by Andrew Marr
Since the speech, there has been a minor argument about how much help had been given by Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell, particularly in inserting the phrase ‘and as a grandmother’ after ‘as your Queen’. Senior courtiers at the time disagree among themselves about who exactly wrote what. And frankly, it does not matter. The speech and other small acts of acknowledgement before and after it – the flag, and then the Queen’s own, unexpected, decision to bow her head in respect as Diana’s coffin passed – were among the most important acts of her later reign. Diana’s funeral was watched by 32 million people in Britain (as compared to 19 million watching the Coronation), second only in history – and only just – to the audience for England’s 1966 World Cup victory over West Germany. No modern television event can match the effect of the Queen’s Coronation, simply because television can never seem so fresh or surprising as it did in 1953 and because the optimism of a country struggling out of post-war greyness cannot be recaptured. But the impact of the funeral was similar in scale – and far bigger, of course, around a more television-saturated world, than any previous event involving the royal family. Some 3 million people are thought to have been in London in person, or on the route of the funeral corte`ge to the Spencer home at Althorp, with flowers strewing the route.
By that stage, after a remarkable, moving and at times bizarre funeral service, which featured a mutinous speech by Diana’s brother, Earl Spencer, that enraged Prince Charles and probably angered the Queen, the cause of the Windsors recovered once more. Princes William and Harry, marching behind their mother’s coffin with their father and grandfather, had touched the hearts of the British deeply enough to make the future of the dynasty, in their time, seem secure. The Queen had acknowledged the power and charisma of the most extraordinary woman the Windsors had ever brought into their family circle. Her court style had unbent enough, and in time, to prevent the sub-revolutionary atmosphere from going any further.
Had things been done differently – had the flag never flown, the funeral been done badly and the Queen declined to explain or discuss – then in all probability, despite Blair’s worries, nothing dramatic would have followed. There would have been no storming of the Buckingham Palace gates, no anti-monarchy bill put before the Commons, no outward expressions of disrespect to the sovereign herself. But the institution would have taken a terrible knock. The careful opinion polling done on behalf of the Palace would have brought bad news. Prince Charles might have found himself so unpopular that he would ask himself whether he wanted to try to be King. The next time there was an argument about the cost of the Royals, it might well have gone badly for them at Westminster. It would have been rust and rubbing, abrading and verdigris: a dulling of the lustre, a souring of the taste. In our times that is how monarchies decline. So those days in 1997 were very important indeed. Yes, they were in part a collective madness, a form of national hysteria that would never have sustained for long. But they could have weakened the Queen and her cause. Instead she emerged wiser, perhaps; sadder, certainly; but stronger, too.
The People’s Queen
What did all this do to the Queen’s relationship with Tony Blair, who was, after Margaret Thatcher, her longest-serving and perhaps most controversial prime minister? One insider, who knows Buckingham Palace and Downing Street well, says the relationship with Blair was not especially close. On the simple ‘Did he stay for drinks?’ test, then, Blair, unlike Major, did not. However, as Blair recalls in his memoirs, the Queen did telephone Blair personally to congratulate him on the Northern Ireland peace process, ‘I thought, I bet she doesn’t do this often, and indeed she doesn’t.’ A senior civil servant at the time characterizes New Labour’s attitude to the monarchy as ‘complete ignorance, combined with a cheerful arrogance that they could cope with it . . . they saw themselves as modernizing people brought in to sweep away the old institutions’. There was a fascination with the US presidency and a belief that the prime minister should become a more presidential figure, which must have discomfited a constitutional monarch.
In the early Blair years, the hunger of the Palace for information about this new government reached a special intensity. ‘Buckingham Palace didn’t understand the Blair regime,’ says a former mandarin: ‘The Palace is very cut off and it was very hard for outsiders to understand, for instance, the Blair–Brown feud, that cycle of rage and fear.’ The lack of understanding was a two-way problem. Ahead of the 2001 general election, then a date still very much under the prime minister’s control, Alastair Campbell had been instructed to leak the timing. Civil servants reminded Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, that constitutionally the prime minister had to go to the Queen and ask for a dissolution of Parliament. There was a startled reaction before Blair hurried off to the Palace. On another occasion, early on, Blair had been reluctant to fall in with the timing of a Commonwealth heads of government meeting and the Queen confronted him: ‘The Queen can be hugely formidable if she decides to be formidable.’
Over time, the Queen impressed her personality more upon her New Labour ministers. On one now famous occasion, the overseas development secretary Clare Short apparently left her mobile phone on during an audience and it started to ring. ‘Do answer it, dear,’ said the Queen, ‘It might be somebody important.’ On another, she is thought to have gently put John Prescott, the distinctly non-monarchist deputy prime minister, in his place – quite literally. As he came over to talk to her, she dropped her voice. Straining to hear her, Prescott leaned down; and seemed to everyone present to have bowed low to his monarch. Clever. As for Blair himself, he appeared to enjoy his weekly audiences more and more, to the point where his staff began to tease him about his infatuation. One observer says: ‘She has phenomenal charm and I think the charm worked.’
Blair’s memoirs, however, went far further than those of any other prime minister in revealing stories about the Queen and what he thought of her. There is a larky element in them, which did not go down well at Buckingham Palace, funny though some of the tales undoubtedly are. Mr Blair discussed the routine of his visits to Balmoral, which he called ‘a vivid combination of the intriguing, the surreal, and the utterly freaky. The whole culture of it was totally alien, of course, not that the royals weren’t very welcoming.’ He gently mocks the valets, the food and the artwork. As for the famous barbecue cooked by Prince Philip, ‘This, too, is governed by convention and tradition. The royals cook, and serve the guests. They do the washing up. You think I’m joking but I’m not. They put the gloves on and stick their hands in the sink. You sit there having eaten, the Queen asks if you’ve finished, she stacks the plates up and goes off to the sink.’ Later, Blair ruminated over the night of the millennium celebrations at the ‘Dome’ in east London, which did not go well. ‘I don’t know what Prince Philip thought of it all, but I shouldn’t imagine it’s printable. I suspect Her Majesty would have used different language but with the same sentiment,’ the former prime minister wrote. Prince Philip had then pointed out that the acrobats overhead were working without safety harnesses and Blair had a vision of one of them falling and killing the Queen: ‘I could see it all. “QUEEN KILLED BY TRAPEZE ARTIST AT DOME” . . . “BLAIR ADMITS NOT ALL HAS GONE TO PLAN”.’9
A joke, a few pages played for laughs: but it has been a long journey from the adulation of Sir Winston Churchill. As with the Queen’s other prime ministers, she has kept her opinions about him very private. It was New Labour, badly briefed by the outgoing Major government, which decided not to replace the Royal Yacht and, despite Blair’s help when Diana died, it is hard to find evidence of much warmth on either side. At Balmoral, when the family were gathering for afternoon tea and Blair was nowhere to be seen, his wife Cherie was asked where he was. She replied that he was probably upstairs writing his speech on the abolition of the monarchy. It was a joke perhaps a little too dangerous for that company. Since then the Prince of Wales has inveighed about political correctness and the blame culture so many times that it is entirely sa
fe to say that he was not an unadorned admirer of New Labour. The Duke of Edinburgh once denied to the writer Gyles Brandreth that he himself was a modernizer, ‘no, not for the sake of modernizing, like some bloody Blairite, not for the sake of buggering about with things’, which is crisply self-explanatory.10 Later he openly complained about the decision to scrap Britannia.
Blair’s fantasy of a radically modernized monarchy, rebranded with Diana magic, came to nothing. Yet when one considers how many changes his government introduced which posed questions about the constitution or (like the foxhunting ban) infuriated individual members of the royal family, it is remarkable there was so little fuss. New Labour expelled all but ninety-two of the hereditary peers from the Lords in 1999, established a Scottish Parliament and a Welsh Assembly, and incorporated much more European law, as well as wanting to abolish the pound in favour of the euro. The Palace might have its opinions, but there were no circumstances in which, under the Queen, it would get into a fight with democratically elected politicians.
This was partly because, when it came to the milestones that mattered most to the royal family, Tony Blair and his ministers were helpful and supportive. There had been gloomy head-shakings about George V’s Silver Jubilee and his granddaughter’s one more than four decades later. Yet again, in the winter of 2001–2 there were plenty of those who predicted a Golden Jubilee flop. The Guardian spoke of ‘panic at the palace’ about the lack of organized street parties, and said the new Buckingham Palace website ‘bears a forlorn look. So far it lists a golden jubilee snooker and pool tournament in Plymouth, the planting of an oak in the village of Oxhill, Warwickshire, the planting of a jubilee garden at Cranmore infants’ school in Shirley, Birmingham, the placing of small fountains all over London – and precious little else.’11 Palace officials were quoted downplaying any thought that the numbers turning out would have any bearing on the monarchy’s popularity.
This jitteriness was caused by the continuing reverberations of the disasters of the 1990s. Some feared that the ‘Cool Britannia’ of New Labour, though no longer fashionable, was still a better description of how the country saw itself than the ageing monarchy was. Nor did 2002 begin happily for the Queen. In February she lost her sister Princess Margaret. This was more of a blow than perhaps it seemed to outsiders. Very different though Margaret’s life had been, the two sisters kept in close touch, talking almost daily. To this day, the Queen carries in her handbag a worn gold box for her sweeteners given to her by Margaret, as a small daily reminder. One of the mourners at the funeral was the redoubtable Queen Mother, who died six weeks later, aged 101. Neither death can be described as unexpected, but it was a tough time for the royal family. Her family say both women had been essential sounding-boards for the Queen. To lose both so quickly ‘was very hard and should not be underestimated’. They would have expected her to cope, and she did. Some Palace people thought that in due course the Queen came to feel liberated, finally herself as sole Queen, reaching a new phase of her life. Prince Charles seemed particularly devastated, however, talking more openly and emotionally about his grandmother than he had about anyone else.
The Queen Mother’s funeral obliged republicans and royal sceptics to think again, just as the Golden Jubilee would too. The Guardian, now the dominant voice of Windsor-scepticism, ran a headline which read ‘Uncertain farewell reveals a nation divided’ and its columnist Jonathan Freedland argued that the crowds outside Buckingham Palace were thin, with the queues to sign books of condolence almost non-existent. This was no Diana moment. Freedland questioned the official period of mourning, which had been cut from thirteen days to nine: ‘Perhaps they anticipated the current mood and worried that the nation’s grief would not last a fortnight. But is there any guarantee that nine days won’t also come to seem excessive?’ In fact, the turnout for the funeral was huge and long lines eventually queued to pay their respects. The slowness of the country’s initial reaction was perhaps a combination of lack of surprise at the news and its taking time for people to recall just how long Queen Elizabeth had served. A media spat fizzed and crackled around the event, as it would often do around royal occasions, with the Daily Mail leading the attack on the BBC for showing lack of respect when a newsreader announced the death wearing a burgundy tie, rather than a black one. Showing one’s monarchism as fervently as possible was becoming a media-led dividing line, between allegedly the deep and patriotic on the one hand, and the shallow and meretricious on the other. It was not a division the Palace itself particularly welcomed.
The Golden Jubilee year broke records. As with the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, the only comparison could be with Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, so long before that lamentations about British imperial decline seemed meaningless. The echo of the Victorian age was dimly audible, though, because the year involved an early royal visit to Jamaica, New Zealand and Australia, and then later on to Canada. There were huge crowds and despite a few protestors, including Rastafarians in Jamaica and French Canadians in Quebec, the tours showed a vast reservoir of affection for the Queen in what had once been Victoria’s Empire. There were gusts of dissent, which may change the world of future British monarchs. In New Zealand the prime minister Helen Clark said the country should become a republic. In Canada, the Queen was welcomed by the deputy prime minister, John Manley, who had said that, after her reign, Canada should end its connection with the monarchy.
In Britain itself there were the now customary rituals. The Queen addressed both Houses of Parliament, reflecting on the altered world since 1952. ‘We must speak of change,’ she said, ‘its breadth and accelerating pace over these years . . . Change has become a constant; managing it has become an expanding discipline.’ Much of her address was devoted to the themes of stability, the importance of institutions, and the nature of the British themselves – ‘a moderate, pragmatic people’ – which have been constants in her speeches for decades. The jubilee was an attempt to express both sides of the national character. There were the beacons, lit around the world this time, 2,002 of them; a procession with the State Coach down the Mall, where a million people crowded on the jubilee weekend, a service of thanksgiving at St Paul’s, and a parade of Commonwealth costumes, and an RAF fly-past, watched by the now diminished royal family from the Buckingham Palace balcony. One of those present said he thought the Queen’s expression of relief and pleasure was the genuine reaction of a fundamentally shy woman.
So far, so predictable. Even the thousands of street parties went ahead. This time, though, there was also a classical concert, the ‘Prom at the Palace’ in the gardens of Buckingham Palace, where 12,500 people heard the BBC symphony orchestra and chorus and a galaxy of operatic stars. It was the biggest event ever held in the gardens. More striking, there was a ‘Party at the Palace’ celebrating British pop, and opened by the Queen guitarist Brian May playing his version of ‘God Save the Queen’ from the Palace rooftops, before other veterans such as Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton and Tony Bennett played in front of the royal family and their guests. The evergreen Cliff Richard was there, too. Attempts by the Royals to get hip with the kids have not had a happy record. There is something about the conjoining of state formality and youth-centred musical exuberance that makes the well-adjusted adult cringe. The younger Windsors tend to be grouse-shooters, polo-players and military officers and this does not sit well with the music of black and adolescent revolt. But of all the gambles in taste engaged in by the Queen’s advisers during the 2000s, this went off the most happily. Britain was a much more varied, knowing – even cynical – country compared with the Britain of her Silver Jubilee. But the celebrations of 2002, which had also included a major series of visits criss-crossing the country, seemed to have firmly re-established the popularity of the monarchy in general and the Queen in particular. They certainly seemed to have engaged more people and produced more enthusiasm than the secular festivities for the millennium two years earlier.
These were the start of the Queen’s quieter years
, when there was more looking back in affection and less embarrassing turbulence than over the previous decade. After the white water, the limpid pool. In 2006 would follow the Queen’s eightieth birthday celebrations – a children’s party at the Palace, fireworks, a family dinner at Kew, a thanksgiving service at St Paul’s – and parties for people aged over sixty. By now, inevitably, there was more focus on the eventual succession. In February of that year, Prince Charles had taken the Mail on Sunday newspaper to court over the publication of extracts from his personal journals which he had circulated himself to friends, and which were politically highly embarrassing. The previous year he had married Camilla Parker Bowles in a civil ceremony at Windsor after years of speculation. She had been divorced from her husband ten years before but had endured a very difficult twilight status since Diana’s death. There was much debate about whether remarriage would be acceptable for the heir and future head of the Anglican Communion; though to keep her as (old, nasty word) his ‘mistress’ seemed worse. Charles’s staff at Clarence House had been engaged in a very careful operation to introduce the idea of Camilla as, first, his ‘companion’ and then likely bride. Most noticed the happier demeanour of the Prince of Wales and the down-to-earth cheerfulness of Camilla. Many merely felt sorry for them, that they had not married half a lifetime before. A minority were Diana-worshippers who would never forgive Camilla for any role she might have played in the breakdown of the Prince’s first marriage, and who were dourly determined she would never be Queen.