Diana's Nightmare - The Family (31 page)

'ELIZABETH and Philip were an absolute godsend,' enthused the titled Chelsea lady. 'I remember going to see the film of the Royal Wedding and it was absolutely wonderful. Life had been so austerely drab and suddenly we had Norman Hartnell poncing around and all these wonderful frocks. It was a real opiate for the masses - I mean, after the war the Royal Family could do absolutely no wrong. All the rumours about Prince Philip were totally quashed and one's elders said, "Don't be so wicked as to even talk about it". Obviously the gossip was going on in London but Elizabeth was so popular it was unthinkable. Everybody copied her clothes and, when Prince Charles was born, women's magazines ran articles on how to knit his baby jumper with little feathers on it.

'When the Duke got his first ship, HMS
Magpie
, Elizabeth followed him to Malta where she was more or less an ordinary naval wife and the mother of two young children. She watched polo with the other wives and went on family picnics. It was the only taste of freedom she ever had. Everything happened in 1952. She stopped being a young girl and a young mother.'

King George VI died of lung cancer on 6 February, 1952, when Elizabeth was still only twenty-five. She and Philip were visiting a game reserve in Kenya and she dashed back to London in a blaze of publicity. Like Victoria before her, 'she took things as they came, as she knew they must be'.

Although a heavily addicted smoker, the King had put his illness down to 'the incessant worries and crises through which we have to live'. 'He smoked 150 cigarettes a day for years,' said a royal medical source. 'Even after his last operation, he couldn't give it up.' Much to her father's dismay, Margaret had started smoking and when he complained, she simply increased the length of her ivory cigarette holders. 'She is so addicted to nicotine I once saw her light up after lunch at the Royal Lancaster Hotel without waiting for the loyal toast,' said a reporter on the royal beat. The Queen was also a smoker, but only in secret. 'The staff knew because they emptied the ashtrays in her private rooms,' said one raised in the Royal Mews.

Queen Elizabeth II threw herself into the New Elizabethan Era with great courage. Resolved to fulfil the pledge she had made on her twenty-first birthday, and renewed at the Coronation in 1953, she realised that there would be a high price to pay. Her personal liberty would have to go, but she had always known that. While she was touring Britain's overseas possessions with Philip, she would have to leave Charles and Anne at home in the care of her mother, who was still grieving the loss of her husband. There would also be long, testing times when she would be separated from her husband, now the proud holder of UK Passport Number One.

Not once did Elizabeth flinch. 'From the moment the King died, the Queen didn't have a moment to spare,' said Godfrey Talbot, the distinguished BBC Court Correspondent. 'She reluctantly had to abandon her children and they virtually didn't see their parents for months on end. It was very unsettling and bewildering for a little boy and he turned to granny for a shoulder to cry on. During the first five years of the Queen's reign, the Queen Mother was both mother and father to Charles and Anne.'

This wasn't the only sacrifice the Queen had to make. The Crown started to take over her personality. 'Monarchy is a very difficult thing - for the monarch,' said a leading psychiatrist. 'When does he or she cease being the title and assume what you might call their real identity?'

So committed was Elizabeth to the sovereign's traditional role that she turned a deaf ear to suggestions that it might be wise to open up a little and become more democratic. 'I never served an apprenticeship,' she reflected ruefully when the mistakes had been made.

This wasn't strictly true. She had been trained from an early age in the rites of royalty. She had also been tutored in constitutional history by a former teacher at Eton, who had the disconcerting habit of addressing her as 'Gentlemen'. Yet her mentors, the diehard Queen Mary and the Old Guard at Buckingham Palace, had singularly failed to anticipate the changing nature of life in the kingdom over which Elizabeth now ruled. Moreover, the advent of television meant that there was an instantaneous feedback on history as it happened. The BBC's live outside broadcast of the Coronation had been an unqualified success. But once the camera started to pry into less salubrious areas, many people did not like what they saw. 'Reality television', as it became known, created a potent political force by revealing the two- nations concept of the kingdom - the haves and the have-nots.

As a symbol of a glorious imperial past, Elizabeth was the youthful embodiment of an almost sacred ideal. But after Britain's catastrophic involvement in the Suez invasion, the ideal itself had been called into question and found to be wanting. The days of gunboat diplomacy were well and truly over. Eden was exposed as a deeply flawed Prime Minister and Macmillan's rise to power over Rab Butler, the Queen's favourite politician after Winston Churchill, owed more to the byzantine intrigues within Westminster than to any electoral mandate. This left the monarchy exposed in a particularly vulnerable way. The existence of a dynastic head of state and the lavishly expensive ceremonial that had come to be associated with it were still plaited together. But the fabric of society itself was being woven into exciting new patterns. No one was asking the Palace for permission.

'Who would have guessed the Queen would have grown into her job the way she has?' countered the informed peer. 'Philip protected her in those early decades marvellously well. He was a very good consort.' The truth, however, was that the Queen lost touch with her people. For the first time, the monarchy was openly criticised. Malcolm Muggeridge's article in the
Saturday Evening Post,
'Does England Really Need a Queen?', and Lord Altrincham's portrayal of her tweedy, elitist court in the
National and English Review
caused a furore. His Lordship called the Queen 'a priggish schoolgirl, captain of the hockey team, a prefect and a recent candidate for confirmation.' Both men were ostracised and Altrincham (John Grigg) had his face slapped by an angry royalist.

A decade passed before the monarchy could shake off the malaise of the late Fifties and re-establish contact with the masses. Neither the birth of Prince Andrew nor the wedding of Princess Margaret to Antony Armstrong-Jones in 1960 achieved the desired effect. 'The Sixties were exciting but they were different because people stopped copying the Royal Family,' said the titled Chelsea lady. 'You stopped looking at the royals and started looking at Carnaby Street and pop stars. All the fashion, everything, came from the bottom, not the top.'

The notion of due deference to one's betters started to crumble. Royalty became an irrelevance in an age of populism. Michael Caine's antihero
Alfie
and Julie Christie's cover girl
Darling
became typical role models for a generation. Cockney, Scouse, Geordie and other regional dialects hitherto confined to the football terraces joined BBC English on the airwaves. Pirate radio stations located offshore, the most famous called
Caroline,
bombarded the kingdom with irreverent new sounds. There was a high-spirited, bloodless revolution going on and the royals were excluded from it. Uniforms and medals were sold in Carnaby Street boutiques not as symbols of imperial gallantry but as psychedelic fashions and accessories.

When John Lennon announced at the height of the Swinging Sixties that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus he could have added, 'And the Royal Family as well'. When the Beatles went to Buckingham Palace in 1965 to receive MBEs, they showed no particular reverence for the surroundings. According to John Lennon, they smoked dope in the Palace loo. 'I think the Beatles think MBE stands for Mr Brian Epstein,' said the trendy Princess Margaret, referring to the group's manager. She, for one, had the time of her life as a fully-fledged member of the permissive society.

EVERYONE remembered the most quotable part of the Guildhall speech in which the Queen said: '1992 is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure. In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has turned out to be an
annus horribilis.
I suspect I am not alone in thinking it so.' Significantly, Her Majesty went on to say:

'No institution - City, monarchy, whatever - should expect to be free from the scrutiny of those who give it their loyalty and support, not to mention those who don't. But we are all part of the same fabric of our national society and that scrutiny, by one part of another, can be just as effective if it is made with a touch of gentleness, good humour and understanding. This sort of questioning can also act, and it should do so, as an effective engine of change.'

By royal standards, this appeared to be radical stuff indeed. Her Majesty had publicly acknowledged not only a need for reform but a willingness to be reformed. After Macmillan's Winds of Change came the Windsor Change. The Queen, however, was working to a timetable she had drafted after consultations with her closest advisers. In truth, she was still in the driving seat of the engine and she had no intention of handing over the controls.

The first key date in the new agenda was her declaration on Christmas Day 1991 that she intended to serve her people 'for years to come'. Charles already knew that his mother hadn't shown the slightest inclination of stepping down, but this brief reference let the rest of the world know that it could stop speculating. Abdication was still the dirtiest word in the royal vocabulary.

Having established security of tenure, she moved on to tackle the next, and most problematical, area of the monarchy - royal finances. For forty-one years, she had steadfastly refused calls from Socialist and Conservative quarters alike that she should pay income tax. But she now sensed a backlash from economic forces outside her control as the worst recession since the Wall Street Crash started to bite deeply.

‘In the latter part of the twentieth century, the Royal Family had stripped away their financial responsibilities and had more financial privileges that at any time in their history,' said Andrew Morton. 'There was a turning point when the Queen was exempted from paying the Poll Tax and she was probably the most privileged she had ever been. In an historical sense, that is when a dynasty has to beware because in 1913 the Russian Royal Family celebrated their tercentenary with elaborate celebrations in Moscow and St Petersburg and four years later it was over. Similarly, the House of Windsor in the latter part of the Eighties and the early Nineties were celebrated as no other family. They were lauded on television, the Press were largely uncritical and they seemingly enjoyed the respect of Parliament. The hegemony seemed to be complete and yet a year later - BANG! 1992 was a fulcrum year.'

Everything that had been preached during the Thatcher era about a 'value for money' society in which everything had to earn its keep turned against the monarchy. High expectations instilled by the optimism of the previous ten years were suddenly dashed aside. People living outside London, which suffered from what Morton called 'the metropolitan mindset', were adamant that it was time for Her Majesty to join the real world and pay taxes like everyone else.

At Buckingham Palace, there was also the added complication of the Family. 'The Queen had known since the beginning of 1992 that the Charles and Diana story was going to break,' said the Palace insider. 'She decided then to pay tax and chop the Civil List without further ado. It was intended as a tactical move to defuse the situation.' The Queen did not believe that the crisis in the marriage was so great that the couple would officially separate as a possible prelude to divorce. An unofficial, unannounced 'separate lives' agreement, her advisers believed, would be sufficient to paper over the cracks. 'The one thing she wasn't prepared for was the problem in the Yorks' marriage,' said the Palace source. 'Andrew came as a complete shock — it came from nowhere.' Instead of having to deal with the ramifications of one failed marriage, she had been faced with what the Conservatives like to call 'a double whammy'.

Her feelings towards Diana were summed up in a remark she made to a friend: 'Life is more difficult now that we've got this tiresome girl.' Ironically, she had always got along with Sarah in a quaint sort of way. She firmly believed that once Steve Wyatt had been chilled out of her life, she would start to mend her ways. She couldn't accept that the Duchess would walk away from the wealth and privilege of her position. When the St Tropez pictures surfaced, Her Majesty insisted on some extremely tough terms for the financial side of the separation. Fergie, who had behaved like a pools winner ever since joining the Royal Family, got only £600,000 - with strings attached. If she and Andrew divorced and she remarried, she would have to repay half that amount.

In September 1992, in the middle of those prolonged and often fraught negotiations, Her Majesty revealed her tax strategy to John Major during his visit to Balmoral. In view of the family difficulties, it was agreed that an announcement should be delayed, but Major nevertheless leaked her intention to cut £1.4 million from the Civil List. 'This made it seem as though it was his idea,' said a Labour opponent. 'John Major will emerge as the unsung hero of 1992,' countered Morton. 'Unlike Mrs Thatcher, he has a very cordial relationship with the Queen and, unlike Mrs Thatcher again, he was able to suggest certain things, or to implement certain ideas from the Queen's side which have helped to bring the monarchy forward a little. But, unfortunately, she was negotiating from a defensive position as opposed to a position of authority. If the Queen had agreed to pay tax five years ago, she would have been praised to the heavens.'

A large part of the problem was that nobody, including the Queen, knew the full extent of her wealth. It had been calculated variously at £50 million, £250 million, £2.5 billion and £7.5 billion. Even the lowest figure made her one of the mega-rich. Parsimonious by nature, she held back until fate itself intervened. On Black Wednesday, 16 September, the economy faced its gravest crisis in living memory. Interest rates blipped up and down on the economic cardiograph, rising and falling four times in a single day. The Bank of England poured £10 billion from the national reserves into the money markets in a vain attempt to stem a concerted run on the pound. Finally, the Chancellor, Norman Lamont, pulled Britain out of the exchange rate mechanism, effectively devaluing sterling by twenty per cent. It was a chaotic piece of mismanagement typical of the Chancellor's unreliable grip on the economy. Britain had become the sick man of Europe. Compared with the billions made by speculators who gambled against the pound, the Queen's pledge of a £1.4 million saving seemed trifling. She would have to think again.