Queen of the World: Elizabeth II: Sovereign and Stateswoman
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The Queen leaves the official greeting line to meet random members of the public in Launceston, Tasmania, during her 1970 tour of Australia. Days earlier she had done the same in New Zealand. The press had christened it a ‘walkabout’. A royal tradition was born.
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Emperor Hirohito of Japan is welcomed to London by the Queen in 1971. War veterans demonstrated in silence, though one man threw his coat at the royal carriage.
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Brentry. May 1972. The French President, Georges Pompidou, welcomes the Queen to the Palace of Versailles. Her state visit was a celebration of Britain’s forthcoming membership of the European Economic Community.
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Reviewing the Republican Guard with President Pompidou. The state visit would include racing at Longchamp, a tour of Provence, fierce gastronomic competition between the Élysée Palace and the British Embassy – and the Queen’s last encounter with the dying Duke of Windsor.
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Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau welcomes the Queen to Toronto in June 1973. He was her fourth Canadian Prime Minister. His son, Justin, would be her twelfth.
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Mobutu Sese Seko, ruler of Zaire, arrives on a state visit in 1973. Few of her staff had ever seen the Queen as angry as when she learned that Mrs Mobutu had smuggled a dog in to Buckingham Palace.
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The Queen opens the 1976 Olympics in Montreal. She would do the same in London 36 years later – with James Bond.
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The Royal Family and Commonwealth leaders gather at St Paul’s Cathedral to mark the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in June 1977. Fears of a late appearance by Uganda’s despotic Idi Amin proved unfounded.
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Marking twenty five years. A Silver Jubilee walkabout in Barbados, November 1977.
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‘That frightful little man.’ The Queen lays on a full state welcome for the Romanian dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, in 1978.
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A day at the races with the Emir of Bahrain during the Gulf tour of 1979.
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The 1979 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Lusaka, Zambia. The Queen welcomes the leaders – including the new British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher -to an historic summit which led to the creation of Zimbabwe.
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April 1980. Lord Soames, Governor of Rhodesia, and his military liaison officer, Lt-Col Andrew Parker Bowles (left) join the Prince of Wales as the Union flag is lowered at Government House, Salisbury. Come midnight, Rhodesia would become Zimbabwe and Salisbury would be Harare.
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Lady-in-waiting. In Marrakesh, the Queen is left wondering what has happened to her host, King Hassan, during her chaotic state visit to Morocco. October 1980.
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Welcome to Windsor, Mr President. The Queen takes Ronald Reagan on an equestrian tour of the Great Park. June 1982.
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‘It’s an adventure!’ Torrential rain fails to dampen the Queen’s enthusiasm as she visits Ronald and Nancy Reagan at Rancho Del Cielo, California in March 1983.
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The Prince and Princess of Wales meet Pope John Paul II at the Vatican during their 1985 tour of Italy. A plan for the Prince to ‘attend’ a Mass was curtailed by Buckingham Palace.
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The Queen and Prince Philip on the Great Wall of China during their groundbreaking 1986 state visit. The American media called it ‘one of the most symbolic turnabouts in 20th Century history’.
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Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev comes to lunch with the Queen at Windsor Castle, April 1989. He invited her to visit the Soviet Union. It had collapsed by the time she got to Moscow.
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‘All I got is a talking hat!’ – NBC commentator after President George Bush fails to lower the lectern at the start of the 1991 state visit to the USA.
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The Queen and Duke in Bugac, Hungary, May 1993.
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The Princess of Wales with Crown Prince Dipendra of Nepal (1971–2001) at a banquet at the Royal Palace in Kathmandu, March 1993.
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The Queen and the French President, François Mitterrand, open the Channel Tunnel in May 1994. Having cut a ribbon on French soil, they travelled through the 31-mile, £10 billion rail link and cut another one in Kent.
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June 1994. Britannia leaves Portsmouth for Normandy ahead of the 50th anniversary of D-Day.
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‘You and I have spent most of our lives believing that this evening could never happen’ – the Queen to President Boris Yeltsin at the Kremlin, October 1994.
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President Nelson Mandela welcomes the Queen to South Africa in 1995. A year later (below), the roles are reversed during his state visit to London. He would become one of the only (non-royal) world leaders to address her as ‘Elizabeth’.
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Making an exit. After handing Hong Kong to China on June 30, 1997, the Prince of Wales sails away in Britannia shortly after midnight.
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The Queen visits the Golden Temple in Amritsar during her 1997 state visit to India.
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‘She gave me a look only a mother could give a child.’ President George W. Bush welcomes the Queen to the White House, May 2007.
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The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge at the 2011 Calgary Stampede.
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Prince Harry receives a hug from Jamaica’s republican Prime Minister, Portia Simpson Miller, 2012.
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So near, so far. The 2011 state visit to Ireland, the first since independence, was one of the most important of the reign. The Queen visits Croke Park, sacred nationalist landmark and home of the Gaelic Athletic Association. She is welcomed by Irish President Mary McAleese and the GAA’s Christy Cooney.
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The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall take the Queen’s 2012 Diamond Jubilee message to Australia and meet the crowds in Adelaide.
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April 2016. Barack and Michelle Obama fly in to Windsor to wish the Queen a happy birthday. She had entered her tenth decade the previous day.
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President Obama meets Prince George at Kensington Palace.
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King Felipe VI of Spain at the Queen’s state banquet, Buckingham Palace, July 2017.
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Succession success. The Prince of Wales was unanimously endorsed as future Head of the Commonwealth at the 2018 London CHOGM. It was hosted by the Queen, together with the Secretary-General, Baroness Scotland, and Prime Minister Theresa May.
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June 2018. A month after the wedding of Prince Harry to the American actress, Meghan Markle, the Queen invited the new Duchess of Sussex to join her for a day of engagements in Cheshire.
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* A popular Foreign Office figure, Ewart-Biggs wore a smoked monocle over his glass eye, the result of a war wound at El Alamein. After a good lunch, he would transfer the monocle to his good eye and enjoy a furtive snooze. Soon after arriving as British Ambassador to Dublin in 1976, he was assassinated, along with a young civil servant, by the IRA.
† Albert Perkins joined the Metropolitan Police in 1927 and served as protection officer to both the Queen Mother and the Queen. Those who addressed him as ‘Perkins’ would be gently taken aside and informed that it was ‘Mr Perkins’. They would have to go one step further shortly before his retirement. In 1973, the Queen gave him a knighthood.
Chapter 8
AFRICAN QUEEN
‘There is cause for real concern at the possibility of an attack on the Queen’s aircraft’
DANGER ZONE
The press, the security services and the Prime Minister were as one: the Queen was in danger. Her upcoming overseas tour was not merely ambitious, but fraught with risks. And those risks went far beyond the possi
bility of her being dragged into an embarrassing political confrontation. That was a foregone conclusion anyway. What was worrying the authorities was the possibility of the Queen being killed. That, at least, was the conclusion of several leading intelligence experts in the early summer of 1979, as the monarch prepared to attend the Commonwealth summit in Zambia, an event that several world leaders were rather keen to avoid. Not since her 1961 state visit to Ghana – when a spate of bombings had led to parliamentary demands for cancellation of the tour – had the Queen been urged to cancel her travel plans for fear of assassination. Once again, the destination was Africa. This time, however, dozens of nations were looking forward to a chance to vent their anger against British foreign policy. As the Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, would admit later: ‘It had all the hallmarks, that meeting, of being very unpleasant, not to say a disaster.’
In the end, as she had done in Ghana all those years before, it would be the Queen herself who would calm jittery politicians, showing some backbone and pulling off a remarkable piece of international peacekeeping. But in the run-up to the visit, things were not looking good at all. According to several credible reports, the monarch might not even make it to the Zambian capital, Lusaka, alive. The city was on the fringes of a war zone. A senior official at the Ministry of Defence had already warned that her Royal Air Force aircraft risked being blasted out of the sky by guerrillas armed with shoulder-fired Soviet-designed SA-7 missiles, capable of hitting anything within a two-mile range at up to 12,000 feet.* Two Air Rhodesia civilian airliners had been shot down this way in the same region just months before. One disappeared with all on board. Another managed a crash landing that killed most of the passengers, although some escaped. Of the eighteen survivors, ten were rounded up as they staggered from the wreckage and were executed by guerrillas.
The right wing of the Conservative Party was working itself into a fever of anxiety, thanks to reports like the one which reached the desk of the British Prime Minister on 18th July 1979. Margaret Thatcher, newly installed in Downing Street two months earlier, had been alerted to the possibility of a Cuban-backed assassination attempt on the Queen’s life. Dotty as it might seem today, Fidel Castro – that closet fan of Her Majesty – was said to be behind a plot to attack the summit, murder the Head of the Commonwealth and create mayhem across the continent.
On top of all that, Mrs Thatcher had been alerted to threats to her own life at the summit. Days before she was due to head for Zambia, Bill Deedes, family friend and editor of The Daily Telegraph, sent her a personal note reporting the conversation that he had just had with a leading African politician passing through London. Dark forces, he had been warned, ‘would be waiting in the wings for Mrs Thatcher’ in Zambia. Not wishing to sound too alarmist, Deedes added cheerily: ‘In such matters I would rather be superfluous now than sorry later. So I pass it on.’
All the arrangements for the summit were in disarray, too. The bedrooms for the visiting heads of government were unfinished. One hotel still lacked a boiler, having had no hot water for two months. A fleet of 100 new cars had been ordered to transport all the VIPs around Lusaka, but the whole lot were still impounded in neighbouring Botswana. The summit’s host, President Kenneth Kaunda, was becoming more prickly by the day and was already picking fights with Mrs Thatcher. Other leaders, including the Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, were so worried about the security arrangements that they were looking for excuses to stay away altogether. And all the while, thousands of Marxist ‘freedom-fighters’ waging guerrilla war in neighbouring Rhodesia were camped around the city, taking potshots at anything they regarded as remotely suspicious.
In London, it was not just Conservative MPs who were alarmed. At the Ministry of Defence in London, senior members of the Armed Forces were also expressing serious reservations about the wisdom of despatching the Queen to a maelstrom of African violence. Sir Douglas Bader, the heroic and much-decorated wartime fighter pilot, had joined the public appeal for her to stay at home. Most significantly, this was a view shared not only by the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, but by the Prime Minister of New Zealand, too. There was, however, one compelling argument in favour of this ostensibly suicidal royal tour: the Queen was very much looking forward to it.
As Head of the Commonwealth, she was not merely determined to join the rest of the ‘club’ in Lusaka, with the Duke of Edinburgh at her side. The couple were even going to bring one of their children, too. With such palpable royal enthusiasm on one side, and such grave reservations from two governments on the other, here were the makings of a full-scale constitutional crisis. Yet it would turn out to be among the most important decisions of the Queen’s reign. For, as we now discover, she would play a pivotal executive role at a key moment in the history not just of modern Africa, but of the Commonwealth, too. We are often told ‘the Queen does not do politics’ – and indeed she does not. But over nearly seven decades on the Throne, there have been moments when she has strayed close to the line. On this occasion, she was willing to cross it.
DECLARATIONS OF INDEPENDENCE
Like so many African nations in the late Seventies, Zambia was a fledgling republic adjusting to the concept of parliamentary democracy. On gaining independence from Britain in 1964, the former colony of Northern Rhodesia had opted for a Soviet-style model of government, a one-party state under President Kenneth Kaunda, a former teacher and the youngest of eight children of a Church of Scotland missionary. He would remain in charge for the next twenty-seven years. Though blessed with some of the richest copper deposits in the world, Zambia faced the familiar problems of corruption, food shortages and poor education. For ‘KK’, however, the overarching issue was bringing an end to white minority rule in neighbouring Rhodesia. Here, a bloody civil war was raging, one that frequently spilled over onto Zambian soil. As well as ending the violence on his doorstep, Kaunda hoped to bolster his position as the elder statesman of African politics. Hence his determination to bring the Commonwealth – and above all the Queen – to his capital for a grand summit. The problem was Lusaka’s proximity to the fighting. It was only 70 miles from the Rhodesian border.
Prior to independence in 1964, Northern Rhodesia had met Britain’s key preconditions for independent nation status, notably free elections and majority rule. This did not happen in the neighbouring colony of Southern Rhodesia, which renamed itself plain ‘Rhodesia’. There, the white minority in charge of the colonial government argued that the country was not yet ready for black majority rule and issued its ‘Unilateral Declaration of Independence’ from Britain in November 1965. Their new leader, Ian Smith, declared: ‘The mantle of the pioneers has fallen on our shoulders to sustain civilisation in a primitive country.’ Though this was still British territory, the Labour government of Harold Wilson was reluctant to intervene by force in a colony that had been such a loyal part of Britain’s war effort just two decades earlier, and was now being led by a former RAF Spitfire pilot with many friends in Britain. So Wilson ordered the Governor, the symbol of Crown authority in the capital, Salisbury, to sack the colonial government. The Rhodesian authorities ignored the edict. When the Governor accused them of treason, they ignored that, too. The Crown had ceased to command any authority and, in due course, this staunchly royalist colony proclaimed itself a republic.
Rhodesia, like its white supremacist neighbour, South Africa, was now a pariah state. At the same time, colonies all over the former British Empire were heading in the opposite direction, embracing majority rule, gaining independence and joining the Commonwealth. The old, white dominions were now in the minority, and the younger nations had just voted to create the new Commonwealth Secretariat, based in that former royal palace, Marlborough House. No sooner had the Canadian diplomat Arnold Smith started his new job as Secretary-General in 1965, than he was plunged straight into the Rhodesian crisis. The majority of the Commonwealth nations warned Smith that they were very unhappy with Britain’s feeble response to Rhodesia’s illegal
, white supremacist independence. So the Secretary-General drew up a plan of action and submitted it to Harold Wilson. He suggested that the British government should send troops to Rhodesia and that the Queen should broadcast to its people. Wilson refused. Undaunted, Smith raised his plan with the Queen herself at an audience at Buckingham Palace shortly afterwards.
‘I never felt inhibited from raising sensitive subjects with her on which my views differed from the British,’ he wrote in his memoirs. ‘She did not comment directly but I had the impression that she would have willingly taken a more active role in the Rhodesian crisis had Wilson asked her to do so,’ said Smith. Perhaps he was being naïve. Yet if he was overstepping the mark in trying to involve the Queen in the dispute, he would have received some sort of signal from the Palace. He did not.