Queen of the World: Elizabeth II: Sovereign and Stateswoman

by Robert Hardman

  * He would go on to be an equerry to the Queen and later become Admiral Sir Jock Slater, First Sea Lord and Chief of the Naval Staff. His great-uncle, Admiral of the Fleet Viscount Cunningham of Hyndhope, was Prince Philip’s wartime commanding officer at the Battle of Cape Matapan.

  † When Burmese retired in 1986, the Queen gave up riding at her Birthday Parade. Thereafter she would travel to Trooping the Colour in a phaeton from the Royal Mews.

  ‡ Seven years later the Queen would get her wish and would visit China. She would successfully avoid the Eastern Bloc countries until after the collapse of communism.

  § Though the Queen has never made it to Mali or its famously remote regional capital, Timbuktu, she has visited the neighbouring states of Senegal and Algeria.

  ¶ An ambassador from one Commonwealth country to another is called a High Commissioner.

  # A Labour MP for thirteen years and a minister in the governments of Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan, Frank Judd was later director of Oxfam and was made a peer in 1991.

  ** Both Hartnell and Amies received knighthoods in later life. ‘When I was eighty,’ Amies told an interviewer, ‘I said to my studio that an octogenarian can’t go crawling around the Queen’s t**s, for God’s sake. So I wrote to her and said: “Ma’am I shall always be watching carefully what is going on, but I think you should have the younger generation to wait on you”.’

  †† The Queen’s ‘signature dish’ is the salad dressing she prepares at picnics and barbecues. The former Governor-General of Canada, Michaëlle Jean, recalled a Balmoral barbecue where she was given a tip: praise the dressing. Not only had the monarch made it herself, but it was her own recipe. The tip had come from Prince Philip.

  ‡‡ One of just four ministers to serve through all eighteen years of the Thatcher/Major Conservative administrations, Lynda Chalker became Baroness Chalker of Wallasey on losing her seat in 1992.

  §§ Strasser, who developed a fondness for clothes from the royal tailor, Turnbull & Asser, failed to follow the Queen’s advice and was ousted in a coup in 1996. Britain attempted to rehabilitate him by enrolling him on a law course at Warwick University, but he dropped out after fellow students complained about sharing lectures with an ex-dictator accused of war crimes. After turning to drink and living on friends’ sofas for a couple of years, he returned to Sierra Leone, where he now lives in a rundown area of Freetown with his mother.

  Chapter 2

  WELCOMING THE WORLD

  ‘That frightful little man’

  THE GUEST LIST

  As well as visiting more of the world and its people than any other monarch, the same is true in reverse. The Queen has welcomed more world leaders, organised more banquets and carriage processions and held more receptions than any of her predecessors. Her diplomatic duties at home, on behalf of both the UK and the Commonwealth, have been just as important to her as her overseas expeditions in envoy mode. On paper, she has organised at least 110 state visits for 108 different heads of state (two were invited twice). Each one would involve every section of the Royal Household in months of the most intricate planning, followed by a few days of faultless execution. Those figures understate the true picture. The official total does not include many other equally elaborate visits, including those by one of Britain’s oldest and closest allies. Presidents of the United States of America might have been visiting Britain ever since Woodrow Wilson arrived in December 1918, but none formally accepted an invitation for a full state visit until George W. Bush in 2003. The celebrated 1982 visit of President Ronald Reagan might have looked like a state visit in every regard, with a white-tie banquet at Windsor and a ride with the Queen through Windsor Great Park. In protocol terms, however, it was not a state visit, merely an ‘official’ one. Similarly, although the Pope is a head of state, neither Pope John Paul II nor Pope Benedict (the only two Popes to set foot on British soil) made state visits. They were classified as ‘papal’ visits.

  It does not, of course, require carriages, tiaras, flummery and bling to deliver a historic bilateral hit. UK–Soviet relations were still well short of the diplomatic intimacy required for a state visit when the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, and his wife, Raisa, made an historic thirty-six-hour visit to Britain in 1989. The trip would be a key moment in bringing about the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Iron Curtain. The symbolic high point was Gorbachev’s visit to Windsor Castle and a luncheon for thirty-four, including Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the Archbishop of Canterbury. The dress code might have been rudimentary – ‘lounge suit’ – but the Queen and her staff were keen to push things to the limit. A guard of honour from the Coldstream Guards greeted the Gorbachevs, ahead of a tour of the state apartments and a lunch of smoked salmon stuffed with crab and fillets of beef and duck. Afterwards, the Queen led her guests through to a special exhibition that she had laid on in their honour, courtesy of the Royal Library. It featured a careful mix of Russian royal artefacts, including works by the great imperial favourite, Carl Fabergé, but also Soviet-era correspondence from George VI concerning the Sword of Stalingrad, the King’s gift to Stalin as a mark of respect at the height of the Second World War. By the time the Gorbachevs departed, there had been two further milestones: Gorbachev’s invitation to the Queen to make a state visit to Moscow at some point in the future – and her acceptance. That one lunch had achieved a more powerful diplomatic impact than so many of those 110 sumptuous state visits before or since.

  Some world leaders can never have a state visit, however much they and the Queen would both like one, for the simple reason that they are not heads of state. The Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, is a case in point. He might control the rising economic powerhouse of both Asia and the English-speaking world, but he is not the head of state. As in Germany, Italy and elsewhere, that post is occupied by a non-executive President. That did not stop the British government giving Modi full royal face-time – with lunch at the Palace and tea at Clarence House – during his 2018 visit ahead of the Commonwealth summit.

  ‘One of the constraints that has emerged in recent years is that the Queen is less inclined to do long-haul overseas travel,’ says Sir Simon Fraser, head of the Diplomatic Service during the Cameron years, from 2010 to 2015. In deference to her advancing years, the world has come to the Queen, instead. Hence, during that period, the leaders of Qatar, the USA, Indonesia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, South Korea, Singapore, Mexico and China (as well as a couple of short-haul Presidents - Ireland and Turkey) were all welcomed either to Buckingham Palace or Windsor Castle by the octogenarian monarch and her nonagenarian consort.

  Though the invitation is ultimately a matter for the government, David Cameron says that he would always be guided by the Queen’s thoughts: ‘I used to talk to her Majesty a lot to make them the best possible success. Who would be next? If they can’t make it, who else? I might say: “We have the Ghanaians coming and obviously we want to emphasise this and that”. She always had her own reflections on what they were like and she often had done an outward state visit to that country so she was hugely knowledgeable. She sees all our ambassadors who are about to leave and all their ambassadors who are coming in, so if you do that every week of your life, you are very well informed.’

  Cameron has found that a summons from the Queen has never been in greater demand. ‘State visits have always been a tool. As she has become more iconic, so they have become more powerful,’ says the former Prime Minister. ‘And I think some of the recent ones have been game changers.’

  ‘Even in fully functioning modern democracies – and most countries are not well-functioning democracies – the way leaders are treated and how they feel they have been treated matters hugely,’ says former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw. ‘Anybody in a leadership position will have a larger ego than the generality of the population so it really matters. And we do incoming visits really well.’ Among the guests during his term of office was the only Russian state visitor the Queen has ev
er received, Vladimir Putin. Though relations would subsequently nosedive over Syria, Ukraine and assassination attempts on Putin’s enemies in the UK, Straw insists that it was a worthwhile exercise. ‘Relations had been strained but everyone was on their best behaviour, trying to make the visit work. I think it made a difference at the time. Relations were straightforward for a period; it gives you a platform on which to build. It was later that things started to go sour.’

  THE ARRIVAL

  Britain can make no greater diplomatic gesture to another country than by inviting the head of state to stay with the Queen. All receive the same treatment, whether friend or borderline foe. State visit number 110, by King Felipe of Spain, was in many ways identical to state visit number one back in 1954. That, too, involved a European monarch, King Gustav VI of Sweden, though he had sailed to London in a Swedish navy cruiser, the Tre Kronor. In 2017, King Felipe arrived by private jet. The Queen’s invitation to Felipe was a strategic move by the British government, part of a royal charm offensive designed to offset some of the political fallout from the UK’s 2016 Brexit vote. The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex were also asked to play their part in this healing process, undertaking a series of European tours to emphasise continuity and to promote the same message: the UK might be leaving the EU, but it is still the same old UK.

  No such grand strategy lay behind the invitation to the King and Queen of Sweden in 1954. The Queen’s international focus in the early years of the reign was very much on cementing bonds with the Commonwealth realms, of which she herself was head of state. Since she could hardly pay a state visit to herself, this left room for a few inward state visits by non-Commonwealth leaders. Why not start with a friendly fellow monarch, particularly one who happened to be married to Prince Philip’s aunt?* The Swedish royal party came ashore at Westminster Pier, where they were formally welcomed by the Queen before the state procession to Buckingham Palace. Neither the state and semi-state landaus from the Royal Mews nor the uniforms of the Household Cavalry had changed by the time the Queen welcomed King Felipe on Horse Guards more than six decades later in 2017.

  For many years, state visitors would fly into London’s Gatwick Airport and travel in the Royal Train to Victoria Station, where the Queen would greet them on the platform. Eventually the welcome ceremony would move to the more elegant and ancient setting of Horse Guards. Wherever it took place, the programme was always the same for every visitor: royal introductions, a government greeting line and an inspection of the guard of honour. Any variation or omission ran the risk of a diplomatic incident, particularly with more protocol-minded visitors. David Cameron remembers negotiating the long list of demands from the Chinese delegation ahead of the 2015 state visit of President Xi Jinping. Some were out of the question. ‘They wanted a five-mile exclusion zone around Buckingham Palace and no protests,’ Cameron recalls. He could not agree to that, as they well knew. On other matters, though, there would be no compromise. ‘The Chinese are very conscious about protocol,’ Cameron continues. ‘They said: “We must have a full honour guard with two bands of the Household Division.” I said: “That’s ridiculous”. And they said: “No – it is protocol. Go check.” I checked. They were right. They really do spot these things!’

  It is the smallest details that can sometimes upset the grandest people. Ahead of the 1960 state visit of King Bhumibol of Thailand, the Queen sent a note via her Private Secretary to all the bands involved in the visit. ‘Not a note of “The King and I” is to be played,’ she wrote. The Rodgers and Hammerstein hit musical about an earlier Thai monarch might have been wildly popular in London, but the Queen was well aware that her guest had banned it in Thailand for being disrespectful.

  The welcome completed, the most dramatic and telegenic element of every state visit has always been the carriage procession to the Palace. Accompanied by the Sovereign’s Escort from the Household Cavalry, the Queen and her guest would travel in the first carriage, while the Duke would steer the visiting spouse to carriage number two. Other members of the family and the rest of the entourage would bring up the rear.

  The procession always draws a crowd and, from time to time, a protest, too. All three Chinese state visits have enjoyed rival demonstrations with Tibetan flags and human-rights banners on one side of the Mall and a pro-government counter-demonstration on the other. The arrival of Japan’s wartime leader, Emperor Hirohito, in 1971 was attended by many British war veterans who had survived the brutality of Japanese prisoner-of-war camps (and some of the families of those who had not). There were a few boos and one man was detained for throwing his coat at the procession, but most stood in contemptuous silence as the Queen’s carriage passed by. Sir Jock Slater was travelling in one of the rear carriages, as the Queen’s equerry at the time, and remembers the strange lack of noise. ‘When I commented to my opposite number from the Japanese Embassy that I hoped the Emperor was not offended by the silence, he looked at me, smiled and pointed out that silence in Tokyo was a sign of respect.’

  The Duke of Edinburgh had a particularly memorable carriage ride during the state visit of President Urho Kekkonen of Finland in 1969, although it is unlikely the same could be said for his opposite number. The first lady of Finland, Sylvi Kekkonen, had been so nervous ahead of the formal arrival that she had accidentally taken a sleeping pill instead of her heart medication. No sooner had she got into her carriage than she started to nod off while her travelling companions, the Duke and Princess Anne, were left struggling to keep her conscious and prop her upright all the way back to the Palace.

  Once inside Buckingham Palace, the Queen would show her state visitors through to the Belgian Suite, the main guest rooms adjacent to the royal swimming pool. Named after Queen Victoria’s uncle, King Leopold of the Belgians, the suite has as its main bedroom the blue-draped Orleans Room, an airy upper-ground-floor bedchamber with Victorian portraits and (nowadays) a large flat-screen television. It is, however, the only head of state accommodation in the Western world without en-suite facilities. The two bathrooms – one green and one pink – are across a corridor and are very much designed for those who prefer a hot bath to a shower. When one Middle Eastern monarch was due to stay some years ago, his advance party insisted that their (amply proportioned) king required a spacious shower, instead of a showerhead attached to the bath tap. At great expense, a temporary shower chamber – nicknamed ‘the Tardis’ – was installed in the middle of one of the bathrooms (all paid for by the visiting king). It was used for just two nights and then removed.

  Once settled in, the state visitors then join the Royal Family for a small welcome lunch and the exchange of gifts and decorations. In 2017, just as on that first state visit in 1954, the Queen made King Felipe an honorary Knight of the Order of the Garter, with its famous blue sash. The ‘KG’ is a rare accolade reserved for fellow monarchs. Non-royal heads of state usually receive the regalia and red sash of an honorary GCB, a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath. The Queen has added an extra touch to her welcome arrangements in recent years, however, just as she did with Mikhail Gorbachev. A special exhibition is usually laid out in the Picture Gallery, featuring a cross-section of royal treasures and souvenirs that have a connection to the guest nation. In the case of the King and Queen of Spain, the Royal Librarian, Oliver Urquhart Irvine, was spoiled for choice as he prepared an exhibition which ranged from a woodcut of Charles I of Spain visiting England in 1520 to a Salvador Dalí water-colour that Dalí had given to the Duke of Edinburgh in person. Based on the British coat of arms, it featured a unicorn with a bloodstained horn and a British crown looking suspiciously like the Rock of Gibraltar. ‘A very amusing deconstruction of the British royal arms,’ observed Urquhart Irvine diplomatically. Alongside the diaries and photographs of earlier royal visitors to Spain was the text of the Queen’s speech in Madrid during her 1988 state visit, the first by a reigning British monarch. Saluting Spain as both a ‘formi
dable adversary and a true and brave ally’, she had cracked a Spanish Armada joke: ‘My country has experience of both!’

  THE BANQUET

  If a state visit is all about dazzling the visitor, then it is the state banquet that generates optimum dazzle – an occasion for tiaras, decorations and the unrivalled collection of gold and silver tableware amassed by George IV. Voluminous flower arrangements are prepared, to reflect the colours of the visiting nation, and the flowers at the very top of the U-shaped table will conceal microphones for the speeches. As with the carriage procession, the spectacle has remained largely unchanged since the reigns of earlier monarchs. However, the Queen has made a few subtle tweaks over the years. The menu at that first state banquet had been a four-course affair, starting with turtle soup, followed by ‘Délice de Sole Elizabeth’, chicken ‘Gustav’ with peas and new potatoes and ‘Soufflé Glacé Louise’. By 2017 it was down to three courses: fillet of salmon trout, medallion of Scottish beef and a chocolate-and-raspberry tart.

  The Queen has never liked long meals. So when, later in the reign, the Master of the Royal Household suggested that banquets could be shortened by twenty minutes if there was no soup, the Queen readily agreed to the idea. Another marked difference in the last two decades has been protocol. On that first state visit in 1954 – and for many years to come – the Palace adhered to the official order of precedence laid down by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office and the Foreign Office. This gloriously arcane index of social hierarchy had a clearly defined place for everyone in relation to everyone else, be they a duchess, a bishop, a Cabinet minister, the younger son of a baronet or a commodore. Arranging the table according to preordained rules certainly made things easier. However, it meant that members of the Royal Family were inevitably concentrated at the top end of the table, often sitting next to each other, while all the rest of the 170-strong guest list could determine their place in the social spectrum simply by their distance from the Queen. There was also little scope for mixing up the nationalities, which was, after all, the whole point of a state visit in the first place. The Queen would always sit next to her fellow head of state, of course. Yet with the Swedes in 1954, for example, there was an unbroken line of British guests, stretching from Princess Margaret at the top end of the table a full fourteen places, via the Archbishop of Canterbury, all the way down to the Lord Privy Seal, before a foreign guest (the Swedish Ambassador) finally appeared on the seating plan. The Foreign Secretary, for whom a state banquet might have been a logical opportunity to promote bilateral relations, spent the evening in an all-British sandwich between the Countess of Scarborough and the Countess of Onslow.