Queen of the World: Elizabeth II: Sovereign and Stateswoman

by Robert Hardman

  The Queen, meanwhile, could content herself that another potential Commonwealth disaster had been narrowly averted. The summit had not been without its dramas for her. As she waited for guests to arrive at her banquet on board Britannia, there was no sign of the summit host, Sir Lynden Pindling.‡ A proud but prickly soul, he had been upset by local anti-corruption demonstrations against him and had learned that protestors were waiting on the road to the port. So he decided to travel to the banquet by boat and invited other leaders to join him. Unfortunately, the Royal Navy patrols guarding the Royal Yacht had not been informed and ordered the boat to remain outside the security cordon. The Queen was left pacing her deck and looking at her watch. ‘Pindling and the others, including Kenneth Kaunda, were stopped by this security boat, which said “Go out to sea and identify yourself”,’ says Patsy Robertson. ‘There was poor KK waiting to be identified while the Queen was waiting and tapping her fingers on the rail because she couldn’t start without the PM. As they traipsed up the gangway, Sonny Ramphal said: “Ma’am, the boat people have arrived!” It was very funny.’

  When an embarrassed Pindling tried to explain his decision to come by sea and avoid the protestors, the Queen was greatly amused. ‘Whatever for?’ she said. ‘We’ve all seen those demonstrations and the banners. They say “The Chief’s a thief”.’ As in Lusaka, she did her best to make the evening as jolly as possible, making sure she had a friendly conversation with everyone. Stuart Mole, a senior member of Sonny Ramphal’s team, vividly remembers the after-dinner reception on board the Royal Yacht. ‘The Queen had a drinks party on the deck at the end of the evening. We looked down on the dock and there was a Beating Retreat from the Band of the Royal Marines and also the Royal Bahamian Police Band. They almost competed against each other in different styles. It was magical.’

  Nassau might not have achieved a great deal, but a break-up had been averted and, crucially, it had come up with a process and a strategy. The Commonwealth delegation would head to Pretoria with a proposal: if the ANC would suspend violence and start talking, would South Africa release political prisoners, including Nelson Mandela?

  EMINENT PERSONS

  Predictably, the idea of the seven-strong ‘Eminent Persons Group’ – including the former Nigerian leader General Olusegun Obasanjo, ex-Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, and Lord Barber, former Chancellor of the Exchequer – was strongly opposed by the South African government. P. W. Botha, who had recently upgraded his position from Prime Minister to ‘State President’, initially refused to talk to them. It was Mrs Thatcher who told him not to be so stupid and, for good measure, got President Reagan to tell him the same thing. Even those critical of the British Prime Minister (Sonny Ramphal among them) give her credit for opening the necessary doors to the group.

  One of the most important doors of all, however, was the one to the cell of Nelson Mandela at Pollsmoor Prison. There, they found Prisoner 466/64, dressed in a suit with an ANC belt, in high spirits. Emeka Anyaoku, the Commonwealth Deputy Secretary-General who was accompanying the mission, remembers the respect that Mandela was accorded by his captors. At one point the members of the group remonstrated when the South African Justice Minister, Kobie Coetsee, and his officials insisted on joining the meeting. ‘Let them come,’ Mandela joked, adding that they would hear it all anyway. There was a comedy of manners when, having done the introductions, the minister duly retreated. ‘Please stay,’ said Mandela. ‘No, this is your occasion,’ said Coetsee. ‘I insist,’ said Mandela. ‘I really think this is your day,’ the minister replied, leaving one of his officials to sit in on the meeting. Chief Anyaoku was struck by the fact that the official insisted on calling Mandela ‘Sir’.

  Mandela would tell the Commonwealth delegation that their visits – there would be three in all – were the most important in his twenty-four years of captivity. On being introduced to Lord Barber, the prisoner replied: ‘I am told Mrs Thatcher says President Gorbachev is a man with whom she can do business. Will you please tell her that it would be far far easier and very much safer to do business with Nelson Mandela.’ It was certainly a historic moment as the group outlined the proposed deal to their host. Mandela immediately accepted the need to call a halt to all violence, in exchange for an end to the ban on the ANC. There would be no such accommodation from President Botha, during a glacial meeting in which he briskly dismissed the ANC as ‘communists’. Yet the mere fact that the South African President received a delegation who had just met Mandela was a start. Whereupon the South African government did something extraordinary.

  On the very morning the Commonwealth visitors were preparing to meet a top-level government delegation, South African jets suddenly invaded the air space of three neighbours, bombing suspected ANC bases in Zambia, Zimbabwe and Botswana – all of them Commonwealth countries. As Chief Anyaoku recalls, the ‘Eminent Persons Group’ duly stormed out of the country so quickly that he left some of his clothes in the hotel laundry.

  International outrage was immediate and across the board. Mrs Thatcher was appalled, telling Botha that the attacks were a ‘watershed’ and shattered the ‘trust and confidence which I had thought we had established’. South Africa had just alienated the one key figure whose goodwill it needed most. Mrs Thatcher had realised that P. W. Botha was a dud after all. She was equally convinced, however, that the release of Nelson Mandela was central to any solution.

  The Commonwealth was certainly not giving up now. It had been agreed in Nassau that there could be a special conference to discuss the findings of the eminent fact-finders. It would not be a full gathering of the Commonwealth but an emergency meeting of seven key leaders. And there was a great deal to discuss. A date was fixed for a meeting in London at Marlborough House in early August 1986 and the Queen was informed. She was in no doubt about the gravity of the situation. Among those pressing her to intervene directly was Desmond Tutu. The newly installed Archbishop of Cape Town had just written her an anguished personal letter, begging for her help in suppressing the ‘most vicious system since Nazism’. The special Commonwealth conference might clash with her holiday at Balmoral, but she was certainly not going to miss it. Once again the Head of the Commonwealth would prove crucial to proceedings. The Queen was not to know that the conference would crown one of the most challenging fortnights of her reign.

  BOYCOTTS AND BAD NEWS

  When the ‘Eminent Persons Group’ published their report, Mission to South Africa, in June 1986, it did something that few official reports have done, before or since. It became an overnight international bestseller. Penguin Books rushed it out as an emergency paperback and its conclusion proved bleak and uncompromising. The world could ‘stand by and allow the cycle of violence to spiral’, it said, or take ‘concerted action’ of an effective kind. ‘Such action may offer the last opportunity to avert what could be the worst bloodbath since the Second World War.’ That certainly set the scene for the Marlborough House mini-summit. Surely now, the Commonwealth leaders thought, Mrs Thatcher would come round to the idea of sanctions? No she would not, they were told. Out of deference to her European partners (not a concern that usually troubled her), she would wait to see the EEC’s view, following its own mission to South Africa. If that was not enough to upset most of the Commonwealth, they were enraged by an interview she gave to the Guardian in early July. The sanctions lobby, she said, were simply high-minded liberals polishing their halos to salve their consciences. Her concern, she told Hugo Young, was for the poor: ‘South Africa runs the best economy in the whole of Africa. You wish all of the people of South Africa to inherit that economy and not to ruin it. Have you looked at the three million people who could be turned back – who come into South Africa to work, who remit their earnings to other people? I do not know where it would end. Please, I am not going to be the one who causes fantastic starvation, unemployment and misery in South Africa.’

  In short, it was a ‘No’. And on the very same day, two countries announced that they
would be boycotting the upcoming Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh as a result. Edinburgh had ended up hosting the 1986 Games as a goodwill gesture as much as anything else, since nowhere else had offered to host them. The city had staged them in 1970 and the facilities were still there. So why not? All that was needed was a new logo and a new mascot – a cheeky Scottie dog called ‘Mac’, as it turned out. Money was already tight, long before the sudden news that Nigeria and Ghana would not be turning up, thanks to Mrs Thatcher’s position on sanctions. In the words of a Nigerian government spokesman, they wished to ‘dramatise to the British government how strongly we feel about the matter’.

  Over the coming weeks more African nations would follow suit, along with most of the Caribbean. The Games would not only be diminished; they would also be overwhelmingly white. It was an alarming prospect, not just for the organisers, but for the Head of the Commonwealth herself. Sir Malcolm Rifkind was both an Edinburgh MP and Secretary of State for Scotland at the time. As such, he regularly accompanied the Queen and the Royal Family to Scottish events and well remembers the nervous mood. ‘They’d have been very upset,’ he says. ‘If people boycott the Commonwealth Games, it’s only a matter of time before they could boycott the Commonwealth.’

  The Queen was not only concerned about the Games, but about the emergency conference at Marlborough House the following week. On the day after the first boycotts of the Games were announced, she let it be known that she was planning to break her holiday and head back to London ahead of the conference. She wished to give a dinner for the Commonwealth leaders at Buckingham Palace ahead of their deliberations. It was, the Palace explained, traditional for her to entertain the leaders at Commonwealth summits. It was also her understanding that the British government was keen on the idea – because Ramphal had said as much. In fact, the government was not. This was no ordinary summit. Downing Street was worried and more than a little suspicious about the Queen’s insistence on a royal banquet. It was not hard to spot the fingerprints of the Secretary-General. As Ramphal and his successor, Chief Anyaoku, would later make clear, they badly needed the Queen’s involvement.

  Mrs Thatcher and her staff would feel a great deal more worried on the morning of 20th July. There, on the front page of The Sunday Times, was the headline ‘Queen dismayed by “uncaring” Thatcher’. It was not just an unwelcome distraction, a mere three days before the wedding of Prince Andrew to Sarah Ferguson. It was, if true, a bona-fide constitutional crisis. For the article stated that the Queen ‘considers her prime minister’s approach often to be uncaring, confrontational and socially divisive’. As well as highlighting deep divisions over the Commonwealth, it reported an even broader chasm between Downing Street and the Palace. The Queen’s ‘dismay’ extended to the recent strike by Britain’s coal miners and American bombing raids on Libya. The Queen was said to believe that Mrs Thatcher’s unyielding confrontation with the miners had caused ‘long-term damage’ to the social fabric of Britain. What’s more, she was said to have ‘misgivings’ about Britain’s decision to let US bombers conduct their Libyan raids from British bases. The monarch was thus not only at odds with her Prime Minister but with Mrs Thatcher’s friend and ally, Ronald Reagan. As The Sunday Times editor, Andrew Neil, would later claim, here was ‘an unprecedented insight into a ruling monarch’s political views’.

  Inside the Palace, the royal wedding suddenly felt like a sideshow. Senior officials had been vaguely aware that The Sunday Times would be running a ‘think piece’ about the monarchy. The Queen’s press secretary, Michael Shea, had let it be known that he had been talking to the paper, ahead of what would be a very favourable article on his boss. One senior member of the Royal Household recalls Shea saying: ‘I’ve just had a rather good chat to so-and-so and I think there might be quite a good story in The Sunday Times.’ On the evening before the story broke, Shea was saying much the same to a gathering of European courtiers at Windsor. The unofficial trade union of continental royal aides was in town en masse ahead of the royal wedding and had gathered at Windsor for drinks with the Queen. Those present even remember Shea being ‘boastful’ about the impending results of his deft news management.

  Mrs Thatcher’s press secretary, Bernard Ingham, was getting a very different read-out from his own sources concerning the story. When he heard the true nature of the article, Sir William Heseltine, the Queen’s Private Secretary, was thunderstruck. He instantly contacted his opposite number at Number Ten, Nigel Wicks, and the pair of them agreed on a course of action. Sir William would head straight to Windsor, where the Queen was about to join the European courtiers for drinks, and would advise her to call Mrs Thatcher and make it very clear that this had nothing to do with her. The Queen duly contacted her Prime Minister and had what Heseltine later described as ‘a very amicable conversation’.

  It was Mrs Thatcher’s view that there should be no response until both sides knew exactly what they were dealing with. When they did, the Palace issued a statement saying the story was ‘entirely without foundation’. Andrew Neil was so annoyed by this that he refused to publish it. As far as he was concerned, the story had come from unimpeachable ‘sources’ deep within the Palace, who had spoken to his reporter, Simon Freeman. At the Palace, Michael Shea assured his colleagues – and thus the Queen – that none of the explosive assertions in the story were his. The paper had talked of ‘sources’ in the plural, not ‘a source’. Someone else must have been involved.

  Meanwhile, the rest of the media and the wider world were left to judge for themselves. It did seem unlikely that, after more than three decades of wholly impartial dedication to duty, the Queen would suddenly deliver a broadside against a Conservative government via any newspaper. On the other hand, there had been a run of recent reports of tensions between Queen and Prime Minister. In June, the same newspaper had reported that the Queen had been ‘sickened’ by television footage of police violence in the South African townships and that she was ‘concerned’ about the Commonwealth rift over sanctions. Other papers had been exploring the constitutional conflict of interest between a queen of several realms that happened to be in sharp disagreement with one another at the same time. ‘Can she blow the whistle if divisions within the Commonwealth get out of hand?’ asked a Financial Times columnist.

  So The Sunday Times’s scoop had not come entirely out of the blue. The phrase ‘no smoke without fire’ was much in use that week. Was the article true? ‘I think everyone in Commonwealth circles felt it was right,’ says Stuart Mole, then special assistant to Ramphal. No one at the Palace or at Downing Street, however, seriously believed that the Queen had authorised, or even nudged, anyone to speak in those terms about her government. While the origins of the story seemed most peculiar, the sentiments attributed to the Queen did not. Many wanted to believe that she did harbour grave doubts about Thatcherism. That is why the story was so damaging.

  To her credit, Mrs Thatcher made no attempt to offer any counter-spin. She made it clear to her officials that there was to be no briefing or subterfuge in her defence. That she was upset, however, was beyond doubt. ‘Very hurt’ is how Lord Butler remembers it. ‘She was in awe of the Queen and at the same time she had a certain political sense about the Queen which took one of two forms,’ he says. ‘First, she didn’t want to be on the wrong side of the Queen or for people to think that she was on the wrong side of the Queen, as it would damage her politically. But personally, she was deeply in awe of the Queen and would be deeply hurt if she felt the Queen was not approving of what she was doing.’

  Mrs Thatcher’s sense of deference towards the Queen even extended to invitations and clothes. ‘In general, she had a policy of not appearing at occasions with the Queen unless she absolutely had to,’ says Lord Butler. ‘As a woman, she was extremely conscious of how they were dressed, relative to each other. Mrs Thatcher would not have wanted to out-dress the Queen. Similarly, she would not have wanted to wear the same thing.’ On one occasion when she did, a Palace spokeswoma
n attempted to head off the inevitable news story with a line that merely amplified it: ‘The Queen never notices what other people are wearing.’

  For her part, those close to the Queen say that her view of Mrs Thatcher was a mixture of profound respect for her achievements and a mild fascination in learning what made her tick, something she was keen to discover in all world leaders§. Both women were born within seven months of each other, and shared many essential character traits. As Kenneth Harris, biographer of both, observed: ‘Neither of them is intellectual, introspective or philosophical; both are direct, matter-of-fact, down-to-earth, practical and perceptive.’ There was even, at times, a vaguely competitive streak. When the Queen was holding her annual Diplomatic Reception, she noticed that Margaret Thatcher was feeling faint and required a seat. ‘Oh, look, she’s keeled over again,’ the monarch remarked, without any great sympathy, as she continued glad-handing her way through more than a thousand diplomats and their spouses.