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Elizabeth Our Queen

HER MAJESTY QUEEN Elizabeth II, the thirty-eighth sovereign of England since William the Conqueror, and the sixth queen regnant, succeeded her father at an unknown moment in the early hours of 6 February 1952. She was far away at Sangana Lodge in Nyeri, Kenya, waiting for the dawn to come up from a lookout point at the top of a tree, which gave an unrivalled view of the animals at the watering hole below. She was accompanied by Lieutenant-Commander Michael Parker, private secretary to the Duke of Edinburgh, who recalled that as they looked at the iridescent light that preceded the sunrise, an eagle hovered over their heads. It was about this time that the King died alone in his sleep at Sandringham and that Elizabeth succeeded to the throne.

Queen Elizabeth II was the first sovereign to be proclaimed in absentia since the accession of her German forebear, George I, in 1714. In Kenya, Martin Charteris, who was to serve her as assistant private secretary and private secretary for twenty-seven years, asked her what she wanted to be called as queen. ‘My own name, Elizabeth, of course,’ she replied. Strictly speaking, north of the border in Scotland she is Elizabeth I. Touching down in London after a twenty-four-hour journey, the slight, graceful figure of the twenty-five-year-old Queen, dressed in black mourning, walked alone down the aircraft steps to greet the Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill, and the officials gathered for her arrival.

At the Accession Council held at St James’s Palace on 8 February Elizabeth appeared, like Victoria, a solitary young woman among ‘hundreds of old men in black clothes with long faces’. Her femininity inspired the same male protectiveness – and the urge to place her on a pedestal. Churchill, whose first response on hearing of George VI’s death had been to say that the new Queen was a mere child and that he hardly knew her, was soon besotted. ‘All the film people in the world,’ he told Lord Moran, ‘if they had scoured the globe, could not have found anyone so suited to the part.’ Queen and Prime Minister presented an interesting contrast in age and experience. He greatly looked forward to their audiences and she was to reward him with the highest honour in her personal gift, the Garter.

Elizabeth was the first British monarch since Victoria who did not hold the imperial title, Empress of India. She was proclaimed as ‘Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her Other Realms and Territories, Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith’. In 1952 she was Queen of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Union of South Africa, Pakistan and Ceylon. India had become a republic during her father’s reign, but acknowledged her as Head of the Commonwealth. She was also head of colonies, territories, protectorates and protected states ranging from Hong Kong to Kenya, Cyprus to Brunei, Barbados and Jamaica to the Falkland Islands, Gibraltar to Malaya, Brunei and Sarawak to Trinidad and Tobago, Nigeria to Mauritius, Singapore to Sierra Leone, and many more. Across the globe, 539 million subjects and citizens owed her allegiance. She was a declared Protestant and Supreme Governor of the Church of England and yet Queen to millions who professed a different religion.

The monarchy was the magic link that united the loosely bound Commonwealth, embracing people of many races, colours and faiths. Perhaps conscious that the decline in the imperial role of the monarchy had already diminished its grandeur, and that the disappearance of empire would weaken its hold on the popular imagination, Elizabeth was to make it her life’s work to keep the Commonwealth together. What she had inherited from her father, she saw it as her sacred duty to hand on to her successor, although her heir will not automatically be Head of the Commonwealth.

If Elizabeth’s accession proceeded seamlessly, the vexed question of the name of her family and dynasty did not. The Duke of Edinburgh’s life had changed profoundly with the accession of his wife to the throne. He had already given up his immensely satisfying and promising naval career in order to support her in her royal duties, but now he found himself in the unwelcome position of nearly all the male consorts who preceded him. He had no wish to play a political role, participating in a dual monarchy, as his great-great-grandfather Albert had done with Victoria. But like Albert he was resented by the tightly closed circle of austere and hidebound courtiers as a foreign interloper with suspect modernizing tendencies. They were hostile and obstructive.

Their worst fears were realized when Lord Mountbatten boasted at a dinner party that the House of Mountbatten now reigned. In fact, Jock Colville maintained that Philip would have been just as happy if his children and dynasty took the name of Edinburgh, but his uncle’s inflammatory comment was a reminder to the old guard, if any were needed, of the ambitions of the ‘upstart’ Mountbattens. When it reached the ears of those two formidable matriarchs of the House of Windsor, Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, there was uproar. Sir Winston Churchill, who had no liking for the man who had given away India and was a friend of the Labour Party, eagerly espoused their cause. Cabinet and courtiers followed suit.

The young and inexperienced Queen was reputedly overawed by Churchill, the world statesman, and readily acceded to his proposal that the name of the royal house would remain Windsor. If the Prime Minister offered advice, she might have reasoned, she was constitutionally bound to take it. Indeed, taking advice was to be the passive option she generally adopted through a long reign. Lacking imagination, she rarely if ever took the initiative; she expected others to make suggestions, then she would react with caution. Nor did she ever like to gainsay her mother. She was already guilty enough that her mother had had to move out of Buckingham Palace; smarting from the fact that she was no longer Queen, she was feeling marginalized. A favourite tactic of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother if she did not approve of something was to state that ‘the King’ – as she continued to call her late husband – would not like it. Elizabeth and the family would instantly fall into line.

Indulging her mother – which became a lifelong habit – and giving in on the question of the name meant that Elizabeth deeply wounded her husband. Had she realized how hurt he would be, she would almost certainly have acted differently. It caused a froideur in the marriage for a time. Prince Albert had had the satisfaction of knowing that his son and heirs would be of the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha; Philip was denied that. ‘I am the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his children,’ he fulminated, no better than ‘an amoeba’. Although the Queen decreed in 1952 that her husband would take ‘Place, Pre-eminence and Precedence’ directly after herself, it was not until 1957 that she gave him the style and titular dignity of a Prince of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland by Letters Patent under the Great Seal and, in due course, their younger children took the name Mountbatten-Windsor.

Unlike Elizabeth’s mother and other queens consort, who were crowned alongside their husbands, male consorts were not crowned. At her coronation on 2 June 1953 Elizabeth processed up the aisle and sat alone throughout the proceedings. Philip merely took his place in the procession as the premier royal duke, the first to swear fealty to her. She had given Philip a role in the committee organizing the event. This was the first coronation where television cameras filmed the actual ceremony, the first time a whole nation and, indeed, a considerable part of the world’s population saw a crown being placed on the head of a queen. Elizabeth, shy of the new medium, was initially opposed to the idea of the ceremony being filmed, but eventually responded to the groundswell of public opinion in favour of it. Churchmen had worried that television would detract from the sanctity of the occasion, but on the day Elizabeth’s concentration was so intense that she appeared to have forgotten the presence of the cameras. When Elizabeth says, ‘With God’s help…’ she means it. She truly believes her sovereignty is God-given, appealing to her people in her Christmas broadcast in 1952 about the coming event: ‘I want to ask you all, whatever your religion may be, to pray for me on that day – to pray that God may give me wisdom and strength to carry out the solemn promises I shall be making and that I may faithfully serve Him and you, all the days of my life.’

At the coronation only the anointing took place out of the view of the television cameras. When she received the Sword of State, with Geoffrey Fisher, Archbishop of Canterbury, exhorting her ‘to do justice, stop the growth of iniquity, protect the holy Church of God, help and defend widows and orphans … punish and reform what is amiss, and confirm what is in good order,’ and she solemnly placed the sword upon God’s altar, one of the officiating bishops observed: ‘She never thought of the crowds of people. She was completely taken up in her Act of Dedication. The most wonderful thing I ever saw in my life was the moment when she lifted the Sword and laid it on the altar … She was putting her whole heart and soul to the service of her People.’

‘She has a great sense of vocation,’ another added. ‘She is a woman not only graceful in her humanity, but full of the grace of God.’

Ritual and ceremony, linking Britain to its historic past, masked the fact that the British Empire was fragmenting and Britain’s future was uncertain. Yet at the same time there was an exceptional degree of moral consensus, a habitual unity left over from the war. It was easy to focus the nation’s hopes on the young Queen. The age often takes its identity from the monarch – Victoria’s certainly did – and this was optimistically called the New Elizabethan Age. That it turned out to be nothing of the sort, with Britain’s status in the world in decline and decades of social disintegration, industrial unrest and economic reversals at home, cannot be blamed on the Queen. She merely reigns and leads by moral example; it is her governments who have the power to effect change.

The televised coronation heralded a new kind of mass participation in national events, which changed for ever the way in which royalty would be perceived. Television created an illusion of intimacy between the royal family and the public, whetting an appetite for more. Deference was still the order of the day, however. Newspaper proprietors, eager to uphold the British establishment’s respectability, had no wish to destabilize the monarchy; besides, during the war the press had developed habits of self-censorship that still held good. For the first few years of her reign, Elizabeth II was the subject of unparalleled adulation, young, beautiful, with a dream family and the adoration of her people around the globe. There was an inherent danger in the fact that the monarchy appeared to accept such uncritical approbation as its due, without taking the opportunity to modernize or slim down, so as to be able to weather the changing times ahead.

The Queen was the embodiment of the nation, the universal representative of society, and it was in her that people saw their better selves ideally reflected. Since part of the popular ideal was family life, it followed that the Queen’s family, including her sister, played a part in this process of reflection. The first intimation of a relationship between Princess Margaret and the older, divorced Group Captain Peter Townsend revealed itself to the public when a camera caught the Princess, in an unguarded gesture, picking a piece of fluff off his coat. It was the first ripple on the smooth surface of the monarchy’s unblemished reputation.

Bereft after the sudden death of her beloved father, whose spoilt darling she was, it was understandable that Margaret should seek solace in Townsend, a former RAF hero and equerry of the late King, who treated him almost as a son. The affair had been going on for some time, but Margaret was persuaded to keep it under wraps until after the coronation. The whole business was badly handled, with Sir Alan ‘Tommy’ Lascelles misleading the couple into believing that they might marry when she reached the age of twenty-five, when she would no longer be subject to the terms of the Royal Marriages Act. Only then, two years later, did it transpire that she could not marry Townsend without giving up her royal status.

The Queen was determined that her sister should make up her own mind. With extraordinary care, Elizabeth managed to remain outside the argument – neither alienating her sister, nor seeking to force her hand. She accepted that nothing could be done to sanction the marriage without the approval of Parliament, the Cabinet and the Commonwealth, but she could have let it be known that, unadvised, she would have accepted the marriage. She gave not an inkling of her opinion and it remains a matter of speculation. ‘Mindful of the Church’s teaching that Christian marriage is indissoluble’, Margaret chose duty over love. It was a pointless sacrifice in view of the later shenanigans of Elizabeth’s children.

The Townsend affair was the first of importance that required the Queen to exercise her independent judgement. Her handling of it signalled a future pattern. On delicate matters, especially involving the family, she would let events unfold, not take sides, and – if a decision was unavoidable – make scrupulously certain that any blame for a mistake would be taken by ‘advisers’, if not in Downing Street, then at the palace. She was nothing if not a cool-headed professional, never letting emotions get in the way. After all, she had been entrusted with a sacred duty: the monarchy must come first.

Those same advisers found the Queen a joy to work with – accessible, disciplined and efficient. The little girl who slipped out of bed to straighten her shoes had grown into an orderly woman who liked the predictability of the royal year. Christmas and New Year were always to be spent at Sandringham, with the Queen leaving before 6 February, the anniversary of her father’s death at the house; Easter and most weekends at Windsor; part of August and September at Balmoral, and much of the rest of the time, when she was not on overseas visits, at Buckingham Palace. As she enters her ninth decade she has indicated that she will be spending more time at Windsor.

Recurring events included the Royal Maundy service on the Thursday before Easter, a ‘reinvention of tradition’ by George V, which is now held at a different cathedral each year; the monarch no longer washes the feet of the poor, as the first two queens regnant did, but she distributes special Maundy money, based on the old Norman currency of sterling, to as many of the deserving elderly as the years of her life; the ceremony of the Trooping the Colour, on her official birthday in June; investitures at Buckingham Palace; receiving ambassadors and their wives; garden parties at Buckingham Palace and at Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh; attendance at the Cenotaph Memorial Service on Remembrance Day in November; and also in November, the State Opening of Parliament, when Elizabeth wears the imperial crown and the scarlet velvet robe she wore at her coronation. She has missed it only twice, when she was expecting Andrew and Edward. No monarch in recent times has fulfilled her ceremonial role so graciously.

It helped that she loved being Queen, positively relished the job, just as the young Victoria had done. Nothing deflects her from her duty and she has never been heard to complain about having to perform it. Like her father, Elizabeth is hard-working and conscientious, a stickler for detail, but, unlike him, she rarely loses her temper. His famous ‘gnashes’ were to bypass Elizabeth, but reappear in her son Charles. George VI taught her that a rebuke from the monarch was far worse than a rebuke from anyone else, so that she has become a mistress of gentle admonishment and understatement. ‘Are you sure?’ ‘How would that help?’ ‘Is that wise?’ are Queen’s-speak for ‘That’s a ridiculous idea’, ‘Forget it!’ and ‘Not likely!’ She is also conscious that when people are introduced to her they are in a terrifically overexcited state, so that it is virtually impossible to have a normal conversation. It does not help that she has no small talk. She avoids making even the smallest off-the-cuff speech and her public jokes, like her speeches, are always scripted.

The Queen feels the monarchy must keep a certain distance if it is to retain any sense of magic. Even people who know her well have to be careful not to step over the boundary between informality and familiarity. Harold Wilson had an excellent relationship with her as Prime Minister, so much so that there was a widely publicized episode at the time of the Queen and Mrs Wilson doing the washing up together. After he retired, however, the Queen wanted to take the relationship no further. When Wilson was seen to be edging too close to her at a Buckingham Palace garden party an equerry was sent to ward him off. ‘No further,’ was the message. On the other hand, her natural humility means that she has never had any wish to be the centre of attention, unlike her late daughter-in-law, Diana, Princess of Wales. She is utterly straight and, like Victoria, a strict adherent of the truth: ‘I am pleased to be at Kingston,’ she corrected an early script writer. ‘Not very pleased to be at Kingston.’ A shrewd judge of character and acute observer, the Queen has a gift for mimicry on a par with Rory Bremner’s. Exercised strictly behind the scenes, it is a natural outlet to the formality that surrounds her.

Even those who have known and worked with her for years find the Queen something of an enigma. To the outside world she seems opaque, still the girl behind the glass. Cautious and conservative by nature and upbringing, she has always guarded her tongue, even in her own home, where she is rarely alone. She gives away little of what she thinks and offers no hostages to fortune. To express feelings in public, as her son Charles has regrettably done, is to reveal one’s weaknesses, opinions and prejudices – something she believes no royal, and certainly not a constitutional monarch, should do. Ultimately, she has gained more respect by not wearing her heart on her sleeve. Even courtiers who have worked for her for years admit they have no idea of her opinions on a vast range of subjects. In the words of one commentator, ‘she remains impenetrably Delphic’. Prince Philip is the only person with whom she can be absolutely frank. To the horror of observers, he does not hesitate to shout, ‘Don’t talk rubbish, Lilibet!’ and ‘Don’t be a bloody fool!’ when called for, but she gives as good as she gets and has been known to tell him to shut up.

Her love for horses and dogs perhaps derives from the fact that she is not a queen, just a person to them, and she can be completely herself, at ease, in their company. She has owned and bred horses for years and knows all there is to know about equine pedigree. It has been an interest and a passion offering diversion and relaxation in a life otherwise devoted to duty. Her late racing manager Lord Carnarvon – ‘Porchey’ – and trainers could always get through to her on her private number. When President Bush appointed William ‘Will’ Farish, the Texan racehorse owner and breeder, US ambassador to the Court of St James it was an inspired choice, as the Queen has often stayed on his Kentucky stud farm on her unofficial visits to the States to inspect world-class stallions and arrange matings between her own horses and theirs. When matters, particularly family matters, are fraught, she takes refuge behind the covers of Sporting Life.

The Queen can look forbidding, but is naturally kind. Her face is either animated by a wonderful smile which reaches her eyes, or serious, almost sulky, in repose. There is no expression in between. She is very good at conveying by the merest gesture – a cool stare or the raising of an eyebrow – her disapproval if she has been placed in an undignified or embarrassing position. When Prime Minister Blair’s wife refuses to curtsey, there is a hint of wry amusement behind the cool blue Windsor stare. Recently, word has got out that when the Queen enters a room she can almost hear Cherie Blair’s knees locking. But a queen who performs her own duties so punctiliously is not always prepared to ignore discourtesy or disrespect in others. When the King of Morocco kept her waiting, she betrayed her irritation by tapping her foot and switching her handbag from one arm to the other, but she received him with immaculate courtesy when he did show up. The rebuke came when he left Britannia. The Queen accompanied her guest to the top of the gangplank. When he reached the bottom and turned for a final wave he found himself waving foolishly at nothing. She had gone.

The Queen derives satisfaction from the expert way she carries out her duties, attributing her success to early training. This is evident in the professionalism with which she tackles her boxes. The contents of the despatch boxes – from the Cabinet, the Church and the Foreign Office, not to mention the Commonwealth papers which come to her directly as its head – are initially sorted by her private secretary, before going up for her perusal and signature. Edward VIII had returned the boxes late, often unread and bearing the marks of cocktail glasses, and today there is similar frustration at the Prince of Wales’s erratic approach to paperwork. This has never been the case with the Queen. If she receives her boxes on Friday, they are invariably returned read, annotated and signed first thing Monday morning. She would ask for the boxes within a day or two of giving birth. Unlike her father, who would often delay a decision until he could solicit his wife’s opinion, Elizabeth has never held up decisions pending Philip’s input. She has always been very clear in her own opinions.

Over the years the contents of the boxes have given her an extraordinary overview of events, especially as, unlike political leaders, she has never spent any time out of office and has seen the whole unfold without interruption. She needs to be well informed in order to deal intelligently with her own ministers and officials and also those from foreign and Commonwealth countries. Her knowledge of what is going on is also bolstered by reading Hansard, the official verbatim accounts of proceedings in Parliament, newspapers and periodicals, a large postbag from members of the public – many petitioning her for help, just as the people have always done the monarch – and meeting people from all walks of life. Overseas visits involve her spending many hours reading up on the place, the personalities, the policies and the problems – as well as putting aside time for the fittings of the clothes she will take with her. She also enjoys television documentaries and glimpses of the lives of ordinary people that television affords. Rather as Albert did for Victoria, Philip has gone out and brought information back for her, especially in the fields that interest him, from science and industry to conservation.

The depth of her experience and knowledge acquired over half a century give the Queen an enormous advantage in her weekly audiences with the Prime Minister. Tony Blair, her tenth Prime Minister, was not even born when she came to the throne. The Queen is the only person to whom the Prime Minister can talk frankly, knowing that the meeting is totally secure. The private secretaries liaise before an audience about the subjects for discussion, but neither the agenda nor a strict time limit is always adhered to. Tony Blair, who reputedly in his early days could not find time for the Tuesday audiences, latterly has had audiences lasting as long as an hour and a half. Although no Prime Minister has ever revealed what has transpired at his weekly audiences with the Queen, out of respect to her and the constitution, James Callaghan has described the techniques she would employ. She would often express or hint at her own opinion by asking a leading question, or referring to someone else who held an alternative view. If she approved of a measure, she would say so, positively. Disapproval was indicated by a significant failure to comment.

She is there to be consulted, to encourage and to warn. She has the right to know all the Cabinet’s decisions, although not necessarily their differences. She can draw the Prime Minister’s attention to a past event that has parallels with something he is proposing to do and which may have similar consequences. The monarchy acts as a fail-safe mechanism, an important safeguard. As a former Foreign Secretary has put it, the Prime Minister’s weekly visits to the palace are a deterrent from shabby or sordid actions. He will have to explain, and justify, his actions to the Queen, who represents moral rectitude in terms of public behaviour and the sanctity of the constitution. In extremis, she can appeal over the head of a government if she feels it is acting contrary to the will or interests of the people; for example, if it turns totalitarian. At least, that it the theory.

The monarchy’s prestige comes from being above politics, nonpartisan. It offers a reassuring link with the past, when a government’s progressive legislation might otherwise seem alarming. Free from political pressure, the Queen can take a longer view than a politician dependent on votes. However, Elizabeth II has been so punctilious at keeping out of politics that it would seem that she has reduced the monarchy to a position where it hardly seems to matter. Characteristically, she has taken no risks and played it absolutely safe.

Perhaps she has not been assertive enough. In a recent interview Tony Blair referred to himself, with reference to the Iraq War, as Commander-in-Chief. No one picked up on it. It is the Queen, not the Prime Minister, who is head of the armed forces. They are, literally, the soldiers of the Queen and owe their loyalty to her as their sovereign lady. When war is declared it is by ‘The Queen’s Most Excellent Majesty in Council’, but she is powerless to prevent war if the government decides on it. In much the same way, even though all justice derives from the crown and is dispensed in the Queen’s name, the prerogative of mercy is now exercised by the sovereign on the advice of her ministers, namely the Home Secretary.

As to war, when Anthony Eden provoked the Suez crisis in 1956 the Queen was better informed of his plans than many members of the Cabinet, but even she might not have been given the full picture. According to Martin Charteris, she did not trust Eden and thought him mad, but she could only warn him. She might have ventured something like, ‘Are you sure this is wise?’ After the debacle, she apparently sighed with relief at his departure in mid term, owing to ill health.

In the case of a mid-term appointment of a Prime Minister, the Queen’s prerogative was to act as arbiter, to decide on his successor. After Eden’s resignation she asked Churchill and Lord Salisbury for advice and having asked for it was constitutionally bound to take it. They recommended Harold Macmillan rather than R.A. Butler. The Queen had failed to use her prerogative but handed it over to the Tory old guard, which set its own precedent, signalling that the royal prerogative had become a doubtful instrument. Nor did she exercise her prerogative when Macmillan in turn was resigning owing to ill health. He duped her into accepting his nominee as his successor. Again, the best candidate was the deputy Prime Minister, R.A. Butler, but Macmillan was determined to scotch that.

As it happened, the man he recommended was none other than Alec Douglas-Home, an old friend of the Bowes-Lyons in Scotland and someone the Queen felt socially at ease with, whereas Butler was too remote and complex for her taste. Her personal preferences aside, Elizabeth had allowed the monarchy to become the pawn of a faction in the Conservative Party. Her passivity and unwitting collusion with Macmillan’s scheme is probably the biggest political misjudgement of her reign.

By the time the Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, made the decision to resign, she was only peripherally involved in the choice of his successor. To save face, Charteris came up with a formula in which Wilson resigned only as Leader of the Labour Party, leaving the party to elect a new leader, and a variation of this was adopted. Wilson informed the palace that James Callaghan had received the most votes and went to tender his resignation as Prime Minister. He was careful not to advise the Queen whom to choose, so preserving the notion of her constitutional right of choice, when in reality she had had none.

The Queen’s discretionary power in the choice of a Prime Minister had, for all practical purposes, ceased to exist.

Because of the nature of her job, the Queen has spent her working life almost exclusively with men. She has a calculating mind like a man and tends to relate better to men than to women. Yet she does not hesitate to use her feminine charms discreetly on susceptible males. It was interesting to see, therefore, how she would get along with her first woman Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, when she came to power in 1979. Thatcher had as little time for inherited privilege as she had for the feckless malingerers at the bottom of the social heap, but she was apparently in awe of the Queen. ‘Her curtsey almost reached Australia,’ a courtier observed sardonically. However, at the weekly audiences the Queen was hardly ever able to get a word in edgeways. According to one of her former private secretaries, audiences ‘tended to be a one-sided rehearsal of what the Prime Minister intended to do’.

The Queen is part of the system of checks and balances, but what if the ‘wayward’ leader came from the right, as Margaret Thatcher did? The style and priorities of the uncompromising premier apparently raised questions at the palace. The ‘welfare monarchy’ dedicated to charitable patronage, of which all British sovereigns since Victoria have been such eager proponents, did not find it easy to embrace a leader and an administration that treated welfare policies as soft. Thatcher also had little time for the Commonwealth. When the Americans sent troops into Grenada, a Caribbean island with a population of less than 100,000, in 1983, the Queen was furious. She happened to be Grenada’s head of state and no one had bothered to consult her.

Apart from the weekly audiences and the official functions they both attended, and the Prime Minister’s annual weekend at Balmoral – which Thatcher, inappropriately dressed and tottering around on high heels, could not wait to escape – the two women did not impinge on each other. They were discreet about their differences, until in 1986 the editor of Today was given a scoop by the Queen’s press secretary, Michael Shea, about her dismay at the divisive policies of her Prime Minister. No one picked up on it until a few weeks later when Andrew Neil splattered the story all over the Sunday Times. Shea was the Queen’s official mouthpiece, but as ever she was able to distance herself. Even though there was much public sympathy with the palace’s viewpoint, the Guardian expressed concern that the monarchy was seeking to rally public opinion against an elected government. The Queen was advised to ring up Thatcher and the two commiserated with each other.

There remained a competitive edge in their relationship. At the victory parade after the Falklands War, it was the Prime Minister, not the Queen, who took the salute as the troops marched past in the City. When Thatcher through sheer exhaustion had to sit down at the annual diplomatic reception two years running, the Queen, who has inherited her mother’s iron constitution and stamina, quipped to Robert Runcie, ‘Oh look! She’s keeled over again.’ Nevertheless, the Queen recognized Thatcher’s achievement by making her the first non-royal Lady of the Garter on her retirement from the Commons in 1992.

Long before women came to the workplace in force, Queen Elizabeth faced the eternal dilemma of the career woman: how to juggle the job and the family so that neither is neglected. Queen Victoria felt that it was an impossible task, frustrated as she was by the conflicting demands of queenship and motherhood, but she remained very hands-on as a mother. It has to be said that while Elizabeth II has been an excellent queen, she has placed her duty to the country before her children and perhaps fallen short as a mother. She is not a tactile person and, after a separation, she was more likely to be seen shaking the hand of her small son Charles than giving him a big hug and kisses, as Diana did her sons. By the time that Prince Andrew was born in 1959 and Prince Edward in 1963, the Queen was able to afford them more time, but still not enough. Theirs was an old-fashioned upper-class upbringing, surrounded by servants, with Mummy holding them emotionally at arm’s length. They needed more than she was able to give.

Perhaps to assuage her guilt at the secondary role her husband was forced to play, Elizabeth allowed Philip to become the dominant force in the family, but he had no model of happy family life to go on. How could he be a father, when his own had deserted him? He expected the children to be self-sufficient, to fend for themselves, as he had had to do. With the exception of Anne, who stood up to him, Philip tended to bully his children, particularly Charles, a shy, sensitive boy who was the antithesis of himself. Philip simply could not abide his whingeing and his diffidence. Charles found the sympathy and understanding his parents denied him in his grandmother, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, and in Lord Louis Mountbatten, whose influence proved a mixed blessing.

The Queen’s failure to forge a special relationship with her son and heir, as George VI did with her, has arguably made the future of the monarchy less secure. Perhaps she felt a boy should be left to his father. Never having been to school herself, she entrusted his education to Philip. The Queen Mother protested about the choice of Gordonstoun, when Eton or Westminster would have been more apt choices for someone of Charles’s character. The Queen briefly considered the alternatives, but deferred to Philip’s judgement that the rough and tumble of Gordonstoun would toughen Charles up. The years he spent at the school, where he was bullied unmercifully, were sheer misery. Apparently, he has never forgiven Philip.

In June 1969 the film Royal Family, released in the run-up to the televised investiture of the Prince of Wales in a mock medieval ceremony at Carnarvon Castle, was an attempt to win some popularity for the monarchy and boost the image of the ‘model family’. Needless to say, the Queen did not initiate it; she knows she is an icon and has no need to sell herself. It was Philip who had these ‘modernizing’ bursts. In his biography of the Queen, Ben Pimlott states that ‘The idea of the film was to shatter the iconography as conclusively as a brick heaved through a stained-glass window.’ It was naïve to think that public appetite would be satisfied with this behind-the-scenes glimpse, which was very much on the monarchy’s own terms. If the royal family was going to exploit the opportunities the media provided, they were fair game for the media. The film gave licence, in due course, to a level of media intrusion that the bemused dynasty was ill equipped to meet.

At her silver wedding in 1972 the Queen remarked how fortunate she had been to grow up in a happy and united family and how fortunate she was in her children. She reiterated the social value of a strong marriage. Her own marriage has proved strong. At their golden wedding anniversary in 1997 she paid a public tribute to Philip: ‘He is someone who doesn’t take kindly to compliments, but he has, quite simply, been my strength and stay all these years.’ Philip enjoys the company of beautiful women, but if his friendships have been more than platonic, he has been discreet. No hint of scandal has ever touched him or the Queen. Sadly, that was not to be the case with their children. As they grew up, the children were given far too much licence, with their own apartments, secretaries and programmes while they were still in their teens. It was indeed more like ‘the Firm’ than a family. If there were problems, they did not talk about them. The Queen, who hated confrontation, would rather busy herself with her boxes than deal with something unpleasant, such as disciplining her children or having a family row. All of them respected her authority; unfortunately, she did not exercise it enough.

Since the First World War, the royal family has looked for its brides beyond the princely courts of Europe, first among the British aristocracy, then, in the case of three of Elizabeth’s children, to the upper and middle classes. Again, the Queen seems to have offered her children no guidance in their choice of partners. By the time he was thirty, the heir to the throne had still to find a bride. True to Mountbatten’s advice, he had been sowing his wild oats. As early as 1973 Sir Martin Charteris told the Queen that the Prince of Wales was having an affair with Camilla Parker Bowles, the wife of a fellow officer, and ‘the Regiment don’t like it, Ma’am.’ Genuinely believing in the sanctity of marriage, the Queen considered her son’s affair with a married woman deplorable, yet at the same time ‘safe’, since the woman was unavailable. Knowing that Camilla was not the only one – Charles was promiscuous – she probably thought it would blow over, but Charles had found the mother-figure he had never had in Camilla and would never let her go.

In 1977 the Queen had had ‘a love affair’ with the country during her Silver Jubilee, when she repeated the vow she had made at twenty-one to serve her people all the days of her life. Four years later, the wedding of the Prince of Wales to Lady Diana Spencer – a descendant of two Stuart kings, Charles II and James II – at St Paul’s Cathedral was greeted with ecstatic enthusiasm. The birth of two sons, William and Harry, followed in quick succession. It was still possible to identify the monarchy with the model family rather than the dysfunctional family. Behind the façade, however, the war of the Waleses was well into its stride.

The Queen was perplexed by Diana. Neurotic, wilful, no country lover, she was simply not her type of girl. Nevertheless, she was prepared to listen to Diana’s troubles, and later was anxious to do what she could to keep the unstable girl onside. Charles, meanwhile, was complaining that he had been pushed into the marriage by his father, and bitterly resented the fact that his parents seemed to hold him largely to blame for its breakdown. In about 1986 Charles resumed his affair with Camilla, smuggling her into Highgrove after Diana and their sons had left for London each week. It is significant that the Queen visited Highgrove only twice in fourteen years, no doubt wanting to keep out of the war zone. Not surprisingly, William and Harry enjoyed being with the Queen – an oasis of calm and stability away from their unhappy parents.

All four of the Queen’s children, according to those who know them, are arrogant, spoilt and selfish, which is probably why three of their marriages have failed. Perhaps to compensate for not giving them enough time, the Queen has been hugely generous in providing expensive homes for Anne, Andrew and Edward. She is unable to deny her children anything. So indulgent was she of her youngest son Edward that she agreed to his proposal for members of the family to take part in It’s a Royal Knockout, although she knew it was a bad idea. It was such a disaster that even the tabloids were left speechless and Edward flounced out of the media tent in disgust. If the royals make fools of themselves, an article in The Times argued, what is the point of the monarchy continuing?

The Queen’s sister had broken the royal taboo about divorce. Princess Anne and Mark Phillips separated in 1989 and divorced in 1992. Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson separated in 1992 and, after the revelation of Sarah’s toe-sucking episode in the South of France, divorce was inevitable. A courtier who observed the Queen on the day Sarah quit Balmoral with her daughters said she looked completely drained. That same year, Andrew Morton’s book, Diana: Her True Story, with its intimate and shocking revelations of the true state of the Waleses’ marriage, stripped away the last vestige of royal mystique, at least from the younger generation. Deference had no place in a world where the royal family washed its dirty linen in public. Worse was to come. A tape of a conversation Charles had made on his mobile phone to Camilla – its exact source never quite established – brought the monarchy to a new nadir, when the heir to the throne told his mistress that he wanted to be a Tampax so that he could stay inside her.

The behaviour of the Queen’s family, for which she must be held partly responsible, damaged the standing of the monarchy, undermining all her good work. The younger generation, particularly her daughters-in-law, had confused royal fame with celebrity, playing a dangerous game of collusion, revelation and counter-revelation with the media. But celebrity is fleeting and those who live by the press die by the press. In the words of Guardian columnist Julie Burchill, the once revered family had descended to ‘Life imitating soap imitating life’. If it no longer represented the ‘model family’, what did the Windsor monarchy have to rest on?

At a Guildhall lunch at the end of 1992 the Queen described the year as her ‘annus horribilis’. All institutions must be subject to scrutiny, she agreed, while appealing for tolerance and understanding. Apart from the misfortunes of her children, she had received another blow when Windsor Castle, which she regards as her real home, was badly damaged by fire. In a further shock, there was a public outcry when a government minister blithely announced that the taxpayer would pick up the tab for the repairs. It was a salient reminder of how low esteem for the monarchy had sunk. Although the matter had been set in motion months before, the Queen announced her decision to pay income tax. The frivolity of the younger royals was partly responsible for this volte face but, even so, she drove a hard bargain.

Her troubles were by no means over. In Jonathan Dimbleby’s authorized biography, Charles publicly rebuked Elizabeth and Philip for their deficiencies as parents. ‘We did our best,’ Philip later told a biographer. Charles was the only one of the four to point the finger of accusation and his siblings were outraged, coming to their parents’ defence; they appreciated that their mother’s duties as queen meant that she had had less time to give them, but denied that she had been remiss as a mother. Charles’s admission of adultery with Camilla Parker Bowles in the Dimbleby television interview in front of millions of viewers in 1994 – the Prince’s need to unburden his conscience in public left Camilla and the cuckolded Parker Bowles with no option but to divorce – was followed by Diana’s tit-for-tat Panorama interview the following year, in which she threw doubt on the Prince of Wales’s suitability for ‘the top job’.

Enough was enough. In neither case was the Queen warned of what was coming, an unpardonable breach of etiquette on the part of her son and heir. For all her great gifts, Diana had proved utterly untrustworthy, a loose cannon. The behaviour of her children and the unresolved state of the Waleses’ marriage were undermining the Queen’s good work and her devoted service over forty years. For a long time she and Philip had dithered, unsure what to do for the best. ‘Where did we go wrong?’ they plaintively asked friends whose children were also divorcing. It was the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Robert Fellowes, Diana’s brother-in-law, who finally persuaded the Queen to write to Charles and Diana separately, demanding that they divorce. The marriage was dissolved on 28 August 1996.

One year and three days later, Diana was dead and the Queen faced the worst crisis of her reign.