The Diamond Queen

by Andrew Marr

  On 23 March 1976 she and Prince Philip went to a farewell dinner at Number Ten, a convivial evening that went on until nearly midnight. She had done the same for Winston Churchill, but for nobody since. It was a mark of considerable respect and affection. They had been through a lot together. Wilson was not a great prime minister. He had spent so much time dodging and tacking to keep Labour united that he was rarely able to grasp the great issues and change the direction of the country. But he had been in charge during a time of ferocious and unsettling social upheaval, of political unrest, middle-class paranoia and inter-generational strife; and he had kept the show on the road. As the quintessential ‘Sixties’ politician, he had remained a resolutely old-fashioned and un-hip figure – podgy, dressed for comfort not fashion, phlegmatic and traditionalist. He smoked pipes and cigars, not marijuana; he liked HP sauce, not curry sauce; he had been in the Scouts, not a pop band. So, though he was only the Queen’s second prime minister to have been born in the twentieth century, and although he was the son of an industrial chemist from Huddersfield, Wilson would not have been as alien a figure to the Windsors as some have made out: there is generational solidarity, as well as the class one. ‘He adored the Queen, he really did,’ says one senior Whitehall figure who worked with him. The Wilson years had been marked by scandals and conspiracy theories but the Queen managed to keep well clear. She cannot have liked some of what he did. Asked to approve a seat in the House of Lords for Marcia Williams, Lady Falkender, Wilson’s controversial secretary and gate-keeper, the Queen rolled an eye: ‘Must I?’ But she complied.

  Royalists and Republicans

  There were two major moments of royal stocktaking in the seventies, the Queen’s silver wedding anniversary and her Silver Jubilee of 1977. Jubilees, culminating in the Diamond, have been among the most characteristic celebrations of the Windsor dynasty. It is worth pausing and reflecting on them. Where did the idea come from? When did they start? The first ‘modern’ Jubilee happened in 1809 when writers and politicians began to raise a hubbub for something to mark the fiftieth anniversary of George III’s accession. Rather as in 1977, it came when the country was badly in need of cheering up. The Napoleonic wars were at their height, with the high taxes, reduced imports, wounded soldiers and physical isolation they had brought to Britain. In Spain and Portugal, the Peninsular war was grinding grimly on. George’s reign had seen the great naval victory of Trafalgar four years before, but he was also associated with the loss of the American colonies and by this time was almost blind and suffering grievously from rheumatism.

  The idea of celebrating his exceptionally long reign was seized upon as a national dance of defiance, a knees-up in the darkness. There were services of thanksgiving around the country, with ox-roastings and formidable amounts of beer being consumed. Special food was issued to soldiers and sailors. The King freed all debtors to the Crown. Many other debtors were released from prison, after being gorged on beef and plum-puddings. Deserters were pardoned. Prisoners of war were released and sent home, except for the French. George III celebrated with prayers and fireworks at Windsor, while in London huge crowds turned out for a thanksgiving service at St Paul’s, afterwards thronging the illuminated streets, dressed in patriotic garter-blue sashes.

  All this did a lot to boost the King’s popularity. Within a year he had begun the sad descent into madness and dementia, which made necessary the Regency Act and the rule of his fat, rebellious son; but the notion of the jubilee had been established. The next long-reigning monarch was Victoria, whose Golden Jubilee of 1887 had an entirely different atmosphere. At the very zenith of empire, it was grander, more military and more imperial, celebrated in India, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Africa as well as in Britain. It was the moment when the Queen left behind her years of seclusion as ‘the widow of Windsor’ and it did much for her popularity, too. The ceremonies in London included a gathering of the vastly extended royal family network of Europe, a parade of Indian troops behind the famous gold coach, in which the crownless Victoria sat and waved, and a service at Westminster Abbey. There was an Irish terrorist plot to blow up the Queen, government and assembled notables, which failed partly because of London’s unreliable public transport system. Around Britain, there was enough collective memory to repeat the ox-roastings, feasts, beer-drinking, bonfires and dances of 1809.

  Victoria was still reigning in 1897 when her Diamond Jubilee was celebrated in similar fashion, though with more looking back and the first tremors of suspicion that Britain’s age of dominance might not last for ever. In the following century, the most significant such celebration had been the Silver Jubilee of George V in 1935. This happened once more at a time of national gloom and uncertainty – among the most fulsome messages of congratulations was one from Herr Hitler. The by now familiar pattern of beacons, fireworks, ox-roastings, parties and church services followed. When the King and Queen visited the slums of east London, the royal coach and horses were followed by enthusiastic roller-skaters and cyclists. There was a sea of flags and cheering faces: one sign in a particularly dilapidated area read simply, ‘Lousy but Loyal’. It was after this that George reflected, ‘I’d no idea they felt that way about me: I am beginning to think they must really like me for myself.’ This was probably not false modesty. Before opinion polls and relatively isolated from public opinion, it took a big occasion to show the monarch the people, as well as vice versa.

  So by the 1977 Silver Jubilee there was an established tradition to work from. We knew what jubilees were for. They were moments of stock-taking and reflection, both about the state of the monarchy and what had happened to the country. They were bad news for oxen and good news for brewers. They had become dates in the national life not unlike big birthdays or diamond weddings in family life. The historian David Cannadine makes a simple but powerful point about them:

  If you live in a republic – let’s take the United States of America – and you think about the period of history that the country’s chopped up into, it is four years for a president, eight years if you’re lucky, and then it’s a hundred years, for centenaries or centennials, and that’s about it; whereas if you have a monarchy, especially if you have the present Queen, who has reigned for twenty-five years, then fifty years, then sixty years, what you get is this sequence of jubilees which provides you with the opportunity for structured retrospection . . . that otherwise you don’t have.32

  What are jubilees? They are catch-your-breath, look-around and what-does-it-all-mean years.

  In 1977 the question was this: after the overblown romantic optimism of the ‘New Elizabethan Age’, how had the post-war country and the Queen done? The Windsors were unscathed by scandal. Behind the scenes the work of Palace officials to avoid controversy had been largely successful. Genteel lack of relevance seemed the greater threat. In 1976 the Queen celebrated her twenty-fifth wedding anniversary by reminding her listeners of the bishop who, when asked what he thought of sin, replied that he was against it: so she was ‘for’ marriage. Her ‘family monarchy’ was intact. Divorce had become a national addiction and the young behaved with much greater sexual openness, even abandon. But, Princess Margaret apart, the Windsors were straight-laced and together. Prince Charles was seen most often in uniform at the bridge of naval vessels or in helicopters, or on a polo pony. Princess Anne had married Captain Mark Phillips three years before, at Westminster Abbey. Phillips declined an earldom and their children, Peter and Zara, would grow up outside the glare of publicity, though the couple would later separate and divorce.

  Princess Anne was already one of the unflashy stars of the family. A superb horsewoman, she would take part in the 1976 Olympics as part of the British team, riding her mother’s horse Goodwill: she says today it is a rare, possibly unique case, of the same person breeding both horse and rider. She had her father’s bluntness and plenty of guts. In March 1974 she had been the victim of an attempted ransom kidnap on Pall Mall on her way back from a charity film screening. The kidnapper
shot and wounded three men, including her driver and protection officer, and told the Princess to get out of the car, to which she replied ‘Not bloody likely’ before bolting out of the other side and eventually being helped by members of the public. Though one of those random events that can threaten the lives of royalty, the incident was also of its time: the would-be kidnapper claimed he wanted to use the planned £3 million ransom to fund the National Health Service, a crude version of the ‘Robin Hood’ rhetoric becoming more popular as politics became more confrontational.

  Ahead of the Silver Jubilee, if the royal family was in good shape, the country was not. With strikes and the three-day week haunting Heath’s domestic premiership, then union militancy returning with added edge in the Wilson–Callaghan government, there had been debates about whether Britain was even governable. Day after day the press reported alarming economic news, dire threats about inflation and the continuing menace of a Soviet Union which now seemed more powerful and threatening than ever. Back in 1968 there had been a brief, abortive discussion between a press baron called Cecil King and Lord Mountbatten about some kind of coup against Wilson, which Mountbatten had brushed contemptuously aside. Even in the mid-1970s there were plenty in the upper reaches of the business and political world who thought that the unions and socialists might only be reined in under some kind of temporary junta. Hostility to joining Europe, fear of Soviet-sponsored communists infiltrating industry and despair about the cycle of terrorist violence spinning out of control in Northern Ireland produced an almost paranoid mood on the right.

  As with her grandfather in 1935, the Queen’s Silver Jubilee provoked some MPs to call for – well, not too much celebration because of the tough economic times. The leftist and republican minority was more vocal than ever, though not, according to the polls, any larger. The Times writer Philip Howard asked how seriously Britain should take the case of the radicals, who felt that monarchy had become ‘a soporific for a geriatric society, and comic relief to the death-rattle of a nation’. He concluded that despite all the current problems, ‘There is a great advantage in having your official head of state above competition and so above party contention. Constitutional monarchy is, paradoxically, a democratic institution: by giving your official head of state no power, it makes her representative of all her subjects, particularly the weaker ones.’33 By the beginning of the Silver Jubilee year it was not yet clear how widely that assessment was still shared. As ever with monarchy, there would be no clear line between the popularity of the private family and the usefulness of the institution.

  On the other side of the political divide, there was a mutinous feeling. For the first time in the Queen’s reign, living standards had actually fallen during the previous two years. Inside the Labour Party, Trotskyists and Marxist local authority bosses seemed to be gaining influence. In jubilee year, the communists would organize their own celebration, socialists would distribute ‘Roll on the Red Republic’ badges and students would hoist red flags over Ruskin College, Oxford, to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution. All of which may have added to the gaiety of the national conversation but did not really amount to a hill of red beans. Photographs of the Queen were removed from some town halls. During the jubilee some others, such as Manchester, decided to ‘waste’ no money on celebrations or decorations and effectively boycotted the event. Summing up the change in mood the New Statesman, which at the time of the Coronation had produced such a reflective and nuanced argument for the monarchy, now ran an anti-jubilee special edition mocking the Queen as ‘the doll in the golden coach’.

  In different ways the views of both right and left were the reflections of elites. Assessing the mood of the majority of people who had no particularly strong political views is far harder. The best assessment, based on personal memories and conversations, might be summed up as simply a feeling of a loss of innocence. The optimistic uplift of the 1950s, essentially romantic and conservative; and naïve peace-and-love hopes of the 1960s counter-culture seemed equally discredited. There was more rudeness and more violence about. Union confrontations had become angrier. In Northern Ireland, the early idealism of the equal rights marchers had given way to a cycle of vicious killing, torture and banditry. Even in popular music, the lull, twang and sugar had been elbowed aside by the raucous insurgency of punk (‘God Save the Queen/ The Fascist Re-giiime’). Where in this picture did the real Queen Elizabeth II and her family fit? All in all, it did not seem an ideal time for a party to celebrate hereditary monarchy. The government was dubious about, and initially hostile to, a big national tour. Would it go off all right? Would it not be a damp squib?

  The jubilee year had begun with a long round of Commonwealth tours. In Britain, it only really got going in the early summer, with loyal addresses from the Houses of Parliament. Speaking to MPs, the Queen made a sharp-edged reference to the fact that she had been crowned Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Scottish nationalism was on the rise, fuelled by the discovery of North Sea oil, and her words caused some offence. But as the domestic tours began, including most riskily to Northern Ireland, it became clear that people were very much in the mood for a party. As in 1809 or 1935, anxieties made the jubilee more welcome, not less. On 7 June around a million people gathered in central London to watch the Queen and her family go by coach to St Paul’s for a thanksgiving ceremony. Harking back to George III, a chain of 101 beacons had been lit around the country – no mean feat, considering the awful weather. Overnight, as at the Coronation, people had been camping out in London. Innovations included a river tour of the Thames, larger-than-ever fireworks displays and the painting of London buses silver.

  At her speech to a banquet in the capital’s Guildhall, the Queen drew attention to the disappearance of the Empire that had still been visible at her grandfather’s Silver Jubilee. During her reign, ‘I have seen, from a unique position of advantage, the last great phase of the transformation of the Empire into Commonwealth and the transformation of the Crown from an emblem of dominion into a symbol of free and voluntary association. In all history this has no precedent.’ It was an unusually frank assertion of her personal enthusiasm for the Commonwealth, but was there a message about the domestic meaning of monarchy? Here too the Crown no longer symbolized power, but democracy. It was a message that would have perplexed her ancestors. The Crown’s strength was its weakness? Its meaning was that it did not mean too much?

  These paradoxes were little discussed in the streets. For more than anything, 1977 would be remembered as the year of the street party. It was a tradition which smacked more of the austerity Britain of the original Coronation, though it was on balance good news for oxen. Streets were closed to traffic so that long snakes of linen-covered tables could be laid out and bunting and flags criss-crossed between top-floor windows. Piles of sandwiches, biscuits and cakes were arranged, record players brought out into the blustery open, neighbours uneasily reintroduced themselves and there was some embarrassing dad-dancing. Villages and housing estates organized beer tents, tug-of-wars and imitations of the dire television jolly-pranks series It’s a Knock-Out. At London’s biggest jubilee party, at Alexandra Palace, the impressive feat was achieved of drinking the place dry: up to 160,000 people were there and 180 barrels of beer were emptied. The capital also won a competition for best-decorated street party, the honour going to the terraced-brick neighbours of Protheroe Road in Fulham. But other areas, such as well-heeled and liberal Hampstead, seemed emptier of street celebrations. One journalist noticed that ‘the wealthier the street, the less likely it is to have a party’.34 Maybe so: but for millions, the collective effort involved in closing streets, introducing neighbours, organizing food and drinks and putting up decorations was a delightful, energizing and nostalgic surprise.

  What, if anything, did any of this mean? The Queen was still young enough for it not to be a celebration of her reign’s length and certainly not, given the temper of the times, its splendo
ur. Perhaps ‘virtuous nostalgia’ is the best bet. The jubilee gave people a shot of the national family feeling that had existed in the immediate post-war years and which seemed to be falling away. There was a sense of ‘we’re still here, still hanging on’. Amidst the consumerism and political bickering, people could turn towards each other again, an ‘imagined community’ perhaps, but one with real warmth. The most visible additions to that community were the immigrants from Asia and the Caribbean, who in 1977 made up around 3.3 per cent of the population, or 1.8 million people. It was noticeable that jubilee celebrations were as keenly supported, even more so, by the new Britons as by the old. Was this, then, a lowest-common-denominator ‘good old us’ jubilee? Yes, but it was perhaps needed at the time. Looking back now, it refreshed and reasserted the meaning of constitutional monarchy and helped produce a new generation of royalism, leading up to the wedding of Charles and Diana four years later, which would be the most exuberant royal display before the bad years began.

  Meanwhile, Wilson’s successor, James Callaghan, continued the tradition of Labour Party super-patriotism. A traditionalist with a naval background, he revelled in his part in the 1977 celebrations. He particularly enjoyed the Review of the Fleet, since his father had been a rigger on an earlier Royal Yacht, the Victoria and Albert, in the time of George V. Like Wilson, Callaghan brushed aside the attempts of Labour left-wingers to abolish the Civil List or make the Queen pay income tax. His cabinet had a long discussion about what gift they should send her for her jubilee, with the suggestions ranging from Tony Benn’s of ‘a vase carved in coal by a Polish miner’ to Shirley Williams’s of a saddle, before they finally decided that a silver coffee pot, purchased by the prime minister’s wife, Audrey, would be safer. Callaghan’s weekly audiences were said to be ‘genial and relaxed’ and the Queen offered him moral support over issues such as the continuing sore of Rhodesia. Callaghan, for his part, tried to interest the Prince of Wales in the world of politics, getting him to sit through a cabinet meeting and attend a session of Prime Minister’s Questions. But he felt, probably rightly, that Prince Charles was not much interested in the formal side of constitutional politics, preferring his own causes: in Whitehall the experiment was judged a failure.35