Her Majesty (34 page)

Politics aside, Prince Philip remains adamant that the Yacht did not need replacing. ‘She ought to have had her steam turbines taken out and diesel engines put in,’ he told an ITV documentary to mark his ninetieth birthday. ‘She was as sound as a bell and she could have gone on for another fifty years.’ As it turned out, she lasted just seven months into the new administration.

Britannia
enjoyed one last world tour to provide Britain and the Prince of Wales with a dignified platform from which to hand Hong Kong back to China. Following her return, the Royal Family gathered in Portsmouth in December 1997 for a decommissioning ceremony. The Queen was not the only one seen to shed tears that day. This was not just a royal mode of transport. It was a home, full of memories of royal childhoods and family memorabilia – Prince Philip’s collection of driftwood and all sorts of unusual trinkets and gifts which had no obvious place at Buckingham Palace or Windsor or anywhere else. It was in
Britannia
that the Queen kept a muchloved copper coffee table given to her in Zambia and an original set of G Plan furniture. The ambiance was that of a small country house – lots of understated style and plenty of character. Naval engineers had even designed the royal observation decks so that gusts of wind were vented downwards. That way, there could be no Marilyn Monroe moments with the royal skirts.

Finally, in April 1998, it was announced that
Britannia
would be towed to Scotland to spend the rest of her days as a tourist attraction in the port of Leith. She remains there to this day in the care of a charitable trust.

Perhaps
Britannia
’s innate problem was that she did her best work overseas, beyond the gaze of the taxpayers who paid for her. To this day, the rest of the world remains utterly baffled that the Queen has lost her maritime residence. ‘I would like the British government to give her back her ship,’ says President Nasheed of the Maldives. ‘It’s madness to take it away.’ He even suggests, only half jokingly, a Commonwealth solution: ‘I think we should all chip in!’ In Britain, however,
Britannia
was associated with royal holidays – Cowes Week, the Queen’s annual Scottish
cruise and the occasional royal honeymoon. Perhaps it was a mistake to call her ‘The Royal Yacht’ in the first place. To many people the word ‘yacht’ has too many connotations of leisure and pleasure, of gin palaces, gold taps and Mediterranean fleshpots.

Perhaps it was all down to timing.
Britannia
needed either refurbishment or replacement at the very moment that royal fortunes were at a post-war low. Had anyone suggested getting rid of her a few years later, it might not have happened. ‘I think if it had happened five years into my time,’ Blair admits, ‘I would have just said: “No.”‘ In any case,
Britannia
was seen as a symbol of ‘Old’ Britain. Fresh symbols were required for a new era and a new century.

Two years later, on the last night of 1999, Blair welcomed the Queen to the opening of a bold new statement about ‘New’ Britain, its values and its place in the world. The Millennium Dome had cost twelve times more than a new Royal Yacht. It lasted a year before the shutters came down and the tumbleweed came rolling through. Years later, it would reopen as a successful concert venue. But it has never sold a single sausage machine.

The early years of the Blair government were some of the most tumultuous of the Queen’s reign. Four months in, the new Prime Minister found himself helping the Royal Family through the febrile days which followed the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. As one member of the New Labour administration recalls: ‘They’d come a little closer than they really felt comfortable with in having a major crisis. Ultimately, the people would have come back to them but it was a little shocking to them.

‘New Labour had not had any reason to demonstrate closeness to the monarchy,’ says Mary Francis. ‘But this was the moment at which Tony Blair realised he had got to support the monarchy and see it through because it wasn’t in anyone’s interests to have the whole thing collapsing around his ears.’

A month later, the Queen’s state visit to India turned into an embarrassing catalogue of diplomatic slights following injudicious remarks by her new Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook. Accompanying the Queen in Pakistan the previous week, Cook had let slip that he favoured an international solution to the disputed Indian territory of Kashmir. Pakistan was thrilled. India, which wants no such thing, was furious.

As a result, the Queen arrived in New Delhi to be greeted by gratuitous abuse in the Indian media. On the eve of her arrival, the Indian Prime Minister described her as the leader of a ‘third-rate nation’. The Band of the Royal Marines, in town to accompany the tour, was suddenly
disinvited from a reception for the Queen. The diplomatic atmosphere was disastrous from the off. As the British press laid the blame squarely with Cook, he took the extraordinary step of asking the Queen’s Private Secretary, Sir Robert Fellowes, to issue a statement saying that the Queen was ‘entirely satisfied with the advice from the Foreign Secretary’.

Since the Queen acts on the advice of her ministers, Fellowes had no choice. As, Kenneth Rose has pointed out, however, this set a dangerous precedent. If the Monarch could be made to speak up for a minister, what was she to say when she was no longer ‘entirely satisfied’ with him?

Just five months later, there was another cavalier approach to the old constitutional customs. The government decided to endorse a backbench campaign to introduce sex equality to the line of royal succession (Coalition Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg would attempt something similar thirteen years later, just before the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge). The centuries-old rule that royal brothers should automatically jump ahead of royal sisters seemed about to be overturned following the introduction of a Private Members’ Bill in the House of Lords by Lord Archer of Weston-Super-Mare (otherwise known as novelist Jeffrey Archer). The Home Office minister, Lord Williams of Mostyn, told Parliament that the Queen had been consulted and had ‘no objection’. Cue uproar on the Conservative benches. The bible of parliamentary procedure, Erskine May, makes it very clear that the Monarch’s view shall never be known let alone used to influence any debate. If we know what she thinks about one Bill, so the argument goes, then we might want to know her views on another. A select committee was duly convened to investigate whether a constitutional abuse had occurred. Lord Williams was absolved of wrongdoing on this occasion, but the government accepted that his words should not be taken as a precedent (in other words: ‘This won’t happen again.’). The Succession To The Crown Bill died a quiet death soon afterwards.

None of this could be described as throne-rocking stuff, but it showed a different mindset at work in government. The monarchy could not expect the old conventions and routines to carry on unchallenged. Sir Malcolm Ross, architect of major royal events for nearly twenty years, clearly remembers the change of mood at one of the first state occasions of the New Labour era. As usual, the Honourable Corps of Gentlemen at Arms, the Monarch’s ‘closest’ bodyguard, were on parade – retired gents in plumed helmets and nineteenth-century uniforms. But the effect was lost on the new Foreign Secretary. As Ross recalls, with some amusement: ‘Robin Cook was attending and the bodyguard marched on. Suddenly, the cry came from this very loud voice: “Who are these
extraordinary
old men?”’

Culture clashes were to be expected. What really concerned the Queen’s senior advisers was Labour’s programme of constitutional reforms, particularly the creation of a new Scottish Parliament and the proposals to remove the hereditary peers from the House of Lords. It was not the proposals themselves which were the issue. These were all well-debated policies which had been in the election manifesto of an all-conquering political party. The big question for the Queen’s officials was how best to keep the monarchy entirely detached from these issues. The obvious hurdle was reform of the Lords. ‘I have no idea what the Queen’s personal views were about it,’ says Mary Francis. ‘But the Palace was sufficiently savvy to see that this was going to happen. The vital thing was to make it clear that having a monarchy doesn’t rest on having a hereditary aristocracy. We had to de-link the hereditary principle in the Lords from the hereditary principle in the monarchy.’ Their task was not helped by royalist commentators in the conservative press insisting that abolishing Earls and Dukes in the Lords was a threat to the monarchy itself.

Were Mary Francis and her colleagues grateful for all this loyal support from papers like the
Daily Telegraph
? ‘No,’ she says with a laugh. ‘We did not want to be defended like that. The view was that a constitutional monarchy works without those bells and whistles and the vital thing was to make sure no one thought anything else.’

Tony Blair had the same concerns. ‘There were some people who said: “If you start tampering with the hereditary principles here, it’s only a short step,”’ he recalls. ‘Whereas my view was that it’s not a short step. It’s a completely different issue.’ But he took care to make his views clear to the Queen. ‘I used to have this conversation with her. My point was that I’m a classic representative of the modern view: I can’t honestly justify my laws being made by people on the basis of [birth]. I can’t do it. And, besides, it gives the Conservatives a perpetual majority in one of the Houses of Parliament. On the other hand, the monarchy is a completely different thing.’

The joint Palace/government strategy of ‘de-linking’ the monarchy from the ‘toffs’ actually worked rather well and the expulsion of the hereditary half of the Lords was achieved with no collateral damage to the monarchy.
^*
What the Queen really thought, we do not know. Several senior ex-courtiers actually believe that the demise of the hereditaries
from Parliament has been a great boon for the monarchy. Heredity is no longer an open political sore.

For Mary Francis and her colleagues, though, there was another equally precarious debate to avoid. Blair and his ministers were planning to create a new parliament for Scotland and an assembly for Wales. Whatever the end results, the Queen’s primary concern was to keep the monarchy out of any rows about national identity. ‘People spent a lot of time asking: how does it affect the Queen and her overall role in the country? I wouldn’t say they were worried but they certainly wanted to make sure they got it right,’ Francis recalls. As the Palace representative on the government working groups for all of this, Francis remained assiduously neutral. ‘There was no inclination to challenge any of it,’ she says.

While there was plenty of heated public debate over symbols and ceremonial for the new legislature. Who would be in the procession? Would that famous Scottish nationalist Sean Connery be turning up? Yet a thumping great piece of constitutional reform passed by with little public comment. The Queen was, in effect, to be demoted. She might have the constitutional right to hire and fire prime ministers of the United Kingdom but the new First Minister of Scotland would simply be handed to her on a plate by the Presiding Officer (or Speaker) of the Scottish Parliament.

Tony Blair will not go into detail but is clear that he had ‘a lot of discussions’ not only with the Queen but with her Private Secretary and the Prince of Wales. While the Palace was not challenging the government, this still had to be a consultative process. ‘They weren’t saying, “We don’t agree with you.” They were simply reflecting on it. I found that not only proper but also very helpful,’ says Blair. ‘There was a concern, which I shared, that devolution was one step on the path to independence. For the Queen, it wouldn’t be great to be the Queen presiding over the break-up of the United Kingdom. So, I would explain my thinking on this which was that unless you offered this halfway house within the United Kingdom, you really would at some point find a fullblown march to independence. As it turned out, it never really happened and actually I think the financial crisis has probably removed any serious possibility. But I said to people throughout that this is a perfectly legitimate worry.’ That worry would certainly become more legitimate, shortly after this discussion, when the Scottish National Party secured an overall majority in the 2011 elections to the Scottish Parliament. The Queen was reported to have sought a special briefing from Prime Minister David Cameron on the subject. Whether an independent Scotland retained the monarchy or not, any unravelling of the United Kingdom would be a seismic constitutional challenge for the Monarch.

Given the party’s mandate at the polls, some of Labour’s new young bloods felt that it was time to question and, possibly, do away with what they saw as outdated flummery. And the sentiment was not confined to the political elite. Within the Civil Service, there were plenty of radical young bucks who felt that a rare opportunity had come to shake out a lot of dusty tradition. So, when the parliamentary and royal authorities set about planning the State Opening of Parliament after Labour’s repeat success in the 2001 election, some of those involved suggested a new form of ceremony. ‘Why can’t she come in a car?’ asked one. Another wondered why the Queen had to deliver the Queen’s Speech from her throne in the unelected House of Lords. Could she not address both Houses of Parliament in Westminster Great Hall? Tony Blair is adamant that these suggestions were not coming from his advisers, despite their zeal for modernising so many other facets of national life. ‘The irony is it wasn’t us. It wasn’t the Alastair Campbells of this world at all. They couldn’t give two hoots about it. There were people in the Civil Service who were desperate. They suddenly thought: “We’ve got a Labour government. For God’s sake, if you’re not prepared to take on all this flummery of the monarchy …” My attitude to it, despite what the press kept writing, was absolutely clear. The Queen’s Speech is a great event. Why do you want her to turn up on a tandem? It’s ridiculous. She’s there in the carriage and it gets filmed around the world!’ Blair says that he repeatedly had to ward off the meddlers: ‘It would usually be some younger guy in the Civil Service talking about this and I would say: “No. I’ve got more important things to worry about and, in any case, I like it.”’