by Andrew Marr
One observer says that, in Buckingham Palace, the Camilla question ‘was there in the background all the time. There was a lot of private discussion with the Queen about her, and her role, and how much things could or couldn’t be acknowledged.’ Camilla herself became very nervous when the Queen was likely to be present, as did Prince Charles. He was, however, quietly insistent about Camilla. One senior official, contemplating a move to work for the Prince, was warned that if he was to work for the Prince of Wales he had to realize that three things were non-negotiable. One was Camilla. Another was Charles’s press spokesman, Mark Bolland. The third was the prince’s factotum and private fundraiser Michael Fawcett, who had formally left his service but remained influential, and was regarded with particular suspicion by Buckingham Palace. In general this was not a happy time between the rival establishments. The Queen viewed Prince Charles’s extravagant behaviour, for instance when he was entertaining at Sandringham, with puzzlement and worry. The Palace read stories suggesting that, over private dinners at Highgrove, Prince Charles was saying his mother really ought to consider abdication before too long. These were vehemently denied by Prince Charles’s office but a lingering hurt remained.
Prince Charles’s office but a lingering hurt remained. The position of Camilla, a strong-minded and grounded woman, was the central question. At Buckingham Palace in the late 1990s, ‘there was a very clear view that nobody should be talking about her being the future Queen or even consort.’ As to remarriage, ‘the Queen’s view was that it was probably going to come; she thought it was probably going to be after her lifetime.’ At least formally, this was Prince Charles’s view too. Even before his divorce from Diana in 1996 his office had said he had no intention of remarrying, a position confirmed in 2000, when complaining about a newspaper article. Since then, the situation had become ludicrous. They were a proper couple. Camilla was living with Charles, supported by him, at Highgrove, a matter which had been publicly acknowledged through his accounts and by MPs. The situation was understood and accepted by both sets of children. Yet Camilla was not allowed to sit beside Prince Charles at public occasions and was not, for instance, allowed to join him for the family Christmas at Sandringham.12 If she was present with him, the Queen was said to be acknowledging her as his mistress. If not, she was the victim of a ‘royal snub’. In human terms, it was offensive and probably by the millennium, when Charles was still denying he wanted to remarry, both he and Camilla were determined this would happen.
The Queen’s position was delicate and difficult. Like her mother, she had enjoyed a strong and happy marriage and firmly believed in the sanctity of marriage. As Supreme Governor of the Church of England, she would risk offending many of its members, particularly on the traditional and evangelical wings, if she condoned the remarriage of two divorcees. Yet as Queen she knew that it would be more damaging to the monarchy if Charles succeeded her unmarried, while living with Camilla. As a mother, she wanted happiness for her son. How was all this to be resolved? A slow dance began to bring Camilla more into the open. The Church of England itself started to speak out. The Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, pointed out that Christianity was about forgiveness and that failure was part of the human condition: ‘The natural thing is that they should get married.’ His successor, Rowan Williams, not only agreed but said that Prince Charles’s remarriage as a committed Anglican would allow him to become the church’s Supreme Governor. That removed one huge blockage. Other clerics made similarly supportive statements.
This did not mean that the couple could marry in a conventional church service, and they eventually chose what was by then a familiar route, which was to have a civil ceremony, followed by an Anglican blessing. This produced a second problem: would the marriage be legal under English law? Charles could have got round an obscure-seeming problem by remarrying in Scotland, as his sister Princess Anne had, but he wanted to be married at Windsor. The 1836 Marriage Act allowing civil marriages had specifically excluded members of the royal family and it was not at all clear that later repeals and rewritings had changed that. A long and passionate if ridiculous debate ensured. Eventually the New Labour Lord Chancellor had to intervene to declare that the government believed the marriage was entirely legal. He relied in part upon the same human rights legislation at which Prince Charles in the past had snarled so often. Laws and doctrines which had blighted the hopes of Princess Margaret and, before her, of Edward VIII, were cast away like so much waste paper.
In recent years the Queen had rarely met Camilla. In 2000 she did so at a lunch Prince Charles was giving for the birthday of the former King Constantine of Greece, but this was followed by reports denying that this meeting was evidence that the Queen approved of the relationship. By the time of the Golden Jubilee, relations had eased a lot and Mrs Parker Bowles was being seen publicly with the Queen. In the next few years Prince Charles’s advisers at Clarence House ran a careful media campaign to soften up the public and media to the idea of a wedding, with choreographed joint appearances of the couple, and much sotto voce briefing. Nothing in the preparations for the marriage went entirely smoothly. The official announcement was rushed out after a newspaper leak. A plan to hold it in Windsor Castle had to be abandoned when it became clear that this would entitle other couples to apply to be married there too. The original timing of the wedding had to be postponed because of the death of Pope John Paul II, whose funeral Prince Charles attended. And that rather silly argument about the legal status of the civil ceremony continued almost until the last moment.
The Queen warmly welcomed the marriage announcement, but on the day itself, 9 April 2005, did not attend the civil ceremony, which had been moved from Windsor to the town’s Guildhall. This was not a snub. It was a mark of her own strong and traditional faith and her constitutional position. We know it was not a snub because at the celebration afterwards the Queen made a particularly witty and emotionally frank speech. She began with a joke, solemnly explaining that she had an important announcement to make: ‘Hedgehunter has won the Grand National!’ She then went on, referring to her son and new daughter-in-law and the formidable fences faced by horses in that race: ‘They have overcome Becher’s Brook and The Chair and all kinds of other terrible obstacles. They have come through and I am very proud and wish them well. My son is home and dry with the woman he loves. Welcome to the winner’s enclosure.’ It could hardly have been put better. These were not the words of a chilly matriarch but of a loving mother who battled all her life with the chillier demands of constitutional propriety. In turn, and particularly of late, Prince Charles has spoken with genuine warmth and emotion about his mother – and not simply as Queen but as his mother.
The marriage concluded what had been a very grim time for the Windsor dynasty, the only part of the Queen’s reign when it had really seemed that the British might turn their backs on the monarchy. Because this is a family story, it is one that never ends. The gap between the Prince of Wales’s office at Clarence House, with its agenda, and the offices of his parents at Buckingham Palace, has not disappeared. There have been indications that the Prince of Wales’s marriage has not been quite as happy as the couple had hoped. When the announcement of Prince William’s engagement to Kate Middleton was made in November 2010, Prince Charles’s somewhat curt response – ‘they’ve been practising long enough’ – suggested to some friends that he worried he was about to be overshadowed again, this time not by his parents or first wife but by the next generation.
Yet important lessons flow from the successful negotiation of the ‘Camilla problem’ during the decade 1995–2005. First, if the weakness of monarchy as an institution is that it depends on the foibles of real families, which periodically fail, then its strength is that families can also learn, grow again, and repair themselves. Second, if the weakness of the British constitution is that it is a jumbled attic of historical offcuts, some of which remain useful while others are antiquated or downright embarrassing, then its strength is that on
e can rummage and pluck from it whatever one wants – a new view of an old law here, a short cut around an awkward doctrine there. And third, though the Queen is wholly serious about her role and status and the importance of precedence, she is far more flexible, adaptable and understanding than the official poker face of the British monarchy suggests.
The next political hurdle the Queen faced came with the British general election of 2010. It followed the most sulphurous and unhappy period in British politics for many years. Parliament had been shaken by a huge scandal over MPs’ fiddled expenses. Eventually some would face jail. Many more decided not to stand again. Meanwhile ordinary people were struggling in an economic whirlwind caused by the incompetence of very highly paid bankers and an addiction to borrowing by both state and families. Britain’s elites, in politics and business, had rarely looked so discredited.
The great banking crisis of 2008–9 had plunged the world’s financial system into chaos and provoked a long period of slow or zero growth, individual national bail-outs and heart-searching – though not at that time the world recession many feared.
With uncharacteristic public bluntness, the Queen had used a visit to the London School of Economics to ask one of its economists, Luis Garicano, ‘Why did no one see it coming?’ She followed this by summoning the governor of the Bank of England for a private meeting. Her much reported question had been followed in June 2009 by a meeting of economists and others at the British Academy, who debated, and wrote back to the Queen that, ‘In summary, Your Majesty, the failure to foresee the timing, extent and severity of the crisis and to head it off . . . was principally a failure of the collective imagination of many bright people, both in this country and internationally, to understand the risks to the system as a whole.’
The bright man whose failure was mostly blamed by voters, however, proved to be the Labour prime minister, Gordon Brown. The Queen had given him all the attention and personal respect of earlier prime ministers and warmly welcomed his two small boys to stay at Balmoral. One had wondered aloud about where all her soldiers were: she replied that she was well protected by her dogs. At the election of 6 May 2010, Mr Brown’s party lost ninety-seven seats and its majority. The Conservatives under David Cameron, however, fell short of the 326 seats they would need to govern alone. The possibility of a ‘hung’ or indecisive result had already been much debated in Whitehall and at Buckingham Palace because the polls showed it was likely. Memorandums had been drawn up, precedents investigated. But everything hinged on the numbers and the way political leaders behaved. As in 1974 it risked the Queen being drawn into political controversy, particularly if Mr Brown tried to stay on for long, struggling to put together a coalition to keep out the Tories.
Though the Conservatives had won the most seats, 302, they did not have the automatic right to try to form a government at once. This meant Brown not only had the right but the duty to stay in office until it was clear that some stable-looking deal could be arranged. But how long was that to be? The election result showed the prime minister had lost the confidence of voters and the condition of the economy remained horribly fragile. The markets were watching. The prime minister and his team tried hard to tempt the Liberal Democrats into a deal, even offering Mr Brown’s resignation as Labour leader in the autumn, though this arrangement still would not have produced an overall majority. In the dire economic circumstances of the time, it looked like an unacceptably weak basis for the hard decisions about government spending to come.
Meanwhile, Mr Cameron had made a generous-looking offer to the Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg and opened talks to form a Tory–Lib Dem coalition, founded on a compromise deal between the parties. Over a long weekend, the haggling on both sides continued, as the markets watched and waited. It was not until the following Tuesday that Brown finally resigned, in a speech of some dignity, having accepted that he could not form a stable administration. The coalition agreement, including a determination to govern for five years, which some thought undermined the Queen’s traditional rights over dissolving Parliament, was agreed. The markets recovered.
Courtiers and civil servants exhaled. There had been intensive discussion about how to ensure the Queen was not under pressure to try to fire one prime minister, or to appear to favour the interests of his successor. At Downing Street Sir Gus O’Donnell, the cabinet secretary and a man who had served under successive Tory and Labour leaders, led a group of constitutional experts, alongside Jeremy Heywood, the permanent secretary there. At Buckingham Palace, the Queen’s team was led by Sir Christopher Geidt, her private secretary since 2007. A former diplomat, Geidt had taken over from Robin Janvrin, now Lord Janvrin, who had had to negotiate the roughest period of the Queen’s life, and he was said to see his job as smoothing the latter part of her reign. Geidt had won the Queen’s strong personal confidence and was now being credited for recent successes. He and the Number Ten team worked hard on different scenarios, the constitutional implications of different voting figures, and the circumstances in which it would be necessary to call yet another – no doubt highly unpopular and economically damaging – general election. The press was in the mood to be highly critical of any attempt by Gordon Brown to stay in office, and the Queen could have found this a very tricky time. After it was over, she showed her gratitude with a warm and private visit to O’Donnell’s team in Whitehall to thank all the civil servants in person.
In the meantime the Queen had been able to call for Mr Cameron to serve as her latest prime minister. Though a younger man, he was not entirely without royal connections. He attended Heatherdown prep school at Ascot, Berkshire, where he once played a rabbit in a production of Toad of Toad Hall. Prince Edward, then eleven, played the part of Mole and the Queen came to watch the performance. Cameron would be the Queen’s first Old Etonian prime minister since Alec Douglas-Home in 1963 and the nineteenth to serve in the job from that school. Those who think political life will therefore be blandly smooth for the Queen are probably mistaken. The defence cuts which were a crucial part of the new chancellor George Osborne’s plan to reduce the national debt faster and further than Labour would have done produced great unhappiness and argument within the military. No family as connected to the military as are the Windsors could have failed to follow rows about aircraft carriers without aircraft and fighter pilots facing redundancy. Senior military figures say privately they ‘hope for and expect’ discreet royal lobbying to go on.
Out of the Rapids
Friday 29 April 2011 demonstrated that the British monarchy could still put on a world-class show. The wedding of Prince William to Kate Middleton was pitch-perfect in almost every way, outclassing even that of his mother and father. Whereas the Charles-and-Di nuptials in July 1981 had been a fairy-tale event featuring an uneasy man and a very young, inexperienced girl at its centre, nearly thirty years on there was more experience and also a slight swagger of informality. Instead of grand St Paul’s and a long procession through London, Charles and Diana’s elder son was married at a Westminster Abbey that had been decorated with lines of trees. The newly minted Duke of Cambridge drove his Duchess away from Buckingham Palace himself, just the two of them in Prince Charles’s green Aston-Martin, which had been decorated with an L-plate and various slogans by his younger brother Prince Harry. It is hard to imagine his father doing something so relaxed. (But then it is also hard to imagine Harry’s father ‘goosing’ Kate’s younger sister Pippa on the balcony of Buckingham Palace during an RAF fly-past, either.)
As with that earlier wedding, which had been one of the most popular events of the early 1980s, huge numbers of people had poured into central London. Many had camped out overnight for the best spots, just as people had done for the Coronation in 1953 and other royal spectaculars. Despite dire warnings of rain and a cold start to the day, it turned out fine and – apart from an errant Guardsman’s horse bolting and a verger caught by the cameras turning cartwheels down Westminster Abbey after the guests had left – everything went according
to plan. The police were criticized for arresting a handful of anarchists and protestors ahead of time, but given the very real security risks from Irish republican extremists and others, they could be forgiven as they congratulated themselves on the flawless marshalling of a million people.
With a bigger and better-connected global audience, their wedding was seen by almost three times as many people as had watched Charles and Diana’s, some 2.4 billion rather than 750 million. These figures are estimates and must be taken cautiously but, if they are true, this means that around a third of the world’s population watched the wedding. In the United States, some 22 million watched the main channels, fewer than had watched the drama of Diana’s funeral, though the figure does not include all those – presumably a lot – who watched online. Like Manchester United, ‘Mon United’ is one of the very few British brands which are still instantly recognized around the world. These royal events are therefore rare national showcases. They are how the British, like it or not, are viewed in China, California and Chile. What message was being sent by this twenty-first-century monarchy? It showed that London could put on and manage a highly sophisticated and complex public event with no slips, and a certain amount of wit, a year before the Olympics. It was filmic. The richly coloured uniforms of the male Windsors and the glamorous, British-made dresses of the bride and her new family added to the Harry Potter effect of swooping television shots in the gothic, leafy and stained-glass-illuminated Abbey. This was hardly an image of the egalitarian, technocratic nation New Labour had hoped for, but had failed to deliver. Nor, however, was it an image of decline or self-doubt.