by Andrew Marr
The end of the 1970s saw several further blows to the royal family. The worst was the murder of Lord Louis Mountbatten by an IRA man, Thomas McMahon, when Mountbatten was on his small wooden fishing boat off the coast of County Sligo in the Irish Republic. He had a summer home there and had been long warned of the danger by the Irish police, for the area was also popular with IRA men on holiday. On 27 August 1979, while off on a lobster-potting and mackerel-fishing expedition with friends and family, his boat was blown to pieces by a remote-controlled bomb. He died shortly afterwards of his injuries. Also killed were two teenagers, one of them his grandson, the other a local boy, Paul Maxwell. His daughter’s mother-in-law, Lady Brabourne, who was eighty-three, died the following day. Timothy Knatchbull, then fourteen, Mountbatten’s grandson, had grown up as the inseparable twin of Nicky, who died: the two were so alike that at times even their parents struggled to tell them apart.
He remembers it as a glorious summer day in the middle of an idyllic holiday, part of a routine he had known since a toddler. Mountbatten was his hyperactive grandpa, still at seventy-nine always at the centre of games and projects, and looking forward to the catch of fish, crabs and perhaps lobsters. ‘We had been going for a few minutes – beautiful, flat, calm sea, not a cloud in the sky.’ Meaningless chat was going on when, ‘There was this almighty bang, just a recollection really of a thud . . . and the next thing I remember is lying on the bottom of another boat.’ He could hear worried Irish voices and felt intensely cold. In hospital in Sligo, his eighty-three-year-old granny died in the bed beside him. His mother lay opposite: ‘Her face was unrecognizable, held together by 117 stitches twenty in each eyeball. My father lay in a nearby ward, his legs horribly smashed up with wounds from top to toe. Between the three survivors we had three working eyes, no working eardrums.’ He came round from three days in intensive care to find his sister Joanna, who told him: ‘When you arrived in the hospital you were unconscious. You woke up. Nicky never did.’ At that moment, he says, he knew the unimaginable had happened, ‘And I knew really in an instant that either I was going to survive or I would never get over it . . . I looked at her, she looked at me, and as her eyes filled with tears I followed, and crumbled.’36
It was the worst terrorist attack the royal family has suffered. Ironically, according to government papers held at Dublin’s national archive, Mountbatten had told the Irish ambassador as long before as 1972 that he was in favour of a united Ireland and would have been happy to help towards reunification. Of the murder, Gerry Adams, who was then vice-president of Sinn Fein, told Time magazine that the IRA had ‘achieved its objective: people started paying attention to what was happening in Ireland’. Adams told the magazine’s Erik Amfitheatrof that, ‘The IRA gave clear reasons for the execution. I think it is unfortunate that anyone has to be killed but the furore created by Mountbatten’s death showed up the hypocritical attitude of the media establishment . . . What the IRA did to him is what Mountbatten had been doing all his life to other people; and with his war record I don’t think he could have objected to dying in what was clearly a war situation.’
The blow was felt particularly heavily by Prince Charles, who in his journal described reacting with ‘agony, disbelief, a kind of wretched numbness, closely followed by fierce and violent determination to see that something was done about the IRA’.37 He reflected that he had lost someone who could tell him unpleasant things he did not want to hear, a man who ‘combined grandfather, great-uncle, father, brother and friend’. Mountbatten had indeed been closer to the heir than almost anyone else, advising him on girlfriends, warning him against his tendency to self-pity and stiffening his sense of duty. The murder not only outraged the country generally but later on must have made it particularly hard for the Queen to swallow her feelings and accept that a future prime minister, Tony Blair, would develop a cordial relationship with Mr Adams as part of the Northern Ireland peace process.
Timothy Knatchbull’s testimony is unusual in the Queen’s story because he experienced at first hand the warm and mothering side of her the rest of the country hardly ever sees. With his mother still completely incapacitated in hospital, he and his sister Amanda were invited by the Queen to Balmoral to help them recover. After being delayed by a fog-bound aircraft, they arrived at the castle between 2 and 3 a.m. and the driver had warned them everyone would have gone to bed long before: they should sneak in and find their bedrooms.
None of it. We arrived through the door and we make a quick left turn and I looked down this long imposing corridor and the sight that greets me is of the Queen, Prince Charles at her side, and she’s sort of steaming up the corridor at us . . . it’s difficult to describe but it had this sort of feeling of a mother duck gathering up her lost young. And just a total look of care and concern on her face – from Prince Charles as well. And it was a wonderful moment, total surprise. And they led us to the back of the house where they had soup and sandwiches – no one else around . . . just the two of them . . . and they really wanted to go into their default setting of love and care, of asking about family, of plying us with soup and sandwiches and wrapping us up in a sort of motherliness coming from the Queen.
The pair tried to prevent her taking them to their rooms and starting to unpack their cases. ‘She was in unstoppable mothering mode, leading Amanda and me down the corridor, pulling open the drawers, getting clothes out.’ Only with some difficulty was she persuaded eventually to leave them and go to bed herself. In the time that followed, the same pattern persisted. The Queen sat the teenage boy next to her at meals, oversaw the dressing of his wounds and sent him to bed when he looked tired. ‘She was brilliant. She was able to draw me out. If I felt a little lost she’d catch my eye and turn the conversation towards me. And within ten, twenty, thirty seconds she had me at the heart of the conversation again, throwing out ideas, chatting, laughing. This is the gift of truly remarkable motherhood and generosity.’ It left him with ‘a strange warm glow that’s really never left me. And it’s about the care, the loving tender care that the Queen [has] as a mum.’
Knatchbull’s memories are a rare frank glimpse of the Queen as mother; she was not, of course, his mother, but she had been very close friends with Patricia Mountbatten since the two women were girls. She had attended Patricia’s wedding as a bridesmaid; their children had arrived in a similar pattern. Later, Knatchbull watched the Queen greet Prince Edward, home from school, with the same exuberant warmth that he found at Balmoral. Others who have been family friends of the Queen also comment on her motherly instincts: one man had been stalking at Balmoral and was late off the hill, to find the Queen pulling her Land Rover to a halt and embracing him with relief. The Queen’s own children have learned to be circumspect about intimate family time but say the picture is accurate. Princess Anne, for instance, says she learned early that her mother’s absences from home were part of ‘the service life’ which was not unique to the Queen (she was probably thinking of the armed forces). She had learned that it was ‘not a personal thing – she’s not going away because she didn’t like you or, you know, there’s something wrong with the system; it’s because there are priorities and you will get your time, and that’s what happened’. Princess Anne adds that Knatchbull’s experience was for her an expectation: ‘As all mothers, she’s put up with a lot and we’re still on speaking terms so I think that’s no mean feat!’ She thinks ‘it was pretty good mothering’ achieved inside a strict timetable but one in which quality made up for quantity: ‘The quality of the time that you get is something that you make yourself.’ In an interview with the author she spoke with real feeling – a useful corrective to the fashionable view that that the Queen was somehow a distant or cool mother.
She certainly had other things on her mind in the late 1970s, however. These were years of constant IRA threat and attack. As Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, she was acutely aware of the blood-soaked and unhappy condition of the final three words of her title
. A vicious war was being fought between Irish republicans, hostile to everything the Queen symbolized, and ‘loyalists’ who loudly proclaimed their passionate devotion to the monarchical state while drawing its soldiers and police into death and danger every day. In Northern Ireland, as nowhere else, the symbols of the Queen’s reign, from cap-badges to letterboxes, had become controversial. The prefix ‘Royal’ was a rallying point or provocation. Her visits to Northern Ireland had become steadily more difficult and briefer, as the security risk increased.
From now on, the physical threat to the Queen was even more firmly in everyone’s minds. So when, on 13 June 1981, while the Queen was riding her beloved horse Burmese at the Trooping the Colour parade, a youth fired shots at her, the first fear was IRA assassination. The youth was mentally disturbed; the shots were blanks; the Queen showed icy courage and expert handling of her horse; royal life went on. Then, the following July, when another disturbed man, Michael Fagan, managed to climb over the railings at Buckingham Palace and make his way to the Queen’s bedroom, again the immediate question was – ‘What if the IRA . . . ?’ Fagan arrived to meet his monarch at 7.18 a.m., having slashed one hand with a broken ashtray. Again she displayed impressive sangfroid, eventually managing to leave her bedroom and get help when he asked her for a cigarette. Similar things had happened in the past. The Queen’s mother, for instance, had been confronted in her room in 1940 by a drunken deserter.38 But now, it was more serious.
Just after the Fagan incident, two IRA bombs had brought death almost to the front door of Buckingham Palace. On 20 July members of the Household Cavalry on their way from their Knightsbridge barracks to change the guard were hit by a nail-bomb attack. Two soldiers died; seven horses were also killed. Another bomb went off under the bandstand at Regent’s Park where the Royal Green Jackets were playing to tourists and relaxing office workers. The two attacks killed eleven people and injured fifty more. This was a world which challenged the Queen’s private motto, ‘I have to be seen to be believed’. Politicians were of course also at risk, and before long Downing Street would be hemmed in by security railings, and London would resound to the throb of police sirens as ministerial cars accelerated through traffic behind motorcycle escorts. The Queen has always been protected, by some of the most experienced officers in the country, and she heeded advice. But she never cancelled and never stopped showing herself during the worst of the danger. As for Lord Mountbatten, in the words of the writer Kenneth Rose, ‘he was eulogized as a Renaissance man and buried like a medieval emperor’.
Interlude
Money
From the mid-1980s a quiet and still mostly unknown Palace revolution had been taking place, as reformers upended the old ‘country house’ atmosphere of the court, seized back control over much of the day-to-day running of the monarchy from the government, and radically increased its efficiency. As we have seen, the royal money question had flared up regularly during the Queen’s reign, from the 1950s onwards. Again and again Whitehall initiatives to ‘keep the Queen out of politics’ had briefly calmed things down, while leaving a residuum of public doubt. Most people struggle to understand large figures, and the real cost of the monarchy is a confusing subject. So a few basics are in order. There are three sources of the Queen’s money. There has been the Civil List. This is money paid by the Treasury to the monarchy for its upkeep. The money comes from the revenues of the Crown Estate – property owned by the monarchy – most of which has gone straight to government. There is a private estate which funds much of the queen’s other spending, and there are her private investments. (The two together are known as the Privy Purse, which makes them sound like a huge velvet handbag.) All these revenues come gnarled with complicated history.
The Crown Estate comprises the lands owned by kings and queens since the Norman Conquest of 1066, and in some cases earlier than that. Through the Middle Ages, as the cost of running a more populous and complicated country slowly rose, the money from these lands was used by rulers to fund their personal government, and many estates were given to noblemen in return for their support, particularly when rebellion threatened or weak monarchs had to buy popularity. Through the centuries the scale of these once vast Crown lands shrivelled. But they remain even today a large holding, worth around £6.6 billion and including everything from forests and farmland to some of the grandest streets in London. The Crown Estate has 450 farms, Scottish grassland, more than half Britain’s foreshore, all the seabed out to the 12-mile limit, swathes of Regent Street and St James’s in London’s West End, the quarries which produce the soft white Portland stone so much of grand Britain is built from, and forests in the West Country.
Once the revenues were simply collected by the Crown, but in 1760 George III agreed to hand them over to his government, in return for a ‘Civil List’ payment from Parliament for his expenses. It was always wrong to say simply that the taxpayer funded the monarchy; the Crown Estate mostly subsidized the state. From 2000 to 2010 it paid £1.9 billion into the Treasury. But this way round of doing things meant that MPs were able to regularly monitor and debate royal spending, which, as we have seen, meant monitoring the monarchy itself. Prince Charles had long chafed at this and, as one of the higher-spending and more ambitious members of the family, wanted the Crown Estate revenues to revert to the royal family, giving them independence from politicians. This seemed the most unlikely of pipe-dreams.
For decades the Civil List had been a nagging problem for the Queen and her ministers. This was not because the public had turned against her in person but because inflation, combined with a more aggressive press, had turned the annual upratings into, in the words of one insider, ‘an increasingly painful running sore’. Every year there were front-page stories about the Queen’s ‘pay rise’ and the extravagance of the Windsors. Buckingham Palace got it from left and right. During the grim years of economic failure in the 1970s there was a rise in republican resentment about the Civil List. But during the Thatcherite 1980s, when the rest of Britain was being vigorously shaken about in the name of efficiency, many asked why this ancient system was not also being sorted out.
To make things worse, the whole issue was becoming confused with the second main source of royal income, the Queen’s private wealth, and whether she should pay tax on that. Nobody else has such a hard-to-disentangle mix of wealth which is hers, wealth which isn’t really but belongs to the Crown, and wealth which is somewhere in the middle. The wonderful paintings and jewels are the Queen’s in the sense that she looks at them and wears them whenever she wants to. But she cannot sell them. They pass down, some for private use, some to be looked at in public spaces. Castles and palaces range from those never lived in by members of the royal family, to country houses, which are their private property. Putting to one side the jewellery, lands, palaces, art and other assets held personally, but in trust for the nation – assets she cannot deploy herself – the Queen’s main source of independent income comes from the Duchy of Lancaster. Dating back to a grant of land made by Henry III in 1265, the Duchy now holds farmland across the north of England; very valuable buildings in London between the Strand and the Thames; an industrial estate in south London; offices and shops in Birmingham, Manchester, Harrogate, Stoke; foreshores and moorlands, the tiny Victorian railway station that features in Harry Potter films, a private airfield, and much else. It is much smaller than the Crown Estate. Its asset value was £323 million in 2009 and it currently pays the Privy Purse (the Queen’s account) a little over £13 million a year. Out of this, she now funds the Royals except for herself and Prince Philip. (The Duchy of Cornwall, founded by Edward III in 1337, supports the Prince of Wales and his family: its income is slightly higher than Lancaster’s, around £15 million a year. Like the Queen, the Prince cannot make profits by selling Duchy assets.)
The Queen also has private investments, which have been guesstimated to be worth billions. This is wildly out: in 1993 Lord Airlie, then Lord Chamberlain, said on her authority that the low
est figure publicly discussed, £100 million, ‘is grossly overstated’. But the private Buckingham Palace opinion polls, conducted early each year for the Queen by the opinion pollsters Mori, had also shown rising public hostility to the Queen’s exemption from income tax. Public polling showed the same thing. By 1991, a year before a spate of royal divorces and the publication of Diana, Her True Story by Andrew Morton, one found 79 per cent thought the Queen should be taxed on her income. Another poll the same year got a 42 per cent agreement to the proposition that the Royals were an expensive luxury the country could not afford.1 It is not hard to see how dangerous the combination of these feelings and the contemporary royal family scandals might have been to the future of the monarchy, at least as a grand and relatively expensive national project. It was a genuinely difficult time for the Queen and the mission she had dedicated herself to since girlhood. That the money did not cause her serious damage is the achievement of two royal reformers above all, Lord Airlie and Sir Michael Peat.
David Ogilvy, the 13th Earl of Airlie, is a crucial figure in the story of the monarchy towards the end of the twentieth century. A tall, handsome man of the Queen’s age, immaculately dressed and softly spoken, he is almost entirely unknown to the wider public. This is how he likes it. Another senior figure describes his importance as rivalling that of Prince Albert for the Victorian monarchy. A Scottish landowner and Old Etonian who served in the Scots Guards during the war, he has estates in Angus not so far from Balmoral. He became a family friend early on – the Queen was at his fifth birthday party – and worked as a merchant banker after the war. Airlie’s career in banking ended when he left the chairmanship of Schroders on 31 November 1984. He went to work at Buckingham Palace the following day. These were the high days of Thatcher radicalism, and it is hardly surprising that a banker found the Royal Household behind the times. The Royal Household’s spending was outstripping the Queen’s income and she was digging deeper and deeper into a dwindling reserve: the problem needed urgent attention. ‘We were simply running out of money,’ says a figure from the Palace at the time.