Elizabeth the Queen (50 page)

There had been press reports in previous weeks speculating that Elizabeth II was concerned that some members could leave the Commonwealth over Thatcher’s South Africa policy. At the October 1985 meeting of Commonwealth leaders in Nassau, Thatcher had vigorously opposed a package of harshly punitive economic sanctions, arguing that they would lead to black unemployment in South Africa, harm the exports of British businesses, and push the white minority government headed by P. W. Botha even further to the right. The Queen had encouraged Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney, who was serving as chairman of the Commonwealth, to work with the other leaders to find a unified position in their efforts to end apartheid.

Elizabeth II offered no opinion about sanctions. But as in Lusaka six years earlier, she dispelled tensions in her individual meetings with the leaders, this time in her stateroom on
Britannia
, emphasizing the “moral obligation” to keep talking. Thatcher eventually compromised by signing the group’s communiqué denouncing apartheid, calling for curbs on bank loans and trade missions, and establishing a group of seven leaders to meet in London the following August to consider further actions. The
Sunday Times
article landed only days before the so-called mini-summit was scheduled to begin.

The newspaper’s sweeping claims about domestic as well as foreign policy ran counter to the Queen’s ironclad rule, which she had followed for the thirty-four years of her reign, to be utterly discreet about political matters. “She never expressed her views on sensitive topics,” said one of her senior advisers. Nor did she have any foreknowledge of the
Sunday Times
article, which her private secretary, William Heseltine, emphatically denounced as false. The question became not only who would leak such an account, but why.

To shield its informant,
The Sunday Times
had misleadingly said it had multiple sources, but by the end of the week the culprit was unmasked as Shea. He admitted that he had spoken to reporter Simon Freeman on a background basis several times by telephone, thinking he was briefing him for a speculative story on the monarchy in the twenty-first century. Shea said he talked in general terms and that Freeman and the newspaper’s political editor, Michael Jones, had “misinterpreted” his words. Freeman insisted that Shea had specifically attributed left-of-center opinions on a range of issues to the Queen, and that the story had been cleared by the press secretary before publication. Shea countered that Freeman had withheld “crucial parts” when he read back the story.

The press secretary’s colleagues, none of whom had known about Shea’s dealings with the
Sunday Times
reporter, concluded that Andrew Neil, the newspaper’s editor, had cooked up a provocative story line, that Freeman had used a combination of cajolery and flattery, and that Shea had gone overboard in a burst of ego and vanity. Even Rupert Murdoch told
Times
and
News of the World
columnist Woodrow Wyatt, “I think he has megalomania.” Shea was also venting his own liberal views that friends had heard him express at dinner parties. “He personally didn’t go for Margaret Thatcher,” said Elizabeth II’s friend Angela Oswald. “He put words in the Queen’s mouth that she never said. She was brought up never to get involved in party politics. She would never imply that she favored one politician over another.”

A week after the story was published, the Queen and her prime minister were at Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh, where Shea was seated between them at a luncheon. He apologized to Thatcher, who simply said, “Don’t worry, dear.” Later that day in a phone conversation, Woodrow Wyatt told Thatcher that the Queen should fire Shea or force him to resign. “Well, I can’t do anything about that,” she said. “It’s up to her. But we will have to see whether new arrangements are made to prevent such a thing happening again. I think they will be.” In a matter of months Shea left his job at the Palace to work in private industry.

On August 4, 1986, Elizabeth II hosted the first “working dinner” of her reign when she gathered the seven Commonwealth leaders at Buckingham Palace after their first round of mini-summit meetings at 10 Downing Street. Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe called it a “deliberate act by the Queen … to remind us all of our commitment to get on with each other.” Earlier that day, Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda had strenuously attacked Thatcher, unfairly accusing her of sympathizing with apartheid. Deploying remarkable sangfroid, Thatcher calmed him by taking his arm and saying, “Now Kenneth, we must get ourselves lunch before we have another vigorous discussion this afternoon.” That night at dinner, the Queen glanced at Kaunda and said with a twinkle to Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, “How is the emotional one?”

“There was no doubt that Her Majesty sided with the Commonwealth,” said Brian Mulroney. “But she couldn’t speak out. You had to understand the nuances and body language. She did it by allusion and by indirection. At the dinner she was a great moderating influence on everyone. She led us through an elevated discussion of human rights. I don’t know how much opinion she expressed, but she would nudge everyone in a certain direction.” By the end of the conference, Thatcher joined the other six leaders on a set of recommendations to be presented later to all forty-nine Commonwealth members. “What saved the day,” recalled Brian Mulroney, “was that Margaret was aware Her Majesty certainly wanted some kind of resolution. So we were able to put in three or four financial things that Margaret accepted, which allowed us to move on to the next meeting without rupture.”

A
FTER THEIR ANNUAL
Balmoral holiday, the Queen and Prince Philip traveled to the People’s Republic of China in mid-October, the first time a British monarch had visited the Chinese mainland. The planning had begun several years earlier. The Queen read extensive briefs on history and culture, as well as on the habits of Deng Xiaoping, the country’s eighty-two-year-old leader, including his bridge playing and incessant smoking. The royal couple’s itinerary took them from Beijing to Shanghai, Kunming, and the ancient city of X’ian, where they walked among the vast army of life-size terra-cotta warriors that had recently been unearthed by archaeologists.

Elizabeth II charmed Deng when they were having lunch and she detected that he was becoming restless. Turning to Geoffrey Howe, she said, “I think Mr. Deng would be rather happier if he was told he was allowed to smoke.” Recalled Howe, “I’ve never seen a man light up more cheerfully. It was a very human touch and he appreciated it.” When the Chinese leader let fly into a spittoon several feet away, the Queen “didn’t move a muscle,” said Michael Shea.

The trip was going smoothly until Philip encountered a group of British students in X’ian and cautioned them that they would get “slitty eyes” if they stayed in China much longer. The tabloid pack howled with glee and filed stories about the duke’s insult to the entire Chinese nation, sweeping aside all the positive coverage of the Queen’s diplomatic bridge building.

“The British press went nuts,” said one of the Queen’s advisers, “but we couldn’t figure out why after the slitty-eyed remark there was no comment in China.” The courtiers assumed their hosts didn’t want to spoil the visit, but senior officials in the Chinese government said later that they had scarcely noticed because they used the term privately among themselves.

For Philip, it was the latest in a long line of gaffes attributed to him by the press when he was trying, in the view of his friend Sir David Attenborough, to “puncture the balloon” during earnest royal rounds. “I don’t know why he has the gift of trying to think of something funny that ends up offending,” said one of the Queen’s former private secretaries. “There is a degree of insensitivity, and once the press gets hold, it looks for further examples and ignores everything else.”

Philip’s wisecracks masked the considerable intellect and surprising dimensions behind his brusque personality, as well as the substantive role he played at the Palace. As chancellor of both Cambridge and Edinburgh universities, he encouraged innovation, especially in technology. “My only claim to fame is that I’m the most experienced visitor of technological facilities,” he once said. “I’ve been doing it professionally for forty years. I can claim to have petted the first microchip on the head.” The thousands of books in his library included substantial collections devoted to religion, wildlife (with a particular passion for ornithology), conservation, sports, and horses as well as poetry and art. His little recognized artistic talent ranged from his oil painting to a flair for designing jewelry, including a gold bracelet entwined with E and P and set with diamonds, rubies, and sapphires that he had given to his wife on their fifth wedding anniversary.

By 1984 he had written nine books—anthologies of speeches, essays on religion, philosophy, science, and conservation, as well as the complete rules for competition carriage driving. He had also appeared on the documentary series
Nature
to plea for the preservation of rain forests in Brazil—a cause his son Charles would take up decades later. In 1982 he began driving a Bedford Smith electric van around the Sandringham estate, and the solar panels he installed there were among the first to be used in Britain—an “energy saving,” he conceded, rather than a replacement for other sources.

“Sometimes I would take an idea to the Queen—not a constitutional issue, because she would ask her private secretary for that,” recalled one of her former courtiers. “She would say, ‘What does Philip think?’ She would make it clear that she wanted you to take the idea to him first, rather than clutter her time with him talking about routine business.”

In his discussions with his wife’s advisers, “Prince Philip would ask for lots of lines of inquiries,” the courtier said. “She might say, ‘Have you thought of x or y?’ It would not be the same way you would engage with Prince Philip. It is not that the Queen does not have the mind for it, but there is a lot that comes across her desk, and she is not the sort to zero in and peel the skin of the onion away every time until you get to the heart of it. He has a sort of Defence Staff rigor, the ability to pull an idea to bits, find the good parts and the parts that need work. You take it back to the Queen once you know that Prince Philip’s view is there, and then you go over it. You know if he is happy with the idea, she will probably be too.”

A crucial issue facing the Queen in the mid-1980s was an unprecedented top-to-bottom review of the administration and expenses at Buckingham Palace conducted by David Airlie, who became her Lord Chamberlain on December 1, 1984, at age fifty-nine after retiring as chairman of Schroders, the venerable merchant banking firm. As a lifelong friend, he was a known quantity. One of his favorite photographs shows Airlie with five-year-old Princess Elizabeth on his fifth birthday after his parents had given him a shiny pedal car. When his father suggested he let the princess ride in it, David resisted mightily until he finally yielded. In the picture, she is happily steering the car while the future 13th Earl of Airlie is pushing it with a furious scowl on his face.

The Queen knew that Airlie was due to retire from banking at the end of November, the same time that Chips Maclean was retiring from the Lord Chamberlain post after thirteen years running the household at Buckingham Palace. Maclean, who had served in the Scots Guards with Airlie, asked if he would consider taking on the job. Soon afterward Airlie was at Sandringham on a shoot when the Queen said, “Do you really want to be Lord Chamberlain?” That was the extent of his job interview with his future boss, but in fact a good deal of thought had been given to his recruitment.

Airlie was known as a tough and highly successful businessman as well as a debonair aristocrat—just the sort who had the credibility and expertise to bring a fresh eye to Palace operations. He was struck immediately that Elizabeth II was “enormously practical” and “extremely businesslike.” If he wrote her a memorandum requiring an answer, she would invariably return it within twenty-four hours. If not, he would know that she hadn’t made up her mind and wanted “to sit on it and think about it.” Although he had been in her company socially for years, Airlie discerned for the first time her powers of observation during public engagements. “The reason why she moves slowly is that she wants to absorb what’s going on in the room and the people in the room,” he said. “You can see her looking around the room as she walks in and taking it all in and my goodness me what she takes in never ceases to amaze me.”

After he had spent six months looking and listening, he advised her to hire an outside consultant for an internal review, to ensure that the result would be evenhanded and unassailably professional. With the Queen’s backing, he brought in thirty-five-year-old Michael Peat, a fellow Old Etonian who had graduated from Oxford and received an MBA from the prestigious INSEAD business school in France. Peat had worked for more than a decade at his family’s accounting firm, KPMG, the auditor of the Palace books, and Airlie had gotten to know him while he was at Schroders.

Under Airlie’s supervision, Peat spent more than a year preparing a 1,393-page report with 188 recommendations for streamlining the household and instituting the “best practices” that were being adopted by many businesses. These included setting up a more professional personnel department and creating the Royal Collection Department to oversee the monarchy’s artistic holdings as well as the retail shops and other commercial enterprises. Among the suggestions were personnel cutbacks, but at the Lord Chamberlain’s insistence to be achieved only by natural attrition rather than by actually firing people.

Airlie kept both Elizabeth II and Philip informed as the review was under way, although not in detail. The Lord Chamberlain understood that the Queen distrusted change for change’s sake, but was open to well-reasoned argument. By the time the report was issued in December 1986, the Queen accepted everything, and within three years, 162 of the reforms were put into effect.