Her Majesty

by Robert Hardman

  The Queen, by contrast, has been served by a dozen British prime ministers – and more than 150 across all her realms. Yet it is hard to point to a single episode of disagreement on a point of policy. And she certainly hasn’t criticised her politicians’ fashion sense either, even when one of her prime ministers raised a brazen two fingers to the royal dress code. In 2002, the then New Zealand premier Helen Clark turned up for a state banquet in a trouser suit. The Queen, dressed in ball gown and tiara, merely stared and said nothing.

  Her discussions with all her prime ministers, of course, are confidential. But there have been enough nudges, winks and third-hand accounts of these encounters to suggest that any serious dispute would have surfaced. We have no inkling of the Queen’s thoughts on two of the issues which have polarised the nation more than most during her reign – the Suez crisis of 1956 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003. That is as it should be. But if we look at a comparable national fault line during the previous reign, such as Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement towards Nazi Germany, there was no doubt where royal sympathies lay. Chamberlain’s appearance on the Buckingham Palace balcony with the King and Queen made sure of that. So when and how has the Queen expressed any enthusiasm or hostility towards a government policy? It has often been suggested that she came to blows with Margaret Thatcher during the eighties, following the Prime Minister’s combative positions towards the miners’ strike and the Commonwealth. As we shall see, however, even this never came close to the dispute it was said to be at the time. In which case, has she been a soft touch? Hardly. She has just done things differently.

  The Queen has certainly been happy to raise objections over matters directly affecting herself. Her decisions to tour Ghana in 1961, Canada in 1964 and Zambia in 1979, in defiance of ministerial concerns about her safety, are cases in point. And when Tony Blair’s government proposed abolishing one of the most ancient posts in the land – the Lord Chancellor – ministers were left in no doubt about the Palace’s opposition to the idea. The Lord Chancellor was promptly reprieved. But on broader matters, an argument is not her style. Because of the confidentiality between monarch and Prime Minister, there may have been a foot-stomping, plate-throwing row with a premier which will only come to light many years hence. Then again, perhaps not. But the Queen certainly has her distinctive way of expressing disapproval or cajoling politicians into thinking again. It’s simple. She just keeps asking for more information. When a Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral once asked her what she could do if a Prime Minister made an appointment she didn’t like, she replied: ‘Nothing constitutionally – but I can always say that I should like more information.’ It is a more gentle, some might say feminine, approach. And it has served her well.

  A classic illustration is her subtle intervention involving a controversial housing dispute in 2010. The Crown Estate was planning to sell 1,230 homes across London to a private company. The sale would raise £250 million to improve its commercial property portfolio in central London but it was enormously unpopular with the residents who, not unnaturally, feared soaring rents and evictions in the hands of a private developer. Local MPs and councillors from all parties were highly critical of the plan. Sally Bercow, the wife of the Speaker of the House of Commons, wrote an article in the Guardian ‘imploring’ the Queen to stop it. In fact, the Queen had been inundated with letters from residents asking her to do just that. The Queen could not – any more than she could sell the Crown Jewels. While the Crown Estate belongs to her in name, its master is the Treasury, its profits are the Treasury’s and for her to start dictating its business strategy would be to risk a constitutional row. But it now turns out that she certainly did not sit idly by. Instead, she asked the Keeper of the Privy Purse, Sir Alan Reid, to contact the Crown Estate and ask its commissioners why they were selling all those homes at that precise moment and what they were planning to do with the money. The Crown Estate replied that it planned to reinvest the money in Regent Street, claiming that it was an ideal time. The Queen was unimpressed. She replied that it could hardly be the ideal time to sell the homes of 1,230 families in the middle of a recession. All summer she deployed the same tactic she had described to that Dean of St Paul’s: if in doubt, keep on asking more questions. We do not know the precise flow of correspondence thereafter. We do not know the internal discussions at the Crown Estate. But we do know this: in October 2010, a new deal was suddenly struck whereby the houses were not sold to a private developer for £250 million. Instead, they were sold for £150 million to the Peabody Trust, a well-respected housing association. The controversy melted away. The residents got on with their lives. The chairman of the Crown Estate issued a statement saying: ‘Everyone who cares about the future of affordable housing in the capital should warmly welcome this news.’ And the politicians patted themselves on the back. No one thought to ask what the Queen had to say on the matter. Why should they? She could not possibly get involved in anything political. Could she?

  So what does the Queen think of her prime ministers? We are unlikely to discover her views on her politicians until that future biographer is granted access to her diaries many years from now. Jim Callaghan made another telling observation, however: ‘Each [Prime Minister] thinks he is treated in a much more friendly way than the one before, though I am sure that’s not true. The Queen is more even-handed.’

  Clearly, the Queen will always have a special regard for Sir Winston Churchill. How could she not? He was her first Prime Minister and an immense figure in her family’s life. As the Queen Mother wrote to the Queen in 1954: ‘What a privilege to have lived in his day – a truly great man.’ At his state funeral in 1965, the Queen set the usual rules of precedence aside so that the Churchill family arrived after and left before the Monarch – a small gesture but one of immense significance at such a carefully choreographed event.

  As for her other prime ministers, it is hard to venture beyond Sir Godfrey Agnew’s assertion that, in the Queen’s eyes, they are all much the same. Some clearly sensed that they enjoyed a special rapport with the Monarch. Harold Macmillan was fond of recounting his arrival at Sandringham after a frantic royal Christmas in 1959 and bumping into the old Duke of Gloucester. As Macmillan liked to remember it, the Duke exclaimed: ‘Thank Heavens you’ve come, Prime Minister. The Queen’s in a terrible state. There’s a fellow called Jones in the billiard room who wants to marry her sister and Prince Philip’s in the library wanting to change the family name to Mountbatten.’*

  Another Prime Minister who liked to think he enjoyed a particular connection with the Queen was Harold Wilson, her first Labour Prime Minister and a man who went out of his way to protect the royal finances from would-be reformers. In fairness, Wilson had good reason to perceive that he had a ‘special’ bond, and not just because he increased the Civil List by almost half in 1975. ‘Harold Wilson certainly felt he was rather a favourite,’ recalls former Private Secretary Sir William Heseltine. ‘Martin Charteris [Private Secretary from 1972 to 1977] once told him that the Queen called him “Harold” and called Harold Macmillan “Uncle Harold”. I think he rather enjoyed the idea of being “Harold”.’ It was Wilson who shielded the monarchy from the left of his own party whenever there was a move to shrivel the finances or take the Queen’s head off the stamps. And even at the very end of his prime ministerial career, he managed to do his monarch a favour. He had made the decision privately to resign from the job in 1975. But he sat on the announcement until March 1976, choosing the very same week that Princess Margaret was due to announce her separation from Lord Snowdon. As Prime Minister, he would surely have been consulted on the unhappy decision. The Princess was about to become the first senior member of the Royal Family to divorce since Henry VIII. Yet Wilson’s news would certainly serve to deflect much of the media attention away from the Royal Family. ‘We had a plan to announce it on the Friday when the Princess’s children would be home from school,’ recalls the Press Secretary of the day, Ron Allison. ‘Then, on the Tuesday o
f that week, Wilson came in to tell the Queen that he was going to resign later that year.’ Did he deliberately do the monarchy a favour? ‘Maybe,’ says Allison. ‘Joe Haines [Wilson’s Press Secretary] didn’t miss many tricks.’

  No one has ever spoken of a ‘special’ rapport between the Queen and Edward Heath, the Conservative Prime Minister from 1970 to 1974. She granted him exactly the same courtesy and respect as all the others, of course. Outside politics, however, the bachelor MP’s only interests were music and sailing, neither of which were high on the Queen’s list of small talk. Politically, he favoured new European alliances over old Commonwealth allegiances, which can hardly have pleased the Head of the Commonwealth. He also gave her a piece of advice which she followed – and forever regretted. In the run-up to the 1971 Commonwealth get-together in Singapore, deep divisions had opened up on the issue of South Africa. Heath felt that a bad-tempered summit was no place for the Monarch who might become dragged into an awkward row. ‘He [Heath] just thought that this was going to be a very difficult, unpleasant meeting and that it would be better if she stayed away,’ says Sir William Heseltine. ‘But I know she always regretted it and steadfastly refused to contemplate the possibility of being absent from any later ones.’ Once again, one wonders what the Queen’s father or son would have done in the same situation. She would have had a plausible constitutional case to ignore Heath. It is accepted that, at a CHOGM, she answers to none of her sixteen prime ministers but to the Secretary-General of the Commonwealth. In the event, she did as she was told.

  Heath clearly believed that he was an open book to his monarch and, by his own standards of brisk inscrutability, he probably was. ‘I believed in telling the Queen everything,’ he said some time later. ‘There was always an agenda drawn up in agreement with the Private Secretary. She had it on a card on the table beside her to make sure that the items were covered but I believed in telling her a good deal else of what was going on.’ It doesn’t sound like much fun for either party. ‘I don’t think he enjoyed his audiences at all,’ says Ron Allison. ‘I don’t think he was wise enough to get full benefit from them. There was no small talk apparently. He was a very strange man.’ Allison had been a BBC reporter immediately before moving to the Palace and had interviewed the Tory leader a few days before the 1970 election. He had found him in his London flat, alone and conducting a record player. Another former courtier, talking to Ben Pimlott, recalled: ‘Ted was tricky. She was never comfortable with him.’

  The relationship which has captivated most historians is that between the Queen and Margaret Thatcher, her first woman Prime Minister. It appears to have been one of strong mutual respect on both sides, despite sensational reports that the Queen was dismayed by Mrs Thatcher’s position on certain issues. The Queen might have had private doubts about some of Mrs Thatcher’s policies just as some of the new Tory free marketers might well have found some of the Palace old guard intolerably plodding and patrician. But senior ex-officials on both sides remain adamant that neither side would have dreamed of briefing against the other. ‘I always felt that those stories were exaggerated. The Queen was always rather fascinated by the achievement of Mrs Thatcher in making such an impact upon the world,’ says Charles Anson, who also worked for Mrs Thatcher at Number Ten in the early eighties. ‘The Queen might be amused or startled by something Mrs Thatcher said but it wouldn’t alter her judgement that she was a fantastic force to be reckoned with. And, constitutionally, the Queen just would not make snap judgements about her Prime Minister.’ Similarly, Mrs Thatcher was appalled at any suggestions that she had upset the Queen. Not only would her curtsey border on the gymnastic but, to avoid keeping the Queen waiting, Mrs Thatcher would insist on arriving early for her weekly audiences.

  If there was any sense of one side leaning on the other, it now turns out that it was the Queen who was actively exerting the pressure on the Prime Minister. Sir William Heseltine recalls the 1979 Commonwealth summit where the future of the war-torn colony of Rhodesia – soon to become Zimbabwe – was on the table. Lord Carrington, then Foreign Secretary, had devised a plan to persuade the conference that solving the Rhodesia problem should be a matter for Britain and not the Commonwealth. But, first, he needed to persuade Mrs Thatcher to agree to his strategy. ‘The Queen helped the Foreign Secretary bring Mrs Thatcher to accept the plan,’ Heseltine recalls. ‘The Queen was also very successful in smoothing the feathers of the African leaders who were upset by some of Mrs Thatcher’s attitudes.’*

  And there was no concealing the Queen’s anger when President Reagan ordered American forces to invade the independent Caribbean island of Grenada in 1983 without anyone bothering to inform its head of state – the Queen. The Palace vented its fury on Number Ten but Mrs Thatcher’s friendship with President Reagan counted for little. Grenada was no longer a British colony but an independent nation. Charles Anson, then a diplomat at the British Embassy in Washington, remembers it well. ‘The Americans were not consulting us much in the final stages of the invasion. It all happened very quickly. You even had the Russian navy in the Mediterranean being scrambled because they heard America was attacking “Granada”.’

  A year or so later, Anson was back in America as the Queen’s Press Secretary when there was a very different conversation with Mrs Thatcher.

  ‘Looking at it from the other end, I was with the Queen in Kentucky at the time of the Brighton bombing.* In those early hours, it wasn’t clear if the Prime Minister had been injured. And when it was clear she was OK, I remember the Queen being very concerned whether she should immediately go back to Britain.’ Mrs Thatcher was having none of it when the two women spoke by telephone soon afterwards. It is said that her first words to the Monarch were: ‘Are you having a wonderful time?’

  Lord Hurd, a Government Minister through both the Thatcher and Major years, travelled all over the world with both the Queen and Mrs Thatcher. He never detected the slightest animosity on either side, although he says that the Queen was occasionally ‘amused’ by Mrs Thatcher’s unyielding stance on a particular point. During the Thatcher years, the Queen allegedly said of her Prime Minister, in fond mock despair: ‘Mrs Thatcher never listens to a word I say.’ Mrs Thatcher, in return, found some of the royal ways equally baffling, not least the Queen’s habit of washing up after Balmoral barbecues with her own bare hands. After one trip to the Highlands, she sent the Monarch a pair of washingup gloves.

  The Queen’s dealings with her subsequent prime ministers – all men – appear to have been more straightforward. ‘I found the audiences much more comfortable than I imagined,’ says Sir John Major. ‘The meetings always had a touch of formality, but it becomes a very easy relationship. And, inevitably, the more one exchanges confidences, the more comfortable it becomes. I don’t want to give you the impression it’s in any sense over-familiar. The Monarch is the Monarch and prime ministers are there as their public duty. But audiences were conducted very informally. They became a very relaxed series of exchanges.’

  It was Major who had to help the monarchy through some of the darkest moments of the nineties. He had his own problems, too, not least the economic crisis of 1992. ‘I was at Balmoral in the days leading up to Black Wednesday and other economies were in terrible trouble, too,’ he remembers. ‘I was talking to a European prime minister and it was a rather difficult conversation because there was a piper walking up and down on the lawn outside playing the bagpipes. And the prime minister kept saying “What’s that noise? What is that noise?”’

  As far as Major is concerned, though, some of the happiest moments of his Downing Street years were spent with the Queen, not least the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day on the Normandy beaches. ‘When the Queen took the salute at Arromanches, officials tried to put a limit on the number of old soldiers who could be there and they failed absolutely. They were there in their thousands and thousands, all these elderly men who’d been in the war, lucky enough to survive it, proud of what they’d achieved. So long was the march
past that we were terribly worried we would be beaten by the tide, but the Queen remained until every last soldier had passed. It was one of the most moving sights I have ever seen in my life. It was just magical. I’ve never forgotten it.’

  The Queen’s relationship with Tony Blair is perhaps the one which people feel they know best. That is because it was the subject of the film The Queen. The Palace will not confirm whether the Queen has even watched it. Tony Blair insists that he has not, although he fears that some people have taken it all a little too literally: ‘Particularly in America, I’m constantly getting people saying to me “I did like you in that movie.”’

  Of all the Queen’s British prime ministers, Blair has also been the most frank in describing the nature (though not the contents) of his meetings with the Monarch in his book A Journey. Recalling his first audience following the Princess’s funeral, he writes: ‘I talked perhaps less sensitively than I should have about the need to learn lessons. I worried afterwards she would think I was lecturing her or being presumptuous and at points during the conversation she assumed a certain hauteur; but in the end she herself said lessons must be learned and I could see her own wisdom at work, reflecting, considering and adjusting.’

  The Blair years were undoubtedly challenging ones for the monarchy as the New Labour project took root after eighteen years of Conservative administration. The party’s manifesto included some of the most dramatic constitutional reforms since the suffragettes, not least the removal of the hereditary peers from the House of Lords. Blair had made a specific point of including a line in his party’s 1997 election manifesto: ‘We have no plans to replace the monarchy.’ The very fact that the point was made did not go unnoticed inside the Palace. So what was he thinking? ‘We had no plans to change it so it didn’t occupy a lot of our time,’ says Blair, sitting in the offices of his new Tony Blair Faith Foundation in central London. But, looking back, he admits he can see why there might have been worries. ‘We were doing a lot of changes. And because we were changing the House of Lords – getting rid of the hereditary peers – there was a worry among some that I was just a cleverer revolutionary. But, actually, I wasn’t!’ He also believes that part of the royal anxiety was simply down to lack of familiarity. Blair had got to know the Prince of Wales and his team during his time as Leader of the Opposition but the Queen’s office at Buckingham Palace was another matter: ‘I was a lot closer to Prince Charles than I was to any of the other royals at that time.’