by Andrew Marr
Part Five
INTO THE MAELSTROM
A wide variety of experienced, shrewd politicians, civil servants and courtiers who observed the Queen’s relationship with Margaret Thatcher at first hand, agree. It was (long pause, pained expression) ‘difficult’. Here were two women of a similar age though of very dissimilar background, previously strangers, conjoined during the most tumultuous and confrontational years of post-war politics. Among the most radical of the Thatcherite thinkers were some whose contempt for the old, flabby institutions of a weary country reached even to the monarchy. They (naïvely) tended to see the United States as a model in politics and economics, a briskly invigorating meritocracy where wealth was made, not inherited. They disliked the Queen’s tolerance of left-wing dictators in the Commonwealth and had no more patience for the easy life and unchallenged rituals of the court than they did for BBC executives or tenured academics.
Ardent young men from think tanks saw ‘Margaret’ as their real queen, the Boudicca modern Britain had summoned. Even older gurus of the right, such as Enoch Powell, warned that the Queen’s overseas ambition was mere swollen pride. In the 1970s the Marxist left had derided the monarchy and she had been assaulted on punk T-shirts. The hostility of right-wing radicals in the 1980s was as serious. By then many on the left had begun to delude themselves that, deep down, the Queen was secretly on their side, so ‘one nation’ that she was really a leftie herself.
Margaret Thatcher herself gave no shrift to anti-Queenism, at least in public. In her memoirs, she said that ‘stories of clashes between “two powerful women” were just too good not to make up’ and praised the Queen for her conduct of the weekly audiences. These, said Lady Thatcher, were no mere formality: ‘they are quietly businesslike and Her Majesty brings to bear a formidable grasp of current issues and breadth of experience’.1 The Tory revolutionary was so punctilious and respectful of her monarch it was almost embarrassing. She curtseyed lower than the Queen thought necessary. ‘It was the starchiest relationship. She was deferential, much too deferential. The Queen was not requiring so much,’ said one long-time observer. ‘The Queen had some most amusing and well-observed lines about Thatcher,’ says a family friend.
Some senior Whitehall sources believed that there was an early ‘stiffness’ between the Queen and Mrs Thatcher. Several say that each of them found the choreography of having two women at the apex of British life slightly awkward, which was why they rarely appeared together. There were early and earnest discussions about which should go to which national events, including to pay their respects at disasters. Some officials recall meetings to make sure the prime minister was not wearing a similar outfit to the Queen. Others say no: the Queen ‘does not notice what other people wear’. Margaret Thatcher’s refusal to leave with the rest of ‘the ladies’ at the end of dinner caused some discussion before she came to Balmoral. Throughout her reign the Queen’s relationship with prime ministers had been with men, either older than herself and to be respected, or younger and to be helped by almost maternal listening. Here was someone different.
There were ice-breakers, none more effective than Denis Thatcher, whose role as prime ministerial consort was not so different from Prince Philip’s. He was equally adept at making himself scarce when ‘the wife’ had state business to attend to, while intervening to protect her at tricky social moments. Denis Thatcher got on well with the Queen Mother, enjoyed a drink as much as she did, and was punctilious about royal protocol. This went some way to making the annual Balmoral visits easier, though unlike other prime ministers, the always-impatient Margaret Thatcher used the trip north to Scotland to get through party business as well. She would visit Tory officials in Edinburgh, stay with Sir Hector Laing, the genial leading elder of Scottish Toryism, at his estate, and perhaps manage a meeting of North East Scottish Conservatives, before arriving at Balmoral. This time management was noted, with some wry amusement, by the Palace. Once she arrived, there was the problem of entertaining such an uncountrified and work-focused prime minister. Asked whether the prime minister would be joining the rest walking on the hill, the Queen dryly replied, ‘I think you will find Mrs Thatcher only walks on the road.’ And later when Denis Thatcher suggested to his wife it was time to retire for bed – the Queen has a strict 11.15 p.m. curfew – she apparently replied with a puzzled: ‘Bed? What we would do up there?’ Afterwards this caused some royal giggling.
After a first evening dinner at the main house, a black-tie one with local guests, the ritual second evening of each Balmoral visit features a barbecue organized mainly by Prince Philip. It takes place at a bothy or sometimes a summer house on the estate and begins with the Duke setting off in a Land Rover with a special trailer, ingeniously kitted out with cutlery, plates, glasses, drink and food. ‘When you arrived there, Prince Philip would be cursing away getting the barbecue going, and the Queen laid out the knives and forks and the equerries got the whisky going, and the seating plan was not at all hierarchical,’ says one participant. Prince Philip would arrive with a beautifully cooked but very rare piece of beef, ‘which didn’t suit Margaret at all, she hated rare meat’, and the Queen would ensure she was sitting next to a new, or relatively junior guest, to put them at ease. Another visitor recalls ‘feeling as if I was in some kind of virtual reality’ where the Queen and Prince Philip were ‘playing at being normal people’. Once as the Queen handed round and gathered in plates, Margaret Thatcher, upset to see her monarch doing a menial job unaided, kept trying to leap up to help. Eventually the Queen hissed: ‘Will somebody tell that woman to sit down?’ The story seems emblematic of their relationship: a prime minister with a strong sense of authority and deference only trying to help, and a Queen who cannot help feeling irritated by her. A similar story is told about the annual diplomatic reception at Buckingham Palace, a mammoth two-hour affair, crowded and intensely hot. At one of them, Mrs Thatcher felt faint and had to sit down. The following year, it happened again. The Queen, physically tough and moving through the crowd ‘like a liner’, glanced over at her prime minister and said, ‘Oh look! She’s keeled over again.’
That, however, is not the whole story. As Mrs Thatcher’s time in office went on, the Queen became more used to her and a mutual affection steadily grew. A senior Buckingham Palace official at the time recalls being struck by how vigorously they would talk together. Another says: ‘The Queen always saw the point of Margaret Thatcher. She understood that she was necessary.’ One long-time courtier remembers hosting a private lunch for the Queen and Lady Thatcher, after the latter’s retirement, and finding that ‘the Queen was much more fond of Margaret than I realized, though amused by her’. Later in the conversation, when the former prime minister began lecturing the table on how, if she were still in charge, she would be dealing with the unions, the Queen quietly said, ‘Well, I think it’s time to go.’ Another former adviser says that the Queen greatly admired her as someone who had fought their way to the top: ‘As someone who inherited her position, she is interested in meritocrats.’
The real question is whether the royal family in any way opposed the principles of the Thatcher revolution. This was always suspected, both by ‘true believers’ in the government and by some on the left. Prince Charles was inclined to be interested in urban poverty, was he not? Lord Charteris, the private secretary who perhaps knew the Queen best of all his tribe, told the historian Peter Hennessy in retirement: ‘You might say that the Queen prefers a sort of consensus politics, rather than a polarized one, and I suspect this is true, although I can’t really speak from knowledge here [Hennessy thought he was dissembling]. But if you are in the Queen’s position, you are the titular, the symbolic head of the country, and the less squabbling that goes on in that country, obviously the more convenient and the more comfortable you feel.’2
A more jagged-edged version of this broke surface in July 1986 in a front-page story in the Sunday Times, owned by the Australian-American republican Rupert Murdoch, which cost the Queen�
�s then press secretary, Michael Shea, his job. Shea had briefed the journalist Simon Freeman and had been so blithe about it that he had boasted to other Buckingham Palace officials there would be something ‘pretty good’ in the paper on Sunday morning. The paper’s editor, Andrew Neil, had brought in its veteran political editor, Michael Jones, to work with Freeman and the result seemed sensational. The Queen thought Mrs Thatcher uncaring, confrontational and socially divisive; she had worried about the social fabric of the country during the miners’ strike; was unhappy about Britain’s use as a base for US aircraft bombing Libya the previous year; and did not agree with Mrs Thatcher over the vexed question of sanctions against apartheid South Africa (the Queen apparently siding with the pro-sanctions majority of Commonwealth members, not with Britain’s prime minister). The Queen, said the newspaper, was on the warpath: she was ‘an astute political infighter who is quite prepared to take on Downing Street when provoked’.
The newspaper insisted that its wide-ranging analysis of the Queen’s pro-consensus and anti-Thatcherite views had been fully briefed by the Palace, which had been well aware that they would be publicized. It seemed almost suicidally daring and made the Queen sound nearer to Tony Benn than to Mrs Thatcher. When the story broke, Mrs Thatcher was in Edinburgh, staying with the Queen at the Palace of Holyroodhouse for the Commonwealth Games, which had been badly disrupted by the decision of many countries to stay away in protest at Mrs Thatcher’s South African policy. The Queen placed Shea between the two of them over dinner. After he had said sorry to Mrs Thatcher, Shea later said that she patted his arm and told him: ‘Don’t worry a thing about it, dear. I know it’s a lot of nonsense.’ But was it? A nasty row broke out. Shea denied the story completely, saying that reports ‘purporting to be the Queen’s opinions of government policies were entirely without foundation’. Neil, for the Sunday Times, hit back, and came close to accusing the Queen’s private secretary, Sir William Heseltine, of lying about the source of the story – something that still rankles in Palace circles to this day. Yet Shea had certainly briefed Freeman. He had not, he later told the historian Ben Pimlott, had a prior briefing with the Queen herself, nor heard her criticize the prime minister. And indeed if the Queen had talked bluntly about her feelings towards prime ministers, somebody, some time, would have overheard her and reported it. ‘She would consider that completely unconstitutional, just out of court,’ says one veteran. Officials who were in the Palace with him feel that Shea had a slight tendency to grandstand and had been led to go too far by the wily journalist. As is the way at the Palace, nothing was said and he was never publicly criticized; but he left the job shortly afterwards.
There is no doubt that the Queen’s lifelong enthusiasm for the Commonwealth was at a different level from any feeling Mrs Thatcher might have had. Heath had not had much Commonwealth feeling, and this had been noted in the Palace. In his case, it was passionate pro-Europeanism that was responsible. Thatcher was not pro-European but she was even more hostile to socialists in the Third World. As we have seen, the Queen was prepared to meet and discuss life with left-wing dictators rather than risk their leaving the Commonwealth and has always believed in the long-term benefits of membership of this club. In 1986 Sir Sonny Ramphal, then head of the Commonwealth Secretariat and no mean street fighter himself, piled into the Sunday Times controversy on the side of the Queen. One close observer at the time agrees that the Queen was ‘pro-consensus’ and heard first hand about the difficulties of miners’ families and other hard-pressed communities during the days of strikes and riot. She was by no means unsympathetic: ‘The idea of saying that there “is no such thing as society” is anathema to the royal family. They could never agree to that. But the time had come for a tempestuous force like Mrs Thatcher and I think the royal family, and the Queen particularly, would give her every credit for that.’
Relations were good. Mrs Thatcher’s redoubtable and controversial press secretary, Bernard Ingham, was regarded as a real friend by the Palace. Unlike later Labour prime ministers, Mrs Thatcher made a point of staying for a whisky or two after her weekly audiences – ‘though with a certain impatience’ – in order to ensure that Buckingham Palace felt in the loop. By the end of Mrs Thatcher’s time in office, according to courtiers who observed them, the Queen had become ‘a mix of fond and amused’ of her prime minister and was genuinely sorry to see her go. Indeed, the Queen invited Mrs Thatcher to join the Order of Merit – a rare honour, and one in her personal gift.
During the Thatcher years the biggest single event for the royal family was undoubtedly the carnival-atmosphere wedding of the thirty-two-year-old Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer on 29 July 1981. It came, rather as the Queen’s wedding had, during a tough year. In 1981 it was not post-war austerity but the high unemployment, continuing inflation and social divisions of the early Thatcher period that people needed to be distracted from. Diana Spencer was a twenty-year-old girl whose parents had divorced but whose family had multiple royal connections. Her older sister had been married three years earlier to the Queen’s assistant private secretary, Robert Fellowes. Prince Charles had briefly dated another sister, Sarah. The Spencers had royal blood themselves, legitimately and illegitimately, running back to the Stuarts. They were familiar with the world of hunting, polo and country life the Windsors liked. Diana’s father, Lord Spencer, had been an equerry to George VI and to the Queen in her earliest years on the throne.
Diana had no string of previous lovers who might have brought embarrassment and caused problems with the Act of Succession. She had seemed artless, genuinely enthusiastic about Charles and, to most people’s eyes, a perfect choice. He had met her shortly after the murder of Lord Mountbatten when she had told him how sad he had looked at the funeral, and how lonely. She had touched him, and, while all relationships are mysterious to outsiders, the two had seemed to be genuinely in love. Charles was serious about marriage being an institution to last a lifetime and seemed to have no illusions about what a tough choice he would be for her. Once she had visited Balmoral and Sandringham and the story about a possible match was out, Diana was hounded by photographers and survived by dint of shy smiles and downcast eyes. The Prince was urged by family and friends to make up his mind and, with only a little hesitation, had proposed. Yet they met fewer than two dozen times before they were married.
Later events made hindsight about this marriage one of the few British growth industries left. Prince Charles was not only a dozen years older but had much more traditional tastes than most men of his age. He had a deep streak of pessimism and had long been close to an early girlfriend, now married, Camilla Parker Bowles. He was cultured, sensitive, spiritual and driven by duty, even while he hated some of what that involved. Between proposing to Diana and his marriage he had been absent for many weeks on an extended royal tour to Australia and America – just the kind of duty his mother had been criticized for when she had left him behind as a child. Diana was by contrast an enthusiast for the emotional pop culture of the early 1980s. Her only experience of the outside world was the comfy one of posh girls in west London, satirized at the time as ‘Sloane Rangers’. She could have no idea of what life as a Windsor would really be like. At best, this would always be an optimistic throw of the dice. Yet plenty of couples make a marriage work despite differences of age and interests.
The assumption that this was a lifelong commitment which would hugely strengthen the royal family was shared by the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, uncountable numbers of fervently monarchist subjects, almost all of the media and – of course – by the royal couple themselves. The only political heckles came from the left, who resented the possibility that Mrs Thatcher’s government, then at its pre-Falklands War low, might gain a patriotic boost from the celebrations. Charles and Diana enjoyed their day as global celebrities (it is estimated that nearly three-quarters of a billion people around the world watched the wedding) and continued for some years as an apparently successful couple, producing the ne
xt heir with commendable promptness.
The Prince of Wales’s story over the next few years became the story of his marriage. Behind that, though, there was another story, which had as much constitutional weight – the Prince of Wales’s politics. In a conventional party-political sense he has no politics and gets understandably irritated when it is claimed otherwise. The Prince is certainly no socialist. He has tried hard all his life to avoid party-political tags or direct interventions in the main themes of political argument, such as the economy, Britain’s membership of the EU, the Iraq war or the size of the armed forces. Yet he has strong views on other things, which are close to ‘real’ politics, and becoming closer. And on those subjects his views have been growing more strongly conservative (with a small ‘c’) as he has grown older. In the Thatcher years this brought him into conflict with Tory radicals, rather than socialists.
During the 1980s his habit of writing critical letters to ministers began. He spent more and more time on his charitable work, above all the Prince’s Trust, becoming involved with an outspoken architect called Rod Hackney, who drove the more radical end of the Prince’s work. After a conversation on a train between the two of them was leaked and then confirmed to the newspaper by Hackney, Charles found himself in the middle of a serious row. He had, reported the Manchester Evening News, become worried that he would inherit the throne of a divided Britain, split between haves and have-nots. This sounded very like an attack on Britain’s radical prime minister, and Mrs Thatcher’s office was furious. Writing to Hackney after his apology, Charles said these were ‘overtly political phrases of a kind I would never, ever use because I know exactly what the political reactions are likely to be . . . it is essential that I operate in this field of community architecture, inner city housing, deprivation, etc. by steering my way very carefully through a political minefield’.3