Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch

by Sally Bedell Smith

  “All her programs are done with great cleverness,” said Malcolm Ross, her former comptroller. “They have reduced the pace for her without it showing.” But whenever her advisers try to sneak something too obvious into her schedule to give her a rest, “she instantly spots it and asks why she is not doing more,” said a source close to the Palace household. “She doesn’t miss anything.”

  Robin Janvrin, the Queen’s private secretary and leading advocate of modernizing, retired in 2007. Janvrin was replaced by forty-six-year-old Christopher Geidt, a like-minded veteran of the Foreign Office with degrees from King’s College London and Cambridge University. He made a smooth transition, setting the tone with brisk efficiency and easy humor.

  The all-important Palace communications apparatus was now run by two women in their late thirties, both mothers of small children. Samantha Cohen, communications and press secretary to the Queen, had written for regional newspapers in her native Australia, and before joining the royal household had been head of communications for National Grid, the international electricity and gas company. Deputy press secretary Ailsa Anderson came out of regional newspapers in Essex to work in the civil service. She served as press officer for Conservative Nicholas Soames at the Ministry of Defence and for Labour politician Margaret Beckett when she served in Tony Blair’s cabinet. Bright, skillful, straightforward, and tough, Cohen and Anderson managed to protect the Queen’s private life while boldly projecting her image as a symbol of modernity.

  Elizabeth II began responding more quickly to crises, and showing more emotion in public. She had her portrait done as a hologram. She chatted comfortably with pop singer Lady Gaga without flinching at the performer’s shiny red latex outfit, and cheerfully welcomed to Buckingham Palace fashion designer Zandra Rhodes, who sported a pink wig, and photographer David Bailey, who wore ratty jeans. When the world financial meltdown hit in the fall of 2008, the Queen made a trip to the London School of Economics. After listening to a presentation on the origin of the credit crisis, she asked the one essential question: “Why did no one see it coming?” “The general feeling is she is more approachable, human, empathetic, and in touch,” said a Palace official.

  Although the Queen had received her first computer twenty-five years earlier from Ronald Reagan, she had lagged behind her husband in adapting to technology. Philip began writing letters on a computer in the 1980s and became an avid user of email and the Internet, especially while researching his speeches. Elizabeth II eventually took up cell phones to send text messages to her grandchildren, and computers to keep track of her horses. At the suggestion of Prince Andrew, she acquired an iPod in 2005. While firmly committed to paper and pen, she began exchanging emails with family members. Ten years after launching the royal website in 1997, the Queen got her own channel on YouTube in December 2007, with a million hits in the first week.

  There was no better indicator of her embrace of the new than her visit to the London headquarters of Google in the fall of 2008. The dynamic young company honored Elizabeth II by incorporating her image and a crown into the “Google doodle” logo on its U.K. home page on the day of her visit. The Queen and Philip (“a great googler,” said one of the Queen’s senior advisers. “He is always googling, and sharing it with the Queen”) spent more than an hour in the company’s offices, meeting a predominantly youthful and casually dressed group of employees. “Just come back from jogging?” Philip inquired when he met marketing executive Matthew Trewhella, who was wearing a hooded top, chinos, and sneakers.

  During her visit, Elizabeth II uploaded onto her Royal Channel a video of a reception at Buckingham Palace in 1968 for Olympic athletes, delicately guiding the mouse with her black-gloved right hand. When she and Philip were shown the famous “laughing baby” on YouTube, they caught the contagion and started to giggle. “Lovely little thing isn’t it?” she said to her husband. “Amazing a child would laugh like that.”

  EVEN AS SHE kept her focus on the here and now, in various ways, publicly and privately, the Queen honored her late mother, whose memory she kept close. During a shooting weekend at Sandringham in January 2009, she lost an important link with the death of Emma, the last of the Queen Mother’s corgis. A visibly saddened Queen went around the room before dinner and gave the news to each of the guests as Philip tried to console her.

  The following month the family and a throng of friends were out in force on the terrace below Carlton House to unveil a bronze statue more than nine feet tall of a faintly smiling Queen Mother in her Garter robes. She was portrayed at age fifty-one because the memorial stood below a bronze statue of George VI, also in Garter attire, at age fifty-six, the year of his death. “At long last my grandparents are reunited,” said Prince Charles after his mother had pulled a cord to remove the blue satin cover. The £2 million memorial, paid for by the sale of coins commemorating Elizabeth II’s eightieth birthday, also featured two eleven-foot-long bronze friezes that captured the Queen Mother’s spirit by depicting her comforting homeless families in London’s East End during World War II, being applauded with one of her winning racehorses, and sitting with two of her corgis in the garden at the Castle of Mey.

  Several months later the Queen turned up as a surprise guest at a fund-raising reception for the Castle of Mey Foundation. The Queen Mother’s favorite residence had been opened to the public in August 2002, and private funds helped maintain both castle and gardens. Elizabeth II was only scheduled to make a brief appearance at the Goring Hotel near Buckingham Palace. Instead, she spent ninety minutes circulating through the room and conversing with patrons and potential donors. One British businessman was so taken by his encounter that he later wrote a £20,000 check to the foundation.

  AN ADVANTAGE ELIZABETH II has had over all her prime ministers is her vast knowledge of the United Kingdom that she gathers in visits called “awaydays” to cities as well as tiny hamlets. “She knows every inch of this country in a way that no one else does,” said Charles Powell, who came to appreciate the Queen’s expertise when he worked as private secretary to Margaret Thatcher and John Major. “She spends so much time meeting people that she has an understanding of what other people’s lives are like in Britain. I think she understands what the normal human condition is.”

  In March 2009 she visited Kingston upon Hull in East Yorkshire—described by The Times as one of the country’s “few dogged bastions of republicanism”—for the first time in ten years. Before her maiden visit in 1957, one of her advisers wrote a speech that began “I am very pleased to be in Kingston today.” The Queen decisively crossed out the “very” and said, “I will be pleased to be in Kingston, but I will not be very pleased.” Whether the adverb applied fifty-two years later she did not say, but she was eager to assess the impact of the economic downturn on the once thriving shipping center, which had also suffered extensive flood damage from torrential rains two years earlier.

  Palace advisers worked with Susan Cunliffe-Lister, the lord lieutenant of East Yorkshire, and other local officials to organize the itinerary for the four-hour awayday. When the Queen was younger, she would pack in as many as eight different stops, but now she did a maximum of four, ending with lunch. To help prepare the Queen, Cunliffe-Lister sent seventy pages of briefings: rundowns on the people she would meet, descriptions of the places she would see, and menus and seating plans for a luncheon in the Guildhall. Palace officials produced a seventeen-page single-spaced schedule that included every step the Queen would take.

  To minimize disruption to the rail system and ensure an on-time arrival, Elizabeth II and Philip spent the night before their visit on the Royal Train near Hull. The shiny maroon train, a staple of royal travel since Queen Victoria ordered the first version in 1842, is endearingly old-fashioned, its functional decor dating from the 1970s. The Queen and Philip each have a separate carriage—“saloon” in royal parlance—divided into a bedroom, bathroom and sitting room with a desk and small dining table. The furniture is blond wood, the floors are cover
ed in plain wall-to-wall carpet, and the plastic walls are adorned with Scottish landscapes and Victorian prints of rail journeys.

  When the train pulled into the Hull station at 10:20 A.M. on March 3, the Queen and Philip were greeted on the platform by the predictable lineup of dignitaries that the Palace calls the “chain gang,” so named for the ceremonial chains and other regalia worn by the lord mayor, the high sheriff, and beadles in their robes, knee breeches, buckled shoes, and plumed hats. The royal retinue was small—a lady-in-waiting, an assistant private secretary, an equerry, and several personal protection officers—but there was a large local security contingent.

  At the Queen’s request, she met more ordinary people than luminaries. Waiting nearby was the royal Bentley (transported the previous day in a truck) with the hood ornament of St. George slaying the dragon and the distinctive shield bearing the Queen’s arms attached to the roof. After a five-minute walkabout of approximately twenty paces along the barriers outside the station, Elizabeth II was driven to the Queen’s Center for Oncology and Haematology, where she spent nearly an hour talking to patients, doctors, and nurses.

  Phil Brown, the forty-nine-year-old manager of the Hull City football team, sat next to the Queen at the Guildhall luncheon. “She has an amazing ability to scan right across the classes, to come to my level and to go back to being regal,” he said. She talked across the table to a “lollipop lady” (a school crossing guard), an ambulance driver, and an “environmental community volunteer.” Maria Raper, the crossing guard, was transfixed not only by the sight of the Queen applying lipstick after polishing off her Tian of Triple Chocolate Mousse, but by the way she “was picking at her bread roll the whole time. She opened it and picked little bits off, and at the end of the meal there was her bread plate with a collection of small bits of bread.” Throughout the day, Elizabeth II smiled frequently and moved unhurriedly, mindful of Martin Charteris’s edict to “spread a carpet of happiness.” The next morning’s Hull Daily Mail rewarded her efforts with the banner headline “SHE’S A ROYAL TONIC.”

  SEVERAL WEEKS LATER she shifted her focus to the international sphere for a state visit by Felipe Calderón, the president of Mexico. After hosting ninety-six state visits, the Queen was no less attentive to the minutiae of ceremony and protocol. Every place setting for the state banquet in the ballroom was precisely measured, and all the fruit on the table was polished to a high gloss.

  In the middle of the Mexican visit, the Queen and Prince Philip hosted a reception at Buckingham Palace for twenty world leaders attending the G-20 summit. Before the reception began they had their first meeting with the new American president, forty-seven-year-old Barack Obama, and his forty-five-year-old wife, Michelle.

  Although Gordon Brown had spent many summers vacationing in Provincetown on Cape Cod, his relationship with the United States was not as close as that of Blair, who had forged personal ties with both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Obama had also shown a coolness toward the “special relationship.” Shortly after taking office, he returned the bronze bust of Winston Churchill that George W. Bush had proudly displayed for seven years. The British government had lent the bust after 9/11 “as a signal of the strong transatlantic relationship,” and Obama decided to discontinue the loan.

  But the forty-fourth American president and his wife had an air of expectancy when they arrived at the private Garden Entrance of the Palace. The first lady even confided to a courtier that she was nervous about meeting the sovereign. The Queen arranged to have her American lady-in-waiting, Ginny Airlie, greet the couple before Master of the Household David Walker escorted them upstairs to the private apartments, where they had twenty minutes of congenial small talk with Elizabeth II and Philip. The royal couple presented their standard gift—a signed framed photograph—and the Obamas gave the Queen a video iPod loaded with forty classic show tunes, photographs, and footage of her 2007 and 1957 visits to the United States, as well as the audio of the president’s speech to the 2004 Democratic National Convention and his inaugural address, along with a selection of inaugural pictures.

  Elizabeth II and Prince Philip greeted the rest of the heads of state visiting for the G-20 summit in a receiving line before they made their way into the Picture Gallery, with its extraordinary array of paintings, including works by Canaletto, Rubens, Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Holbein. “The Queen knows when she enters the room she is the most compelling head of state in the room,” former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney once observed. “She is number one even though her country is not number one.”

  The atmosphere was electric with concentrated power as the Queen informally circulated among the world leaders, with no need for introductions by her equerries and ladies-in-waiting, who lingered nearby mainly to engage guests as they waited for a chance to speak. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was working the room like a political candidate, stopping at one point to talk to French president Nicolas Sarkozy over the Queen—a maneuver that Elizabeth II doubtless thought “frightfully funny,” said one of her ladies-in-waiting.

  With the American president standing six foot one and his wife nearly as tall, the Obamas towered over nearly everyone. As Michelle Obama and the Queen were talking, they turned toward lady-in-waiting Susan Hussey to remark on their disparity in size. The first lady wrapped her arm around the Queen’s back, and Elizabeth II responded in kind, lightly placing her arm around Michelle’s waist. After ten seconds, the Queen dropped her arm to her side, but the first lady kept her hand in place and even gave the sovereign’s shoulder a reassuring rub.

  “It happened spontaneously,” said Peter Wilkinson, the Queen’s videographer, who recorded the moment. “The Queen and Michelle were lifting up their heels to compare the size. The Queen came up to Michelle’s shoulder, and when they put their arms around each other, the Queen jokingly looked skyward. Sue Hussey was laughing. They sort of did it together as they compared their heights.”

  The newspapers grabbed Wilkinson’s footage off the television screens and made a fuss about an “unthinkable” breach of protocol by the first lady. But after the Queen’s encounters in the United States and Australia in recent years, not to mention her hugs and kisses with close friends, she was more relaxed about gestures of familiarity. Palace officials hastened to say there was neither an offense nor a faux pas in what a spokeswoman described as a “mutual and spontaneous display of affection and appreciation.” “You can’t analyze it,” said a courtier. “It just happened. We’d never seen it before, but the Queen was happy, the event was going so well, which is why there was a spontaneous happy expression.”

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  THE FOLLOWING NOVEMBER Elizabeth II was off on her big foreign tour of the year—two days in Bermuda, followed by a three-day state visit in Trinidad and Tobago combined with the biennial meeting of Commonwealth leaders. They were sent on their way, according to custom, at Heathrow Airport by the Queen’s Lord Chamberlain, William Peel, the 3rd Earl, a ritual that invariably prompted Philip to exclaim, “Mind the shop!”

  At age eighty-three, the Queen studied her briefs as conscientiously as ever—biographical summaries of all the people she would meet (with difficult pronunciations phonetically spelled out) along with Foreign Office guidance on questions that the foreign leaders might raise. Her itineraries, prepared by the host countries and Palace officials, had been approved in detail by the Queen, with time splits down to the half minute. Every conceivable scrap of information was included in a four-by-six-inch spiral-bound blue book called the “Mini”—names, logistics, security details, dress requirements, and the number of paces from point to point (13+7 signifying 13 steps, a pause, then 7 steps), rehearsed repeatedly by her staff during a series of reconnaissance trips.

  The visit to Bermuda was to mark the four hundredth anniversary of the island’s settlement by English voyagers marooned after a shipwreck. It was fifty-six years to the day since she had first set foot on her distant territory in the Atlantic as she began her coronati
on tour.

  After her eight-hour flight with no time to nap, she arrived in mid-afternoon to a ceremonial welcome led by Bermuda’s governor, Sir Richard Gozney (resplendent in a white uniform and white cocked hat decorated with swan feathers) and Premier Ewart Brown, followed by a walkabout and a ninety-minute cocktail party with 150 prominent Bermudians at Government House, the governor’s Italianate home on the island’s north shore.

  The Queen was a smiling icon moving through the crowd at the reception, careful not to engage too much. For all her expansiveness in private, her remarks in these settings seemed to escape like wisps of vapor. After decades in the public eye, she had become like a Rorschach test, saying little and allowing others to superimpose their impressions. At a small dinner afterward, Richard Gozney noted that she showed “no visible signs of flagging. She is clearly a master of pacing herself. You don’t see it, but she organizes her own energies and output accordingly.” She had a four-hour stretch of downtime in the next day’s twelve-hour schedule, which she used to do her boxes in her three-room suite.

  As she crisscrossed the island, she walked whenever she could, was driven through the streets of Hamilton in an open landau, and slowed her motorcade whenever possible—knowing, as she had said decades earlier, that “I have to be seen to be believed.” An estimated twenty thousand people lined the roads, in some places four deep, far exceeding the turnout on her previous visit in 1994. The enthusiastic support for the monarch was seen as a rebuke to Ewart Brown’s advocacy of independence for the island, which had been rejected repeatedly in public opinion polls.

  For her four-hour flight to Trinidad the next day, more than sixty people were on board the British Airways 777, including two private secretaries, her equerry, two ladies-in-waiting, a physician, her personal assistant, a hairdresser, footmen, maids, administrative support personnel, and security officers, along with fifteen members of the broadcast and print media, all spread out in an aircraft that usually accommodates 230.