At 8.35, the Camerons emerge from the King’s Door. The Queen’s tally of British prime ministers has now reached a dozen. The next tenant of Number Ten Downing Street escorts his pregnant wife to the right-hand door of the car and shuts it before walking round to the other side. He waves at the broadcasters on the way out. Within minutes, they are handed another piece of paper announcing: ‘The Queen received the Right Honourable David Cameron this evening and requested him to form a new administration. The Right Honourable David Cameron accepted Her Majesty’s offer and kissed hands upon his appointment as Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury.’
It’s not exactly a surprise but it ends the uncertainties of previous days. As the reporters broadcast these words to the nation, they don’t see another car quietly pulling away from the Palace’s Garden Door. The Queen has kept the Gentlemen Ushers waiting quite long enough at the Turf Club. It’s time for dinner.
The Queen’s actual discussions with her prime ministers have remained locked in the vaults of their collective memories to an astonishing degree. But we have had many indications of the tone and atmosphere. The late Lord (James) Callaghan summed it up neatly when he said: ‘What one gets is friendliness but not friendship. She’s very interested in the political side – who’s going up and who’s going down. But not so passionate about the MLR[minimum lending rate].’
Like most prime ministers before him, David Cameron genuinely looks forward to his Wednesday trips to the Palace: ‘The audiences are very friendly, enjoyable occasions because it’s just the two of you so you can say what you like and she can ask what she likes. As well as talking through what the government’s up to, there is quite a lot of businesslike stuff – my travel, her travel, state visits and so on.’
Both the Prime Minister and the Queen like to roam well beyond affairs of state. When Cherie Blair was pregnant with Leo, one of the first people whom Tony Blair informed was the Queen.
Sir John Major found the Palace far more comfortable on the inside than it is perceived to be from the outside. ‘What seemed remote from afar became warm and very human at close quarters,’ he says. And he never felt any need to tiptoe round any subjects. ‘Nobody else is present, except the occasional corgi. That trust is absolute. I never held back on anything I wished to say to the Queen and I believe that the reverse is equally true.’ The audience, he believes, is a vital element of sound government. ‘The Queen sees state papers but she doesn’t know what is not yet committed to paper. She doesn’t know what is in the mind of the Prime Minister. Without the weekly audience, that crucial line of communication would be broken.’
Those working close to the Queen all testify that she genuinely enjoys the daily business of politics. As one puts it: ‘It’s what she’s for.’ She is genuinely interested in the human dynamics of it all. It was the personal dimension, as much as the political, which intrigued her about the formation of her first Coalition Government. ‘She asked a lot about it,’ says David Cameron. ‘She asked how we were all getting on.’
Prince William, who has already met many of the Queen’s various prime ministers around the world, has no doubt that these audiences are appreciated equally by both parties. ‘If you think how many meetings she’s had with different prime ministers at different times it’s incredible,’ he says. ‘Some of them must wish she would turn round and tell them what to do! But she always speaks very highly of having these meetings.’
During the British parliamentary year, the audiences are weekly (officially, the Prime Minister has ‘an audience of the Queen’, not the other way round). And every summer, the Prime Minister is invited to stay at Balmoral, attend the Braemar Highland Games (optional) and enjoy a Royal Family barbecue cooked by Prince Philip (not optional). It can be a strange experience. Tony Blair has written that his first Balmoral weekend was ‘a vivid combination of the intriguing, the surreal and the utterly freaky’ fortified by ‘rocket fuel’ cocktails and a breakfast, lunch and dinner ‘out of Trollope or Walter Scott’. No wonder, he observed, the Royal Family eat sparingly.*
Blair’s first visit was, understandably fraught, given the recent death of Diana, Princess of Wales.
Sir John Major has fond memories of walks down to the Balmoral cricket ground and of trips to tea at Birkhall. ‘The Queen usually drove me there and we would have tea and cakes with the Queen Mother and I would admire her collection of Spy cartoons and look with awe at the stack of Dad’s Army videos.’ Later on, there might be a black-tie dinner or, more often than not, that barbecue cooked by Prince Philip and another member of the Royal Family. ‘At the end of those very informal – and hugely enjoyable – evenings, the Queen and other members of the family would wash up and any guests who offered to do so would be politely repulsed,’ says Major. But, in among all the pleasantries, there would also be a lengthy one-on-one audience, too. ‘Nobody’s around in August, so there’s always a lot to catch up on in September.’
The Queen’s political antennae extend far beyond her audiences and what she gleans from the media (newspapers and radio in the morning, television news at night). Every morning at eleven o’clock, she telephones her senior Private Secretary and asks an entirely redundant question: ‘Are you free to come upstairs?’ No Private Secretary in history, as far as anyone knows, has replied: ‘Sorry, but I’m a bit tied up.’ They will run through any events touching on the monarchy – casualties in Afghanistan, a Cabinet reshuffle in New Zealand, thoughts for the Christmas broadcast – and the Queen’s diary. After half an hour, she will call down to ask her Deputy or Assistant Private Secretary if they might be ‘free’ and one of them will bring up the paperwork, including documents for signature. There are usually around a dozen and, depending on the document, she will write either ‘Approved ER’ or ‘Elizabeth R’ (the royal signature is known as the Sign Manual). It might be army regulations, royal warrants, Letters of Credence for ambassadors or a parliamentary Bill. It’s more than a regal production line. The Queen will not read every clause but she will know exactly what she is signing. When this sort of stuff is coming across your desk day after day, you have a feel for the pace and nature of what is happening across your kingdom.
Every few weeks, she receives her Vice-Chamberlain, the government whip who is the House of Commons go-between with the Palace. He or she will turn up carrying the wand of office, a black staff which unscrews in the middle, and then relay various messages between MPs and the Monarch. These might involve the Queen’s Speech or a House of Commons resolution to wish her a happy birthday. The Vice-Chamberlain must also write that daily ‘message’, the personal summary of what is happening in Parliament.
As we have learned, these may sometimes be light-hearted but they are also a reflection of genuine backbench feeling. The Queen doesn’t want a constant diet of glowing reports about government triumphs. The message may be a closely typed side of A4 paper but it will be read and digested, along with a selection of state papers and anything else she finds in her Red Box. Every night at seven o’clock one of these battered briefcases – leather on the outside, metal within – will be sent from the Private Secretary’s Office.
By eight the following morning, it will have been returned, with anything which has caught the Queen’s eye underlined in red pencil. Inside is material for signature, material she is obliged to see (not least the top copy of the latest Cabinet minutes) and material she will be interested to see (a sheaf of Foreign Office telegrams, perhaps). On weekday evenings, the box is a smaller model known as a ‘Reader’. It can be piled high, unless there is an evening engagement or a state banquet in prospect, in which case the contents may be reduced. But private secretaries are told that the Queen prefers to be given a little too much than run the risk of overlooking something important. At weekends, it’s a larger model called a ‘Standard’. Inside will be a broader selection of reading material plus weekly summaries from the Queen’s fifteen other realms around the world. Some of the Canadian briefings will be in French (no tra
nslation is required; the Queen is fluent in French). But it will all have been processed and returned by Monday morning. Even when the Queen would rather not read something, she gets on with it regardless. ‘A lot of material goes into her boxes, huge amounts of stuff about appointments that have to be in her name,’ says former Deputy Private Secretary Mary Francis. ‘It all goes in but not an awful lot comes back to you. She reads the Foreign Office telegrams and puts a tick on them, she reads the Cabinet minutes and puts a tick on them. You don’t very often get a question or a comment. But you know it’s all sinking in and almost certainly some of it gets played back when she meets the Prime Minister at her weekly meeting or has her audiences with new ambassadors.’
The Queen does not cut corners. If it’s in her Red Box, it’s there for a reason. ‘She is very assiduous and careful about reading things and when you discussed things with her, she had read them very carefully,’ says Francis. ‘And she was on top of them – not in an academic, intellectual way but she had certainly understood them and spotted the main messages and the main issues.’
But why on earth is she expected to do all this? No one doubts the Queen’s devotion to duty, so she will read whatever she is given. But is it really necessary for her to wade through the minutiae of appointments or legislation that she cannot amend? Why must she read obscure diplomatic dispatches or be presented with technical issues which are gibberish to all bar experts in the field? Some have suggested that she sometimes uses the Red Boxes as a diversionary tactic, an excuse to lock herself away. Mary Francis thinks it goes to the heart of what constitutional monarchy is all about. ‘I often wondered what the point was, to be perfectly frank. But she is a constitutional monarch and there are points at which she has to engage – whether it’s meeting the Prime Minister or other Ministers or making appointments. And it would be strange if the person who was doing those things was being kept ignorant of the workings of government and what was happening generally.’ In other words, it might be a document of stultifying inanity or head-throbbing complexity. But if it passed through the political system without passing beneath the gaze of the Monarch, then she would quite simply feel that she had failed in her duty.
Besides going through new legislation – and turning it into law with a stroke of a pen – there is another political duty at the dustier end of the regal spectrum which the Queen is said to enjoy greatly. The Privy Council is the oldest legislative assembly in Britain and once served as the Monarch’s Cabinet. Today, its work is no longer secret and it remains a means of pushing through a lot of low-level government business without involving Parliament. It can be both a wonderful and tedious hotch-potch of stuff – authorising new laws in the Channel Islands or issuing coins. It involves proclaiming Bank Holidays. Tens of millions of diaries cannot be printed until these are sorted out. The Queen must also approve the marriages of all direct descendants of George II under the terms of the Royal Marriages Act. Many of them will be leading ordinary lives and will never even have met the Queen. Some may not even be aware of the rule. Yet if they do not go through the Queen and the Privy Council, then, according to the law, their marriage is invalid and their children are, technically, illegitimate. Most couples with a royal ancestor are, of course, thrilled to get their union personally blessed by the Monarch but the Privy Council Office is aware of some exceptions. They need not fear a knock on the door from the wedding police, however. ‘We don’t go looking for them,’ says one of the team. ‘We take a pragmatic view. It’s a case of don’t ask, don’t tell.’
A lot of Privy Council business involves amending the statutes of universities or anything with a royal charter (including the BBC). It also has a judicial wing which acts as the court of appeal for Commonwealth countries which have yet to construct one of their own. On rare occasions, one of these sober little gatherings in the 1844 Room of Buckingham Palace can, effectively, send a man to his death. Some countries which retain the Privy Council also retain the death penalty. The Council doesn’t carry out sentencing, it merely judges appeals. But if it rejects the appeal of a murderer on death row in the Caribbean, then a condemned man is on his way to the gallows once the Queen has uttered a single word: ‘Approved.’ And it is her constitutional duty to do so.
There is no debate at these meetings. All the business has been prepared in advance and is usually over in five minutes. But it’s by no means formulaic ritual. The Clerk of the Council always prepares a short explanation of every item of business for the Queen in advance. It might be a couple of sentences explaining the reasons for, say, amending the Charter of the University of Keele or freezing the assets of a terrorist suspect. There might be dozens of items but the Queen reads the lot. It’s just like her Red Boxes. It’s often dense, turgid stuff. But that’s not the point. She believes that she would be falling down on the job if she did not know what it was she was actually approving at these meetings.
The Lord President of the Council – a senior Cabinet Minister who usually has a more onerous day job like Deputy Prime Minister – turns up with a trio of Government Ministers. The minimum required for any meeting is three Privy Counsellors.* They line up outside the 1844 Room and the Lord President goes in first for a few words with the Queen. When she is ready, she presses her buzzer and the rest of them file in, along with the Clerk, and they shake her hand.
The emphasis is on brisk efficiency, hence the fact that meetings are conducted standing up, a time-saving mechanism famously introduced by Queen Victoria. The politicians stand on one side of the Queen with their backs to the window while the Clerk stands on the other. The Lord President reads out all the orders on each page of what is called the List of Business whereupon the Queen replies ‘approved’ and everyone can turn the page.* When it’s all done, the President will say: ‘That, Your Majesty, concludes the business of today’s Council.’ The Queen might comment on one of the more interesting orders and then she rings her buzzer, the doors open and the ministers walk out. Because they are all Privy Counsellors, they are not expected to turn round on their way out and bow again like ordinary mortals. These people – with ‘Right Honourable’ before their name and ‘PC’ after it – are, historically, the Sovereign’s trustiest advisers. They just leave.
‘I always had the sense that the Queen really enjoys every aspect of it,’ says former Clerk of the Privy Council, Alexander Galloway. He admits that the details of some rituals are so complicated that they can fox the most experienced people in the room, namely the Queen and the Clerk. ‘The great thing about being Clerk of the Privy Council is that if anyone asks you a question, it’s almost certain that no one knows the answer,’ he points out.
On half a dozen occasions during her reign, though, the usual calm of the Privy Council meeting turns into a cross between a circus and a medieval homage. It happens when a ruling party falls and a new government comes to power with a lot of first-time ministers. Not only must the Queen swear in a lot of new Secretaries of State but there are a lot of new Privy Counsellors to be created, too. ‘It was like a baptism by hosepipe,’ says David Cameron with a smile, recalling the day when he took his new Coalition to be sworn in. ‘There was this wonderful scene – a lot of people getting into the Privy Council and then a lot of people kissing hands and accepting the seals of office too. So you had someone like the Lord Chancellor, Ken Clarke, who’s had the seals of almost every office [Kenneth Clarke held no fewer than five different Cabinet positions during the Thatcher/Major years] and you had Liberal Democrats like Danny Alexander who never thought they’d ever get the seals of any office! Here was this giant queue of oath-takers. They go down on one kneeler, kiss hands and affirm the oath of the Privy Council and then get on another kneeler to become Cabinet Ministers and do the kissing and swearing again.’ Just to add to the confusion, the Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, had to be sworn in ahead of the Prime Minister since he was also the new Lord President of the Privy Council. And without a Lord President no one else could be sworn in. Cameron go
es on: ‘My abiding memories of the day are of Nick Clegg going first and all the Lib Dems thinking: “Good God: we’re running the whole country!” and of everyone getting seals of office except me. They come in these huge leather boxes with a key. And everyone gets one except the Prime Minister who just kisses hands. But it was all beautifully arranged, with a rehearsal and coffee and a very nice room at Buckingham Palace followed by a chat afterwards. Like all these things, the Palace do it very well and make everyone feel very special.’ It is always a frantic few days after a change of government. Not only must the Palace round up the victors for swearing in but the Queen will also summon the losers for a formal farewell. By tradition, every departing Cabinet Minister is granted an audience when a government falls. ‘It was a perfectly pleasant ten-minute conversation about the way things were going and then you got the smile and the handshake and that was it,’ says one former Cabinet Minister. ‘But it helps. It produces finality. It’s a very nice recognition and you feel a little bit warmer that you’ve seen the Sovereign, even if she’s only saying: “Thank you very much. Don’t call me. I’ll call you.”’
This complex collection of constitutional duties, conventions, obligations, quirks, anomalies and fathomless rituals is not laid down in black and white, of course. Walter Bagehot might have distilled some of the essentials of constitutional monarchy in his great work, The English Constitution, but he never said anything about Red Boxes or the Commonwealth or detachable wands or kissing hands. Yet this entire, often baffling interplay between the Sovereign and the political class is neatly encapsulated in one of the most colourful and spectacular days in the royal calendar.
The Buckingham Palace Billiard Room is packed. Accountants, secretaries, cleaners and several peers of the realm are gathered beneath the naval portraits and the china displays. They are all staring, spellbound, at the table – but no one is playing billiards. Laid out before them is a very handsome cross section of the Crown Jewels.
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