Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch

by Sally Bedell Smith

  The royal couple had First Class to themselves, members of the household occupied Business Class, and press and security men occupied Economy. The premium Economy section, with all the center seats removed, held a pile of securely strapped royal luggage overseen by Matthew King, the Traveling Yeoman. The Queen brought thirteen outfits, along with four spare dresses, two diamond tiaras, an array of brooches, necklaces, earrings, and bracelets. In years past, when the royal party traveled on Britannia, the entourage was much larger, with several chefs and a large military contingent, and the household brought abundant quantities of food, wine, and spirits, as well as linen, china, flatware, and such equipment as the Queen’s monogrammed electric kettle for tea. Since the decommissioning of the royal yacht, the Queen relied on the host country to meet most of those needs. In Port of Spain, Trinidad, the Queen and her household took over the entire twelve-story Carlton Savannah hotel.

  Elizabeth II was back in her element in the Caribbean. Trinidad and Tobago had obtained independence in 1962 and had voted to become a republic in 1976, but the country remained in the Commonwealth and kept strong financial and cultural ties with Britain, along with an enduring affection for the Queen. She showed her respect during the state dinner on the first night by wearing an Angela Kelly–designed “emblem dress” embroidered with images of the country’s national birds, the scarlet ibis and the cocrico, and the national flower, the wild poinsettia.

  She opened the Commonwealth conference the next day by attending an elaborate ceremony in the country’s performing arts center, where she gave a five-minute speech reminding the group that they should work together on environmental problems, especially by helping smaller and more vulnerable countries. “Every word she says is listened to carefully,” said Kamalesh Sharma, an Indian diplomat who was serving as the Commonwealth’s secretary-general.

  “The Commonwealth is very much her legacy,” said Brian Mulroney. “For her it is a major achievement and platform.” Without the Queen’s leadership and example, “many of us would have left,” said Kenneth Kaunda, the former president of Zambia. Lacking executive power, she had nevertheless learned to use her role to exert influence and to work quietly behind the scenes to defuse crises. Through her own sources of information, she came to know more about the issues and concerns of Commonwealth countries, particularly in Africa, than her government’s top officials. She developed better relationships with Commonwealth leaders, even the Marxists, than her prime ministers. She could discuss grazing rights in Somalia, or a particular leader’s fishing habits and favorite hymns. Prince Philip said she became the “Commonwealth psychotherapist.”

  While in the past she would have twenty-minute audiences with every head of government, in Trinidad she limited herself to a private reception with the fifteen leaders who had taken office since the previous Commonwealth conference two years earlier. At her dinner that evening for all the leaders at the Hyatt Hotel—where each place was set with silver gilt Commonwealth goblets sent over from London the previous week and stored in a vault at the Central Bank in Port of Spain—Gordon Brown was just one among many, a diffident presence at the end of the receiving line.

  All the events on the Queen’s tour were stage-managed by press secretary Samantha Cohen. She helped set up photographers’ shots, mindful of vantage points and background colors, and worked with reporters on human interest angles that would appeal to their editors. Unlike the Queen Mother, Elizabeth II “doesn’t look at photographers,” said Robin Nunn, a longtime photographer of the royal family. “Over time you know that she’ll look in a certain direction, so you can catch her.”

  Elizabeth II was interested in seeing as much Caribbean culture as possible, so Eric Jenkinson, the British high commissioner in Port of Spain, organized a series of musical performances, followed by a walkabout among masses of children costumed for Carnival. The Queen seemed unperturbed by the frenzy, the noise, and the heat as a scrum of still and video photographers rushed close, little girls dressed as butterflies and hummingbirds twirled and swayed to the rhythms of drums and steel pans, and adults scrambled to catch the scene on their camera phones. Nearly a dozen protection officers formed a cordon by placing themselves nearby, while Samantha Cohen kept her arms on photographer Tim Rooke’s waist as she guided him along. Videographer Peter Wilkinson worked intently but never closer than five feet away, filming for the monarchy’s website as well as a private DVD so the Queen could recall events and see people she missed.

  Her final engagement—her fifth evening out—was a garden party for sixty-five worthies at the peach stucco residence of the British high commissioner on a hilltop overlooking Port of Spain. Although she had been going nearly nonstop since mid-morning, she seemed remarkably fresh and no less disciplined as she talked to seven groups arranged by themes such as sport, environment, and culture. The schedule called for 4.5 minutes per group, but Elizabeth II and Philip spent more than the allotted time, somehow managing to cross paths exactly in the middle of the terrace.

  With each encounter, the Queen leaned forward, offering a smile and pertinent comment. One young man from Kenya cheekily asked for her favorite song on the iPod given to her by Barack Obama the previous March. “I don’t have time to use it much!” she replied, escaping the query without giving offense. It was a hot night, and the faces of several Palace officials were dripping sweat, but as usual the Queen’s maquillage showed no hint of moisture.

  Pausing briefly inside with Jenkinson and his wife, Maire, the Queen had a soft drink and prepared for her long flight home. The royal couple walked into the night and climbed into their car, which remained illuminated as they were driven away while waving to the guests lining the driveway. “That was a seamless beautiful moment,” said one of the security men.

  Elizabeth II and her entourage landed on Sunday morning at Heathrow, where they were greeted by Willie Peel, the Lord Chamberlain. After only two days off, she was back on a full work schedule, with an investiture, visits to Wellington College and the Ashmolean Museum, and a dinner party for twenty-five at Windsor Castle. “I sometimes think her advisers don’t realize she is 83 years old,” said her cousin Margaret Rhodes. “But maybe she doesn’t want them to slow her down.”

  “There was sunshine and

  laughter and happiness that

  everyone could join in.”

  Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, her husband of sixty-three years, during the wedding of their grandson Prince William to Catherine Middleton at Westminster Abbey, April 2011. Ian Jones Photography

  TWENTY-ONE

  Long Live the Queen

  THE ONLY OTHER SOVEREIGN IN THE HISTORY OF THE BRITISH MONARCHY to spend sixty years on the throne was Queen Victoria. In 1897, during the six-mile carriage procession that was the high point of her Diamond Jubilee celebration, Victoria, then seventy-eight, was so overcome by the tumultuous reception that she wept openly. “How kind they are to me!” she said repeatedly. Too infirm to walk into St. Paul’s Cathedral, she sat outside in her carriage for a brief service of thanksgiving, surrounded by clergy and dignitaries as the choir sang a Te Deum, followed by an unconventional exhortation from the Archbishop of Canterbury: “Three cheers for the Queen!” Victoria died at age eighty-one on January 22, 1901, after sixty-three years and 216 days on the throne—a record that Queen Elizabeth II would surpass in September 2015.

  Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee was arranged with some concessions to her eighty-six years. She won’t cover the forty thousand miles overseas that she logged during her Golden Jubilee travels, but her tours throughout England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland will cover ten regions. Members of the royal family will visit all fifteen of the Queen’s other realms as her representatives. The plan has many of the same elements—parades, concerts, luncheons, dinners, garden parties, religious services, themed events, and fireworks—to capture the affection and admiration that have grown stronger since the last jubilee. “Her reputation now is as high as at any time since
the golden early years when everyone was intensely loyal to the new Queen, and Churchill was flat on his back with admiration,” said Margaret Thatcher’s senior adviser Charles Powell.

  Her regional tours will begin in May of 2012 following Accession Day on February 6, always a time of quiet commemoration for the Queen. The apex of the public celebration spans four days of events on the first weekend in June that includes national holidays on Monday and Tuesday. The timing of the Summer Olympic Games six weeks later promises to extend the festive atmosphere, and to give Britain’s athletes added incentive to win for their Queen as well as their country.

  With the exception of security and a special grant from the Treasury of £1 million to cover costs such as additional staffing, funding for the jubilee has come from nongovernment sources, with broadcasters and private organizations underwriting concerts and other events. The Thames Diamond Jubilee Foundation organized and funded “the largest flotilla to be assembled on the river in modern times,” scheduled for Sunday, June 3. Featuring at least one thousand boats and covering seven and a half miles, the river pageant was designed to surpass the Silver Jubilee barge procession, which had only 140 vessels. At the head of the waterborne progress will be a special barge for the Queen and Prince Philip, modeled on an eighteenth-century royal galley and powered by oarsmen that London mayor Boris Johnson joked could be “oiled and manacled MPs.”

  On Saturday she will celebrate by watching the Derby at Epsom, and Monday will feature a concert produced and financed by the BBC and attended by twelve thousand people chosen by lottery as they were a decade earlier. They will attend a garden party at Buckingham Palace, followed by the musical program, which will include selections from classical to popular. The Queen will again light a national beacon as others are lit around the United Kingdom and Commonwealth. The stage will have the Palace as its dramatic backdrop, stands will be built around the Victoria Memorial, and large video screens will be placed down the Mall.

  On Tuesday the Queen will be honored at a service of thanksgiving at St. Paul’s Cathedral, and her carriage procession afterward will trace part of Queen Victoria’s route. None of the celebrations could be considered modest, nor will they be extravagant, in keeping with the Queen’s wishes to minimize the expenditure of public funds.

  Planning for the jubilee began in 2009, which the Palace called its “ideas” year. The elements of the celebration were rolled out in a low-key fashion to tamp down expectations, as had been done for the 2002 festivities. The Queen’s advisers were mindful that opposition to the monarchy had dwindled considerably, and they were determined to keep it that way. “Republicanism isn’t even an esoteric political position in Britain these days,” wrote Times columnist Hugo Rifkind in 2009. “It’s barely even a political position at all.” Forty years after surveys about the monarchy’s popularity began in 1969, the Queen continues to enjoy an approval rating of around 80 percent.

  Evidence of the monarchy’s strong emotional hold, not only over the British people but around the world, could be seen in the popularity of the Oscar-winning film The King’s Speech, the inspiring tale of how Elizabeth II’s father, George VI, overcame his stutter through perseverance and discipline. The film touched people’s hearts but also tapped into a yearning for the monarchy’s enduring values of duty, integrity, and courage. In one movie theater after another, audiences applauded after the final scene.

  Intrigued by the response to the film, the Queen saw it in a private screening. “On the whole she quite liked it,” said Margaret Rhodes. “I’m glad she saw it. It’s always difficult to see your own parents depicted, but she wasn’t violently either pro or con. Obviously there were a few bits that were not characteristic, but she thought it was okay.”

  A powerful source of the Queen’s success as sovereign has been her inscrutability and avoidance of controversy. With the exception of a few relatively inconsequential remarks over the years, her political views remained a matter of conjecture long after The Sunday Times tried to portray her as a soft Tory against Margaret Thatcher’s hard line. Sometimes she has hinted at progressive thinking: applauding the Commonwealth’s multilateralism and initiatives to combat climate change, and speaking of “redressing the economic balance between nations” in her Christmas speech in 1983 by urging prosperous countries to share modern technology with poorer countries. But even then, her public statements have been well within constitutional bounds, and congruent with her government’s policies. Above all, the arguments against the monarchy as antidemocratic and backward-looking have been overwhelmed by the Queen’s dependable and consistent presence—what David Airlie, her former Lord Chamberlain, calls “the sheet anchor in the middle for people to hang on to in times of turbulence.”

  ON TUESDAY, MAY 11, 2010, Elizabeth II greeted her twelfth prime minister, Conservative leader David Cameron. At age forty-three, he was the youngest politician to take that office since Lord Liverpool was appointed in 1812. Born in the fifteenth year of her reign, Cameron was also junior by three years to Prince Edward, the Queen’s youngest child. She had first glimpsed the future PM when he appeared at age eight with Edward in a school production of Toad of Toad Hall. It was a remarkable trajectory from her first prime minister, who was born in the nineteenth century and served in her great-great-grandmother’s army.

  Cameron made the time-honored trip to the Palace five days after the general election on Thursday, May 6, resulted in the first hung Parliament since 1974. The Tory party had won 306 seats, but it was twenty shy of the majority needed to govern. Labour tallied 258 seats, and the minority Liberal Democrats (the party created in 1988 when the Liberals merged with the Social Democratic Party) captured fifty-seven seats, placing their forty-three-year-old leader, Nick Clegg, in the role of power broker as he considered overtures from the two other parties. The Liberal Democrats were in many respects more in line with Labour, but Cameron moved more nimbly than Gordon Brown, offering terms for a deal that Labour couldn’t match.

  At one point Brown’s chief negotiator, Peter Mandelson, sought advice from Private Secretary Christopher Geidt at the Palace, who said Brown had a “constitutional obligation, a duty, to remain in his post” until a new government could be formed. As the period of limbo extended through the weekend, Geidt made regular trips to 10 Downing Street to get briefings. “It was important for Geidt to be visible, and to show that he was very much there on behalf of the Queen,” recalled Brown’s press spokesman and Palace veteran Simon Lewis.

  During his final encounter with Clegg on Tuesday, Brown said, “I can’t keep the Queen waiting. Make up your mind, Nick.” In the end, Clegg accepted what Cameron later described as “a big generous offer to have a coalition government” that included making the Liberal Democrat leader deputy prime minister. Still, the deal for the first two-party government since World War II was subject to ratification by Clegg’s party. When Cameron met with the Queen after Brown’s resignation, “I said I couldn’t be totally sure about what sort of government I was going to form,” he recalled. “I said that I hoped to form a coalition government but I might have to come back in the morning and tell her it was something rather different.”

  Cameron was the first Old Etonian to become prime minister since Alec Douglas-Home left office in 1964. The new prime minister came from a wealthy family of bankers interlaced with aristocrats including the 7th Earl of Denbigh. His father, Ian, was a stockbroker who taught his son about coping with adversity. Born with severely deformed legs, Ian managed to play tennis and cricket, endured repeated surgery, and finally suffered through amputation, always steadfast and devoid of self-pity. After attending Heatherdown with Prince Edward, David went to Eton and graduated from Oxford with honors. He spent much of his early career as a backroom strategist for the Conservative Party and honed his ability to get his message across during seven years as a public relations executive at Carlton Communications, one of Britain’s leading media companies.

  Once he was elected to Parliamen
t in 2001, Cameron rose to the top in just four years, working to modernize the Tory party by emphasizing individual initiative as well as social justice while tackling government excesses. Handsome, easygoing, and quick on his feet, he struck the right notes in the way Tony Blair had done with the Labour Party. His wife, Samantha, the daughter of a baronet, cut a stylish figure, and they had three young children. The eldest, Ivan, born with cerebral palsy and severe epilepsy, was unable to eat on his own, speak, or walk. Although he required round-the-clock care (including twenty-six doses of medicine a day), the Camerons tried to include him in as many family activities as possible and expose him to the outside world.

  In 2009, Ivan died at age six from the complications of his illness. Gordon Brown, who knew the pain of losing a child as well as caring for one with a serious chronic illness, spoke of his rival’s tragedy with unusual feeling on the floor of the House of Commons. Three months after her husband became prime minister, Samantha Cameron gave birth to their third daughter, although their happiness dimmed just two weeks later when Ian Cameron died of a stroke at age seventy-seven while on vacation in France.

  David Cameron’s combination of matter-of-fact strength and ingenuous openness about his hardships simultaneously aligned him with the Queen’s instinctive stoicism and the post-Diana emotional accessibility she had come to accept as part of modern life. Aside from Cameron’s school days in the shadow of Windsor Castle, he and the eighty-four-year-old Queen found other common ground. He had grown up in the countryside, in a small village in Berkshire, where he enjoyed hunting and shooting. His father had a passion for horse racing, taking shares in several thoroughbreds. Like the Queen, the prime minister had a practical turn of mind, and spoke in an unusually forthright way for a politician. There was, in short, an ample comfort zone for the weekly audiences at Buckingham Palace, which Cameron could readily fill with self-deprecating humor and a companionable personality.