‡ HMS Vanguard was the largest – and last – battleship built by the Royal Navy. Launched by Princess Elizabeth in 1944 and commissioned in 1946, at a total cost of £11.5 million, it had eight 15-inch guns, a top speed of 30 knots and a crew of nearly 2,000 officers and men. It would have been called HMS Home Guard if the King had had his way. The Admiralty thought otherwise.
§ The Cullinan Diamond, the world’s largest, was a 3,106-carat specimen named after the manager of the South African mine that discovered it in 1905. It was so big that an Amsterdam cutter was commissioned to break it into several usable pieces. ‘I’d love to have been there,’ the Queen told the royal commentator, Alastair Bruce, in 2018. The largest stone, Cullinan 1, sits in the Sceptre; Cullinan 2 is in the Imperial State Crown; numbers 3–9 are in brooches and other royal jewellery.
¶ Pakistan’s modern capital, Islamabad, had not yet been built, though the Queen was shown the proposed site from an aircraft. By the time of her next visit, in 1997, Islamabad was a sprawling conurbation of two million people.
# He would disclaim his earldom in 1963 on becoming Prime Minister. He sat in the Commons as Sir Alec Douglas-Home until he returned to the Lords, with a new life peerage, as Baron Home, in 1974.
Chapter 4
HEAD OF THE COMMONWEALTH
‘They all love a bit of royal jelly on their toast’
THE BEEHIVE
Exotic dancers are lighting up the East Front of Buckingham Palace. A giant illuminated peacock has been projected over the central arch, its wings fanning out across the very balcony where the Queen and her family appear on special occasions. In the kitchens the Royal Chef, Mark Flanagan, and his team are preparing 5,000 Indian-themed canapés with help from chefs from Britain’s oldest Indian restaurant, Veeraswamy. The Queen is holding a reception to mark the 2017 UK–India Year of Culture, a series of events designed to honour the seventieth anniversary of Indian independence in 1947. That was the moment when the subcontinent was divided into modern India and Pakistan, marking the formal end of the British Empire. It also led to the birth of the modern Commonwealth. These, though, were tumultuous events that left enduring scars. For tonight’s anniversary party, the Queen is treading carefully. This will be a sensitive celebration of contemporary ties between two great nations. A selection of Indian music had been played during the Changing the Guard ceremony earlier in the day. There is a modest exhibition of uncontroversial gifts from the Indian subcontinent, such as the shawl that Mahatma Gandhi wove for Princess Elizabeth as a wedding present and the garland the Queen received on her first visit to India in 1961. This is not a moment to evoke memories of the British Raj.
The Royal Family are here to help the Queen with a 300-strong guest list, which includes an eminent cross-section of UK/Indian life. Word has clearly gone round to keep things demure and ‘culturally appropriate’. The Duchess of Cambridge and the other royal ladies have all steered clear of anything resembling a sari. The Duchess is wearing a below-the-knee metallic dress by Erdem and sparkling Oscar de la Renta shoes.
‘What do you do?’ the Queen asks Kapil Dev. ‘I used to play cricket,’ replies the man named by the cricketing bible, Wisden, as ‘Indian cricketer of the century’. The Duke of Cambridge chats to Dev about Indian food and about his alma mater, St Andrew’s University in Scotland. It transpires that the revered sportsman knows it well, because his daughter is currently a student there. Here is just one more reminder of the intricate web of personal connections, networks and historical ties that make up the Commonwealth.
For this evening is honouring much more than a seventieth-birthday party for modern India. It is also a celebration of one of the oldest and quirkiest multilateral international organisations in the world, which is why the Queen is making such a big fuss of the occasion. The Commonwealth is one of the Queen’s greatest achievements. It is the key to any understanding of her world view and her engagement with the rest of the planet.
Anyone with a close working knowledge of this post-imperial ‘family’ of fifty-three nations – covering what used to be the footprint of the British Empire – will readily concede that were it not for the Queen, the Commonwealth might very well have disappeared long ago. And if it had not been for India, it might never have existed in the first place. For, as we have seen, it was India that forced the expiring British Empire to reinvent itself as a unique and benign alliance of equal and independent nations.
To some, the Commonwealth might now seem like a sepia-tinted relic, superseded by shiny new talking shops like the G7 or the G20, and dwarfed by that great behemoth, the United Nations. That is how it is seen by many within the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, an institution that sometimes gives the impression of having jettisoned the ‘C’ in FCO. Yet everyone knows that the Queen adores her Commonwealth, which helps explain why it enjoys an unusual ambience and range of perks. Its ambassadors are called High Commissioners and get invitations denied to the rest of the diplomatic pack. ‘People are not quite foreigners. It’s a subtle difference,’ says Lord Howell, former Cabinet and Foreign Office minister and President of the Royal Commonwealth Society. ‘It is an association which starts with a prejudice in favour of friendship,’ the former Prime Minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, said in later life, ‘and that, in this modern world, is a good start.’
Yet the Commonwealth is often its own worst enemy, squabbling ineffectively over membership rules and the allocation of its small, ever-dwindling budget. ‘I think we are struggling to find a role for it,’ says former Conservative Foreign Secretary, Lord Hague. ‘You do have to think: in fifty years’ time are all the leaders going to be sitting at those meetings? Are they going to find that there’s value in that? But I do think it is worth trying to keep such a network going because you don’t know what networks will survive.’
The more the former British Empire recedes into the past, the more it seems to be demonised as a force for evil. At Oxford University, a perennial student campaign calls for the removal of all traces (except the vast financial endowment) of the colonial adventurer Cecil Rhodes. When Nigel Biggar, Oxford’s Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology, embarked on a study of imperial rights and wrongs in 2017, he was denounced as ‘racist’ for suggesting that there could be any positives at all. Yet the overwhelming majority of countries which once constituted that empire still resolutely insist on staying inside – and celebrating – this association of Empire alumni, hand-in-hand with the original imperial power. Whatever their divisions, the one thing on which they all agree is their respect for the old Emperor’s daughter. No wonder foreign observers are baffled, while the Commonwealth’s critics ask despairingly: why don’t these countries get it? By way of an answer, one Commonwealth official points to Monty Python’s cult film, Life of Brian, as the armchair revolutionary asks: ‘What have the Romans ever done for us?’*
Most complaints about the Commonwealth are not about glossing over imperial wrongdoing – which no one denies – but about hypocrisy. Often fully justified, these criticisms focus on the Commonwealth’s high-minded preaching about human rights while ignoring flagrant abuses by member governments. Yet that is to overlook its immense advantages as a network that operates in umpteen ways at a human level.
After a distinguished diplomatic career spanning the Foreign Office, the United Nations and the Commonwealth, former Deputy Secretary-General of the latter, Sir Peter Marshall, has ‘lost count of the number of times I have heard its demise confidently predicted or stridently recommended’. It continues to flourish, he says, because it is many things at once: ‘The experts debate whether the Commonwealth is a church, a club or a beehive. The only possible diplomatic answer is that it is all three, simultaneously and interactively.’
Whatever the political row of the moment – and there have been some spectacular ones over the years – the practical, human side of the Commonwealth cheerfully gets on with its own thing. It is the ‘beehive’ aspect that the Queen most enjoys. Indeed, she eve
n takes a keen interest in the work of the Commonwealth Beekeepers’ Association and has warmly approved its proposals for a new fund to assist beekeepers in poorer parts of the Commonwealth, like the honey-gathering Batwa Pygmies of Uganda. On being informed it would be called the Sir Edmund Hillary Fund, after the beekeeping Kiwi conqueror of Everest, the Queen is said to have clapped her hands in delight.
The G7 cannot boast an association of beekeepers, or a club of more than 500 universities on every continent that talk to each other every day, as the Association of Commonwealth Universities does. Neither the G20 nor OPEC can connect paediatricians or tax inspectors or teachers or police officers in the Caribbean with their equals in the South Pacific. Set aside the politicians, and here is a network of people who may all be delighted to see the back of the British Empire but who, as a result, nonetheless have a shared language, a shared legal system, a very similar civil service and a very similar system of parliamentary democracy.
Sir David Manning, former Ambassador to the United States and a senior adviser to the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and The Duke and Duchess of Sussex calls the Commonwealth a ‘surprising’ organisation. ‘It sticks together because, on the whole, there is no one overwhelmingly in charge,’ he says. Lord Howell believes that hierarchical, geographical blocks like the European Union are gradually losing ground in the digital age. Not so the Commonwealth, as he argues in his book, Old Links and New Ties: ‘Take a planet-wide common working language, similar legal systems, a new weave of business alliances in friendly and familiar markets, a cross-pollinating stream of educational linkages, a plethora of professional associations and mix all these in with the age of broadband and the internet. An extraordinary new trans-continental brew of connections and exchanges emerges. That is the new Commonwealth case.’
It is a view shared by the Queen, which explains why she has quietly spent the last few years creating so many new Commonwealth organisations in her own name. They have been carefully designed to keep politicians at a distance, keep the costs down and focus on young people. It all goes back to why she is making a big fuss of India at the Palace tonight. For India is the economic powerhouse of her Commonwealth, not to mention the home of half of its 2.4 billion citizens. This reception is the first of many events leading up to what will be one of the most glamorous and poignant occasions in the organisation’s history, the 2018 Commonwealth Summit in London. That will be an event where, on the eve of her ninety-second birthday, the Queen will discreetly hand the baton on to the next royal generation, secure in the knowledge that her Commonwealth is back on an upward trajectory. It still needs the British monarchy to provide lustre and continuity, though. ‘There is no doubt that the Queen provides the magnet,’ says the then Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, mingling with the guests at the Indian reception. ‘The lunar pull of royal charisma is incredibly important for the Commonwealth, always has been, always will be.’
It has, though, been a very bumpy journey.
GANGING UP
Those landmark royal tours to places like India and Ghana had captured the mood across a fast-expanding Commonwealth. As more and more colonies sought independence, the founding fathers of these young democracies came to regard the Queen as a dependable friend and ally, rather than an aloof superior. She had already earmarked ‘Granny’s house’ for the general use of the Commonwealth, making it clear that Marlborough House should retain its status as a royal palace, to give the organisation added royal kudos. So who was actually supposed to be administering this new Commonwealth? Despite the stuff about all members having ‘equal status’, the British government assumed that it was still in charge. After all, it was to London that the leaders came each year for their conferences, with a British minister in the chair. Britain, surely, was more equal than the rest?
By the mid-Sixties, however, the new members were having other thoughts. Arnold Smith, then an adviser to the Canadian Prime Minister, witnessed a telling moment at the 1964 meeting. The British Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations, Duncan Sandys, launched into a speech presenting decolonisation as a British gift to the world. ‘His speech was pure Britannia nutrix, the proud mother who had nursed her infants to strength and independence,’ Smith wrote later. Suddenly an African voice interrupted. ‘Now come, Mr Chairman, let’s be frank with each other,’ said Dr Hastings Banda of newly independent Malawi. ‘You British have not been as pig-headed as other imperialists. You have recognised in time what is inevitable and accepted it gracefully. That is your greatness and we honour you for it. But it has not been all voluntary. There’s been a significant element of persuasion and many of us here have been among the persuaders.’ He then went around the table pointing out the number of prime ministers present – himself included – who had actually been imprisoned by the British in the not-too-distant past. Had Nehru, nine times a prisoner, not just passed away in May 1964, the list would have been even longer.
It was Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana who addressed that 1964 meeting with the idea of an independent Commonwealth management operation. Crucially, he argued that it should not be controlled by the British. Though the British government loathed the idea, the other heads agreed, and Arnold Smith was hired as the first Secretary-General in 1965. The British government did its best to put this upstart body in its place. At the 1965 meeting of Commonwealth finance ministers, Smith discovered that the British Commonwealth Office had taken it upon itself to organise the seating plan and had allocated him a place next to the shorthand typists. He swiftly relocated himself alongside the chairman. At the annual Buckingham Palace reception for the Diplomatic Corps, the Queen and the Duke were surprised to come across Smith at the bottom end of the greeting line, lurking in the sub-ambassadorial undergrowth, somewhere beneath the lowest-ranking chargé d’affaires. ‘What are you doing down here?’ the Duke asked him. ‘It’s your party, Sir,’ Smith’s wife, Eve, replied. ‘Yes, but you know who organises these things!’ said the Duke conspiratorially. ‘The Commonwealth Relations Office.’ Within a week, after some ‘royal prodding’ in Whitehall, Arnold Smith was informed that he had mysteriously been granted an extraordinary special status. In future he was to be placed ahead of even the most senior ambassador at the Court of St James.
The Smiths would often find themselves invited to dinner à quatre with the Queen and the Duke. The Palace, he wrote, showed ‘a concerted effort to give us a welcome and to impress upon Whitehall officials that I was to be considered one of the Queen’s advisers’. In the battle between the new Commonwealth administration and the British establishment, the Queen was not just ensuring fair play. She appeared to be siding with the Commonwealth.
Within weeks of Smith’s arrival, he would be handling the first major Commonwealth schism, following the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) in the white-run colony of Rhodesia. The row would open a fault line between ‘old’ and ‘new’ members of the Commonwealth, as the former continued to misunderstand the depth of feeling among the latter when it came to colonisation and its legacy. As the former Commonwealth Secretary-General, Chief Emeka Anyaoku, later wrote: ‘Only people who have lived through the dying days of colonial rule can fully appreciate how deeply the sense of racial inequality was embedded in people’s consciousness at the time.’ He has pointed out that Siaka Stevens, President of Sierra Leone in the Sixties, even wanted to create a new national honour; Stevens wanted to call it the Order of the Mosquito, in recognition of the insect that had sent so many would-be European settlers to an early grave in West Africa and had curtailed the colonial ambitions of so many others. As far as Stevens and some of his generation of West African leaders were concerned, the long delay in discovering quinine, as a treatment for malaria, was actually a blessing.
Rhodesia’s unilateral declaration of independence – and Britain’s dithering on the matter – had enraged the younger African nations. As a result, an important precedent was set. The Commonwealth no longer felt obliged to assemble in London, since it was no l
onger under the auspices of the British government. The growing faction of recently liberated ex-colonies wanted to have meetings on their own terms. Those ‘fireside chat’ gatherings of the past were very much at an end. In 1965, the African leaders demanded an emergency Commonwealth meeting to present a united front against Rhodesia’s white rulers. They did not want the meeting in London, but in Nigeria. Britain, they argued, had been utterly hypocritical in failing to intervene against the white rebellion in Rhodesia when a colonial insurrection by black insurgents anywhere else would, surely, have been met with brute force. Patsy Robertson, a former Jamaican journalist who would run media operations at Marlborough House for many years, had just joined Arnold Smith’s team. She well recalls how much the rest of the ‘club’ enjoyed ganging up on the British delegation, led by Harold Wilson. ‘I remember, in Lagos, we had this all-night session confronting the British as never before,’ she says. ‘The next morning, at six or seven, the lift opened and out stepped Lester Pearson [Prime Minister of Canada] and he said: “What fun we had”. And I realised how much people enjoyed this.’ At one point, an exasperated Wilson had complained to Albert Margai, Prime Minister of Sierra Leone: ‘Stop your caucusing!’ Margai’s swift riposte caused much mirth: ‘Harold, we’re not Caucasians.’
The UDI crisis also set an important precedent for the new-look Commonwealth. Two nations, Ghana and Tanzania, had been so enraged by Britain’s response that they severed diplomatic relations with London. Crucially, though, they did not also sever relations with the Commonwealth. As the former Secretary-General Sonny Ramphal explains, this was a pivotal moment. No longer could anyone claim that the Commonwealth was ‘British’. It might still have the Queen as symbolic Head and its headquarters in London, but it had now established its credentials as an independent body. Its Canadian Secretary-General, Arnold Smith, owed no loyalty to the British government, even if Britain was still expected to pay the lion’s share of the bills, under a funding formula based on each nation’s wealth. This new spirit of independence would make life increasingly difficult for the Queen.
Queen of the World: Elizabeth II: Sovereign and Stateswoman Page 18
