Elizabeth the Queen (62 page)

The two main concerns among the Queen’s senior counselors at the outset were that the monarchy was losing support among the young, and that the royal family was perceived to be “too myopic and inward looking.” In general, the research, which included some focus groups as well as traditional surveys, established that support for the monarchy is a stable and enduring value for the British people, transcending the headline of the moment—knowledge that gave the Palace greater confidence and enabled it to take a long view. The results of the private polling over the first several years also confirmed that while support for a republic among people in their twenties ranged from 28 percent to 35 percent, by the time they reached their mid-thirties, they would “revert to the mean” of 19 percent. “People start thinking about the future, about raising kids, living in a decent country,” said Robert Worcester. “That is why the monarchy is such a deep value and so consistent.” The most conspicuous area of weakness for the royal family was the perception that they were out of touch, which was held by more than a third of the British people when polling began in the late 1990s.

While Palace officials found much of the research reassuring, they began to develop strategies to respond to public opinion and show that the royal family was “in touch.” Surveys helped the Palace choose places the Queen should visit and themes for events she sponsored. They upgraded the press secretary’s job to “communications secretary” and recruited a public relations professional from British Gas, thirty-nine-year-old Simon Lewis, on a two-year secondment, with half his salary paid by his corporate employer. He first met the Queen and Prince Philip on a Friday afternoon at the end of May 1998.

“My abiding impression was how remarkably open they were,” Lewis recalled. “We had a discussion of what I would do and what the challenges were. It was more discursive than I had anticipated.” Lewis was struck “by the interaction between the two of them, how comfortable and easy they were, and how they had both thought about this role together. It was a very balanced discussion.” Philip in particular “had thought carefully about the communications area. The probing discussion was led by him. He was very interested in the nascent website, and he was pushing the idea of direct contact with the public. He had given up on the traditional media, which he thought was unwinnable. In his view, the only way was direct communication. I was impressed by how farsighted he was.”

The royal family began to manage its public duties more closely as well. In late 1994 David Airlie had started the Way Ahead Group to bring together the Queen, Prince Philip, their four children, and senior advisers twice a year to coordinate their plans. Now they focused on shaping the family’s activities to incorporate some of the best of what Diana had done, lessening the formality (instructing people before meeting members of the royal family that the bow and curtsy were optional), and consistently taking a more unassuming approach to public engagements—sitting down for tea in public housing projects, or walking around a classroom rather than peering in the door. “It is not heart on the sleeve or contrived,” explained one courtier. “But showing more empathy.”

The watchword became “imperceptible evolution,” based on an analogy that Robin Janvrin called “the Marmite theory of monarchy.” The salty food spread found in British cupboards for over a century has a distinctive red, yellow, and green label that is comforting in its familiarity. But only by comparing a fifty-year-old Marmite jar with one on contemporary shelves is it possible to see pronounced differences. The jar evolved so gradually and slowly that the changes were imperceptible. By Janvrin’s theory, the monarchy needed to change the same way—incrementally over time, small steps rather than large steps, so people were reassured that the institution was staying the same while adapting.

But Janvrin and his colleagues did make the occasional misstep, such as when they arranged for the Queen to greet people outside a McDonald’s restaurant in a display of populism. Determined to cast the visit in a poor light, the press ran photographs of her Rolls-Royce under the fast-food sign, making the appearance look contrived. Elizabeth II had a word with Robin Janvrin afterward, but she didn’t belabor the matter. “She has incredibly good instincts about how something will be perceived,” said Simon Lewis. “I was struck by her pragmatism and her sense of what would work. She has a finely tuned sense of the moment. On occasion ideas would be put to her and she would say, ‘We can’t do that. It’s far too grand.’ ”

T
HE FINAL YEARS
of the twentieth century brought the Queen a new round of worries, this time about her mother and her sister. The Queen Mother was inevitably growing more fragile as she neared her hundredth birthday, although she still had her doughty spirit, refusing offers of a wheelchair and even balking at using a cane. “Time is not my dictator,” said the Queen Mother. “I dictate to time. I want to meet people.”

She continued her royal rounds even after she had her right hip replaced in November 1995. While visiting the Sandringham Stud in January 1998, she fell and broke her left hip, which required a second replacement surgery. At age ninety-seven, she made another remarkable comeback and appeared at the end of March at St. James’s Palace for her annual Clothing Guild meeting—the first of forty-six public engagements that year.

Margaret’s problems were psychological as well as physical. She had suffered from a range of ailments over the years—migraines, depression, bronchitis, gastroenteritis, and alcoholic hepatitis—resulting mainly from her excessive drinking and smoking. She had surgery in 1985 to remove a small portion of her lung. Although it wasn’t malignant, she had tried—unsuccessfully—to stop smoking, and she had cut back on her Famous Grouse whisky.

The two sisters kept up their daily phone calls, and when Margaret traveled overseas, she would call the Queen first thing on arrival. At Balmoral, Margaret “was almost like a poor relation,” said one courtier. “The Queen felt sorry for her.” “Sometimes Margaret was a very lonely person,” said her longtime friend Jane Rayne. “After Tony, then Roddy, no one else made her happy,” observed a man who was friendly with Margaret. “At dinner parties she would often indicate that I should drive her home. She would ask me in, and offer me a drink, then she would talk about all her personal problems.”

In late February 1998 Margaret suffered a mild stroke at age sixty-seven. She recovered well, although she showed signs of fatigue as well as forgetfulness. Almost exactly a year later, she badly scalded her feet while taking a bath in her house on Mustique. The Queen arranged for her to be flown by Concorde back to England, where she was treated at King Edward VII Hospital. Afterward she had difficulty walking and often relied on a wheelchair. There were other signs of decline as well. Since the early 1980s, Margaret had faithfully corresponded with Nancy Reagan, but in 1999 her lady-in-waiting Annabel Whitehead had to begin writing on her behalf.

As late as May 1999 the Queen was unsure whether her ailing sister could attend the wedding the following month of Prince Edward to thirty-four-year-old Sophie Rhys-Jones, a middle-class career woman who bore a passing resemblance to Diana. The daughter of an auto parts salesman and a homemaker, Sophie had grown up in the Kentish countryside and attended Kent College Pembury, a well-regarded girls school. After working in a variety of public relations jobs, she started her own firm in 1996. She met Edward while promoting a charity tennis tournament in 1993, and after dating for five years, they announced their engagement in January 1999.

Following the debacle of
It’s a Royal Knockout
, Edward had made a modestly successful career as a producer of films including documentaries on haunted castles in Wales, his great-uncle the Duke of Windsor, and the restoration of Windsor Castle. But as the last of the Queen’s children to marry, thirty-five-year-old Edward had also been subjected to such a persistent whispering campaign about his sexuality that Sophie herself denied publicly that he was gay. “How I’d love to be able to go out and sing from the rooftops: IT IS NOT TRUE,” she said. “I want to prove it to people, but it’s impossible to do that.”

Unlike the other royal siblings, Edward and Sophie had a relatively low-key wedding in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle on June 19 that they organized as much as possible on their own. The Queen gave them the titles of Earl and Countess of Wessex and set them up in a fifty-six-room Victorian house in Surrey called Bagshot Park that was criticized as excessive for their position in the royal family. They both continued in their jobs and were known professionally as Edward and Sophie Wessex, determined to combine royal life with everyday work.

E
LIZABETH
II
LOST
one of the stalwart figures in her life that December with the death of Martin Charteris at eighty-six. He had been diagnosed early in the month with advanced liver cancer and was immediately admitted to King Edward VII Hospital. While he was there, the Queen came for an hour-long visit. “They picked up right away on topics that were current,” recalled Gay Charteris. “They talked about all sorts of issues. I had never seen them talk that way together.” At no point did the Queen commiserate with her long-serving adviser about his terminal condition. “She knew that was pointless,” said his widow, “and that Martin wanted to talk about the kinds of things they had talked about when he worked for her.”

After three weeks, he left the hospital and died at his home in Gloucestershire on December 23. A year later the Queen invited the Charteris family to Windsor Castle for the installation of a cast-iron fireback that he had been sculpting in the last year of his life. He had died before finishing it, so a young sculptor at Eton completed the job. The design had all the royal emblems, and in a fanciful touch, three corgis as well. “I know if Martin had lived, one of the corgis would have lifted its leg,” said his widow. The Queen placed the fireback in St. George’s Hall, a reminder of the man who was her friend as well as her courtier.

T
O CELEBRATE
M
ILLENNIUM
Eve on December 31, 1999, the Blairs invited the Queen and Prince Philip, along with Anne and her husband, to the vast Millennium Dome in Greenwich. Originally intended as an exhibition center that would symbolize New Labour’s “Cool Britannia” image, the dome had been plagued by cost overruns and poor planning. Tony Blair promised that the opening night extravaganza would be nothing less than “the greatest show on earth.” It featured acrobats in the nether reaches of the structure, a concert, and, shortly before midnight, a prayer read by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Alastair Campbell observed that Elizabeth II “at least managed the odd smile,” while the others “looked very pissed off to be there.” Anne, in particular, “was like granite.” One reason may have been the absence of heat, which caused the Queen, among thousands of other guests, to keep her coat buttoned. “It was pretty clear they would rather be sitting under their traveling rugs at Balmoral,” recalled Campbell. As the clock struck twelve everyone was expected to link arms and sing “Auld Lang Syne.” The Queen merely stared ahead and lightly clasped the fingers of Blair and Philip, who gave her a rare public kiss on the cheek. Even Blair called the touchy-feely moment “ghastly.”

Despite her obvious discomfort on New Year’s Eve, the Queen had established a fond relationship with Blair. She had presided over the opening of the Scottish Parliament and witnessed the establishment of the National Assembly for Wales—two essential pieces of New Labour’s program to devolve some legislative powers away from the British Parliament in Westminster after decades of nationalist pressure. “The Queen had a central role in the devolution process,” said Simon Lewis. “So it was important for her to be there and visible. As the country was changing, she needed to be seen to be involved.” In accepting devolution, she was careful to point out that politicians should be mindful that “the kingdom can still enjoy all the benefits of remaining united.… The parts are only fragments of a whole,” and with unity “we can be much more than the sum of those fragments.”

In the early going, Blair was not as assiduous about his weekly audiences at the Palace as he later became, and he was known to do an irreverent impersonation of Her Majesty: “Now Blair, no more of this people’s princess nonsense, because I am the people’s Queen.” In time, he developed a “high regard for her street smarts,” said Jonathan Powell, Blair’s chief of staff, and her skill “at assessing people and situations.” Blair recognized that she kept her finger “steadily on the national pulse—more, probably, than people would perhaps perceive.” “Her quality is the ability to get underneath what is happening,” Blair said. “It’s not just a question of knowing the facts on this and this and this.… It’s also being able to sense … the small p politics of something.”

Like his predecessors, Blair came to regard the Queen’s audience room as a sanctuary. “He was always working flat-out, one meeting after another,” said another of his advisers. “When he climbed into the car with his private secretary it was a moment for decompression. It was a time of tranquillity for him, to walk in and sit down and talk about what the Queen wanted to discuss.” He appreciated that she was “very to the point” and “very direct.” He learned, he later wrote, that “you don’t get matey with the Queen. Occasionally she can be matey with you, but don’t try to reciprocate or you get The Look.”

Cherie Blair mellowed in her view of the royal family after a rocky beginning in which she had frosty exchanges with both Princess Margaret and Princess Anne, who declined to call her Cherie because, said Anne, “it’s not the way I’ve been brought up.” “I have a soft spot for Prince Philip,” Cherie said. “He and I share a great interest in the Internet.” The prime minister’s wife enjoyed the barbecues at Balmoral that initially flummoxed her husband when “the person who you have grown up with as the Queen” was “fussing around you and looking after you.” Mostly Cherie was impressed by the way Elizabeth II played with the Blairs’ two-year-old son, Leo, during a visit to the Highlands, patiently teaching him how to toss biscuits to the corgis and reacting with benign tolerance when he threw a handful around the room.