Blair had never voiced any criticisms of the monarchy himself, although some of his Cabinet colleagues and backbenchers certainly had. In some cases, this had involved a spot of youthful rebellion – like the republican cross-Channel awayday to Boulogne to ‘avoid’ the 1981 Royal Wedding. Among those on board were future Labour luminaries Harriet Harman and Lord Mandelson. Senior figures like Jack Straw had also advocated urgent modernisation of the monarchy from the comfort of the Opposition benches. Once in office, though, they all rather appreciated their trips to the Palace. As Home Secretary, Jack Straw would even appear in morning dress for the swearing-in of bishops (‘if there’s a dress code,’ he explains, ‘you should follow it’).
For many others on the Labour benches, though, removing a hereditary head of state was a logical aspiration following the removal of the hereditary element in the Lords. Palace wariness was heightened by the fact that the Royal Family had been dragged into the election firing line by a tiny issue which, none the less, was a headline-grabber on the campaign trail: the future of the Royal Yacht Britannia. The Conservatives had pledged to build a new one. Labour was opposed. Douglas Hurd goes as far as describing the entire saga as the greatest mistake of the Tory government in which he served.
In 1994, John Major’s Conservative government announced that it would decommission the forty-one-year-old Yacht when she reached her next major overhaul. Ministers announced that they would retain an open mind on the merits of a replacement but there were few signs of enthusiasm. Given recent controversies over royal finances and domestic troubles, the Queen and the Royal Family remained silent on the matter.
The Yacht issue was definitely one for the government, whatever the family’s own private thoughts. Sir John Major remains resolute on this matter: ‘During the early nineties, the monarchy went through a very difficult time. Ask yourself this question: in the midst of the recession, with the British people facing economic hardship, how popular would it have been to announce a £50 million spend on a new yacht for the personal use of the Royal Family? How would that have been portrayed by the media? I had not forgotten the storm two years earlier when I announced the rebuilding of Windsor Castle.’ He also argues that Britannia had been designed for a long-gone era of ocean-going royal tours. Air travel, he says, had rendered her semi-redundant.
There were sound reasons for building a new ship, however. When plans for Britannia were first announced in 1951, she was to be designed with a twin role in mind – royal residence and wartime hospital ship. The latter was never a serious option. Without a helipad, Britannia could never be a proper hospital ship and her royal status would always make her a target, however prominently a red cross was painted on the sides. Later on, however, she developed a serious peacetime role as a trade promotion platform. On any tour, she would spend more time on commercial than royal duties for the simple reason that it worked. No royal passengers were necessary. If a British trade delegation invited a bunch of Wall Street titans to a business breakfast in a New York conference room, then attendance would be sparse. Who wanted yet another hotel buffet? If the same guests were invited to the same meal in the dining room of the Royal Yacht, then a full turnout could be expected. Similarly, if a British ambassador in the Gulf invited his most senior contacts for a drink aboard the Yacht – and, crucially, included spouses on the invitations – then he was suddenly the most popular diplomat in town.
In 1993, British businesses based in India were informed that Britannia would be stopping in Bombay. Any companies with contracts ready for signature were welcome to invite their Indian opposite numbers to attend a signing ceremony on board – and in the Queen’s own drawing room to boot. There were no members of the Royal Family within a thousand miles, yet the royal setting was enough. Deals which had been languishing for years suddenly enjoyed a new lease of life. Protracted haggling over the small print miraculously gave way to constructive dialogue. Minor legal squabbles were suddenly resolved. ‘The Yacht thrashed about in the Bay of Bombay,’ Lord Hurd recalls, ‘and millionaires trooped aboard and signed up.’ By the end, contracts worth £1.1 billion were signed. ‘I went to a similar event with the Prince of Wales in Kuwait to educate the Kuwaitis about privatisation,’ Lord Hurd continues. ‘They all came on board, had a good luncheon and billed and cooed. It was a very, very valuable appendage.’ On one trip, Rear-Admiral Sir Robert Woodard, Britannia’s captain, found himself receiving a bearhug from a West Midlands industrialist who had just sold a £1.5 million sausage machine on the back of a Britannia reception in the Caribbean.
Such occasions were a powerful antidote to the routine criticisms of the Yacht’s £11 million annual running costs.
Sir John Major says that he explored all the commercial arguments. ‘All kinds of different options were discussed and examined,’ he says. ‘As a trade vessel, the Royal Yacht still had quite a cachet. But when you examined it more closely, a good enough case couldn’t be made. Would I, personally, have wished to retain her? Of course I would. But one has to be pragmatic about such things and I don’t think such a decision would have been very helpful to the monarchy at that particular time. If it had been economically practical to keep her, without the risk of heaping more grief on the Royal Family, we would certainly have wished to do so.’
But the primary purpose of having a Royal Yacht was not an economic one. Nor was it that tired old catch-all excuse of ‘security’, although Britannia was undoubtedly a secure place to berth a monarch abroad. The main arguments for maintaining the Royal Yacht were political and emotional ones. Many people believed that Britain, as a maritime island nation, should have a national flagship, especially one that was recognised around the world. ‘Britannia was brilliant at projecting influence rather than power,’ says one of our most senior ex-ambassadors. ‘And we are in the influence game.’
Lord Hurd describes his ocean-going tours with the Queen and Prince Philip as the ‘most pleasant’ moments of his entire career as Foreign Secretary. ‘With the Queen on board, it underlined the fact the monarchy was different and not like the Prime Minister,’ he says. ‘I travelled a lot with Margaret Thatcher and John Major and you were in hotels but it wasn’t the same. There was a magic about Britannia which had nothing to do with magnificence because she wasn’t a magnificent ship. She was a homely ship in the proper sense – and extremely effective – because the Queen was at home.’
Britannia had her enemies, though. Some MPs – mostly Labour but with some Conservatives among them – regarded her as an expensive, embarrassing anachronism. The Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont could find the £60 million needed for a replacement easily enough but he did not want the special pleading from every other arm of government if he produced it. His Treasury officials, never the most romantic breed, certainly disliked having this anomaly on their books. Within the Ministry of Defence there were top brass from all the Services who resented the special status of the Royal Yacht Service – a one-ship fleet. With much weightier matters on his mind, John Major pushed the whole issue to one side until the 1997 general election was imminent. With less than four months to go, the Defence Secretary, Michael Portillo, suddenly produced a new policy and got it past a weary Cabinet on the cusp of defeat: if re-elected, the Tories would build a new Royal Yacht. But Portillo omitted to follow one important convention regarding royal issues. He did not clear the plan with the Labour Opposition. As a result, Labour campaigners had every right to attack it. And they did. A much-loved royal institution was now a hot political issue. Day after day on the election trail, old-style Labour politicians like John Prescott made a virtue of scrapping what was presented as a millionaire’s toy. The fact that Britannia had originally been commissioned by a Labour Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, was never mentioned.
As the Duke of Edinburgh observed to Gyles Brandreth some years later: ‘Attlee did it properly. He got the Opposition on board.’ The Duke was less impressed by the Tory tactics in 1997: ‘Major was blocked by Lamont and did
n’t get the Opposition on board. And then Portillo got involved and made a complete bollocks of it. Absolutely idiotic.’
Lord Hurd accepts some responsibility himself. ‘I blame myself somewhat because as Foreign Secretary I ought to have made sure that the Opposition – Blair and Robin Cook and so on – had some experience of Britannia and knew what it was about. But they didn’t. They weren’t asked to things on board. And that was a mistake because they threw away a huge asset for the country as a whole. They didn’t have that experience of what the ship could do and why she was unique in the world.’
His contrition is well founded. It now turns out that it might all have been very different after Labour won its landslide victory in May 1997. ‘I’ll tell you this,’ says Tony Blair, lowering his voice, ‘I didn’t want to get rid of it [Britannia]. After we’d agreed to get rid of it, I actually went on it and I remember, as I stepped on, thinking: “That was such a mistake to have done that.” And I think it was Prince Charles who was showing me around and I could see him thinking: “Thank you for that.”’ With a new government buzzing with pent-up reformist energy, Blair did not have the time for this sort of eccentric distraction. Besides, Gordon Brown’s Treasury advisers were desperate to kill off the Yacht once and for all. ‘I don’t put this on Gordon Brown,’ he says, ‘but the Treasury were saying: “This is just ridiculous” and so forth.’ Tellingly, he adds that the Queen never raised the issue with him. Not once.
Politics aside, Prince Philip remains adamant that the Yacht did not need replacing. ‘She ought to have had her steam turbines taken out and diesel engines put in,’ he told an ITV documentary to mark his ninetieth birthday. ‘She was as sound as a bell and she could have gone on for another fifty years.’ As it turned out, she lasted just seven months into the new administration.
Britannia enjoyed one last world tour to provide Britain and the Prince of Wales with a dignified platform from which to hand Hong Kong back to China. Following her return, the Royal Family gathered in Portsmouth in December 1997 for a decommissioning ceremony. The Queen was not the only one seen to shed tears that day. This was not just a royal mode of transport. It was a home, full of memories of royal childhoods and family memorabilia – Prince Philip’s collection of driftwood and all sorts of unusual trinkets and gifts which had no obvious place at Buckingham Palace or Windsor or anywhere else. It was in Britannia that the Queen kept a muchloved copper coffee table given to her in Zambia and an original set of G Plan furniture. The ambiance was that of a small country house – lots of understated style and plenty of character. Naval engineers had even designed the royal observation decks so that gusts of wind were vented downwards. That way, there could be no Marilyn Monroe moments with the royal skirts.
Finally, in April 1998, it was announced that Britannia would be towed to Scotland to spend the rest of her days as a tourist attraction in the port of Leith. She remains there to this day in the care of a charitable trust.
Perhaps Britannia’s innate problem was that she did her best work overseas, beyond the gaze of the taxpayers who paid for her. To this day, the rest of the world remains utterly baffled that the Queen has lost her maritime residence. ‘I would like the British government to give her back her ship,’ says President Nasheed of the Maldives. ‘It’s madness to take it away.’ He even suggests, only half jokingly, a Commonwealth solution: ‘I think we should all chip in!’ In Britain, however, Britannia was associated with royal holidays – Cowes Week, the Queen’s annual Scottish cruise and the occasional royal honeymoon. Perhaps it was a mistake to call her ‘The Royal Yacht’ in the first place. To many people the word ‘yacht’ has too many connotations of leisure and pleasure, of gin palaces, gold taps and Mediterranean fleshpots.
Perhaps it was all down to timing. Britannia needed either refurbishment or replacement at the very moment that royal fortunes were at a post-war low. Had anyone suggested getting rid of her a few years later, it might not have happened. ‘I think if it had happened five years into my time,’ Blair admits, ‘I would have just said: “No.”‘ In any case, Britannia was seen as a symbol of ‘Old’ Britain. Fresh symbols were required for a new era and a new century.
Two years later, on the last night of 1999, Blair welcomed the Queen to the opening of a bold new statement about ‘New’ Britain, its values and its place in the world. The Millennium Dome had cost twelve times more than a new Royal Yacht. It lasted a year before the shutters came down and the tumbleweed came rolling through. Years later, it would reopen as a successful concert venue. But it has never sold a single sausage machine.
The early years of the Blair government were some of the most tumultuous of the Queen’s reign. Four months in, the new Prime Minister found himself helping the Royal Family through the febrile days which followed the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. As one member of the New Labour administration recalls: ‘They’d come a little closer than they really felt comfortable with in having a major crisis. Ultimately, the people would have come back to them but it was a little shocking to them.
‘New Labour had not had any reason to demonstrate closeness to the monarchy,’ says Mary Francis. ‘But this was the moment at which Tony Blair realised he had got to support the monarchy and see it through because it wasn’t in anyone’s interests to have the whole thing collapsing around his ears.’
A month later, the Queen’s state visit to India turned into an embarrassing catalogue of diplomatic slights following injudicious remarks by her new Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook. Accompanying the Queen in Pakistan the previous week, Cook had let slip that he favoured an international solution to the disputed Indian territory of Kashmir. Pakistan was thrilled. India, which wants no such thing, was furious.
As a result, the Queen arrived in New Delhi to be greeted by gratuitous abuse in the Indian media. On the eve of her arrival, the Indian Prime Minister described her as the leader of a ‘third-rate nation’. The Band of the Royal Marines, in town to accompany the tour, was suddenly disinvited from a reception for the Queen. The diplomatic atmosphere was disastrous from the off. As the British press laid the blame squarely with Cook, he took the extraordinary step of asking the Queen’s Private Secretary, Sir Robert Fellowes, to issue a statement saying that the Queen was ‘entirely satisfied with the advice from the Foreign Secretary’.
Since the Queen acts on the advice of her ministers, Fellowes had no choice. As, Kenneth Rose has pointed out, however, this set a dangerous precedent. If the Monarch could be made to speak up for a minister, what was she to say when she was no longer ‘entirely satisfied’ with him?
Just five months later, there was another cavalier approach to the old constitutional customs. The government decided to endorse a backbench campaign to introduce sex equality to the line of royal succession (Coalition Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg would attempt something similar thirteen years later, just before the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge). The centuries-old rule that royal brothers should automatically jump ahead of royal sisters seemed about to be overturned following the introduction of a Private Members’ Bill in the House of Lords by Lord Archer of Weston-Super-Mare (otherwise known as novelist Jeffrey Archer). The Home Office minister, Lord Williams of Mostyn, told Parliament that the Queen had been consulted and had ‘no objection’. Cue uproar on the Conservative benches. The bible of parliamentary procedure, Erskine May, makes it very clear that the Monarch’s view shall never be known let alone used to influence any debate. If we know what she thinks about one Bill, so the argument goes, then we might want to know her views on another. A select committee was duly convened to investigate whether a constitutional abuse had occurred. Lord Williams was absolved of wrongdoing on this occasion, but the government accepted that his words should not be taken as a precedent (in other words: ‘This won’t happen again.’). The Succession To The Crown Bill died a quiet death soon afterwards.
None of this could be described as throne-rocking stuff, but it showed a different mindset at work in gover
nment. The monarchy could not expect the old conventions and routines to carry on unchallenged. Sir Malcolm Ross, architect of major royal events for nearly twenty years, clearly remembers the change of mood at one of the first state occasions of the New Labour era. As usual, the Honourable Corps of Gentlemen at Arms, the Monarch’s ‘closest’ bodyguard, were on parade – retired gents in plumed helmets and nineteenth-century uniforms. But the effect was lost on the new Foreign Secretary. As Ross recalls, with some amusement: ‘Robin Cook was attending and the bodyguard marched on. Suddenly, the cry came from this very loud voice: “Who are these extraordinary old men?”’
Culture clashes were to be expected. What really concerned the Queen’s senior advisers was Labour’s programme of constitutional reforms, particularly the creation of a new Scottish Parliament and the proposals to remove the hereditary peers from the House of Lords. It was not the proposals themselves which were the issue. These were all well-debated policies which had been in the election manifesto of an all-conquering political party. The big question for the Queen’s officials was how best to keep the monarchy entirely detached from these issues. The obvious hurdle was reform of the Lords. ‘I have no idea what the Queen’s personal views were about it,’ says Mary Francis. ‘But the Palace was sufficiently savvy to see that this was going to happen. The vital thing was to make it clear that having a monarchy doesn’t rest on having a hereditary aristocracy. We had to de-link the hereditary principle in the Lords from the hereditary principle in the monarchy.’ Their task was not helped by royalist commentators in the conservative press insisting that abolishing Earls and Dukes in the Lords was a threat to the monarchy itself.
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