The Queen

by A. N. Wilson

  In 1995 the Queen went to South Africa as the guest of President Mandela. It was the place where she had made her ‘vow’, written by Tommy Lascelles, in 1947 devoting herself to the service of ‘our great Imperial family’.88 The Queen had seen far more of that great family, which became the Commonwealth of nations, than any British politician – or, come to that, simply more than anyone else. Like Queen Victoria, who scandalized her snobbish and racist court by befriending Abdul Karim, Queen Elizabeth II was ‘colour blind’, though not blind to the political implications of racial tension in the world. In 1961 Harold Macmillan, the Prime Minister, had told her it was too dangerous to visit Ghana and its neo-Marxist dictator Kwame Nkrumah. Macmillan wrote in his diary, ‘The Queen has been absolutely determined all through. She has great faith in the work she can do in the Commonwealth.’89 Her visit to Ghana was a triumphant success. She scandalized Apartheid South Africa and the racist British press by dancing with Nkrumah.90 Ghana remained part of the Commonwealth of nations. Few nowadays would commend Nkrumah, either as a man or as a politician. The Queen, however, was a bridge-builder in a way that the politicians and the journalists were not.

  Likewise, in relation to South Africa nearly thirty years later. Thatcher’s Government tried to stop Lancaster University giving Nelson Mandela an honorary degree while he was still in prison. Thatcher continued to defy Commonwealth opinion and to oppose sanctions to South Africa. Many in her party openly supported apartheid. Thatcher denounced Mandela as a terrorist. It was the Queen who kept faith with her friends in the Commonwealth. It was the Queen who did what seemed the decent thing at the time and, in retrospect, seems the absolutely correct thing politically: namely to see Mandela as a hero and a friend. When he returned her state visit and came to Britain in July 1996, he danced with her, and she bestowed upon him the Order of Merit, the highest honour in the sovereign’s personal gift.

  The Thatcher years left the British so shell-shocked that some of the electorate were credulous enough to vote in Tony Blair as a plausible alternative. Blair’s attempt to use the Queen in his vulgar games of self-promotion were so transparent that they rebounded upon him. Low points included the New Year celebrations at the Millennium Dome in 1999, when he held hands with Her Majesty and tried to make her sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ – her lips remained tightly closed – or when he tried to milk the death of Princess Diana by rushing to the microphones on behalf of the nation and calling her ‘the People’s Princess’.

  Blair’s desire to make political capital out of the monarchy was also on monstrous display after the death of the Queen Mother on 30 March 2002. The official known as Black Rod, who was in charge of the ceremonial at Westminster, politely told the Prime Minister’s office that no particular ‘role’ for the Prime Minister was planned during the lying-in-state or the funeral of this much-loved royal person. Black Rod – Lieutenant-General Sir Michael Willcocks – recalled, ‘Throughout the next five days, my staff and myself were telephoned, at times it seemed constantly, by staff at Number 10 repeating these questions on the role of the PM, but also exerting rather more pressure along the lines of: “Don’t you think the PM ought to be at the north door?” [of Westminster Hall where the coffin lay]… “He must have more of a role surely”.’91

  Meanwhile, Blair’s wife Cherie Booth QC self-importantly refused ever to curtsey to the Queen, not seeming to realize that these little rituals do not signify hero-worship of a person, but rather respect for an office and a tradition. The bad manners involved, comparable to refusal to remove one’s shoes before entering a mosque, suggest a complete failure to understand why these rituals and conventions arose in the first place. Had Cherie Booth QC been lucky enough to be taken to a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan by Harold Wilson, she might have behaved less boorishly.

  It would be churlish not to recognize that both Thatcher and Blair had their followers. At Thatcher’s funeral, the crowds stretched all the way from St Paul’s Cathedral, down Ludgate Hill and the Strand, way beyond St Clement Dane’s. The BBC, which hated Thatcher, did not report this fact, but it was a palpable demonstration of her popularity. The crowds near St Clement Danes were largely Eastern Europeans who clapped her as her coffin was lifted from a motor-hearse on to a gun carriage. The crowds nearer Ludgate Circus included, I should guess, many British people who had become home-owners for the first time as a result of being able to buy their own council house or flat. Probably there were not so many attending who were now unable to obtain a council flat because so many had been sold off during the Thatcher years.

  We do not know yet how many will attend Tony Blair’s funeral. The British experience of having the Thatcher years followed by the Blair years actually had a profound effect on the British people’s relationship with the monarchy.

  In the Queen’s Golden Jubilee year – 2002 – in which she lost both her mother and her sister, she visited seventy British towns and cities. ‘Gratitude, respect and pride, these words sum up how I feel about the people of this Country and the Commonwealth – and what this Golden Jubilee means to me.’92 That was what she said in the Guildhall, having been conveyed there in a gold state coach. The people reciprocated, with apparently over 200 million watching the Jubilee celebrations on television worldwide. In Britain the gratitude was positive – gratitude to a woman who had been so faithful to her calling for fifty years. It was also, in part, negative. A high proportion were grateful that she was neither President Thatcher nor President Blair.

  7

  DOES THE MONARCHY

  HAVE A FUTURE?

  Chris Mullin MP, showing Prince Philip the

  ultra-modernist design of the new GCHQ building in

  Cheltenham: Would Charles approve?

  Prince Philip: Charles who? 93

  Larkin’s lines on the Queen’s Jubilee were perhaps less famous than his poem ‘Annus Mirabilis’, which dated the change in sexual mores to 1963:

  Between the end of the Chatterley ban

  And the Beatles’ first LP.

  Larkin was a passionate monarchist, but he also envied the emotional and erotic freedoms of the young. For the monarchist, there is a paradox here. In the merry old days of yore, when we of the middle and lower classes were expected to disguise our sexual feelings behind a carapace of conventions, it was, supposedly, the upper classes, and royal personages, who could get away with behaving as libertines. Even a cursory reading about the life of Louis XIV’s court at Versailles, as described in the pages of the Duc de Saint-Simon, would make you think that Britain in the Swinging Sixties was comparatively strait-laced. Likewise, if you read Roger Fulford’s Royal Dukes (1933) about the sons of George III, you would think that no modern royal scandal could match the way in which the self-indulgent and, on the whole, rather nasty uncles of Queen Victoria chose to behave.

  Today, the boot is on the other foot. We’ve all changed, and it is the Royal Family who are supposed to keep the suburban virtues of the 1950s vintage. Newspapers express mock amazement if they do not. A Prince in a nightclub, half tight and dancing with a good-time girl? Perfectly normal for Edward VII or Edward VIII but apparently shocking for Prince Harry. The phrase ‘living in sin’, to describe a man and a woman who shared a house without being married, was commonplace in the 1950s. Now, almost all young people consider it not merely natural, but proper not to marry the first person to whom they feel attracted. Sin does not come into it. When the Queen came to the throne, consenting gay men would be sent to prison, and the law only changed gradually, during the Labour Governments of Harold Wilson, under the benign Home Secretaryship of Roy Jenkins. It is all so recent, and yet, for anyone under the age of forty, it must seem all but unimaginable. Now, it is the fortunate who find that they are still happily married to the same partner throughout their lives; and when a marriage breaks down, or fizzles out, or whatever the appropriate metaphor might be, the ethos of the age would suggest that it was more seemly to bring such an unhappy union to an end in as ‘civilized’ a
manner as possible, than to struggle on in what John Milton, that seventeenth-century advocate of divorce, called ‘a drooping and disconsolate household captivity’.

  The sexual revolution placed the Royal Family in a very difficult position, not least because it coincided with a growth in the power of the British press, the collapse of the culture of deference, and the disappearance, really, of any conventions by which figures in public life might be protected from intrusion by the cameras or pens of journalists. Whereas the Queen’s generation, and that of her parents, were bound by strict marital conventions, they were also protected by strict press conventions. ‘Everybody knew’ about the behaviour of, let us say, the Queen’s uncles, the Duke of Kent, or Lord Mountbatten, whose marriages were far from being models of middle-class rectitude. Equally, though Everybody knew, Nobody would have printed the stories in the newspapers; it would have been quite unthinkable. Throughout 1936, when le tout Londres spoke of Edward and Mrs Simpson, the newspapers said nothing. Those with an eye for social change would have seen that Private Eye, in the early 1960s, changed the atmosphere forever. Its repeated hints, for example, about Lord Mountbatten’s bisexuality were regarded as the worst of bad taste. They also changed the way the public expected to read royal news. While the conventional press continued to lard the Royal Family with flattery, the Eye – and the TV satirists of That Was The Week That Was – made them objects of derision; and, as such, fair game – that cruel, monosyllabic phrase which usually denotes its opposite. Merely being born royal now made the press feel entitled to spy upon them, and report all the matters which, in a normal human life, are kept hidden.

  The Queen’s children were to grow up into an unfair world, where all their emotional mistakes were regarded as fair game by the Fourth Estate. The great public came to terms with the revolution in sexual ethics, except in relation to the Royal Family. The public – most of them, it would seem, anyway – wanted a relaxation of the old morality. They wanted to be free to fall in and out of love, to have more than one partner in the course of their lives, and to demand the freedom before the law to behave as they liked, provided that ‘they’ were mutually consenting adults. Here, the public – or at any rate, the scandalous newspapers which they eagerly purchased in huge numbers – wanted things both ways. Their own private lives could remain as private as they chose, and could be as emotionally chaotic as they chose. Perhaps partly for this reason, they wanted the royal marriages to be ‘fairy tales’, just as some roués tearfully devote themselves to the Blessed Virgin. When the reality of royal ‘fairy tales’ became apparent, the press responded with a prurient severity which they would not have visited upon pop singers or film stars.

  ‘We had the good fortune to grow up in happy united families,’ the Queen said in a speech at the Guildhall to mark her silver wedding in 1972. ‘We have been fortunate in our children, and above all we are fortunate in being able to serve this great country and Commonwealth.’94 As far as her husband was concerned, this was a piece of pious fiction – he had not grown up in a happy family. Indeed, if you wrote down a short biography of Prince Philip on a piece of paper without mentioning that he was royal – ‘born on a kitchen table of impoverished refugee parents; mother certifiably insane; father deserted the marital home; child the youngest of a rum brood, one of whose sisters married a keen and practising Nazi; brought up in a Scottish boarding school by punishment freaks, and only occasionally seen by unsympathetic grandparents’ – you would think that he should, rather than being sent to Gordonstoun, have been taken into care. Perhaps, in a sense, that was what his marriage was? Perhaps for all his strutting claims as a young man that he found the burden of being second fiddle to his wife hard to bear, and the abandonment of his naval career a sad deprivation, he actually needed the disciplined and restricted life which being the Duke of Edinburgh imposed upon him?

  Lilibet’s childhood had, by contrast with her husband’s, evidently been happy, and her father’s letter to her upon her marriage to Prince Philip would be regarded as touching even by the most steely hearted: ‘Our family, us four, the “Royal Family” must remain together.’95

  The stability of ‘us four’ enabled the Royal Family to put behind them the nightmare of the Abdication. Was there a little hubris in the Queen’s repetition of ‘we are fortunate’, in that speech of 1972? The innocent domestic simplicity which was exemplified and enjoyed by her father and mother could not realistically be reproduced in the marriages of her sister or of her children. In 1976 Princess Margaret and her husband Lord Snowdon were separated after sixteen years of marriage. On 24 May 1978 the Princess was granted a decree nisi by the Law Courts in London, and became the first member of the British Royal Family to obtain a divorce since George I dissolved his marriage to Princess Sophia of Celle. (The newspapers wrongly said it was the first royal divorce since the reign of Henry VIII; they also overlooked George IV’s very public, if unsuccessful, attempt to divorce Caroline of Brunswick.) Until the end of Princess Margaret’s marriage, it had been possible to maintain the old conventions: those who married the divorced, as Edward VIII so fatefully had done, could not expect to be presented at the twentieth-century court, or even to be admitted to the Royal Enclosure at Ascot. Now came the woeful roll-call of the Queen’s children and their marital misfortunes: Princess Anne, married 1973, divorced 1992; Prince Andrew, married 1986, divorced 1996; Prince Charles, married 1981, and also divorced 1996. (His wife Diana was killed in the Paris motor smash the following year.) Statistically, the Royal Family scores highly – anyway by British standards – in its divorce rate; it is easily on a level with Beverley Hills, perhaps in part for similar reasons – only a certain type of person would wish to marry either a famous film star or a member of a royal family, and one of the qualifications would, normally, be stupidity. For who would choose – actually choose – to abandon privacy?

  Each of those failed marriages – Margaret, Anne, Andrew and Charles – were played out in circumstances which any normal, private person would have found intolerable. It is truly remarkable, the embarrassing personal details about all of them which were fed into the public consciousness. Any one of these stories, if told about ourselves or our children to a wider public, would be enough to induce nervous collapse in a normal family. For the Queen’s sister and her children – who were not necessarily the cleverest or strongest people in the world – it became part of the everyday fabric of experience that the public should know not merely the bare fact that their marriages had failed, but quite prodigious amounts of detail, about their verbal quarrels, their love affairs, their foibles.

  Very occasionally, as when Princess Margaret appeared in her last illness, being pushed in a wheelchair with a swollen face and dark glasses, or, most extreme of all, when Diana was killed in Paris, the blood-lust of the press would be shamed into a shocked silence… For a day or two. On the whole, however, the lust remained insatiable, with long-ranged photographic lenses and phone hacking making it possible for the press to intrude to an extent which would have been impossible in an earlier age – even if ‘deference’ had not made such intrusions unthinkable. With the coming of the Internet, the days of print journalism appeared to be threatened, if not altogether numbered, and like a wild beast snarling with ever greater ferocity in its dying gasps, it seemed not to care how cruelly it behaved. Phone hacking was only the part of it.

  The existence of such journalistic tricks, combined with a perceived ‘right to know’ the financial secrets of famous figures, has had a devastating effect on the political and public life of the Western world. In the past, a clever or gifted person could aspire to a position in public life without feeling that they, and their children, would lose all privacy. He or she who chooses to become a politician in today’s Western world, with ‘freedom of information’ and a journalistic ‘open season’ on what was once ‘private life’, is either unusually blameless or so ambitious as to be brazen. Clearly, it has led to the withdrawal of very many men and women
of talent from the public stage, who would prefer to work as financiers, lawyers, writers and business-people than to put themselves and their families through the hell of perpetual exposure.

  The hereditary monarch and her family do not have this luxury. When they behave oddly, which they quite often seem to do, it is worth remembering that they are now living lives which most of us would be unable to endure. The Queen has been largely protected from the full glare of journalistic publicity, the only aspect of her private affairs to which attention is drawn from time to time, being the all but impenetrable area of her personal finances. Because the Queen is spared, the Duke of Edinburgh is spared. Although they may think that they suffer an intrusive press, what they have suffered has been nothing compared with the scrutiny which has been directed, in season and out of season, at their four children and their spouses, and their grandchildren.

  This fact is so overwhelming that it overshadows any consideration of whether the Queen and Prince Philip have prepared the next generation to be monarchs for the future.

  Most people are agreed that the Queen has performed her tasks well throughout her reign, and – with the inevitable provisos about the ‘gaffes’ – everyone agrees that Prince Philip has been a loyal and dutiful consort, though never the Prince Consort in name. The Queen’s task, however, is not merely to be a constitutional monarch, but to prepare that institution for the future.

  If monarchs had a statutory retirement age at, say, seventy, which no law could alter, they would perhaps have a different relationship with their heirs. As it is, any reigning monarch, looking at the heir apparent, will think, ‘You are waiting for me to die. Until I do so, you have no function, other than functions which you have dreamed up for yourself.’