Queen of the World: Elizabeth II: Sovereign and Stateswoman

by Robert Hardman

  Dressed in pale orange, the Queen went on to receive several standing ovations from a packed chamber, during what would be the speech of the tour. ‘Some people believe that power grows from the barrel of a gun,’ she said. ‘So it can, but history shows that it never grows well nor for very long. Force, in the end, is sterile. We have gone a better way: our societies rest on mutual agreement, on contract and on consensus.’

  The White House staff were taking no chances with the arrangements for this state banquet. The US Marines Band played the Queen into the State Dining Room to the reassuringly familiar sounds of William Walton. Col. John Bourgeois was under strict orders not to repeat the error of 1976. Asked if he would be playing ‘The Lady Is a Tramp’, he replied: ‘It’s long been removed from the repertoire.’ Instead of a pop duo, the after-dinner entertainment was the soprano, Jessye Norman. Following the Maine lobster and roast lamb, President Bush saluted a relationship ‘which has never been more special’ and the Queen’s resilience. ‘Rain or shine, your long walks have left even the Secret Service agents panting away,’ he told her. ‘I’m glad that my fibrillating heart was not taxed by a competitive walk-off today.’ The Queen praised the President for his ‘quiet courage’ during the Gulf War – ‘what Thoreau described as “three-o’clock-in-the-morning courage”,’ she said – and recalled her father’s visit to President Roosevelt: ‘No wonder I cannot feel a stranger here. The British have never felt America to be a foreign land.’

  During her stay in Washington, the Queen also had her first encounter with the President’s son, George W. Bush, then in charge of the Texas Rangers baseball team. He had been forewarned by his mother not to talk to the Queen, as he could be ‘mercurial’. The Queen herself was rather intrigued, particularly since he had cowboy boots etched with the words ‘God Save the Queen’. At one point she asked him if he was the black sheep of the family. ‘I guess so,’ replied Bush Junior. ‘All families have them,’ observed the Queen. ‘Who’s yours?’ Bush Junior replied, at which point the first lady intervened with a cry of ‘Don’t answer that!’

  A highlight of the Washington leg occurred during the Queen’s visit to a new housing project. She was due to visit the home of Alice Frazier, sixty-seven, an African American grandmother of considerably greater physical stature than the Queen. The visit became world news when Alice engulfed her in a bear hug, before offering her chicken wings, iced tea and potato salad. ‘They said I wasn’t supposed to do it but I just couldn’t stop myself,’ she told reporters. ‘Shoot, she’s a woman just like I am. If she didn’t have that crown on, she’d be just like me.’ Ms Frazier had been particularly excited, she explained, because her fifteen-year-old granddaughter, Laverne, had just made her a great-grandmother for the third time. ‘That’s tremendous to have three great-grandchildren,’ the Queen said brightly, by way of congratulation. Though the media were desperate to paint the bear hug as a great faux pas, the Palace and the Foreign Office were not worried. ‘It’s not something that often happens but the Queen took it in good spirit,’ says Sir Antony Acland. ‘One didn’t want to make a fuss about it or make it a breach of protocol.’

  After four days in Washington, the Queen climbed back aboard Concorde for the next leg of the tour, her mission accomplished in the capital. As the New York Times put it, the Queen had ‘created a fuss in Washington this week that no other national leader could match, not even Mr Gorbachev at the height of Gorbomania’.

  The visit moved on to Florida, a state which the Queen had never visited before. The Royal Yacht had sailed in to meet her in Miami, though a diplomatic incident nearly curtailed the entire programme. As Britannia’s crew waited for the royal party to arrive, they flushed through all the royal baths and heads (ship’s lavatories) as a precaution. Whereupon Britannia’s captain, Rear Admiral Robert Woodard, suddenly had a furious official from the Miami port authority thumping on his door. ‘He said we had polluted his harbour, that we were fined ten thousand dollars and that we had to leave in two hours,’ he recalls. The fact that Britannia was due to host a state banquet a few hours later made no difference whatsoever. Rules were rules. It would require the intervention of the White House to allow Britannia to remain alongside.

  In Miami, the press heard Uriah Goldfinger, a twelve-year-old pupil at Coconut Grove Elementary School, ask the royal guest how long she had been Queen. ‘Too long,’ she replied. ‘Wait and read about it in your history book.’ It prompted some commentators to ask whether Britain was asking too much of a grandmother who had just turned sixty-five. Even then, a year before the fortieth anniversary of her accession to the Throne, there was the same retirement speculation that would surface at subsequent key stages of her life – and promptly vanish, when it became quite clear that she had no intention of retiring. Later on, the Queen was reunited with two ex-heads of state now comfortably into their own retirement, and showing a few signs of it, too. The Queen had invited the hosts of both her previous state visits, the Reagans and the Fords, to her banquet in the Royal Yacht. Ronald Reagan, delighted to be back on board, had an animated chat with the Queen about the state of the economy, much of it captured by film-maker Edward Mirzoeff, making an award-winning BBC documentary to mark the fortieth anniversary of her accession. Both the Queen and Reagan were concerned about the spiralling cost of spending – ‘the next generation are going to have a very difficult time,’ she observed – but viewers would be captivated by Reagan’s preoccupation with finding decaffeinated coffee. This, it transpires, had become something of an obsession. Sir Robert Woodard remembers Reagan’s confusion as the port came round after dinner. ‘Decaf, Ma’am?’ he asked. ‘That’ll come later,’ she replied, nodding at the port. ‘Just pass it on.’ Much to the Queen’s amusement, the next evening one of the ship’s stewards produced a decanter labelled ‘Decaffeinated Port’.

  The main purpose of the Florida leg was to visit the Tampa headquarters of General ‘Stormin’ Norman’ Schwarzkopf, the architect of the Gulf War victory, who was to receive an honorary knighthood. Travelling by sea over the weekend also gave the Queen a bit of breathing space. ‘The plan was to go round the bottom of Florida and pull in to Tampa so she could knight Stormin’ Norman,’ says Woodard. What should have been a relaxing weekend became rather dramatic. At Loggerhead Key, Britannia dropped anchor for a picnic, with the Duke of Edinburgh in charge. ‘He very much liked organising the barbecue and didn’t thank you if you tried to help,’ says Sir Antony Acland. ‘It was his act and it was a mistake to interfere.’ While the Duke was cooking, Woodard received a call from Britain. East Midlands Police had just received a warning that a bomb had been planted four feet below Britannia’s waterline and would explode within an hour. Woodard quietly asked his senior officer to carry out the standard checking procedure with a minimum of fuss. The Queen, sensing that something was up, asked for an explanation. Woodard hid nothing from her and found her as stoical as ever. ‘She said it was hard to know when to take these things seriously,’ he recalls. Besides, as he pointed out to the Queen, Britannia was currently anchored just four feet above the seabed anyway. ‘If it had gone off, we’d just have sat there like a rather grand hotel.’ The picnic continued without a murmur.

  In Tampa, the Queen duly invested General Schwarzkopf with his knighthood and invited him on a tour of the Yacht. What impressed him most was not the state apartments, but the engine room. At first he assumed that all the gleaming boilers and pipework must be some sort of museum display and asked to see the ‘real’ engine room. On being told that he was already in it, he was dumbfounded. ‘You could eat your lunch off that,’ he told Woodard. ‘I’d rather you didn’t,’ the Rear Admiral replied. ‘It would make rather a mess.’

  The official tour concluded with a tour of Texas, including a visit to the Johnson Space Center and Mission Control, Houston. The Queen was particularly keen to ask astronaut Mike Foale why certain food would not float in space – surface tension, came the answer – while Prince Philip put on space glov
es to handle moving objects in a vacuum. This final leg of the tour included a trip to the Alamo in San Antonio and a visit to the Antioch Baptist Church in downtown Houston. Even the Queen’s Private Secretary, Sir Robert Fellowes, was caught up in the gospel-singing swing of things, according to the Ambassador. In his despatch to the FCO, Sir Antony noted that one of the highlights of the three days in Texas had been ‘the sight of the Queen’s Private Secretary jabbing his finger in the air and crying “Amen” and “awl rayte”.’

  For the locals, the high point was the Queen’s speech on the lawn of the state Capitol in Austin. ‘No state commands such fierce pride and loyalty,’ the Queen told her hosts. ‘Lesser mortals are pitied for their misfortune in not being born Texans.’ This prompted euphoric applause from the thousands who had waited for hours in scorching sunshine to see the monarch. As USA Today put it: ‘Texas was taking to the Queen like ticks to a hound dog’. The Chicago Tribune observed that the Lone Star State had ‘donned a ten-gallon tiara’.

  The calibre of the speeches – and the warmth with which they were received – was a notable feature of this tour. No one was calling the Queen a ‘frump’ any more. Nor did anyone begrudge her four days of private horse-watching in Kentucky, ahead of her return to Britain.

  ***

  Relations between London and Washington cooled to a businesslike level during the Clinton years, largely because of politics. The fact that John Major’s Conservatives had provided active support for George H. W. Bush’s 1992 election campaign angered Clinton. There would be heated disagreements over the Western response to war in Bosnia, and Major stopped taking Clinton’s calls after the USA granted a visa to Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams in 1994. There would be no state visit in either direction in that sort of climate. In the same year, however, the Queen fulfilled her now-familiar role as keeper of the ‘special relationship’. Clinton might not have had the full royal treatment at Windsor or Buckingham Palace, but he would get it elsewhere. The fiftieth anniversary of D-Day was looming. There would be major events in Britain ahead of the 6th June commemorations, followed by a spectacular re-invasion of Normandy. The leaders of all the Allied nations would board the Royal Yacht at Portsmouth for the day, review a fleet of international warships and then sail for France, accompanied by ocean liners full of veterans. Only one ally, however, would be invited to stay overnight in Britannia. Bill and Hillary Clinton, who had just flown in from commemorations at Second World War battlefields in Italy, were given cabins nine and eleven, the best suite apart from the Queen’s. A presidential bodyguard took up position at the door and refused to let anyone inside, including the steward bringing the Clintons’ morning coffee.

  The commemorations began with a banquet for the leaders at Portsmouth Guildhall on the night of 4th June. As John Major would recall, the Queen averted an awkward situation when she was shown the seating plan. The Foreign Office had followed protocol by seating the Queen next to the King of Norway and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, while the presidents of France and the USA were to be placed some way down the table. Since D-Day involved the Americans, British and Canadians liberating France, it would be very odd to put the Queen of Britain and Canada at the head of the table and the presidents of America and France somewhere else. The Queen changed the placement. ‘Of course, people will expect President Clinton and President Mitterrand to sit beside me,’ she told her Private Secretary, ‘and, in any event, I see my cousins all the time.’

  Clinton would later recall the ‘clever manner in which she discussed public issues, probing me for information and insights without venturing too far into her own political views’. He was up early the following day for his exercise routine. No one could fail to spot him. ‘He put on these DayGlo neoprene things and asked me where he could find a two kilometre run,’ says Sir Robert Woodard, Britannia’s captain. ‘I said: “Mr President, run round the dockyard because if you run outside into Portsmouth, you’ll be swamped.” He set off and didn’t really run anywhere. He stopped to talk to every dock worker, every crane driver. He came back and the whole Yacht came to attention for the president in his strange clinging garb.’ The crew would remain at attention for some time.

  ‘He walked half way across the gangway and stopped,’ laughs Woodard. ‘He did his post-running press-ups and hip jerks for quite literally five minutes with the whole Yacht standing to attention. Then he went down and was politely late for breakfast.’

  Only a handful of senior members of the Royal Household were at the breakfast table, along with the Duke of Edinburgh. One recalls the extraordinary moment when Clinton began to describe his visit to Italy the previous day: ‘He was talking about visiting the US graves at Anzio and suddenly he burst into tears – which was unexpected.’

  There would be many emotional moments during the course of one of the great days in Britannia’s history. With crowds packing every yard of shoreline and the sides of countless ships out in the Solent, the world leaders were overwhelmed. Poland’s tearful President, Lech Walesa, was left speechless, raising clasped hands aloft to the crowds. Surveying the scene, Clinton admitted that what stuck in his mind were the words of a predecessor. ‘The one thing that encapsulates it all for me,’ he said, ‘is Eisenhower’s phrase that D-Day represented the fury of an aroused democracy.’

  American national pride, understandably, dictated that he could not be seen to re-invade France in the Queen’s Yacht. He and the first lady had to transfer to a launch that would carry them to an adjacent American warship. They would arrive in France aboard the aircraft carrier George Washington, then the world’s largest warship. Jumping off Britannia onto a ship’s launch for the transfer several miles out in a choppy English Channel was not for the faint-hearted. ‘Transfers at sea can be rather amusing,’ remarked the Princess Royal as the Queen waved off her American guests. Fortunately for UK–US relations, there was nothing amusing about this one.

  ***

  It would be George W. Bush who became the first US President to pay a full state visit to the United Kingdom when he arrived with his wife, Laura, in 2003. By now, two seismic events had intervened. On a personal level, the Royal Family had been through the maelstrom of the Nineties, culminating in the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997. There were few places where Diana’s star had shone brighter than in the USA. And four years later, the US endured the worst terrorist attack in its history when nearly 3,000 people were killed in four co-ordinated attacks on American soil involving hijacked airliners. Though the vast majority of the dead were US citizens, 371 of them were from abroad, sixty-seven of them British. No foreign nation lost more. The events of 11th September 2001 had drawn Britain and America as close together as they had been at any time during the Queen’s reign. Tony Blair had been the first world leader to arrive in Washington after the attacks, to show solidarity with Britain’s wounded ally. ‘Tony rose to the occasion,’ says the then Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw. ‘Bush required a lot of emotional support. Anybody would in that situation and he received it from Tony.’

  The television images of the attacks on the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center shocked the Queen as she watched at Balmoral. Years later, when visiting Ground Zero, she would tell the widow of a New York fire chief: ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything in my life as bad as that.’

  The morning after the attacks, she ordered the Union flag on Buckingham Palace to be lowered to half-mast and asked the band to play the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ during Changing the Guard. For grieving expatriate Americans, as well as tourists marooned in London by the sudden ban on all aircraft movements, it was both comforting and profoundly moving. Nor were US citizens the only ones weeping openly in front of the Palace.

  As Bill Clinton told William Shawcross later: ‘I knew her well enough to know that she thought of it herself. It took my breath away. It was wonderful. It was something I will never forget for as long as I live.’ He would be equally moved by her letter to the American people which was
read out by the British Ambassador, Sir Christopher Meyer, at a New York memorial service for the Britons killed in the attacks. It included a line that is destined to go down in history as one of the Queen’s most-quoted sayings: ‘Grief is the price we pay for love.’ ‘It was a perfectly fine letter until that stunning sentence,’ Bill Clinton said later. ‘I don’t know how to explain the impact it had on the audience. It was so wise and so true that it somehow made people feel better. It was a healing statement. It was just so pointed and eloquent.’

  Against this emotional backdrop, the 2003 state visit of George W. Bush was always going to be a congenial affair, regardless of the (smaller-than-expected) anti-war protests outside the Palace. There would be no carriage procession, though that was nothing to do with the protestors. US security officials were never going to allow any president to travel through a major capital city in a horse-drawn vehicle made of wood and leather. Security imperatives led to a somewhat comical welcome. The Bushes, who had already arrived the night before, drove in the US presidential limousine from one side of the Palace to the other for the official ceremony. The visitors were bowled over by the hospitality. Unlike the dreadful Ceausescus, who had been paranoid about anyone touching their clothes, the Secretary of State, General Colin Powell, was delighted by the royal treatment. ‘I went to see Colin Powell at the Palace,’ says Jack Straw, ‘and he was joking how he was getting even better service than when he was a senior officer in the Army having his bags unpacked and clothes hung up.’

  That evening, as she served halibut, chicken and praline ice cream at her state banquet, the Queen deployed the S-word in her state-banquet speech. Noting that it had been Winston Churchill who had coined the term ‘special relationship’, she went on: ‘Despite occasional criticism of the term, I believe it admirably describes our friendship. Like all special friends, we can talk frankly and we can disagree from time to time – even sometimes fall out over a particular issue. But the depth and breadth of our partnership means that disputes can be quickly overcome and forgiven.’