Whitehall was uncertain about the wisdom of her going, British ministers were reminded that it was none of their business. She was Queen of Canada and Trudeau was her prime minister, just as much as Douglas-Home, Wilson or Heath. And when, during his 1980s term as prime minister, Trudeau decided that Canada’s constitution should be ‘patriated’ – that is, properly written down and established for and in Canada, rather than as an appendage of British law – he said the Queen approved. In his memoirs, Trudeau said he had been impressed by her grace in public and the wisdom of her private conversations.
The 1982 patriation, which included a Canadian Bill of Rights and Liberties, did not lead to serious new questioning of the monarchy and is now a cornerstone of Canadian identity. It has been a classic example of the wisdom of the gentle, unprotesting retreat of British power, just as the Queen’s handling of Trudeau helped ensure that a potential enemy of her authority ended up as a supporter of it. In his final despatch to London in 1984, the British high commissioner, a career diplomat called Lord Moran, who had been in the service since the 1940s, took a harsher view. Trudeau’s great contribution had been to defeat Quebec separatism and terrorism but ‘he has not been greatly respected or trusted in London. He has never entirely shaken off his past as a well-to-do hippie and draft dodger . . . Many of my colleagues here admire him. I cannot say I do. He is an odd fish and his own worst enemy.’ It was the kind of thing a retiring official can say; it was passed around with many snorts of amusement in London, but would get an icy glare at the Palace. It was in Trudeau’s era that the notion of vesting Canadian sovereignty in the governor general, and so passing to a republic, began to be seriously discussed. There is now an active republican organization, Citizens for a Canadian Republic, which argues that when the Queen dies, the monarchical connection must go and a native-born Canadian become head of state. By 2010, when the Queen again visited Canada, though not Quebec, opinion polls showed a clear majority, 58 per cent, in favour of severing the country’s ties with the monarchy after her death.
Back in the 1970s, Australian and Canadian lessons were debated in Britain, too. The thought of ‘losing’ such giant and final pieces of the old story caused much unease. Yet the ambiguities of the Queen’s role could not be ignored. Was she purely symbolic or were there situations in which she not only could intervene in politics, to unblock a crisis, but ought to? How did one distinguish between her role as head of different states if their interests collided? There could be no precise parallel of the Australian crisis which had ousted Whitlam, since Britain did not have an elected second chamber. Yet there were questions about how she might act in Britain if the parties or Parliament were stuck. Suppose Harold Wilson, who returned as prime minister in 1974, had suddenly resigned. Should the Queen appoint a stop-gap herself to allow ‘the Queen’s business’ to continue smoothly?
If so, was she not giving a potential candidate for the job an unwarranted leg-up? Or should she simply wait, passively premier-less, for the party to choose a new leader? There was much debate about this between the Palace and Downing Street. The formula devised by Martin Charteris was that the prime minister must stay in office, resigning only as party leader. The party would choose a new leader and at that point there would be a seamless switchover, leaving the Queen entirely out of it. This was exactly what happened when John Major resigned as party leader to confront his Tory critics: he remained prime minister while the contest went on and indeed assumed he would continue to be prime minister after he had flushed out his enemies. When Wilson s
hocked the political world by announcing his resignation in 1976, he did indeed stay in office while Labour conducted its election for a new leader, so that the Queen was not involved.
On that occasion Jim Callaghan beat the left’s much loved intellectual Michael Foot to become leader, and, in short order, prime minister too. Wilson’s announcement had spawned a score of pop-eyed theories involving blackmail, Russian spies, or South African ones, and corruption. His loyal press secretary Joe Haines is convinced that the revelation by his doctor to Wilson of the early onset of Alzheimer’s disease was the true reason for his exit. If so, he must have indicated this to the Queen privately in September 1975 during his annual Balmoral visit. Apart from his wife Mary, the Queen was the first to know that he was determined to go the following March. On 6 December 1975 he told her at his audience that he would leave around 11 March, and later the same day said at dinner given by his lawyer Arnold Goodman that ‘I mentioned that matter to the Queen’ so nobody could then say he had been pushed into it at the last minute. He told Barbara Castle the same thing – ‘she’s got the record of it’. The conspiracy theorists had a field day anyway, of course; quite whether Wilson thought the Queen would write to The Times or call the Today programme to explain it all was never clear.