This summit is the organisation’s sixtieth birthday party but the arguing starts early. The host, Trinidad’s Prime Minister, Patrick Manning, wants to make global warming the big issue of his summit. But many of the lobbyists and activists here want the Commonwealth to ‘get real’ and focus on issues it can actually do something about, namely human rights abuses by its own members. The President of Gambia has just imprisoned a Scottish missionary for calling Gambia ‘hell’ and has informed political reformers: ‘I will kill you and nothing will come of it.’ Swaziland is spending more than half its aid budget on a private jet for the King. And Uganda is passing laws to extend the death penalty to homosexuality (which is already illegal in forty Commonwealth countries).
Manning does not want his moment as saviour of the planet soured by such matters. ‘These are domestic issues,’ he declares at the opening press conference. ‘They need not detain us here.’ The human rights campaigners are outraged.
Meanwhile, the Commonwealth is under attack from its own fan club. The Royal Commonwealth Society (Patron: The Queen) has conducted an extensive global survey on what people think about the Commonwealth. The results are not comfortable reading. Most people have no idea what it does, aside from the Commonwealth Games, and most people in countries like Australia, Canada and Britain – which fund it – would not be bothered if it disappeared. It clearly needs to decide what it’s for – and make itself more relevant instead of engaging in what RCS chairman Peter Kellner calls ‘earnest futility’. It’s a dilemma not unfamiliar to the Queen. The Commonwealth Secretary-General and his staff are rather cross about this survey and try to bury it. Privately, though, many delegates agree that it is a ‘timely wake-up call’. Certainly, no one is objecting in the royal camp. The monarchy knows what happens to organisations which allow themselves to stagnate.
The Queen takes centre stage at the opening ceremony, a colossal production at the brand-new National Academy for the Performing Arts. It’s a very expensive, very shiny new addition to Port of Spain’s landscape, a Caribbean answer to the Sydney Opera House. It is so new that the cement mixers only stopped working two hours before the Queen’s arrival. There is an air of happy chaos. There are no programmes as they are still being printed. Apparently, they will arrive a few days after the grand event is over. As a result, no one is entirely sure what is happening. Despite the climate change agenda, each delegation from each nation arrives at the grand entrance in an individual motorcade. Every government leader is applauded on to the stage, quiz show-style, by a hand-picked local audience. The hosts put on a dizzying cultural tour de force involving 935 actors. It’s the indoor equivalent of an Olympic opening ceremony. Everyone is genuinely impressed.
The Queen, her voice croaking from a combination of her cold, the air conditioning and jet lag, delivers a speech which chimes entirely with the environmental mood of the national leaders. She urges them to ‘lead’ the world in fighting climate change, noting: ‘The Commonwealth can be proud of the fact that in each of its six decades, it has shaped the international response to emerging global challenges.’ The media are so excited about ‘Green Queen’ headlines that they miss her thinly veiled support for those who want to give the organisation a big shake-up. ‘This diamond anniversary year is an important time for the Commonwealth to look forward,’ she says. ‘Like any good organisation, we must continue to pay close attention to the things that give it distinctive character.’
The leaders go back to the conference room to carry on arguing. Manning has persuaded President Sarkozy of France to drop in en route from South America and lend his support to the Commonwealth’s planet-saving declarations. Not everyone is happy. France is not a member – and it means having to find some interpreters. The Queen keeps her distance. She invites all the new leaders who have never attended a Commonwealth summit to drinks at her hotel. She also meets the organisation’s youth wing, the Commonwealth Youth Forum, led by an articulate young Australian lawyer, Matthew Albert, twenty-nine (‘youth’, in Commonwealth terms, stops at thirty). His briefing to the Queen is more polished than some of the stuff she hears from the heads of governments. She must be impressed because she includes Albert and his colleagues in her Christmas broadcast a few weeks later.
It is also an occasion for the Queen to catch up with some of her own prime ministers. John Key, the Prime Minister of New Zealand, has asked for an audience and is summoned to the ‘Wow Suite’ for a chat. He is enjoying his first Commonwealth summit and, for some reason, has been seated next to President Kikwete of Tanzania at three consecutive meals. Far from running out of small talk, the two men have become friends and have hatched a plan. Key has agreed to send some Kiwi farmers to help Tanzania set up a new agricultural institute. Kikwete has promised him two cheetahs for a New Zealand zoo in return. You don’t get that sort of quickfire diplomacy at the G20. The Queen immediately asks Key about plans for Prince William to open Wellington’s new Supreme Court building. ‘The first thing she said to me was to make sure I look after William when he comes down to New Zealand,’ says Key afterwards. ‘She seemed very amused by the fact that we were going to abandon the state dinner for a barbecue with the All Blacks.’*
Talk turns to one of Key’s coalition partners, New Zealand’s minority Maori Party. The Maori community has always believed that when it signed the original 1840 peace treaty with the first European settlers it was dealing with Queen Victoria, not the settlers. ‘There’s always been a sense from Maori that their historical relationship is with the Crown,’ says Key. ‘We’re in partnership with them and it’s one of the things the Queen asks about every time I’ve seen her. She always asks how the relationship’s going and she was pleased that we did it.’ It’s a fascinating little constitutional insight. As in Britain, so in New Zealand, the Queen is positively enjoying the latest flourishing of coalition politics.
Everyone will have their moment with the Queen at her traditional Commonwealth banquet. She has even brought the Master of the Household and some of his team with her to give it the Palace gloss. Round tables of ten are laid out for a dinner of cured salmon, roast loin of lamb and chocolate cardammon truffle cake. Every place is laid with a Household eye for detail and every menu card tied up with ribbons in the Commonwealth colours of blue and yellow. The Queen has packed the ‘Commonwealth Goblets’, a gold cup for the head of each delegation.
The leaders of all fifty-four nations and their spouses line up for a formal introduction to the Queen and Prince Philip. It doesn’t take long and everyone then mingles informally over drinks. There is a bit of a glitch, though, when it is time to move through from the reception to the banquet. The Secretary-General, Kalamesh Sharma, has been collared by someone so the Queen walks through unaccompanied. She is left to sit down in her chair alone with no one to talk to. It’s a blunder. She looks unamused but unfazed. ‘It’s sloppy,’ murmurs one of her team disapprovingly. ‘But she’s gripping it.’
As far as the Queen’s body clock is concerned, it is midnight and she also has a bad cold. She just wants to ‘grip’ it and get on with it. Eventually she ends up with the Prime Minister of Singapore on her left and Patrick Manning on her right. The seating plan ensures a mix of continents on every table. The Queen’s circle includes the President of Kenya, the Crown Prince of Brunei, and the hapless Edward Natapei, the man who is being toppled as Prime Minister of Vanuatu at this very moment.* The Duke sits next to the only female leader at the summit, Sheikh Hasina Wazed, the Prime Minister of Bangladesh. By popular demand, speeches are early and short. Two new boys, John Key and Jacob Zuma of South Africa, have been chosen to say a few words and raise a toast to the Queen and to the Commonwealth. She hits her gavel and rises to say, simply: ‘I wish you every success in your deliberations.’ With that, the cured salmon arrives and the Queen will play no further part in the proceedings. The following day she is heading home as the leaders produce their grand declaration – ‘The Port of Spain Climate Change Consensus’. This gatherin
g has actually been a modest success. The Queen will be pleased. It’s been a good few days for other reasons, too. She might have lost one of her thrones over the weekend. The Prime Minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines, an island constellation which still has the Queen as its head of state, had decided to stage a royal referendum to coincide with her visit to the region. Ralph Gonsalves – known locally as ‘Comrade Ralph’ – had urged his 100,000-strong electorate to vote for a republic. What’s more, he had the support of the main opposition party. Since the Grenadines include the famous royal playground of Mustique, this had the potential to be an awkward story, ‘MUSTIQUE KICKS OUT QUEEN’ is not a great headline midway through a Caribbean tour. In the event, the people rejected the idea by 57 to 43 per cent. Comrade Ralph – who still turned up for the Queen’s banquet and still got a smile and a handshake – will not have his head on the coins just yet.
The Queen’s view has always been that constitutional issues like this are entirely a democratic matter for the people concerned, not some popularity contest. She is happy to remain a constitutional monarch wherever she is wanted. The last thing she wants is to be seen as hanging on. Most realms are former dominions or colonies which have chosen to retain their historic ties with the Crown. With Papua New Guinea, it was a case of deliberately appointing the Queen. This was Australian territory until 1975 when it sought independence and a republican constitution was prepared. But with more than eight hundred languages among Papua New Guinea’s seven million people, the founding fathers decided that the Queen offered greater prospects for national unity. What’s more, she had actually been there. So the Queen was inited to add another realm to her portfolio. She gladly accepted and, to this day, Papua New Guinea is the world’s most enthusiastic distributor of old imperial honours.
For now, she remains Queen of a large part of the earth’s surface. She is head of state of 16 nations, plus another 14 British overseas territories, including Bermuda, Gibraltar and 660,000 square miles of Antarctica. It is only in Britain that she reigns directly. In her fifteen other realms, she does so through a locally appointed Governor-General who fulfils all her ceremonial functions. But the big decisions have always been approved by her – including a little-known de facto abdication.
In 1987, when she was Queen of Fiji, there were two military coups. ‘The Governor-General had been sort of pretending to be in charge of Fiji,’ recalls Sir William Heseltine. ‘But after the second coup happened he really couldn’t pretend to go on doing that. So the Queen took the initiative in suggesting to him that the time had come for her to accept that Fiji was now a republic. It was no use pretending any longer that Fiji was still a realm. Mrs Thatcher was quite opposed to the idea of the Queen, as it were, abdicating. But it wasn’t up to her because it was as Queen of Fiji that she had come to this conclusion.’ And it was as Queen of Fiji that the Monarch’s mind was made up. The only government was an undemocratic republican one so the Queen told her Fijian self, namely the Governor-General, to resign. He did.
One of the most famous constitutional crises was in Australia in 1975 when the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, sacked the Australian Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam. The Queen knew nothing about it in advance but it gave considerable momentum to the rising Australian republican movement. That would come to a head in the nineties with a celebrated referendum. It was Australia’s Labour Prime Minister, Paul Keating, who began the process towards a grand vote on whether to replace the Crown with a republic. Demonised in sections of the British press as the ‘Lizard of Oz’ for apparently touching the Queen (he was steering her through a crowded reception; she was not remotely bothered), Keating came to Britain to explain his plans in person to the Queen. It was a tense occasion which neither side particularly enjoyed. As one member of the Household told author Graham Turner, the Queen emerged with the words: ‘I really do need a very large drink.’ A very senior retired aide recalls that it could have been a lot worse. ‘Keating came to Balmoral and it was absolutely fascinating. I liked him. He was a very intelligent man, a great expert on Regency clocks which was an unexpected revelation. And I mean expert, too – he collected them. He was a republican. He minced no words. He was extremely courteous to the Queen – he couldn’t have been more so – and there was a picnic. And I remember the Queen talking to him about what Menzies [her first Australian Prime Minister] had said to her. And you did feel that this guy was going for more than just a short-term political trick.’
In the event, Keating lost the 1996 election and it was the monarchist Prime Minister John Howard who delivered the referendum in 1999. The choice was between a president elected by Parliament or the status quo. The political and media establishments were overwhelmingly in favour of change. To worldwide astonishment, Australians voted 55–45 per cent in favour of keeping the Queen. Furthermore, constitutional change would have required a majority in four of the country’s six states. It occurred in just one. Even diehard royalists would concede that there had not been a sudden resurgence of 1954-style Queen worship. The determining factor, surely, had been the fact that many Australians did not like the republican model on offer – a cosy system of politicians electing the president themselves. But this, in itself, was a reminder of a central element of constitutional monarchy – it’s a politician-free zone.
The republican tide continues to ebb and flow. Some, like the late Ben Pimlott, have suggested that the Queen should jump while the going is good in places like Australia rather than wait to be pushed. All those around the Queen regard the idea as unthinkable. They see it as asking for troubles not yet even contemplated. The Royal Family accepts that, ultimately, all these nations may want their own heads of state but would rather let them do it in their own time, as long as it is done by consent. A very senior courtier sums up Palace thinking on the issue: ‘The attitude is: “Just tell us when you want us to go” – unless it’s a maverick who is twisting the tail of the vast majority of the population. Then you have got to sit it out. But if it’s a democratically elected government, then so be it.’
Malcolm Fraser, former Australian Prime Minister, says he is typical of the large numbers of ‘geographical’ republicans in Australia – and happy to call himself a monarchist for the duration of the present reign. ‘Her Majesty can obviously do things for Britain which she can’t do as head of state for a country with our geography,’ he says. ‘The real stumbling block is finding a model which is workable and we’re prepared to accept. And that might take longer than people think. But if I was in Britain, I certainly wouldn’t be a republican.’ He also believes that ‘90 per cent’ of Australian republicans would want to retain the British Monarch as Head of the Commonwealth. ‘Australia may become a republic but her links to Britain could be just as strong as they are now through the bonds of the Commonwealth,’ he argues. ‘There’d be just as much affection.’
The days of appointing a member of the Royal Family to be a Governor-General are long gone, although the Queen did try to give her sons a taste of the ‘old’ Commonwealth in their youth. Prince Charles spent part of his education in Australia, Prince Andrew in Canada, Prince Edward in New Zealand. In the late eighties, Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke gave serious thought to appointing the Prince of Wales as Governor-General. The Prince liked the idea but explained that it could only happen with cross-party support. Hawke had to drop the plan when he could not convince his own Labour party.
For many years, the Palace regarded Canada as the republican hotspot, particularly during the rise of secessionist feeling in Quebec in the sixties. But, over time, Canada began to lose its appetite for republicanism. ‘I went to Canada with the Queen a lot in the seventies because all the provinces were having their centenaries,’ says Ron Allison. ‘And then Watergate happened in America and they peered over the border and thought: “That couldn’t happen here … our head of state and head of the executive are not the same.” And I think that greatly strengthened the monarchy.’
After the failure o
f the Australian referendum in 1999, eyes turned towards New Zealand. With no federal system there, a straightforward plebiscite could topple the Crown more easily and Labour’s Helen Clark was no royalist. But she had other business to attend to. Now the tide has turned there, too. After taking power in 2008, John Key and his conservative coalition made a tiny but important decision. They decided to restore titular honours – knighthoods and damehoods – for Kiwis. ‘Sir’, ‘Lady’ and ‘Dame’ had been scrapped by Clark’s administration, seen as evidence of a ‘cultural cringe’ towards Britain and its old imperial ways. Restoring them would only involve a handful of people every year but it also showed a renewed sense of kinship with the Crown. Even Key has been surprised by the success of a policy which scored an 80 per cent approval rating in opinion polls – only narrowly pipped in popularity by a new national cycleway. ‘Nearly three years on from the reintroduction of the honours system in New Zealand, it has gone from strength to strength,’ says Key, looking back. The Queen’s reaction to the plan? ‘She was absolutely thrilled.’
Another obstacle for republicans is that even the most rational arguments can succumb to deep-rooted emotion. Dr Jane Connors, chronicler of the great 1954 royal tour of Australia, describes herself as a republican and a ‘person of the left’. She recalls demonstrating outside the new Parliament building in Canberra when the Queen came to open it in 1988. And then something strange happened: ‘We were all protesting and chanting. But then the Queen arrived and we fell silent. It was funny but we just couldn’t boo the Queen.’ She believes that the Australian republican lobby’s big mistake has been to mock the royalists. ‘You had an elitist republican movement which sneered that anyone who likes the royals believes in medieval mumbo-jumbo. They claimed that the monarchy has a negative impact on our daily lives when it doesn’t. It was a mess.’ She points to the Australian media establishment’s collective amnesia about the 1954 tour, a defining moment in the country’s history yet one which has barely warranted a documentary since. ‘The story has been completely wiped from the national memory because our history has been written from the left and the left have always been embarrassed by that tour. It was seen as a women’s event. We were supposed to be a nation of rebels like Ned Kelly. Media people like to say that the arrival of the Beatles in 1964 was the biggest thing in our popular history because it suits the narrative. They only mention the Queen’s 1954 tour in relation to later visits, never in its own right.’
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