Politics is a dirty game, but we politicians could
never teach those at the palace anything.
Margaret Thatcher
On 12 October 1984, just as the queen was leaving for a holiday inspecting racehorses in America, she was told that a powerful IRA bomb had exploded at the Grand Hotel in Brighton during the Conservative Party Conference. Margaret Thatcher, who had been the prime target of the attack, had escaped unhurt, although she had been minutes away from being killed. Five people died, and thirty-four were injured, including Cabinet colleague, Norman Tebbit, and chief whip, John Wakeham. Alan Clark put it in his famous diary, ‘Mrs T had been saved by good fortune (von Stauffenberg’s briefcase!) as she was in the bathroom, had she been in the bedroom she would be dead.’1 The morning after the attack, Mrs Thatcher addressed the conference at 9.30 a.m., giving a defiant speech announcing, ‘All attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail’,2 and ‘it was an attempt to cripple Her Majesty’s democratically elected government’.3
Thatcher had taken a hard line in Northern Ireland against the 1981 hunger strikers, when ten IRA members being held in the infamous Maze prison for terrorism starved themselves to death, demanding the status of political prisoners. During this period, one of the strikers, Bobby Sands, had been elected to Parliament, prompting worldwide media interest, and his funeral was attended by 100,000 people. After her 1983 election triumph, her opposition to any political demands from IRA only heightened.
The Buckingham Palace press secretary, Michael Shea, censured the attack as a ‘dreadful outrage’ and the queen sent a message of ‘sympathy and concern’ to the prime minister.4 She then got on a plane and went on holiday. The almost successful attempt to assassinate a sitting prime minister was not considered of sufficient importance for Her Majesty to delay her equine adventure in the legendary bluegrass horse country of Kentucky with her close friends the Porchesters. (There are gossips who persist in believing that Prince Andrew’s natural father was Henry Porchester, ‘Porchey’, 7th Earl of Carnarvon, suggesting the conception took place when Philip was away on one of his long sea voyages on the Britannia.5) It was not until the royal flight landed in Wyoming that the queen called Mrs Thatcher, whose first words were, ‘Are you having a lovely time?’6 This story is often quoted to illustrate the stiffness of Margaret Thatcher and her inability to express any real feeling even in the face of death.7
The queen’s close relative Lord Mountbatten had been murdered by an IRA bomb in 1979, and Mrs Thatcher had lost one of her earliest political supporters, Airey Neave, in a car-bomb attack a few months earlier. These two incidents were a reminder of the danger both the queen and prime minister faced daily.8 Only twenty days after the Grand Hotel attack, Indira Gandhi, a friend to both women, was shot dead by her own Sikh bodyguards in New Delhi. Margaret made a point of attending her funeral, but it could so easily have been the other way around.
The Brighton bombing might have forged some bond between the sovereign and her prime minister, but it failed to. Both women adhered to the strict formalities of their two respective offices and were separated by class, outlook and experience. The queen remained in the United States looking at horses, and Mrs Thatcher got on with the conference. It was business as usual.
This dramatic escape from a terrorist bomb, along with victory in the Falklands and the election, combined to inflate Margaret’s beliefs. For her, politics was a battle between good and evil which had cast her as a modern day Joan of Arc. Assassination, the curse of all world leaders and monarchs, had been aimed at her personally. She emerged from it resolute, and it confirmed on her a status enjoyed previously only by Winston Churchill.9
Mrs Thatcher’s fiercest critics and enemies sat directly behind her on the back benches of her party.10 Within the higher echelons of the Tories there was a feeling that someone with such an inferior pedigree as Thatcher ought not to be prime minister; she was, in their eyes, still only a grocer’s daughter. Until Margaret’s takeover of the Conservative Party, it had been controlled by old-school landed gentry types. The prevailing rationale was that these Establishment figures, groomed at Eton and Oxbridge, were compassionate, broadminded, intellectual chaps who embraced the principles of noblesse oblige.11 To Margaret this was just humbug, she found them patronising and felt they wanted power to dictate to other people what they thought was good for them. The Thatcherite Tories called them the ‘Wets’, a public school term meaning soppy or weak.
Indulging in a bit of class revenge, she told Brian Walden in an interview, ‘Success is not an attractive thing to many people … and of course, some of them are snobs. They can never forgive me for coming from a very ordinary background.’ Thatcher, unlike the old Tories, understood the passions that drove everyday folk for policies that led to them buying their own home or running their own businesses. Her intuition caught political fire. If the ‘Wets’ had dared to face Margaret down when they had been in the majority in Cabinet, history would have been different. But the ‘Wets’ were wet, and they lacked the stomach for a fight.12
The shake-up over the old boy network wasn’t just taking place in Westminster, it was nationwide. Britain changed more during the 1980s than at any time since the queen’s coronation. There was an expansion in private business and the service industries. Old state-owned industries were transformed into modern public companies as they were sold off. ‘Privatisation’ became a word that Thatcher had invented. Deregulation in the City, known as the ‘Big Bang’, revolutionised British banking traditions. Hard-working, ambitious, noisy, south London boys flocked to the city trading floors, waving fistfuls of cash and swigging champagne in overpriced bars after work.13 Some traders were earning £100,000 a year by the time they were 23. Another word, ‘Yuppie’, standing for ‘young urban professional’, entered the vernacular. To the pure Thatcherite, the free market encouraged individual virtue. It produced people who were robust, independent and willing to take responsibility for their actions.14
David Owen feels that Margaret Thatcher never understood the non-strivers:
That incomprehension was a huge weakness. That’s rare, you don’t see that very often these days in prime ministers, most of them are pretty much on all fours with their fellow citizens, she wasn’t and she couldn’t understand the failing of the people who can’t … the non-achievers.15
This was in direct contradiction to the queen’s personality, states Owen:
The queen is quite good at understanding … she’s gone around a lot and seen the disadvantaged, the weak and the inadequate, and she can empathise with them and she knows they exist in all societies. She isn’t a do-gooder, but she’s on all fours with it.16
In Peter Morgan’s play, The Audience, the queen asks Mrs Thatcher to remember:
Not everybody is as strong as you Prime Minister. Or prodigiously gifted. Or driven. I can’t help thinking about the rest of us sometimes. Those that are just … normal. That have to read things twice to understand. That need a prevailing wind to get thorough life. And rarely get it.17
The Thatcher revolution seemed unstoppable, and Margaret began to question anyone who did not embrace the principles of her credo, including the royal family. Were the Windsors ‘true believers’? On close inspection, members of the royal family looked suspiciously liked a collective of Tory ‘Wets’. They were worried paternalists who instinctively favoured the type of Conservative Party and society Thatcher now challenged.18 They believed in compassion and caring, just so long it didn’t mean giving up their palaces, cars, holidays and horses.
Prince Charles was seen as the ‘wettest’ royal of all. As the prince fretted over urban poverty and green issues he became a real irritation to Mrs Thatcher, giving speeches about how Britain was becoming a selfish consumer-orientated society in a state of spiritual decay.19 In October 1985, Charles was quoted as saying that he feared inheriting a ‘divided’ Britain, when the Manchester Evening News ran the headline ‘Prince Charles: My Fears for the Future’. The article stated that the prince was ‘prepared to force his way through parliamentary red tape to ensure that his country is not split into factions of the haves and have-nots’. Charles was reported to be worried that ‘when he becomes king there will be no-go areas in the inner cities, and that the minorities will be alienated from the rest of the country’.20 The voicing of the Prince of Wales’ opinions ignored the warning of the great constitutional expert Walter Bagehot about the danger of having on the throne ‘an active and meddling fool’.
When the Manchester Evening News story broke, Margaret Thatcher was addressing the United Nations in New York. Incensed, she phoned Buckingham Palace demanding an explanation and was less than convinced by the royal courtiers, who insisted that Charles had intended no criticism of her government. The provenance of the royal remarks was murky. They had, however, been leaked by Rod Hackney, one of Charles’s architectural advisors, following a private conversation on the royal train. Hackney, whose brand of ‘community architecture’ had seen him forge an alliance with the prince, now found himself rebuked and banished from the prince’s inner circle. Tory Party hard man, Norman Tebbit, said on television, ‘I suppose the Prince of Wales feels extra sympathy towards those who’ve got no job because in a way he’s got no job … He’s 40, and he’s not been able to take responsibility for anything, and I think that’s his problem.’21
Prince Charles told his biographer that he found Thatcher ‘formidable’22 and he complained to the editor of the Sunday Express that she was ‘a bit like a school ma’am’ with a tendency to lecture.23 Charles eventually became so disenchanted with Thatcher’s Conservative policies that he sent a memo to the queen imploring her to do something before the prime minister ruined the country.
For once, the queen shared Prince Charles’s views.24 Lord Charteris, the queen’s private secretary, told the historian Peter Hennessy that:
You might say that the queen prefers a sort of consensus politics, rather than a polarised one … If you are in the queen’s position, you are the titular, the symbolic head of the country, and the less squabbling that goes on in that country, obviously the more convenient and the more comfortable you feel.25
The queen, who came to agree with her son, shared her displeasure with Commonwealth leaders. ‘Her Majesty was not at ease with Margaret Thatcher’s policies,’ said Robert Hawke, the former Prime Minister of Australia. ‘She saw her as dangerous.’26 Thatcher’s willingness to accept high unemployment as a painful part of making British industry more efficient and her determination to tame the unions only sharpened social division, which the queen feared could rebound on the royal family. The monarchy had a vested interest in social harmony, continuity and consensus. Margaret told conservative aides that Her Majesty was not ‘one of us’.27
The consensus that the queen so favoured was about to be broken in apocalyptic fashion as Margaret Thatcher prepared herself to face down Arthur Scargill. She even made secret plans to have 4,500 troops on standby ready to break the miners’ strike, as official records declassified in 2014 reveal.28 Whereas the first Thatcher Government would be dominated by monetarist economic reform and the Falklands War, the second would be overshadowed by the miners’ strike, the longest in British history and one of the most bloody and tragic. Common belief during the 1970s and early 1980s was that trade union power was so great it simply couldn’t be broken, and Mrs Thatcher had always believed this to be one of the least acceptable aspects of socialism.
Resistance from the miners’ unions to any reform had pressured Ted Heath into the so-called ‘U-turn’ of 1972. The former prime minister had been forced to back away from free market principles, and the unions forced the country into a three day working week. It was a humiliation for both Heath and the Conservation Party.
Arthur Scargill, then a senior figure in the Yorkshire branch of the miners’ union, had introduced the tactic of flying pickets, dispatching troops of militant strikers to the scene of any dispute, to devastating effect. Scargill was a socialist hero after helping to bring down the Tory Government in 1984. Miners were encouraged to chant his name and pledge loyalty to him personally rather than to the union. ‘There’s only one Arthur Scargill’ was sung to the tune of ‘Guantanamera’. It was the politics of a personality cult.29
For Thatcher, who had served in Ted Heath’s Cabinet, the former prime minister’s climb down was a shameful capitulation and an act of weakness. She wanted to show she was made of sterner stuff, and announced during the 1980 Brighton Conference that the ‘the lady’s not for turning’. Margaret spoke of, ‘the enemy within’ and was determined that Britain wouldn’t, in her words, ‘be made ungovernable by the Fascist left’. She knew Scargill was committed to increasing the political power of the unions, but public opinion was against their disproportionate leverage.
Thatcher sensed that the ‘decent people’ of middle England were outraged by their tactics. She had won to her side the aspirational working class who were skeptical about their union leadership. They increasingly viewed high taxation, inflation and government regulation as curbs on their upward mobility.30 The country was ready for change. Thatcher waited for her moment and planned for it meticulously, ensuring that the coal stocks were built up, and the police prepared and equipped for the riots that were sure to come.31 She made her goal explicit: she intended to destroy socialism in Britain. In return, Scargill made it his ambition equally clear: he planned to destroy Thatcher. And so the strike began.32
Scargill was never interested in the details of pay packets or in a pit-by-pit discussion of which coal mines were economically viable to keep open. He was determined to force the government, in Thatcher’s contemptuous words, to pay ‘for mud to be mined’ rather than see a single job lost.33 It cost £44 to mine a metric ton of British coal, while the rest of the world were selling it for £32 per ton. The Monopolies & Mergers Commission reported that some 75 per cent of British pits were making losses and the mining industry cost taxpayers £1 billion a year to subsidise.34 For Thatcher, the coal industry represented everything that was wrong: waste, inefficiency, irresponsibility and unaccountability.
Under the urgings of a largely right-wing press, public sympathy now turned against the miners. To the astonishment of most people, including her party, she won the strike.35 For the Tories, the defeat of the miners was essential revenge after the miners’ humiliation of Heath. Norman Tebbit wrote that Thatcher had broken ‘not just a strike, but a spell’.36 Union power was broken in Britain for good.
For most hard-working miners their prime concern was not about a political battle between the left and the right, it was about their homes and families. In 1985, there were around 200,000 people employed in the industry; by 1995 it was down to 11,000, and vibrant mining communities were destroyed.37 At the height of the strike in 1984, Arthur Scargill’s wife, Anne, had presented to Buckingham Palace a petition signed by 20,000 women from mining communities appealing to the queen to support the coal miners. It read, ‘We ask you, Your Majesty, to speak up on our behalf and help us to defend our families, our communities and sources of energy which can only grow in importance.’ The petition also complained that the police had been used to:
… terrify us and to try to silence us … As loyal and law-abiding citizens in this country, we never thought that violence, the denial of civil liberties, the day and night harassment, employed by police forces … would enter our lives.
Mrs Scargill was later joined by her husband, Arthur, and some 15,000 women, mostly miners’ wives carrying flowers, in a central London rally in support of the strike. They marched to 10 Downing Street, where they stood for a few minutes in what they called a ‘silent protest’.38 ‘I hope the queen can help,’ said one of the rally organisers, Martha Marshall, movingly.39 But Her Majesty, who was on holiday at Balmoral, did not immediately see the petition.
The north versus south; old Tories versus Thatcherites; ethnic minorities versus police; strikers versus the police; rich versus poor; employed versus unemployed; Mrs Thatcher versus the Commonwealth and Mrs Thatcher versus everyone. Tensions were high all around. Britain, it seemed, had never been so divided.
From her holiday home in Scotland, Elizabeth was unimpressed by Margaret Thatcher’s attitude regarding the unemployed and the underprivileged.40 The rhetoric and violence of the miners’ strike, which culminated in the terrible violence at Orgreave, when seventy-two police and fifty-nine miners were injured, were particularly shocking. Allegations were made on the BBC that Special Branch had infiltrated a spy, ‘Silver Fox’, right into Scargill’s inner circle.41 It all seemed very extreme.
The queen was more comfortable with previous Labour and Conservative governments who had secured industrial peace by consensus, even if that meant kowtowing to union demands. This new radical right with its subversive attitude to hierarchy, deference and consensus, seemed as big a threat as the republican socialists. Indirectly, Thatcherism wasn’t kind to the royal family. Management of the royal finances, like those of other national institutions, were all coming under scrutiny: palaces, yachts, trains, holidays and retainers once taken for granted now had to be justified on a value-for-money basis.42 It must have seemed as if it were only a matter of time before Thatcher tried to reform Buckingham Palace and its inhabitants.
By the mid-1980s, a royal whispering campaign started against Thatcher’s regime. One of its manifestations was a long profile of Prince Charles in the Economist, which analysed his views and painted him as a hybrid of a ‘one-nation’ old school Tory and a moderate Social Democrat. The Economist was able to write with such great authority because of an off-the-record interview with the prince in which he discussed the key issues of the day. ‘It was the manifesto of an SDP king,’ said Simon Jenkins, who conducted the interview when he was the magazine’s political editor. The prince clearly saw David Owen and his new party of Social Democrats as the potential saviours of Britain.43
The tabloid press was becoming increasingly intrigued by the notion that the country had two queens. Stories appeared throughout the decade that were both personal – such as the fact that Mrs Thatcher hated going to Balmoral – and political, with the two women disagreeing over the importance of the Commonwealth. It was a caricature that was too good an opportunity for the tabloid press to relinquish. In the satirical television show Spitting Image, the queen is shown throughout the series as relishing the opportunity to wind up Mrs Thatcher. The prime minister is always portrayed as having regal ambitions, wearing the imperial state crown and insisting her ministers call her, ‘Your Majesty’.
In television soap land the battles of the two ‘Dynasty Divas’, Joan Collins (Alexis) versus Linda Evans (Krystal), fuelled this fantasy. They fought each other in the boardrooms of Denver and in one memorable fight they threw one other into a lily pond. Their rivalry became a hallmark of the series, and perhaps the tabloids wanted this fairytale to be replicated within the soap opera that the royal family was fast becoming. The queen versus Mrs Thatcher would be the ultimate cat fight. The press tried to extract clues from Buckingham Palace, and by 1985 began to have some success.
At the Commonwealth Conference in Nassau in the Bahamas in 1985, Margaret Thatcher and the queen found themselves at odds over the issues of economic sanctions against South Africa. Mrs Thatcher was loudly opposed to them; the queen was not. Edwina Currie feels there may have been a small undercurrent of racism towards the Commonwealth by Mrs Thatcher. Her views on South Africa would have been enormously shaped by Denis Thatcher, who had done a great deal of business there.44 The head of the Commonwealth secretariat, Sir Sonny Ramphal, stated that, ‘she [Mrs Thatcher] had worked herself into the position where people were beginning to identify her not with anti-sanctions but with pro-South Africa … it was as though she was more opposed to sanctions than to apartheid’.45
The queen’s position was different. She travelled to Nassau on the Britannia and remained on board throughout the conference. Many noticed the royal vexation, and when a group of delegates arrived late on the yacht, she drummed her fingers on the rail. Many of the delegates had made it clear to her that Britain was forfeiting its unique place in the leadership of the Commonwealth. Rajiv Gandhi, who had taken over his mother’s position in India following her assassination, talked of the dangers of the whole institution becoming extinct. An identical message had been given to her by a succession of African leaders in their routine twenty minute meetings with her. The new Australian Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, was struck by the strained atmosphere. He said:
I was well aware that you wouldn’t describe the relationship between Her Majesty and her prime minister as one of extreme cordiality. In a formal sense there was a respect and acknowledgement of the role and importance of the other [but] it’s fair to say that the queen didn’t have a great affection for Mrs Thatcher.46
Although the Commonwealth countries voted 48:1 in favour of sanctions, Mrs Thatcher would not yield to secure unanimity. She remained in a self-righteous minority of one, fearing that any damage to the £2 billion in trade that took place annually between Britain and South Africa would affect employment in both countries. As Bernard Ingham explained:
She [Mrs Thatcher] probably did as much by plain speaking to P.W. Botha [South Africa’s President] as all the sanctions conceived to end apartheid. She did not think sanctions would work, given how often they are broken by supposed allies, and that if they did the very people who would be worst hit would be the proletariat.47
Early in the summer of 1986, Downing Street discovered, to the great annoyance of the prime minister’s staff, that a senior unnamed courtier had made critical remarks about Mrs Thatcher’s sanctions policy.48 William Whitelaw, the deputy prime minister, also referred to a potential rift between the palace and Downing Street when briefing lobby journalists. The most explicit story was, however, published in Today in July 1986, and exposed the quarrel. It was based, allegedly, on apparently authorised information acquired by the editor from the palace press office and reported that the queen had urged Thatcher to agree sanctions against South Africa. ‘She fears Britain’s stand on trade sanctions could lead to a breakup of the Commonwealth. The queen gave the prime minister a discreet warning during a private audience at Buckingham Palace.’
The main source of the story was the queen’s press secretary, Michael Shea,49 who gave the story to the newspaper as a reward for apologising (something tabloids are loath to do) for a false piece which claimed Princess Diana was pregnant. However, Today’s scoop was largely ignored.50 The paper was not considered important and had little influence amongst London’s opinion formers. Journalists, however, could clearly smell a story that warranted further scrutiny and realised that people inside the palace were talking.
Amid these rumours, on 20 July 1986, the Sunday Times blazed a trail when it exploded a bombshell article entitled ‘The African Queen’. The feature was the joint work of journalist, Simon Freeman, and the paper’s respected political editor, Michael Jones, and claimed that Elizabeth II was dismayed by the policies of Margaret Thatcher. The queen purportedly took issue with her prime minister’s opposition to the Commonwealth’s policy of using economic sanctions against South Africa to bring an end to apartheid. She was also concerned by Thatcher’s rough tactics to break up the miners’ union during the long and violent strike of 1984. It also claimed the queen was unhappy with her prime minister for granting permission to Ronald Reagan for United States’ aircraft to refuel at British airbases before launching bombing missions against Libya the previous April.
According to the Sunday Times’ report, the queen regarded Thatcher’s approach to governing as, ‘uncaring, confrontational and divisive’.51 Altogether, the article suggested that the queen felt Mrs Thatcher was a menace to the consensus that, in her view, had served Britain so well in the post-war years. The queen feared that, because of the miners’ strike, serious long-term damage would be done to the nation’s fabric. This royal expression of vexation was not just a clash over economic sanctions for South Africa or anxiety that the Commonwealth might break up.52 Her Majesty was even prepared to break with convention to make her displeasure public.53 The British public was now transported back to the style of eighteenth-century politics with a so called ‘Royal Party’ that supported a stronger monarchy to counterbalance the office of prime minister.54
The timing couldn’t have been worse, from Her Majesty’s perspective or that of Mrs Thatcher’s, or better for the newspapers. The article appeared just as the queen’s second son, Prince Andrew, was about to wed Sarah Ferguson at Westminster Abbey. Margaret and Denis Thatcher were even VIP guests alongside Elton John, Michael Caine, Estee Lauder and Nancy Reagan. A week later, the Commonwealth Games were about to start in Edinburgh and the African states were boycotting it because of Thatcher’s policies on South Africa.
Late on Saturday night before the story was published, senior royal advisors were dining at Boodle’s, the Mayfair gentleman’s club. At eleven o’clock, their assistants were dispatched to Victoria Station to grab early editions of the Sunday Times, just as the trucks were delivering them to the newspaper stands ready to be sold the following morning.55 ‘Sources close to the queen,’ wrote Michael Jones and Simon Freeman, offered the Sunday Times readers an ‘unprecedented disclosure of the monarch’s political views’.56 Stories claiming to represent royal opinion were always vague about their sources, but this one was precise and was based, as Jones and Freeman explained, on several briefings by the queen’s advisors.57 The Sunday Times stated, ‘Far from being a straightforward countrywoman, a late middle-aged grandmother who is most at ease when she is talking about dogs and horses, the queen is an astute political infighter who is quite prepared to take on Downing Street when provoked.’58
The editor of the Sunday Times, Andrew Neil, upset both Mrs Thatcher and the queen in that one sentence. Both were furious that a major unwritten rule of the Establishment had been broken. Her Majesty hated to be pulled into the political amphitheatre because it would be damaging constitutionally. Margaret Thatcher knew it would hurt her to have a head of state as loved and respected as Elizabeth II denounce her policies.
If the story had been presented merely as inspired speculation it would have received scant attention, as rumours of the differences between the queen and her prime minister had been long-standing. In fact, the Sunday Times played down indications of a personality clash to underscore the disagreement with actual policy. What gave the account such effect was its detailed rundown of the queen’s anti-Thatcher views and the claim from the journalists that they had an ‘unimpeachable’ source who wanted the comments to be published.59
A full-blown constitutional crisis was now on the horizon. The Daily Mirror took delight in rewriting the original story under the headline, ‘Queen and Charles Loathe Thatcher’. The Sun delivered its verdict with the headline, ‘Stop Your Meddling, Ma’am’.
More details emerged the following week, when the Sunday Times explained that its journalist had spoken to his source five times before publication; the article was also discussed with Downing Street and Buckingham Palace before going to print, and the palace had never asked for it to be withheld.60 Michael Jones had called Bernard Ingham, Thatcher’s press secretary, on Saturday, and read the news story over the phone to him for a Downing Street reaction. An angry Ingham informed Thatcher’s private secretary, Nigel Wicks, who called Sir William Heseltine and told him the contents of the story.61 Wicks called Mrs Thatcher who said, ‘Don’t say anything at all.’ She was dismayed that this kind of thing could come between her and the queen. Ingram also spoke to Shea, who confirmed that he had spoken to the Sunday Times. Ingham wasn’t entirely surprised:
There was a feeling around Buckingham Palace that people were amused by Mrs Thatcher’s passion. I lived to detect a certain snobbishness in the hangers-on who tended to ridicule this ‘Joan come lately‘ and not least because of her apparently exaggerated deference to the queen. Note her very deep curtsies. I sometimes wondered whether she would ever get back upright in good order.62
Andrew Neil’s team had done their homework. Bernard Ingham described his journalism as ‘thorough and thoroughly commercial’.63 Simon Freeman was an experienced news and features journalist assigned to investigate the potential rift developing between the queen and Mrs Thatcher over the Commonwealth. What he came up with was even better: now he had sourced information on a whole range of topics, from American planes using British bases to bomb Libya to the miners’ strike. It was a hugely significant scoop because the queen’s private thoughts on any issue are almost never publicly known. What made it doubly unique was that the source was the queen’s press secretary, Michael Shea.64 Shea had spoken off the record to Simon Freeman, which meant he could use the material, but not name him as a source. Freeman even read the article back to Shea and was corrected on some points, while having more details filled in regarding others.65
Before printing the story, Andrew Neil had phoned the paper’s proprietor, Rupert Murdoch. ‘Are you sure it’s true?’ Rupert asked. He wasn’t surprised. Murdoch saw himself, like Thatcher, as an outsider. He told Neil, ‘The Establishment hate Thatcher, and you can’t get more Establishment than the royal family. But they’re crazy to bad mouth her like this; it’ll backfire on them.’66 Murdoch also felt a fight between Thatcher and the queen wouldn’t do Thatcher any harm, ‘it will do her a lot of good,’ he disclosed to Woodrow Wyatt.67
The account of the queen versus Thatcher dominated the news bulletins around the world for days, even knocking the royal wedding of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson off the number one spot on ITV’s News at Ten the day before the actual ceremony. The American networks were as preoccupied as the Commonwealth countries by a story involving two such high profile women. Arguably, an attempt by Buckingham Palace to distance themselves from Margaret Thatcher’s hardline policies had backfired spectacularly.
Andrew Neil said:
The palace was rumbled. It had overplayed its hand, its fingerprints were all over the story and it rushed for cover, rewriting history as it did so.68
There was a whispering campaign orchestrated by the palace … to do down the Thatcher Government. This began to appear in a whole host of stories done very subtly, never sourced to the palace … that Mrs Thatcher was upsetting the royal family in general and the queen in particular.69
Thatcher’s supporters, like Alan Clark, believed that the briefing ‘must have been a put-up job to cut Thatcher down to size’.70
The hunt was now on for the source of the story, and a lynch mob was forming outside Andrew Neil’s door. The Establishment was on the warpath, although in certain circles the Prince of Wales was suspected of being the leak.71 Everyone seemed to be angry, and letters flooded into the Sunday Times from readers demanding Andrew Neil’s resignation and threatening never to buy the paper again.72 Michael Shea, who had lit the fuse, now dissembled and issued a statement that the story was ‘entirely without foundation’. It was an act that obviously infuriated Andrew Neil, the Sunday Times editor, who found himself being trashed by the person who had fed him the story. In his biography, Neil stated, ‘Why should I allow him to plant his bomb then print his denial of any responsibility for the explosion?’73
Various worthies and royalists were wheeled out to rubbish the story and condemn Neil. Faced with demands for authentication, Andrew Neil was forced to admit that the informant worked at Buckingham Palace.74 This narrowed the field to the three potential courtiers. The queen’s private secretary, Sir William Heseltine; her assistant private secretary, Robert Fellowes; and her press secretary, Michael Shea.
On 27 July the Observer pinpointed Michael Shea.75 That evening Neil received a phone call from Charles Wilson, the editor of The Times. He explained that Monday’s Times would be carrying a long letter from Sir William attacking the article and defending Michael Shea. ‘It’s an unprecedented intervention by such a senior courtier,’ claimed Wilson, and it could only have been written with the queen’s consent. That night Andrew Neil knew ‘there was an Exocet heading my way in the morning’. Under the rules governing letters to The Times, he was not able to reply until after the letter had been published.76 Meanwhile, two Establishment-supporting directors of Times Newspapers, Lord Drogheda, a well-connected figure in the palace and the press, and Lord Dacre, the famous Oxford historian who damaged his own reputation by authenticating the notorious fake Hitler diaries in 1983, started to lobby Rupert Murdoch to sack Neil. According to Neil, a deal was even mooted that if he were fired then the palace would sacrifice Michael Shea.
The following morning, Andrew Neil woke up to read that his story has been dismissed as nonsense and that it was difficult to see how he could survive as editor. Sir William’s letter disputed the account of the remarks that were published. As former royal press secretary, Ronald Allison explains this ‘put Bill [Sir William] in a very difficult position which as you can imagine he didn’t appreciate’.77
In his letter to The Times, Heseltine was forced to write that the queen is:
… obliged to treat her communications with the prime minister as entirely confidential … After thirty-four years of unvarying adherence to these constitutional principles, it is preposterous to suggest that Her Majesty might suddenly depart from them … It is equally preposterous to suggest that any member of the queen’s household, even supposing that he or she knew what Her Majesty’s opinions on government policy might be (and the press secretary certainly does not), would reveal them to the press.
He defended Michael Shea by explaining that:
Although parts of the feature article ‘The African Queen’ were read over to the press secretary, other crucial parts were not; and no warning was given directly by the Sunday Times to the palace of the article on the front page or of the impact which the Sunday Times expected the articles to cause.
Neil, together with Michael Jones, sat down to draft a robust reply for the next day’s Times, accusing the palace of ‘playing with fire’ and lacking the wit to blow it out before it burned them. Andrew Neil pointed out in his reply that ‘for the first time’ Buckingham Palace were admitting that Michael Shea ‘was sufficiently involved with the preparation’ of the article. He went on, ‘We have said from the start that all of it was read, Sir William now says only parts of it. But when Mr Shea contacted me the day after publication he made no complaint that he had been duped’.
Andrew Neil’s reply ended the crisis for him; perhaps the palace had expected him to roll over and surrender and were taken aback by someone daring to stand up to them. They clearly didn’t relish a prolonged confrontation between Buckingham Palace officials, Downing Street and the Murdoch empire.
Andrew Neil was certain that Michael Shea was too cautious a man to act on his own. A graduate of Gordonstoun with a doctorate in economics from the University of Edinburgh, he had served for fifteen years as a diplomat before joining the palace in 1978 to run the press office. Neil believed that he must have felt his controversial briefings had the approval of at least some of the royal family and courtiers in the palace who were at least as senior as he was. As an ex-diplomat, he would have been too careful not to risk it otherwise.78 The identification of the press secretary as the source raised several very serious constitutional questions. Michael Shea was the queen’s official spokesperson. Ronald Allison, who held the post before him explains his duty:
You represent the queen, you represent the royal family, you represent the monarchy … If you express an opinion about something or other you … will be held accountable as expressing the queen’s opinion. So you don’t express opinions about contentious issues.79
Shea had a strong working relationship with the queen and was known to be in contact with her two or three times a week. Questions were inevitably asked: How did he happen to be talking about such delicate issues? Was the queen herself in any way responsible for the disclosures?80
If so, she was breaking a lifetime of discretion. Lord Carrington insists, ‘The queen … has never said what she felt about anything.’81
A slightly alternative perspective is offered up by David Owen, a former Foreign Secretary, who suggests, ‘She’s [the queen] indiscreet to a point, but she doesn’t cross a line … she’s very cautious, little asides that you might pick up that there’s an edge in their relationship, that’s maybe what Mike Shea picked up over the Commonwealth.’82 As Foreign Secretary, Owen also accompanied the queen on the Royal Yacht Britannia. He remembers how she ‘sort of kicks off her shoes, tucks her feet under her bottom and sits on the sofa and starts to mimic guests, is indiscreet, funny and completely different to the queen you ever see in any normal circumstances’.83
The Guardian journalist, Ian Aitken, expressed disquiet at the notion of the queen seeking to marshal public opinion in opposition to an elected government, even an objectionable one.84 According to royal biographer, Nicholas Davies, the Sunday Times accurately summed up the queen’s vision of ‘one world’ working towards the unification of black and white nations.85 If Elizabeth had approved the story, in doing so she would have set herself up against Mrs Thatcher and arguably crossed over the constitutional line. Elizabeth believed fervently that South Africa should be punished for its apartheid policies, its suppression of free thought and imprisonment of government critics. The sanctions debate threatened her beloved Commonwealth, and she was determined to use her influence to prevent that. No other matter of policy throughout Mrs Thatcher’s time in office proved so divisive to her relationship with the queen.
During the aftermath of the story, the Conservative Party’s rating in the polls slumped by an astonishing nine points. There were some pained faces inside Downing Street as aides had to resist the temptation to hit back or even indirectly be seen to condemn the palace. The idea that the queen was vexed with Thatcher was the last thing they needed. The following Tuesday, at Question Time in Parliament, Mrs Thatcher had the humiliation of standing up in the House of Commons to answer the usual questions about her engagements for the day, which included the customary audience with the queen. At that moment, the Labour bench burst into braying laughter, and she just had to grit her teeth. The Left rejoiced at finding an ally at the palace86 and seemed delighted by the embarrassment it caused Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher complained to Woodrow Wyatt. ‘It’s unfair on me. The queen doesn’t have to fight an election. I do.’87
Meanwhile, in the Sunday Telegraph, journalist and ‘Thatcherite High Tory’ Peregrine Worsthorne thought the queen’s displeasure had made an ‘indelible impression on the public imagination’, and that as a result, ‘the prime minister’s spirit may actually have been broken’.88 For Thatcher, who had idolised the queen before she became prime minister, the rejection she felt was acute. In her memoirs, Thatcher glossed over the issue. She wrote:
The press could not resist the temptation to suggest disputes between the palace and Downing Street, especially on Commonwealth affairs, I always found the queen’s attitude towards the work of the government absolutely correct. Of course, under the circumstances, stories of clashes between, ‘two powerful women’ were just too good not to make up.89
However, her real inner feelings were revealed when Brian Walden went to interview her for the Sunday Times, some time after the row. Brian, an ex-Labour MP who was now a Thatcherite convert, had become very friendly with her. He noticed that she was a bit sniffy that he was there for the Sunday Times.
‘Does the “Queen vs. Thatcher” story still rankle?’ he asked.
‘Yes, it does, Brian,’ she replied, ‘it hurt me very badly at the time.’
‘But you know it was true,’ said Brian. ‘The palace was out to undermine you.’
Thatcher hesitated for a moment, then took off her glasses and pinched her nose, bowed her head and said sadly, ‘I know, Brian, I know. The problem is the queen is the kind of woman who could vote SDP.’90
In the aftermath of the affair, Mrs Thatcher treated the reckless Michael Shea gently, at least superficially. Thatcher, the queen and Shea were all at Holyrood Palace, the queen’s official home in Edinburgh while the story was still being reported. It couldn’t have been a very jolly breakfast with press headlines everywhere about the queen’s rift with her prime minister. Later in the day, the queen deliberately placed the press secretary between herself and Mrs Thatcher at table. Michael Shea apologised for what happened. ‘Don’t worry, dear,’ the prime minister replied. Not much was said after that.
Thatcher didn’t take it completely lying down; she told diarist Woodrow Wyatt that, ‘We will have to see whether new arrangements are made to prevent such a thing happening again. I think they will be.’91
Following a decent interval, Shea was quietly dropped as palace press secretary, without much ceremony. He disappeared to write books and articles about spin-doctoring, and later took a corporate job at Hanson plc as director of public relations. He never received the customary knighthood that often comes with the job. His discreet memoirs about his time at the palace, A View from the Sidelines (2003), do not mention the affair. Thatcher’s people later assigned the aristocratic William Whitelaw, who had links to grandees in the royal household, to tell the palace to ignore the dissident Tory wets.92
Downing Street may have been annoyed, but the Foreign Office was more conciliatory and over at the Commonwealth secretariat there was unashamed delight. ‘I was very glad about the Thatcher row,’ said Sir Sonny Ramphal. ‘What Michael Shea was saying to the press, was what we knew to be the reality, and it needed to be said.’93
When Sir Geoffrey Howe made a visit to Zambia and faced the cameras for a televised meeting with President Kenneth Kaunda on 24 July, he found the leader full of venom towards Mrs Thatcher, whom he accused of ‘kissing apartheid’. President Kaunda was only prepared to welcome the British Foreign Secretary because of his ‘love and respect for Her Majesty the Queen’.94
The queen’s rift with Thatcher rallied the black leaders of the Commonwealth to the monarch and encouraged them not to leave the organisation. She had, it seemed, protected her favourite institution from breaking up; if a battle had been fought behind the scenes, the queen had won it.
By 30 July, an Evening Standard poll suggested that the Tories were only one point behind Labour. The damage didn’t last that long, as both women had moved quickly to brush such a potentially damaging disagreement quickly under the carpet. As Bernard Ingham said, ‘I think the article damaged Mrs T only to the extent that it gave those who wanted to damage her something to play with … Otherwise, another short-term media sensation. They come around like clockwork.’95 Rupert Murdoch told Woodrow Wyatt, ‘I always said a row with the queen would do Thatcher a lot of good. You fought a civil war about this once.’96
Former Liberal Party Leader, David Steel, explained:
Michael Shea was a close friend of mine, so I am not impartial. He felt shopped by Andrew Neil. He was a loyal servant to the queen and meant wholly well, but was perhaps too indiscreet. I think Mrs T was furious and of course it correctly showed that she was uncaring and confrontational which was not helpful to her.97
Michael Dobbs, who also knew Michael Shea, points out, ‘I think you have to be able to distinguish between Michael Shea’s opinion of Mrs Thatcher and the queen’s opinion of Mrs Thatcher. They weren’t necessarily one and the same thing.’98
Many in the media made up their minds that the whole story was hyperbole. Woodrow Wyatt dismissed Shea as a ‘megalomaniac’99 and Tim Bell is also dismissive, ‘Michael Shea was a gossip queen. And he said things that he has no basis of knowing; they’re just inventions. The reason they do it is because they know that nobody can deny it because nobody knows what happened between them.’100 David Owen is also suspicious of Shea, ‘The household is full of gossip and people purport to know what the queen’s view is.’101
However, three years later, in October 1989, Andrew Neil had lunch with former Cabinet minister and notorious Tory ‘wet’ Norman St John-Stevas (later Lord St John of Fawsley). A loyal monarchist, he had publicly attacked the Sunday Times during the queen versus Thatcher quarrel.
‘Why did you attack me, Norman?’ Andrew asked, ‘When you must have known the story was true?’
‘Yes Andrew it was true, which is precisely why I had to deny it.’ Then he added with a smile, ‘it was more true, Andrew, than you’ll ever know.’102
When Michael Shea had joined the household he had found himself very close to the pinnacle of the ‘ultimate club’, the British Establishment. To belong, you must never repeat what the queen has said. You bow and hold your tongue. Royal author, Graham Turner explains:
Once you are in that circle you see that preserving ring of silence that surrounds and protects the queen … When you join the household, Civil Service or government you are never told that, but you just pick it up. You’ve become part of the circle and accepted its norms.103
Michael Shea broke that rule.
1 Diaries, Alan Clark (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1993).
2 Elizabeth, the Queen, Sally Bedell Smith (Penguin Books, 2012).
3 The Rise and Fall of the House of Windsor, A.N. Wilson (W.W. Norton & Co., 1993).
4 Elizabeth, the Queen, Sally Bedell Smith (Penguin Books, 2012).
5 ‘Portrait of a Marriage’, Daily Telegraph, 5 September 2004.
6 Elizabeth, the Queen, Sally Bedell Smith (Penguin Books, 2012).
7 The Queen: Elizabeth II and the Monarchy, Ben Pimlott (HarperCollins, 1996).
8 Ibid.
9 The Windsors, Piers Brendon and Phillip Whitehead (Pimlico, 2000).
10 ‘The Blooming of Margaret Thatcher’, Gail Sheehy, Vanity Fair, June 1989.
11 Ibid.
12 Elizabeth, the Queen, Sally Bedell Smith (Penguin Books, 2012).
13 Ibid.
14 Thatcher & Sons, Simon Jenkins (Penguin, 2007).
15 Interview, David Owen, 2013.
16 Ibid.
17 The Audience, Peter Morgan (Faber & Faber, 2013).
18 One of Us, Hugo Young (Macmillan, 1989).
19 Charles: A Biography, Anthony Holden (Corgi, 1999).
20 Manchester Evening News, 23 October 1985.
21 Glasgow Herald, 11 April 1988.
22 Charles: A Biography, Anthony Holden (Corgi, 1999).
23 Ibid.
24 The Royals, Kitty Kelly (H.B. Productions Inc., 1997).
25 Having It So Good, Peter Hennessy (Allen Lane, 2006).
26 There is No Alternative, Claire Berlinski (Basic Books, 2008).
27 Ibid.
28 National Archives – papers released in 2014.
29 There is No Alternative, Claire Berlinski (Basic Books, 2008).
30 ‘The Blooming of Margaret Thatcher’, Gail Sheehy, Vanity Fair, June 1989.
31 Strange Rebels, Christian Caryl (Basic Books, 2013).
32 There is No Alternative, Claire Berlinski (Basic Books, 2008).
33 Iron Lady, Stephen Blake and Andrew John (Michael O’Mara Books, 2003).
34 There is No Alternative, Claire Berlinski (Basic Books, 2008).
35 ‘The Blooming of Margaret Thatcher’, Gail Sheehy, Vanity Fair, June 1989.
36 Upwardly Mobile, Norman Tebbit (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988).
37 Iron Lady, Stephen Blake and Andrew John (Michael O’Mara Books, 2003).
38 Courier, 12 August 1984.
39 Montreal Gazette, 13 August 1984.
40 Elizabeth: Behind Palace Doors, Nicholas Davies (Mainstream Publishing, 2000).
41 ‘True Spies’, BBC News, 2002.
42 The Queen: Elizabeth II and the Monarchy, Ben Pimlott (HarperCollins, 1996).
43 Full Disclosure, Andrew Neil (Macmillan, 1996).
44 Interview, Edwina Currie, 2013
45 The Windsors, Piers Brendon and Phillip Whitehead (Pimlico, 2000).
46 Ibid.
47 Author’s correspondence with Sir Bernard Ingham, 2013.
48 Full Disclosure, Andrew Neil (Macmillan, 1996).
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid.
51 ‘The African Queen’, Michael Jones and Simon Freeman, Sunday Times, 20 July 1986.
52 Ibid.
53 One of Us, Hugo Young (Macmillan, 1989).
54 Ibid.
55 Elizabeth, the Queen, Sally Bedell Smith (Penguin Books, 2012).
56 ‘The African Queen’, Michael Jones and Simon Freeman, Sunday Times, 20 July 1986.
57 The Queen: Elizabeth II and the Monarchy, Ben Pimlott (HarperCollins, 1996).
58 ‘The African Queen’, Michael Jones and Simon Freeman, Sunday Times, 20 July 1986.
59 The Queen: Elizabeth II and the Monarchy, Ben Pimlott (HarperCollins, 1996).
60 Ibid.
61 Full Disclosure, Andrew Neil (Macmillan, 1996).
62 Author’s correspondence with Bernard Ingham, 2013.
63 Ibid.
64 Full Disclosure, Andrew Neil (Macmillan, 1996).
65 Ibid.
66 Ibid.
67 The Journals of Woodrow Wyatt, Sarah Curtis (Ed.) (Macmillan, 1999).
68 Full Disclosure, Andrew Neil (Macmillan, 1996).
69 The Windsors, Piers Brendon and Phillip Whitehead (Pimlico, 2000).
70 Ibid.
71 Full Disclosure, Andrew Neil (Macmillan, 1996).
72 Ibid.
73 Ibid.
74 The Queen: Elizabeth II and the Monarchy, Ben Pimlott (HarperCollins, 1996).
75 Observer, 27 July 1987.
76 Full Disclosure, Andrew Neil (Macmillan, 1996).
77 Interview, Ronald Allison, 2013.
78 Full Disclosure, Andrew Neil (Macmillan, 1996).
79 Interview, Ronald Allison, 2013.
80 The Queen: Elizabeth II and the Monarchy, Ben Pimlott (HarperCollins, 1996).
81 Interview, Lord Carrington, 2013.
82 Interview, David Owen, 2013.
83 Ibid.
84 Guardian, 21 July 1986.
85 Elizabeth: Behind Palace Doors, Nicholas Davies (Mainstream Publishing, 2000).
86 The Queen: Elizabeth II and the Monarchy, Ben Pimlott (HarperCollins, 1996).
87 The Journals of Woodrow Wyatt, Sarah Curtis (Ed.) (Macmillan, 1999).
88 Sunday Telegraph, 27 July 1986.
89 The Downing Street Years, Margaret Thatcher (HarperCollins, 1993).
90 Full Disclosure, Andrew Neil (Macmillan, 1996).
91 The Journals of Woodrow Wyatt, Sarah Curtis (Ed.) (Macmillan, 1999).
92 Full Disclosure, Andrew Neil (Macmillan, 1996).
93 The Queen: Elizabeth II and the Monarchy, Ben Pimlott (HarperCollins, 1996).
94 Conflict of Loyalty, Geoffrey Howe (Pan, 1995).
95 Author’s correspondence with Sir Bernard Ingham, 2013.
96 The Journals of Woodrow Wyatt, Sarah Curtis (Ed.) (Macmillan, 1999).
97 Author’s correspondence with David Steel, 2013.
98 Interview, Michael Dobbs, 2013.
99 The Journals of Woodrow Wyatt, Sarah Curtis (Ed.) (Macmillan, 1999).
100 Interview, Tim Bell, 2013.
101 Interview, David Owen, 2013.
102 Full Disclosure, Andrew Neil (Macmillan, 1996).
103 Elizabeth: The Woman and Queen, Graham Turner (Macmillan/Daily Telegraph, 24 May 2002).