‘THE QUEEN MATTERS’
While Commonwealth fortunes fluctuated around the world, there was no question that the organisation was declining in prominence and prestige, as far as the British government was concerned. Until 1966 there had been a Colonial Office to handle those parts of the old empire still under British control, and a Commonwealth Relations Office dealing with independent ex-colonies. In 1966, they merged into a single Commonwealth Office and, just two years later, that was itself absorbed into the new Foreign & Commonwealth Office, at the very moment it was wholly preoccupied elsewhere. By then the overarching foreign-policy objectives were Britain’s entry into the European Common Market and the state of relations with Washington. ‘The Foreign Office at that time was very much of the opinion that the Queen and Commonwealth was a load of nonsense,’ says Sir Roger du Boulay, the diplomatic veteran who began his career in Africa, went on to serve in Washington and Paris and later became Vice-Marshal of the Diplomatic Corps – the link between the Foreign Office and the Palace. ‘Those mandarins thought it was their right to run the country and what was important was America and Europe, not the Commonwealth.’ He clearly remembers the words of the Queen’s Private Secretary when he was appointed Vice-Marshal in 1975. ‘The first thing Martin Charteris said to me was this: “Now look, I want you to understand. The Queen matters!” And she did.’
The Commonwealth still ‘mattered’, too, during the eleven years of Margaret Thatcher’s tenure in Downing Street. It might have been at odds with her on many points, but she never forgot that it stood full-square behind Britain during the Falklands conflict of 1982. Even those with whom Mrs Thatcher quarrelled most vehemently, like Sonny Ramphal, would acknowledge that she took the Commonwealth seriously and commanded its respect, if not its affection. ‘It is a remarkable institution. No one could ever have invented or designed it,’ she said in her speech at her dinner to mark Ramphal’s retirement as Secretary-General. ‘We don’t tell each other what to do. We listen and make up our own minds.’ Her successor, John Major, also had a strong regard for the organisation, having lived in Nigeria before entering politics. ‘He worked in the Commonwealth as a young man,’ says Robin (now Lord) Butler,‡ the former Cabinet Secretary. ‘And then there was cricket. He was someone who was naturally respectful of institutions anyway but cricket was a big thing with him. That gave him a natural affinity with some of the leaders.’ To this day, Sir John Major says that one of his happiest Commonwealth memories is opening the batting against his Australian counterpart, Bob Hawke, at a cricket match during the 1991 CHOGM in Harare. Emeka Anyaoku and Stuart Mole point out that it was Major and his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Ken Clarke, who pioneered Commonwealth debt-relief strategies for poor nations, which would eventually be adopted by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
It was also Major who invited the Commonwealth to meet in Edinburgh in 1997, though he would have been ejected from Downing Street by the time it happened. His successor, Tony Blair, would host the event. Stuart Mole, one of the senior organisers from the Commonwealth Secretariat, remembers that Blair and his team wanted the summit to promote his new ‘Cool Britannia’ agenda, right down to a ‘funky’ version of the national anthem played on dustbins and pieces of piping. ‘It sounded as if they were playing a central heating system,’ recalls Mole. ‘Although this was Edinburgh, the word went out: “No kilts. We don’t want lots of Scottishness”.’ More problematic was the retreat, at the home of golf in St Andrews. Never having attended a retreat before, Blair’s officials decided to arrange it their way, with rows of chairs in front of a dais from which Blair would address all the other leaders. Stuart Mole remembers the heated row: ‘We got in there and said: “We cannot have this arrangement. This is just not how it is.” It was supposed to be informal and in the round. Their attitude was that it was a photo opportunity.’
Blair never warmed to the Commonwealth after that. According to Lord Howell, his staff once discussed removing the ‘C’ from the title of the ‘FCO’ altogether. Though he had retired by then, Sir Sonny Ramphal was surprised by Blair’s indifference towards the Commonwealth. ‘I expected better internationalist policies from him,’ he says. ‘He lacked the empathy for dealing with the developing world – something which Callaghan and Wilson [his Labour predecessors in Downing Street] had.’
At one summit, Blair left an executive session to watch football on television. In 2003, Nigeria were the hosts and had been meticulous in ensuring that everything was ready for the Abuja summit. ‘There had been a certain amount of trepidation and unfair stereotyping about anything running on time in Nigeria,’ recalls Stuart Mole, ‘but the Nigerians did a brilliant job with the opening ceremony.’ Everyone, including the Queen, had got there on time – with one exception. ‘It was running perfectly until Tony Blair completely threw it. The whole opening ceremony was delayed by fifteen minutes.’ The Secretary-General of the time, Don McKinnon, the no-nonsense former Foreign Minister of New Zealand, was distinctly unimpressed that Blair ended up arriving after the Head of the Commonwealth. As one of his team remarked: ‘Of course Tony comes after the Queen. He’s the Emperor.’
‘FRUMPISH AND BANAL’
Blair provides a useful indication of his general opinion of the Commonwealth in his autobiography. He does not mention it at all. His lack of enthusiasm may have stemmed, in part, from the diplomatic disaster which befell the first two state visits of his new administration – to two of the largest nations in the Commonwealth. Though Blair might have enjoyed a large parliamentary majority and a fair wind at home, this could also lead to complacency and cockiness overseas. That was certainly the case when his government despatched the Queen to India and Pakistan to mark the fiftieth anniversary of independence. Any hopes of a rerun of that triumphal tour of 1961 would soon be dashed.
Since India had been the Queen’s first port of call on her 1961 tour, Pakistan would be first on her itinerary this time, in October 1997. It was a nervous start to the tour as the Queen arrived in Islamabad. This was her first overseas trip since the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, who had been something of a local hero in Pakistan after her visit to a children’s hospital there not long before her death. The Queen used her opening state banquet speech to pay tribute to the Princess and to thank Pakistan for sharing ‘our grief at Diana’s tragic early death’. Her words were well received and, thereafter, the trip followed the usual pattern. In her speech to parliament, the Queen contrasted her 1961 visit – when there had been no parliament at all, because of the military coup – with the ‘vigour and self-assurance’ of modern democratic Pakistan.§ She and the Duke of Edinburgh were quartered in the same Lahore suite in which they had stayed in 1961, and rode in a horse-drawn carriage to a dinner at the Lahore Fort (no one was asked for a medical certificate this time). Later on, the Duke travelled to the wilds of Chitral to inspect aid work and hand out polo prizes. So far, so good.
But the beginnings of a diplomatic disaster were taking place on the High Commissioner’s lawn. Robin Cook, accompanying the Queen on his first state visit as Foreign Secretary since Labour’s return to power in May 1997, was accosted by members of Pakistan’s media at a British reception. To their delight, he expressed Britain’s willingness to act as a broker in any peace negotiations with India over the disputed territory of Kashmir. His words chimed with a passage in the Queen’s banquet speech in which she had spoken of her hopes for ‘reconciliation’ on the issue. When Pakistani news reports announced a fresh breakthrough on the future of Kashmir, the Indian government was appalled. It wanted no external interference. The mood worsened when the British High Commissioner in India, Sir David Gore-Booth,¶ was tackled on the subject at a press conference ahead of the Queen’s arrival in Delhi. His dismissive retort that the Indians should ‘stop tilting at windmills’ brought simmering resentments to the boil.
As the Queen and the Duke spent a private weekend at a Pakistani hill station prior to the start of the Indian leg of t
he tour, Cook returned home for a couple of days ‘on business’. When the royal party arrived in Delhi the following week, however, the mood was toxic. The Indian Prime Minister had been quoted in the media belittling Britain as a ‘third rate power’, while The Times of India printed the following on its front-page: ‘Thought for the Day: “Frumpish and banal” – Malcolm Muggeridge, British writer, referring to Queen Elizabeth II’. Some guests found that their invitations to royal events were mysteriously rescinded. The Band of the Royal Marines, due to perform at a royal event at the National Museum, were suddenly told not to bother coming. The original itinerary included a slot for a speech by the Queen in Madras. Though the speech had already been drafted, her Indian hosts suddenly removed it from the official schedule.
The mood worsened when the royal party visited Amritsar, scene of the 1919 massacre of 379 unarmed protestors by British forces. There had already been demands by a small but vociferous protest group for the Queen to make a formal apology. When a television camera overheard the Duke of Edinburgh suggesting the official death toll had been exaggerated, the mood soured further. As the media pointed the blame at Robin Cook – who had not only stirred things up in Pakistan, but had approved every aspect of the Queen’s programme – the Foreign Secretary was in no mood to take responsibility. He had only been in the job for a matter of months. A prickly but gifted parliamentary performer with a high regard for his own brilliance, he was not about to allow this tour to besmirch his reputation. Cook redirected all the blame towards the media, the Royal Household, junior staff – anyone, in fact, but himself. He even blamed the previous Conservative government for agreeing to the visit in the first place, arguing that the fiftieth anniversary of independence had been a silly time for a royal tour anyway. What Cook was less keen to discuss was the urgent ‘business’ that had called him back to the UK halfway through the state visit. It later emerged that he had not spent the weekend on pressing international affairs of state, but had been at home in his constituency with the new woman in his life – his diary secretary, Gaynor Regan for whom he had recently left his wife.
Officially, both sides maintained the niceties. In his speech at the state banquet in the Lutyens-designed Rashtrapati Bhavan – formerly the Viceroy’s Residence – President Narayanan assured the Queen that ‘the esteem and affection and depth of feeling for Your Majesty have only increased with each visit’. The Queen replied that ‘a deep, real and durable friendship is the bedrock of our contemporary partnership’. The final straw came as the Queen went to fly home. The Indian authorities roughed up one member of the British High Commission team and tried to block her press secretary from boarding the plane. The visit, The Times pronounced, had been a ‘disaster’. ‘Conceived in error, botched at birth,’ wrote the BBC’s veteran India expert, Mark Tully.
Sir David Gore-Booth had a difficult task as he sat down to write his despatch on the tour for his boss, the Foreign Secretary (and now released after a Freedom of Information request). Showing an almost Olympian capacity for looking on the bright side, he painted the tour as a great result for all concerned. Gore-Booth opened with a quote from the Irish writer Brendan Behan: ‘All publicity is good, except an obituary notice.’ The tour had taken place on two levels, ‘the real and the imagined’, he explained. ‘At the real level, the Visit was full of symbolism and redolent with success.’ The speeches, he added, ‘correctly pointed out that through thick and thin there are certain fundamental values which unite Britain and India in a relationship which, as much as if not more than any other, deserves the label of special’. He dismissed the ‘imagined-level stories of missing invitations, bands and speeches that were seized on and masticated by a carnivorous British press only too eager to find fault’. Gore-Booth concluded with another reference to Brendan Behan: ‘No obituary notices are being written here.’
The actual mood inside the British High Commission was less upbeat. One diplomat recalls ‘a perfect storm of factors’ and believes that blame resides across the board: ‘The Palace were feeling bruised. They were fixated on getting over the Queen’s first tour after Diana’s death and ended up blaming the Foreign Office. Then you had the Foreign Office still working out how to get on with new Labour after the Tories had been in for so long. And in the middle of all this, Cook’s marriage was falling apart. Everyone had taken their eye off the ball when it came to what Cook and the Queen said in Pakistan. The Indians were to blame, too. They were not happy that Labour had got in to power because Labour were more active on the Kashmir issue.’ The British diplomats, according to one of those involved, were ‘pretty devastated’ by the diplomatic setback. It is an astonishing measure of the failure of the tour that the FCO personnel department even felt obliged to write to the relevant officials, assuring them that the visit would not be held against them on their records. Sir David, who died in 2004, had been tipped as a future British Ambassador to the United Nations. His staff, whom he stoutly defended from the internal fallout after the visit and who were very fond of him, believe that the royal debacle scuppered his UN prospects.
A senior Palace veteran agrees with Gore-Booth’s thesis to a certain extent: ‘India was the one you had to lock in and it was always very difficult. There was and is a special relationship there but the imperial dimension is love/hate. We have to try to get the love bit right and we can’t do a lot about the hate. But we have to work with the superpower of the future.’
Following the departure of Tony Blair in 2007, it appeared that his successor, Gordon Brown, had no great interest in the Commonwealth either. As Secretary-General, Don McKinnon was invited to a dinner at Downing Street at which Brown referred to him as ‘the head of the British Commonwealth’. ‘Sorry, Gordon,’ McKinnon replied. ‘Wrong on two counts. The Queen is the head and the “British Commonwealth” died in 1949.’#
In fact, Brown would warm to the Commonwealth in due course, even persuading the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, to attend the 2009 summit in Trinidad in order to add his support to a Commonwealth proposal for an international climate-change fund. Shortly afterwards, it was adopted at the UN’s 2009 summit on climate change in Copenhagen, one of very few things on which that much-hyped but largely inconsequential gathering agreed.
Like Brown, David Cameron treated the Commonwealth with a mixture of respect and exasperation after his arrival in Number Ten in 2010. He was, however, keen to show willing. When the proposed host of the 2017 summit, Vanuatu, was hit by a devastating cyclone, Cameron offered Britain as a new location and moved the date to 2018. It would be his successor, Theresa May, who ended up as the host.
THE ROYAL AUDIENCE
As so many leaders have testified over so many years, had it not been for the Queen, the CHOGMs might have finished years ago and the Commonwealth itself might well have imploded. ‘The Queen is the personification, not just the Head, of the Commonwealth,’ says Alex Downer, the longest-serving Foreign Minister in Australian history who went on to be High Commissioner to the UK. ‘Hyperbole never does anybody much good but she is loved through the Commonwealth and no one knows what would have happened without her.’ Former Prime Minister David Cameron is in little doubt. ‘I suspect it would never have got off the ground the way it did without the Queen as its champion,’ he says. ‘I think she ensured its birth, its growth and development at every stage. Without her it wouldn’t have happened.’
From the early days up until the 1990s, the Queen’s relationship with the leaders was more personal. Her core business at every summit was an audience with every single head of government, however small the nation or disagreeable its representative. Her schedule for the 1981 CHOGM in Melbourne shows back-to-back audiences on board the Royal Yacht, starting on a Monday morning and continuing until Friday afternoon, plus a banquet for the leaders, a reception for ministers and another reception for senior officials in between. Sonny Ramphal remembers the routine very well: ‘No matter what was being debated, when the allotted time came you would see a head o
f government slip away from the meeting because his or her twenty minutes were due. That, for many heads, was a priceless moment, an intimate moment, a moment when they discovered how much the Queen knew about their countries, about their problems. That stunned them.’ ‘You feel you’re not being judged by her,’ says the former Foreign Office minister, Baroness Amos. ‘For many prime ministers and presidents, to have someone you can confide in is very important.’
Sir Robert Woodard, the former captain of the Royal Yacht, was astonished by the raucous informality at a Commonwealth dinner that the Queen held on board Britannia during the 1993 Heads of Government Meeting in Cyprus. ‘The banquet was hysterical because a lot of the older leaders were old friends of the Queen,’ he recalls. ‘They were actually heckling her when she got up to speak. One of them joked: “I hope this isn’t going to be long!” It was that sort of thing. And she’d wave her hands at them and say: “Now be quiet! I want to be serious just for a minute”. There were roars of laughter and this wonderful atmosphere. Many of them were at each other’s throats the rest of the time. Some of them were at war. But on the evening, it was just one big family.’
Over time, there has been a marked shift in the Queen’s role at these summits. When the Commonwealth gathered in Edinburgh in 1997, the Secretary-General at that time, Chief Emeka Anyaoku, and his team felt that it was time she participated inside the summit, even if some of the more republican-minded leaders might not approve. For the first time she would attend the opening and make a speech. ‘She’d previously been “offshore” as it were,’ recalls Stuart Mole, Anyaoku’s chief of staff. ‘She’d have her audiences. And she’d have her parties and a banquet but she wouldn’t actually be in the meeting. Even though a lot of people thought she was in the meeting, she wasn’t!’ This was the Nineties, the low point of the Queen’s reign – that period of marriage breakdowns, media assaults on the state of the royal finances, the Windsor Castle fire and eventual tragedy. The Edinburgh summit came just weeks after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Anyaoku, a Nigerian chieftain and staunch royalist, understood the importance of symbolism in an organisation spread across so many faiths and backgrounds on every continent. He wanted to formalise the monarch’s role even more. It had been his idea to create what are sometimes called the Commonwealth’s ‘crown jewels’. To mark the Queen’s fortieth anniversary as Head in 1992, he had commissioned a gold mace to symbolise her authority at formal Commonwealth occasions, just like those in her parliaments. And there would be a set of silver-gilt goblets, each inscribed with the name of a member state, for use at Commonwealth banquets.
Queen of the World: Elizabeth II: Sovereign and Stateswoman Page 20
