The Diamond Queen Read online

  The British Queen’s authority is more like a quiet growl from ancient days, still quietly thrumming and mysterious. She stands for the state – indeed, in some ways, at least in theory, she is the state. She is the living representative of the power-structure that struggles to protect and sustain some 62 million people, and another 72 million in her other ‘realms’.

  She is not the symbol of the people. How could she or anyone represent the teeming millions of different ethnic groups and religions, of every political view, shape, bias and age? Her enthusiasm for the Commonwealth of nations, which is not the private passion of many British politicians, has made her more interested in the lives of the new black and Asian Britons than one might expect. Receptions at Buckingham Palace are generally more socially and ethnically mixed than they are at Downing Street, or in the City. She is at her most relaxed and smiling with young people, nervous people and unflashy people. Watching her at official occasions, it is clear that the chores are the grand dinners and speeches.

  Yet, like it or not, she is the symbol of the authority which drives the state servants and laws – the elections, armies, judges and treaties which together make modern life possible. For sixty years she has appeared to open her Parliament, to remember her nation’s war dead, to review her troops or to attend services of her Church. ‘Britain’ cannot go to the Republic of Ireland to finally heal a political breach that goes back to the Irish struggle for independence in the 1920s – but the Queen can. ‘Britain’ cannot welcome a pope or a president. She can.

  She has great authority and no power. She is a brightly dressed and punctual paradox. She is the ruler who does not rule her subjects but who serves them. The ancient meaning of kingship has been flipped; part of the purpose of this book is to explain how, and why, that has been done. Modern constitutional monarchy does not mean subjection, the hand pressed down on an unruly nation. Instead it offers a version of freedom. For the Crown is not the government. There is a small, essential space between them. It would be rude to say that ministers are squatters in the state – for governments come from parliaments which are elected, the ultimate bastions of our liberty. Nevertheless, ministers are lodgers in the state. They are welcome for a while, but have no freehold rights.

  The Queen stands for continuity. This is a dull word, but when asked what the Queen is really about, ‘continuity’ is the word used most often by other members of the royal family, by prime ministers, archbishops and senior civil servants. What do they mean? Not simply the continued existence of the country or the state. It is true that the state is a living and valuable presence before and after any one government. People look back to the past and imagine a future that outlives them: monarchy takes a real family and makes it the rather blatant symbol of that existential fact. So a constitutional monarchy claims to represent the interests of the people before they elected this government, and after it has gone. It remembers. It looks ahead, far beyond the next election.

  The distinction between state and government is an essential foundation of liberty. In Britain a pantomime of ritual has grown up to express it. At the annual State Opening of Parliament, once in a year, the Queen reads out her prime minister’s words, ventriloquizing for her government. She speaks with deliberate lack of emphasis or emotion: nobody must be able to hear her own feelings break through. A junior minister is taken hostage at Buckingham Palace to guarantee her safety and underline the separation of politics and state. When she leaves Westminster, he is released (after a decent drink) and normal politics resumes. The state and the government have come together, touched hands, and gone their separate ways. Other countries have a similar distinction, expressing it through written documents or powerless elected presidents; the British have long preferred a person.

  This is the job. In practice it is a little harder than it looks. When the most important foreign leaders arrive for a state visit, the Queen greets them in the country’s name with a smile and a gloved handshake and small-talk, again deliberately designed never to offend. She offers house-room and pays kind attention to people she may privately regard as abominable or merely hideous bores. Guests at Buckingham Palace or at Windsor will be guided around by the Queen in person. She will have checked the rooms first herself, trying to make sure suitable books are left by the bed, that the flowers look good, and that everything is welcoming. At the grand dinners she will have overseen the food, flowers and place-settings: will everybody be satisfied with where they are seated, and get on with the people put beside them?

  When the guests arrive and the conversation starts she has to remember to dodge anything that might cause her ministers a headache. One former foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, has watched her do it: ‘She’s got quite an elaborate technique. When a visiting head of state, or whatever it is, begins to talk politics, begins to explain what’s happening in his country, she says, “That’s very interesting Mr President . . . and I’m sure the foreign secretary would very much like to discuss that with you.” And so you’re shunted. The points change, and you’re shunted onto a different line.’ Others talk about how she uses polite silence to deflect trouble; and it is very noticeable that when you ask people about their conversations with the Queen, they bubble about her wit and insight – and then tell you exactly (and only) what they said to her. Clever.

  Much the same seems to happen in her weekly audiences with her prime ministers, of whom there have been a dozen to date. Though these meetings are completely private (no note-takers, no secretaries, no microphones), former premiers and civil servants talk about them as a kind of higher therapy, rather than a vivid exchange of views. For sixty years she has listened to whatever they have said – self-justifying explanations, private whinges, a little malice about their rivals – without letting any of them know whose side she is on except, in the broadest sense, the side of the continuing government of the country. Sir Gus O’Donnell, a cabinet secretary who has worked with four prime ministers – Sir John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and now David Cameron – says: ‘They go out of their way not to miss it. It’s a safe space where prime ministers and sovereigns can get together, they can have those sorts of conversations, which I don’t think they can have with anybody else in the country . . . they come out of them better than they went in, let’s put it that way.’

  She knows almost every state secret of the past sixty years. Every day she works her way through state papers, sent in red boxes to her desk. Gus O’Donnell again: ‘We give the Queen the minutes of cabinet, for instance, so she’s up to date on the discussions, the decisions that have been made. She gets a lot of material about what the government’s actually doing, in her red boxes.’ The Queen is very interested in issues involving the constitution – Sir Gus singles out current controversies about Britain’s switch to fixed-term parliaments and the future of the House of Lords – and anything to do with Britain’s military. She works hard too, to support the civil service, who, like her, have to be neutral but get very little applause from the public or press. In public, in her Christmas broadcasts and many speeches, she generally takes great care to stay on the safe ground of general expressions of goodwill, although at Christmas she often touches on issues of the day. For decade after decade she has dodged traps that could have led the monarchy into serious danger. She has made mistakes, of course. She is only human. But she has managed this dance of discretion so adroitly that many people have concluded that she is herself almost without character – neutral, passive, even bland.

  She is not. She is capable of sharp asides, has a long memory, shrewd judgement and is a wicked mimic. She has been very frank about her children’s scrapes. She has closely observed and dryly described the oddities of foreign leaders and famous politicians. She has done it sitting playing patience during the evening at Balmoral, or with her legs tucked up under her on a sofa on the Royal Yacht, a glass of something cheerful in hand, or walking on beaches and hillsides. In private she has hugged and laughed; and been sharp with bores, dawdle
rs and slow eaters. Though she does not like confrontation, and has often sub-contracted that out to her husband, she has strong views about people. It is just that her job means she has to hide all this. Other people, celebrities and actors, are paid to have a ‘personality’. She is required to downplay hers.

  This does not mean her life is dull. ‘We’re in the happiness business,’ whispers one of her ladies-in-waiting as the Queen heads for yet another line of shouting, waving children. It must be wonderful to cheer people up without cracking jokes, or telling odd stories. She can do it simply by arriving, smiling, nodding and taking a posy or two. No one who has followed this now slightly stooping lady in her mid-eighties as she walks through small towns, foreign hotels, cathedrals and military barracks, casting sharp glances all around, and observed the grinning, pressing lines of people waiting for her, can doubt it. But there is ‘the tough stuff’ too – a huge amount of ceremonial, religious and social business to be dealt with, week in, week out. (Some say, too much, particularly for a woman of her age.)

  She is a woman of faith. She stands atop the Anglican Church, that national breakaway from Rome hurriedly set up by her Tudor ancestor, the beef-faced and priapic Henry VIII. So she is called Defender of the Faith and Supreme Governor of the Church of England. The former title is technically absurd since it was given to Henry by Pope Leo X before he rebelled. But the latter one certainly counts: the Queen appoints bishops and archbishops and takes her role as the fount of Anglican respectability very seriously, addressing the General Synod and talking regularly to its leading figures.

  The current Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, says she is formally the final court of appeal, the place where arguments stop. In practice, of course, she does not intervene in rows about the ordination of women priests or gay marriage, any more than she does in parliamentary arguments. But, says the Archbishop, ‘She believes that she has some responsibility for keeping an eye on the business of the church, some responsibility to support it, to get on the side of those who are administering the church and she is herself very committed as a Christian.’ Williams says she was profoundly affected by being given a book of private prayers by a predecessor shortly before her Coronation, which she still uses. For her the Coronation was a vocation, ‘a calling, not a privilege but a calling. If it’s costly, it’s costly.’ As we shall see, at times it certainly has been.

  The Queen is also ‘the fount of honours’. She bestows medals, crosses, knighthoods and ribbons, mostly (but not always) on the advice of politicians, to those who are worthy (and sometimes not so worthy). Each one requires conversation, eye-contact, briefing and time. She has so far bestowed 404,500 honours and awards, and personally held more than 610 Investitures (the grand honour-giving ceremonies) since becoming Queen in 1952.

  Then there are the services: the Queen is Head of the Armed Forces. It is to the Queen that new soldiers, airmen and sailors pledge allegiance, and in whose name they fight and die. She has a special relationship with some regiments – her first official job was as a colonel-in-chief – and a general one with all. This means many more visits and ceremonies. She is also a patron of huge numbers of charities. They too lobby and plead for her time, often to encourage fundraising. From time to time the royal family settles down together to try to organize their charitable work. After the death of her mother and sister, the family sat down at Sandringham around a card-table and shared out the work they would have to take on. They discovered some charities had rather too many Royals associated with them, and others none at all; so some switching-around was agreed.

  Beginning to feel tired? What about Abroad? The Queen never forgets that she is Head of the Commonwealth, a title invented in 1949 to allow the newly independent republican India to keep its association with Britain. This involves her in a huge amount of travel, in addition to visiting her other realms and the diplomatic and trade-boosting visits her government tells her each year she must make. In the Foreign Office they draw up their wish list for state visits and other visits, arguing about which trading partner has priority over which, and which leader would be particularly gratified if the Queen arrived. And then another negotiation about her diary begins.

  These visits are not jaunts. They involve a lot of planning and travel, endless changes of dresses and hats and, above all, a huge amount of listening, nodding and smiling. Most trying of all, there are the speeches. The Queen is a naturally shy and quiet person who even now, after all these years, gets no pleasure from public speaking whether the event is grand or modest. One journalist who has followed her for decades says, ‘Whether it is the Great Hall of the People, or the Girl Guides’ Association, she gets nervous before the speech. And yet afterwards, once she’s completed that speech and she’s got marvellous congratulation and applause, then she’s . . . really buzzing because it’s out of the way. I’ve never seen her change once.’ As the Queen and Duke get older, they find these visits more tiring and trying. So far, they keep agreeing to go, in general twice a year.

  Beyond all this, the Queen has run the monarchy as a national adhesive, making constant visits around the country to be seen, to greet and to thank people who are mostly ignored by the London power-brokers and commercial grandees. She holds parties, lunches and charity gatherings at Buckingham Palace and Edinburgh’s Palace of Holyroodhouse to thank or bring together other lists of good-doers, civic worthies and business strivers. At special themed receptions she honours all sorts of disparate groups – they might be Australians in Britain, or young people in the performing arts, or campaigners for the handicapped, or the emergency services. These events are meticulously planned. The Queen hangs over the lists of who may be invited, and why. She plans the evenings and the choreography, and manages to remember at least many of the names. Only by watching the delight of elderly volunteers whom nobody else had thought to make much of or struggling young musicians, can one understand the quiet power of this mostly unreported monarchical campaign.

  Finally, there are the mass celebrations, the royal jubilees and marriages, which get most of the attention. The jubilees are an invented tradition, which allow the monarchy to dominate the crowded news agenda of a busy country and enable people to look back at the last twenty-five, fifty or sixty years, and to look forward too: a kind of national pause-for-thought. The marriages may turn out well or not, but allow the most fanatically royalist, and many others, to go briefly mad. Anyone who has paid any attention to public life in Britain sort of knows all this. Not many of us think about it much. By now, I hope the reader is feeling a little exhausted. We have not yet talked about the extra little jobs of mother, grandmother, wife, aunt, horse-owner, manager of farms and estates, employer and overall accountant-in-chief that fill in the quiet moments.

  For most of us the Queen seems always to have been there. She has done her job so well it has come to seem part of the natural order of things, along with the seasons and the weather. One day, of course, she won’t be there. Then there will be a gaping, Queen-sized hole in the middle of British life.

  Part One

  DYNASTY IS DESTINY

  How the British Monarchy Remade Itself

  The Queen is only the fourth head of a fairly new dynasty. If you put brackets around her uncle, Edward VIII, who lasted less than a year, she is only the third of the Windsors. Yet the British monarchy itself is one of the world’s oldest and the Queen can trace tiny flecks of her bloodline back to famous Anglo-Saxons and ancient Scottish warlords. More recently, Hanoverian ancestry remains a strong influence. Both she and her eldest son have faces that recall monarchs of the eighteenth century, the solemn early Georges. But like other families, monarchies can reinvent themselves. Today’s House of Windsor created itself less than a century ago, leaping away from the Hanoverians and their German connections in 1917.

  The previous British monarchy, of Victoria the fecund Queen-Empress and her son Edward, the louche and shrewd King-Emperor, had been at the centre of a spun golden web of royalty str
etching across Europe and Russia. Monarchy was a family club, largely closed to outsiders. Britain’s segment of the web had particularly close connections with German royal houses, connections that went back to the eighteenth century and the Hanoverians. Kaisers came to tea and joined parades dressed in British military uniform. They raced their yachts against those of their British cousins at Cowes. There might be mutual suspicion, but it was family rivalry rather than political. The closeness was symbolized by the last visit King George and Queen Mary made to Germany before the war. Arriving in Berlin in May 1913 for the wedding of the Kaiser’s daughter to their cousin, the Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, they had been greeted by Queen Mary’s aunt, the Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz – a very old English-born lady who remained in her north German estate until 1916. They went on to meet the Kaiser, Tsar Nicholas II, endless other dynastic cousins and what the family called simply ‘the royal mob’. The mob noted the presence of film cameras, or what they called ‘those horrid Kino-men’, but felt themselves a family, whose connections remained essential to the future of the ‘civilized’ world.

  George V was particularly fond of his Austro-Hungarian fellow Royals, and of numerous princely German relatives. Fritz Ponsonby, the King’s private secretary, noted of the visit, ‘whether any real good is done, I have my doubts. The feeling in the two countries is very strong . . .’ and George’s biographer rightly said that, in the coming of the Great War, ‘King George V was no more than an anguished and impotent spectator.’1 Others at the time took the opposite view, or diplomatically pretended to: the British ambassador to Berlin Sir Edward Goschen said he thought the visit would prove ‘of lasting good’.2 Queen Mary had a lovely time in Berlin. Interestingly, by contrast, she dreaded a visit to Paris the following year, primarily because France was to her above all an alien republic and there were no friendly family faces to welcome her.