The prime minister—nicknamed “Sunny Jim”—was an avuncular presence in his weekly meetings with the Queen, who was fourteen years his junior. The son of a chief petty officer in the Royal Navy and a schoolteacher, he had entered the civil service as a tax collector when he was unable to afford a university education. An unabashed monarchist, he enjoyed his meetings with the Queen, relieved to be in a setting where “conversation flowed easily and could roam anywhere over a wide range of social as well as political and international topics.” After spending fifteen minutes or so on three prearranged agenda items, their talk over the next hour might touch on their families or perhaps the price of hay in Sussex, where he had a farm, compared to Norfolk or Scotland. Callaghan learned to respond adroitly to the Queen’s fascination with political personalities, and he came to admire her oblique way of getting across her points: how she “weighs up” the problems of her prime minister, hinting at her thoughts in a “pretty detached” manner, and avoiding direct advice.
At six foot one, he was the tallest of the Queen’s prime ministers, handsome, easygoing, ready with compliments and even mildly flirtatious. One week she memorably took him for a stroll in the Buckingham Palace gardens and coquettishly placed a sprig of lily of the valley in his buttonhole. Callaghan correctly summarized her evenhanded approach to all her prime ministers, with the exception of Winston Churchill, who was sui generis. “What one gets,” Callaghan said, “is friendliness but not friendship.”
For “poor old Jim Callaghan,” as the Queen Mother referred to him, the Tuesday evening interludes offered a brief moment of tranquillity amid political strife. Despite the compelling need for austerity, the unions plunged ahead in 1978 with demands for fat wage increases, which meant higher government spending to placate public employees. Throughout what became known as the “Winter of Discontent”—one of the coldest on record—the country was crippled by a series of strikes by truck drivers, hospital orderlies, trash collectors, ambulance drivers, school janitors, and gravediggers. Piles of refuse filled the streets, a symbol of a nation that had lost its way.
On March 28, 1979, the Conservatives in the House of Commons introduced a vote of no confidence in the government, which is required under the constitution to have the support of a majority of the legislature. The Labour government lost the confidence motion by one vote (thanks mainly to the Liberal Party’s backing of the Tory initiative), and a general election was called for May 3. The Conservative Party, led by fifty-three-year-old Margaret Thatcher, swept to power, winning 339 seats to 268 for Labour and 11 for Liberals. Thatcher’s arrival at Buckingham Palace the next day to kiss hands as the first female prime minister was a historic moment for the ambitious young politician who had written twenty-seven years earlier that the accession of Elizabeth II could help remove “the last shreds of prejudice against women aspiring to the highest places.” When thoroughbred trainer Ian Balding called the Queen shortly afterward, she said, “What do you think about Margaret Thatcher getting in?” “Ma’am,” he replied, “I’m not sure I can get my head around a woman running the country.” The Queen fell silent. “You know what I mean?” he said. This time she laughed, and said nothing in reply.
The two women were only six months apart in age. Impeccably dressed and meticulously coiffed, they were equally professional and hardworking, but they differed markedly in background and temperament. Margaret Roberts was the daughter of a successful grocer in Grantham, Linconshire, who lived above the store. She earned her Oxford degree in chemistry on a scholarship, married Denis Thatcher, a prosperous divorced businessman, and worked as a lawyer before being elected to Parliament in 1959.
She oversaw housing and education policy for the various Conservative prime ministers, and in 1975 the party elected her as its leader, deposing Edward Heath. She was determined to reverse the country’s economic decline by loosening the grip of organized labor, dramatically cutting public spending, reducing the dependence of citizens on their government, deregulating business to promote growth, and, along the way, raising Britain’s stature on the world stage.
Thatcher was fearless and nimble in debate, and passionate about her principles of bedrock conservatism shaped by such intellectuals as Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek. The conservative historian Paul Johnson admiringly called her “the eternal scholarship girl. She loved learning, swotting things up, being tested, passing with honours.” Her zest for combat was antithetical to the Queen’s nonconfrontational nature. Nor could the Queen share with her prime minister something like the irony of her conversation with Ian Balding, because Thatcher’s sense of humor was barely discernible. For the next eleven years, there would be none of the lively banter that Elizabeth II enjoyed with James Callaghan, whatever she might have thought of his policies. Conversations would no longer be divided equally, since Thatcher had a habit of lecturing. “The Queen found that irritating,” said a top army general close to Elizabeth II.
Their audiences were formal and businesslike. “The agenda included major topical events,” said Charles Powell, who was the prime minister’s senior foreign policy adviser. “It was not a trivial agenda. Lady Thatcher wouldn’t prepare. She would be fully up to speed anyway. She would want to know what the Queen would want to talk about, and what she might say to the Queen, who was working on the same information base. Lady Thatcher didn’t need anything to impose discipline, because she was disciplined enough.”
Afterward, the prime minister would join the Queen’s private secretaries for a whisky. “She chatted with us,” said a former courtier. “She was quite relaxed, which was rare for her. I think the audience was something like a tranquilizer.” On returning to Downing Street, Thatcher might carry a request from the Queen, usually something to do with an army regiment. “She seemed to come back in a cheerful frame of mind,” recalled Charles Powell. “She genuinely enjoyed the meetings. Her demeanor on returning did not say, ‘Oh God, what a waste of time that was.’ In fact it was the opposite.”
After giving birth in 1953 to twins, Thatcher, like the Queen, had been an exception in her generation as a working mother, and had likewise relied on nannies for her children’s upbringing. Both women had trouble discussing their feelings, which prevented them from venturing into personal topics that might have formed a bond—the push and pull of combining professional life and motherhood, and the challenges of having a husband in a subordinate position. One exception was the time the Queen ended an audience by offering wardrobe tips before the prime minister visited Saudi Arabia. Otherwise, the two women avoided any hint of “girl talk.” “Mrs. Thatcher would have thought it impudent to have tried to establish a close relationship and would have expected the Queen to make the first move,” said a former government adviser. Although no such move was forthcoming, the Queen treated her prime minister with courtesy and thoughtfulness. Whenever the Thatchers came to Windsor for a dine-and-sleep, Elizabeth II took care to choose items for the library exhibit with particular meaning: one year a selection of antique fans, another time a manuscript written by Mozart when he was ten years old.
Queen and prime minister thrived in a masculine world, but in different ways. Elizabeth II “was reserved but she could give you not quite a come-hither look, but one which was so friendly as to be encouraging,” said her long-serving courtier Edward Ford. “She made us feel like men.” Thatcher, who had just one woman in her cabinet, asserted her position with an intimidating firmness—earning the nickname “the Iron Lady”—that the Queen would have considered unnecessary if not unseemly for herself. Spitting Image, the satirical television show featuring large puppets that caricatured politicians, the royal family, and a slew of celebrities, famously presented a skit in 1984 showing the prime minister and her cabinet sharing a meal. “Would you like to order, sir?” the waitress asked Thatcher (dressed in a man’s suit and tie, holding a cigar in her left hand). “Yes, I will have a steak,” she replied. Waitress: “How’d you like it?” Thatcher: “Oh, raw please.” Waitr
ess: “And what about the vegetables?” Thatcher: “Oh, they’ll have the same as me.”
Princess Michael of Kent, the wife of one of the Queen’s cousins, came up with a surprisingly apt description of the division of labor between Britain’s two female leaders, each of whom had a powerful aura: “The Queen is the mother of the country,” she explained to her children. “She sends you to school.” Margaret Thatcher was “the headmistress who makes the rules you have to obey.”
Yet the prime minister was scrupulously deferential to her sovereign. “No one could curtsy lower than Margaret Thatcher,” said Charles Powell. “If I did it you would need a crane to pull me up. She came from a very patriotic lower middle class family who had huge respect for the royal family and the Queen, so as a result she would have been slightly formal.” Thatcher once said that if she were a visitor from Mars required to create a constitutional system, “I would set up … a hereditary monarchy, wonderfully trained, in duty and in leadership, which understands example, which is always there, which is above politics, for which the whole nation has an affection and which is a symbol of patriotism.”
One obligation the prime minister regarded as burdensome was the annual autumn pilgrimage to Balmoral, which she did “out of loyalty,” said Charles Powell. She invariably arrived in a tweed suit and heels, utterly ill-equipped for country life. “Does the prime minister like to walk in the hills?” asked one frequent guest. “The hills?” replied the Queen. “The hills? She walks on the road!” Elizabeth II also knew that Thatcher never accepted the custom of withdrawing with the other women after dinner. “The Queen finessed it by always inviting the Thatchers to a barbeque, which was more informal than a dinner in the castle, so didn’t follow the convention of having the ladies withdraw,” explained a fellow guest. An equerry was assigned to play golf with Denis Thatcher, and the Queen routinely took the prime minister for tea at Birkhall, since the Queen Mother was an enthusiastic admirer of Thatcher. On the final day, the prime minister and her husband usually left at dawn.
Only three months after taking office, Margaret Thatcher encountered a surprisingly assertive Queen in her role as head of the Commonwealth. The cause was the outcast white minority government in Rhodesia led by Ian Smith that had been worn down by persistent attacks by black guerrillas. In late July and early August 1979, the Commonwealth leaders were set to meet in Lusaka, the capital of neighboring Zambia, to endorse a proposed conference in London between Smith and all factions including black guerrilla leaders Robert Mugabe (an avowed Marxist) and Joshua Nkomo to end the Rhodesian conflict and prepare for free and fair elections. The British prime minister regarded the guerrilla leaders as terrorists and favored a power-sharing agreement that Smith had already negotiated with a more moderate black party.
Because the guerrilla forces were operating out of bases in Zambia, Thatcher tried to prevent the Queen from attending the Commonwealth meeting on the grounds that she might be at risk. But Elizabeth II well remembered being banned by Heath from the Singapore meeting eight years earlier, and she insisted on traveling to Africa. Before arriving in Lusaka, the Queen set aside nine days for state visits to Tanzania, Malawi, Botswana, and Zambia. What she heard made her increasingly concerned that a number of African countries could leave the Commonwealth unless the black majority took charge of governing Rhodesia. During the Malawi state banquet she was so engrossed by Dr. Hastings Banda, the country’s “President for Life,” that she let her manners slip and kept her elbows on the table as they talked at length. Little wonder, since Banda was one of Africa’s most idiosyncratic leaders—a repressive dictator educated in the United States and Scotland who had practiced medicine in the United Kingdom, where he took to wearing Homburg hats and three-piece suits.
Elizabeth II arrived in Lusaka on July 27, 1979, two days before Thatcher, for meetings with Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda in which she urged him to subdue the anti-British rhetoric in the local press. During the four-day Commonwealth conference she followed her customary routine as the organization’s symbolic head by hosting a reception and banquet for all forty-two leaders. That evening she uncharacteristically stayed until nearly midnight, “quartering the room and talking to the various heads of governments,” recalled Chief Emeka Anyaoku of Nigeria. “I am convinced that the intervention spurred the organization—which was on the point of possibly splitting up—on to compromise.”
Her informal role continued behind the scenes, when she received each leader in a private audience for fifteen to twenty minutes in her bungalow. In those sessions, particularly with the Africans, she conveyed sympathy for their position without explicitly stating her own, and they came away impressed by her knowledge of their problems. By bringing down the temperature, the Queen made it easier for Thatcher to move toward the Commonwealth position, which others, notably her own foreign secretary, Peter Carrington, and Australian prime minister Malcolm Fraser, had openly urged her to do. The African leaders yielded as well, agreeing to consider a formula for some white representation in Rhodesia’s new parliament.
No one could pinpoint what exactly the Queen had done beyond playing what Carrington called “an enormous role in calming everything down.” By the end of the meetings, Thatcher signed the Lusaka Accord calling for a constitutional conference at London’s Lancaster House in September. The Queen “talked to Mrs. Thatcher and to Kaunda,” said Sonny Ramphal of Guyana, the Commonwealth’s secretary-general at the time. “The fact that she was there made it happen.”
Britain’s prime minister enthusiastically embraced the peace process, which led to an agreement on December 21 calling for a cease-fire, free elections, and Rhodesia’s independence in April 1980 as the Republic of Zimbabwe, the forty-third member of the Commonwealth, with Robert Mugabe as prime minister. Only in time did Thatcher’s initial misgivings about Mugabe prove prescient, as he set himself up as an egregiously corrupt dictator, brutally crushed his political rivals, drove the white farmers from their land, and destroyed what had been Africa’s most vibrant agricultural economy. In 2002 the Commonwealth suspended Zimbabwe’s membership, and Mugabe permanently withdrew the following year.
SHORTLY AFTER RETURNING to England from Africa on August 4, 1979, the Queen headed to Balmoral for her annual holiday. Whenever she and Philip are having lunch together in the castle, courtiers are forbidden from disturbing them except in an emergency. So at midday on Thursday, August 27, when Robert Fellowes, her assistant private secretary, entered the dining room, Elizabeth II knew he bore bad news. That morning, during a holiday at the Mountbatten vacation home at Sligo in the Republic of Ireland, a twenty-seven-foot fishing boat carrying six members of their family and a local boy had been blown up by an IRA bomb. Philip’s uncle and the Queen’s cousin, seventy-nine-year-old Dickie Mountbatten; John Brabourne’s eighty-three-year-old mother, Doreen; Nicholas Knatchbull, one of the Brabournes’ fourteen-year-old twin sons; and Paul Maxwell, the fifteen-year-old Irish boy, had been killed. Patricia and John Brabourne and their surviving son, Timothy, were critically injured.
The Queen and her family were grief-stricken. Prince Charles considered Mountbatten “his closest confidant and the greatest single influence.” Writing in his diary, Charles described his great-uncle as “someone who showed enormous affection, who told me unpleasant things I didn’t particularly want to hear, who gave praise where it was due as well as criticism.… Life will never be the same now that he has gone.”
The Queen called the hospital and had a long conversation with family members, but only Philip wrote a condolence letter. As a Red Cross doctor explained to Patricia Brabourne, “That kind of private person has strong feelings but doesn’t want to convey them. She would feel what she might say would be totally inadequate, so why try.” By contrast when her sister Pamela Hicks once wrote a note about the death of one of the royal corgis, the Queen replied with a six-page letter. “A dog isn’t important,” Hicks figured, “so she can express the really deep feelings she can’t get out otherw
ise.”
The royal family traveled to London for a full ceremonial funeral at Westminster Abbey on September 5, with massed military bands and 122 naval ratings pulling the gun carriage holding Mountbattten’s coffin. The earl had planned every detail of his commemorative ceremony, and there had been numerous rehearsals in the previous week. When the family boarded the train to Romsey for the burial, the Queen said to her cousin Pamela, “Please sit with me and tell me everything that happened.” “She hardly made any remark,” Pamela Hicks recalled. “But she absolutely listened to every word.” After the interment, the family gathered at Broadlands. In the absence of her parents, who were still hospitalized, Joanna Knatchbull, the eldest of the Brabournes’ daughters, served as hostess, waiting at the front door. Elizabeth II stepped out of the car, her eyes reddened from crying. “Ma’am, would you like to go upstairs?” Joanna inquired. “Yes I think I would,” replied the Queen.
A month later, Elizabeth II made her most meaningful gesture when she invited fourteen-year-old Timothy Knatchbull to stay at Balmoral after his release from the hospital. He arrived at the castle late at night with his older sister Amanda, when he spotted the Queen “striding down the corridor” like “a mother duck gathering in lost young.” She greeted Timothy and his sister with kisses, served them soup and sandwiches, took them to their rooms, and started to unpack until Amanda persuaded her that she should go to bed. “She was in almost unstoppable mothering mode,” Timothy recalled.
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