Queen of the World: Elizabeth II: Sovereign and Stateswoman

by Robert Hardman

  To Matilda, Phoebe and Hal

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  Chapter One: On Tour

  Chapter Two: Welcoming the World

  Chapter Three: Setting Sail

  Chapter Four: Head of the Commonwealth

  Chapter Five: The Realms

  Chapter Six: The Special Relationship

  Chapter Seven: Europe

  Chapter Eight: African Queen

  Chapter Nine: The Yacht

  Chapter Ten: Elizabeth, Margaret and Nelson

  Chapter Eleven: Breaking the Ice

  Chapter Twelve: The Prince of Wales

  Chapter Thirteen: The Family

  Appendix

  Sources and Bibliography

  Picture Permissions

  Index

  INTRODUCTION

  ‘I am the last bastion of standards’

  Buckingham Palace is in the middle of one of the busiest days anyone around here can remember – including the Queen. And no one has a longer memory than the monarch’s.

  In the Palace ballroom, representatives of every faith and major organisation across the Commonwealth are taking their seats for the opening ceremony of the biggest summit the Commonwealth has ever known. In the Blue Drawing Room, leaders from fifty-three nations of what was once called the British Empire are being welcomed by the Queen, the Prince of Wales and the rest of the Royal Family. The atmosphere is upbeat, informal, noisy and familiar. Most of the time, visitors to the Palace’s state apartments treat these rooms with reverence and awe, much as they might a great museum, taking great care not to touch a thing. Yet this lot are lounging around on George IV’s blue silk-damask Regency sofas and chairs, feet up, gossiping and cracking jokes. They could almost be at home. In a sense, they are. This is, after all, where the Head of the Commonwealth lives.

  In the 1844 Room, staff are preparing the Queen’s lunchtime reception for those leaders attending their first Commonwealth meeting. Meanwhile, the Royal Chef and his team are already preparing for this evening’s banquet for 135. For such a multinational crowd, the Queen has approved a meat-free menu of watercress panna cotta, halibut and rhubarb-and-ginger mousseline. It is a pity that the Duke of Edinburgh will not be there, as he continues to recover from a hip operation. For tonight will also be the moment of truth for his latest experiment on the Windsor Estate. As Ranger of the Great Park, the Duke has overseen the planting of a new vineyard. This will be the first state occasion at which the Queen and her guests raise a toast using Windsor sparkling wine rather than champagne.

  The 2018 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting will be one of the most important gatherings in recent royal history – and a moment of great poignancy, too. Commonwealth leaders have never assembled in this sort of strength before, but they are all conscious that this represents a crossroads for the ‘family of nations’ to which Princess Elizabeth dedicated herself at the age of twenty-one.

  Two days short of her ninety-second birthday, the Queen is opening what is almost certainly her last Commonwealth summit. She is in a lively, even skittish mood as she chats to the leaders, some of whom she has known since they were children. These events happen every other year, but because the event moves to a different part of the planet each time, it will almost certainly not return to Britain for at least another twenty years. The Queen has announced that she will no longer be flying long distances, so she will certainly not be attending the 2020 summit, scheduled for Rwanda, or the 2022 gathering in Samoa. Come the 2024 event – which may very well be somewhere in the Caribbean – she will be ninety-eight.

  It means that this event will be a very curious gathering – a farewell of sorts for someone who is not leaving and is not retiring, either. The Commonwealth has always been the odd one out among the world’s great geopolitical groupings. This is an organisation with an evolving, unwritten constitution, just like Britain’s. The nearest it has to a rulebook is a list of enlightened aspirations embodied in a single charter, which has just one signature: the Queen’s. Its members – most of them republics – owe her no allegiance. She has no say in their affairs. Her role as Head of the Commonwealth is to embody a free association of equals, to provide continuity, dignity and calm. As the former New Zealand Prime Minister, David Lange, once remarked: ‘We do the fighting. She does the unifying.’ The Commonwealth has never had quite such a family feel at one of these gatherings, with three generations of the Royal Family on hand to welcome the leaders to London. And today will be exceptional for another reason. In seven decades, the Queen has never once openly interfered with the internal workings of the organisation. On this occasion, though, she will do so for the first time. She will ask the Commonwealth leaders to endorse the Prince of Wales as her successor, telling them that it is her ‘sincere wish’. No one is going to begrudge the request of the person who has done more than anyone to ensure the very survival of what many still call ‘the club’.

  It has long been fashionable in some political and diplomatic circles to dismiss the Commonwealth as irrelevant and outdated, its supporters as deluded and sentimental. Its champions point to the queue of nations that want to join, and the myriad number of global civic organisations in its orbit.

  It is self-evident that the Queen is very fond of the Commonwealth. What today’s events at the Palace will show is just how fond the Commonwealth is of the Queen. Her reign will go down in history for many reasons, not least the fact that it exceeded the duration of all others before it, one of so many royal records smashed by Elizabeth II. Future historians, however, will credit her with a great deal more than longevity. From the Norman Conquest to the end of the Second World War, British monarchs were cast as rulers. Foreign policy was about either expansion or consolidation in the name of the Crown, reaching its apotheosis in the British Empire. Our Queen is unique. She has been the first monarch who, from the moment of her accession, was expected to reverse that process. However, this has not been a story of reluctant decline. Rather, it has been about redefining the role of Britain and the monarchy itself in a post-imperial world of equals. It is a role reversal that hasn’t always been easy. The Queen may have inherited her Crown, her Church and her Forces, but her ‘family of nations’ was different. She had to earn its approval, often in the face of thinly veiled opposition from her ministers in Britain. That process would help transform Britain into today’s multicultural society, a process in which the Queen herself has had a key role. It was her task to offset the pain felt by old Commonwealth cousins when Britain embraced a new European future in the Seventies. Following the UK’s 2016 vote to detach itself from the European project, it would also fall to the Queen and her family to help provide some soothing balm once more, both at home and across the continent.

  There are those all over the world, even in countries that have no connection with the Crown she wears, who feel a close affinity for this unchanging global figure. As the Queen approached her ninetieth birthday, the American Ambassador to Britain reflected on her transnational – if not universal – appeal, at the end of an evening at Buckingham Palace. ‘Not only is the Queen the constant for this country,’ Matthew Barzun observed, ‘but for the rest of us.’

  Thomas Kielinger, the Queen’s German-language biographer and long-standing London correspondent for Die Welt, says that many Germans view her as a ‘global’ monarch. ‘I can’t begin to think what the German Bundespraesident would do if he was also head of state of Canada and Australia,’ says Kielinger, a former academic, adding that the Queen is one of a handful of British institutions for which hi
s compatriots have long felt a proprietorial sense of shared ownership. ‘The German language has imbibed three main sources: the Bible, Goethe and Shakespeare. So Shakespeare is virtually German! The Queen is our Queen in the same way that Shakespeare is our author. We don’t think she is actually German but we feel familiar, we feel close. Like Shakespeare, she is a figure in our imagination and in our heart.’

  A former Private Secretary found a similar reaction during the Queen’s trips across the Channel: ‘Visits to France were always very moving. When you walk down a street and hear cries of “Vive la reine!” it does make the hairs stand on the back of your neck.’ No one in France would ever specify which reine they had in mind. There was no need.

  Former Prime Minister Sir John Major has had the same experience on his travels. ‘Everybody in the world has seen the Queen as part of their lives since they were born,’ he says. ‘I was in Zambia some years ago and went to a village very close to the Zambesi. I went in to see the head man who turned out to be a head woman. This very distinguished elderly lady put out her hand and said: “My name is Elizabeth – just like our Queen”.’

  Following the 1981 state visit to Sri Lanka, the British High Commissioner in Colombo, Sir John Nicholas, reported that many people had still not accepted the ex-colony’s transition to a socialist republic nine years earlier. ‘The placards saying “God bless our Queen” were not written in ignorance of the constitutional changes,’ he reported to the Foreign Office, ‘but reflected a genuine feeling that in spite of these changes, Her Majesty still in a sense belonged to the people of Sri Lanka.’ Sir John went on to describe the remarkable scenes when the Queen had arrived in Kandy, once a kingdom in its own right. She was greeted by ‘fifty caparisoned elephants and richly clothed Kandyan Chiefs’ as part of a ‘royal welcome from the Kandyan Kingdom to a monarch who, in the eyes of many in Sri Lanka, not least the President, is considered to be the last in the royal line dating back 2,500 years’.

  William Hague* points to the opening night of the 2012 Olympics as an example of the Queen’s global stature. Unlike most people, he is not thinking about her appearance alongside 007 in a spoof mini-Bond film,† but of the Buckingham Palace reception for heads of state a few hours earlier. No previous Olympiad had attracted quite so many world leaders. No other city had staged three games – 1908, 1948 and 2012 – let alone with the same family presiding over the opening ceremony each time. As Hague recalls: ‘The Queen was able to give a speech saying she was about to open an Olympic Games, like her father and great-grandfather, which is a totally unique thing to be able to say. There was a gasp as everyone realised: “This is serious”.’ The main organiser of the Games, former Olympian Lord (Sebastian) Coe, had used the monarchy to seduce the International Olympic Committee (IOC) during the original Olympic bidding process, taking the IOC’s evaluation team to meet the Queen at the Palace. Even so, it was not until 2012 that Coe fully appreciated her pulling power. ‘I didn’t quite understand the global reach until we got to the business end of the Olympic Games,’ he explains. ‘We had 205 Olympic committees all wanting to come to the UK and saying, above and beyond anything, that it was Her Majesty The Queen who they wanted to see, not Usain Bolt.’

  It was the Harvard political scientist Professor Joseph Nye who developed the theory of ‘soft power’ as ‘the ability to produce outcomes through attraction rather than coercion or payment’. As more and more of the world is shaped along democratic lines, he argues, so soft power becomes more important. The monarchy, Nye believes, is one of the factors which help to keep Britain up at the top of the ‘soft power charts’ regardless of passing political storms. ‘Britain is in the top rank, it really is. Despite things like Brexit, there are other soft power assets and one of them is the Royal Family,’ he says, pointing to the global interest in the 2018 royal wedding. ‘We had Americans staying up in the middle of the night to watch this. It was quite remarkable. Not just Anglophiles who were committed devotees of Britain but all sorts of people.’ Nye believes that it is ‘one of the great ironies of this century’ that this ancient hierarchy is ‘a very cost-effective way of attracting attention for Britain today.’

  The global success of The Crown, the Netflix dramatisation of the Queen’s life, is another example. Beautifully produced and with fistfuls of awards, much of its success is down to the brilliance of the creative team involved. Yet its core appeal is that it is based on a true person who also happens to be the most famous woman in the world. Some of The Crown’s plotlines are far-fetched, others wholly fabricated, and yet they are a portrait of someone who is not only alive but still in office. It is perhaps unsurprising then, that some people feel that the series has pushed the bounds of dramatic licence, not to mention taste, to the limit.

  Asked to place the Queen in the pantheon of post-war world figures, former Labour Foreign Secretary Jack Straw replies instantly: ‘At the top – not just in terms of longevity but the way she’s handled herself over more than sixty-five years.’ He calls her the ‘epitome’ of soft power. ‘She has been able to promote the United Kingdom in a way that goes above and beyond what a politician can do. Diplomacy is still about projecting power,’ says Straw. ‘You have to do it in a physical way and I am afraid size matters. We are in a world where twenty countries have populations bigger than ours. The metrics are changing and wealth is being shared more which is good but projecting power is very, very important. If you’re lucky, you’ve got a head of state who is able to symbolise your power and influence.’

  Successive prime ministers have had good reason to be thankful for this very substantial extra diplomatic asset. In March 2016, President Barack Obama left British diplomats crestfallen as he witheringly described British foreign policy in Libya as ‘a shit show’. Prime Minister, David Cameron, he said disparagingly, was ‘distracted by a range of other things’. No US President had been quite so caustic about the UK for years. Might the fabled ‘special relationship’ be in peril? If it was, it wasn’t for long. A month later, Obama would record a special message for an ITV documentary to mark the Queen’s ninetieth birthday. ‘I’m glad to be the very first president of the United States to wish Her Majesty a happy Ninetieth Birthday,’ he announced. Describing her as ‘a source of strength and inspiration not only for the people of Britain but for millions of people around the world’, he added: ‘The United States is extremely grateful for a steady and energetic leadership.’ To cap it all, he then flew into Britain just one day after the Queen’s birthday to be the first world leader to congratulate her. ‘He was devoted to her,’ says David Cameron. ‘He was really keen to come and be one of the first to wish her Happy Birthday. He talked about her a lot. It’s rather intriguing how devoted he was.’ In others words, here was soft power at its hardest.

  The former Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, remembers listening to President Obama’s speech at the funeral of the former Israeli leader, Shimon Peres. ‘It was very striking when Barack Obama was trying to think of other great leaders in the world today,’ he says. ‘The first one he reached for was Queen Elizabeth II.’ Another former Foreign Secretary, Margaret Beckett, believes that the Queen and the BBC World Service are Britain’s two greatest soft power weapons. It is why she takes issue with politicians and civil servants who believe that Britain should offload grand old assets on cost grounds, whether it is a palatial embassy building or the Royal Yacht. ‘I do think the Treasury has a very silly attitude to a lot of this stuff,’ she says. ‘There have always been bean counters who say: “You’ve got this residence. Sell it.” But ambassadors will tell you that people genuinely want to come to the Queen’s birthday party at the old embassy.’ Together with several former foreign secretaries, she managed to dissuade a successor, David Miliband, from selling off the Foreign Secretary’s official London residence, 1 Carlton Gardens (a former home of Prince Louis Napoleon, later Napoleon III of France).

  The Queen provides similar continuity for the Commonwealth. Lord Howell,‡ the Pre
sident of the Royal Commonwealth Society, points to a royal paradox: the monarchy has become more influential as its power has declined. He says that an organisation like the Commonwealth is perfectly suited for a digital age, quoting another Joseph Nye maxim: ‘Military resources may produce the outcome you want in a tank battle but not on the internet.’

  Howell points out that the Commonwealth includes seven of the world’s fastest-growing economies, offers smaller nations a platform and serves as the ‘ultimate network’, with self-help groups covering almost every conceivable requirement for a modern nation state, from dentistry to higher education. That, in turn, offers larger members like Britain a chance to deploy their various sources of soft power: culture, non-governmental organisations, the judiciary, the arts, design, and so on. Underpinning all that, in turn, is the Queen. When it comes to engaging with the world, the Commonwealth is her ideal conduit.

  A few months ahead of the big 2018 London summit, the Queen and Prince Harry are having a reception to get her latest Commonwealth venture under way. The Queen’s Commonwealth Trust will bypass the politicians and give direct grants to help enterprising young people in all member states. It will be similar to the original Prince’s Trust, which started out using the Prince of Wales’s Royal Navy pension pot to make small grants, and went on to become Britain’s biggest youth-charity network. The Queen is no mere figurehead. The fact that she has appointed two of her outgoing Private Secretaries, Sir Christopher Geidt§ and Samantha Cohen, as founding trustees shows how seriously she takes this.

  Among the first cluster of beneficiaries here tonight is Joannes Yimbesalu, a young scientist from Cameroon who used his savings to set up Hope for Children Cameroon, a tiny organisation building lavatories in rural schools. He knew that the absence of toilets was keeping both teachers and students, particularly girls, away from school, as well as causing disease. His government wasn’t interested, but the trust has now come up with a £35,000 grant, enabling him to build latrines for seven schools, covering 1,300 children. The results have been both swift and astonishing: school absence down by 27 per cent and a similar reduction in sickness. The Queen knows all about it. It’s hard to imagine a previous monarch talking toilets with a guest at a Palace reception, but she is fully briefed on Joannes’s work. ‘It’s splendid, isn’t it? Harry was telling me all about your exploits and how well you’ve been doing,’ she tells him brightly. Prince Harry is busy pushing Joannes’s story to a cluster of would-be donors who have been asked tonight. ‘God knows how many ideas are being wasted every day because young people don’t have the support,’ he says crossly. Joannes still cannot quite believe that the Queen, her family and her staff are all promoting his tiny charity at the Palace. ‘She doesn’t only believe in young people. She sees us as stewards of development,’ he says. After this evening, he hopes that someone from the Cameroon government might finally return his call.