The Commonwealth … that’s all she’s got.
Denis Thatcher, on Her Majesty the Queen
Within days of Mrs Thatcher setting up home in Number 10, the public started to speculate about the phenomenon of a woman prime minister and her relationship with the queen. To begin with, relations were, in the words of Thatcher’s biographer, John Campbell, ‘punctiliously correct’,1 but insiders soon realised there was little love lost on either side. Margaret, having married a divorcee, was the second Mrs Thatcher, and even as late as the 1970s divorce remained an anathema to the palace. The queen harboured private suspicions of a woman in power and now took an active dislike to this new girl who clearly wanted to be head girl.
Mrs Thatcher’s attitude to the queen was ambivalent. On the one hand she had an almost mystical reverence for the monarchy, ‘Nobody would curtsy lower,’ one courtier confided,2 but on the other she gave in to school ma’am lecturing which didn’t go down well, and she started to view Buckingham Palace as full of the ‘unproductive’ types.
Recently revealed memos written by Mrs Thatcher’s aides show that, even during her first three years in power, the prime minister was constantly trying to avoid the audience with the queen. These documents hint at the early antagonism and tension between the two women, which they were both at pains to conceal. One, sent to Clive Whitmore, Mrs Thatcher’s principal private secretary, and written by Caroline Stephens, Mrs Thatcher’s diary secretary, reads, ‘Tuesday, December 9 is not convenient as she has committed herself to entertaining a French high level mission (mostly bankers) for a drink’. When Mr Whitmore wrote to Sir Philip Moore, the queen’s private secretary, he appears not to mention the French bankers and says only that the PM has a ‘long-standing engagement’.3 In one note Clive Whitmore cautions, ‘I really think this will be pushing our luck with the palace’, and Ms Stephens, equally concerned, writes, ‘I don’t want to spoil our relations with the palace’.4
Other memos reveal attempts by the prime minister to avoid attending the queen at Buckingham Palace, particularly when Parliament was in recess. Meetings between the two women were constantly rescheduled, and dates dropped. Finally, on 12 February 1981, an irritated Sir Philip Moore writes back stating that the audience time should now be ‘regarded as firm’, following yet another cancellation.5
Mrs Thatcher also declined to be a weekend guest at Windsor Castle for a ‘dine and sleep’ in 1979, the year she was elected, because her husband Denis had a board meeting the following morning.6 She clearly wasn’t over eager to socialise with the queen.
When the queen and prime minister were together in private, Thatcher was nervous and obsequious. She irritated Her Majesty with her combination of social anxiety, false humility and suburban pretensions. The queen wondered, ‘Why does she always sit on the edge of her seat?’7 and noted that she spoke with Royal Shakespeare Received Pronunciation from circa 1950.8 Before long, she came to dread Mrs Thatcher’s visits to the palace.9
Known for her mimicry, Elizabeth loved telling Margaret Thatcher jokes, her favourite being about the prime minister visiting an old people’s home:
‘Do you know who I am?’ said the queen, imitating Thatcher’s grandiose yet artificial accent as she shook the hands of an elderly resident.
‘No,’ replied the confused resident. ‘But if you ask matron, she’ll tell you.’10
However, jokes, for Margaret Thatcher, were no laughing matter. Irony was lost on the Iron Lady. On visiting a navy destroyer, she asked a sailor about the recoil of a naval gun on deck, ‘Can this thing jerk you off?’,11 and on praising her deputy prime minister, William Whitelaw, she delivered her most notorious double entendre, ‘Every prime minister should have a Willie.’12
There was one area in which the queen felt she was more expert than her lecturing, but less well-travelled, prime minister; and that was international affairs. Elizabeth II, by way of her position as Head of the Commonwealth, is sovereign of seventeen realms scattered across the globe. To Her Majesty, Mrs Thatcher was merely the eighth prime minister of the UK, and in 1979 when she took office, the queen had been in her job twenty-six years. Although Thatcher’s ignorance of foreign affairs when she became prime minister was alarming, the queen’s opinions were shaped by the former era of empire, when her royal cousins such as the Hohenzollerns and Romanovs sat upon the thrones of Europe and Britain ruled a large portion of the world.
To make matters more difficult, Mrs Thatcher had a loathing of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office. The Foreign Secretary at the time, Lord Carrington, acknowledged this:
She [Thatcher] hated the Foreign Office … she felt that anybody who tried to get along with foreigners was somehow disloyal and that they were the sort of people who would give in to foreigners … She hated the idea of a consensus and, as a result, she never got on with the people in Europe, partly because I think she mistrusted people whose mother tongue wasn’t English. Americans were alright; Australia was alright, Canadians were okay, but when you came down to French and Germans, well, that was a different matter altogether.13
Thatcher viewed all the inhabitants of the Foreign Office with great suspicion – public school boys with second-rate brains compared to those at the Treasury next door. ‘Many in the department were Arabist scholars who spoke Arabic. Her constituency in Finchley was dominated by Jewish voters with whom she shared an affinity. The foreign office was very old-fashioned, if a woman got married in those days she had to leave her job,’ Edwina Currie recognised.14
Mrs Thatcher’s first adventure into international affairs was just before the 1979 election, when the Iranian Revolution forced the Shah of Iran into exile in Morocco. Thatcher sent word to the exiled emperor that she would allow Britain’s old ally and friend to come to the United Kingdom should she win the election. The intermediary was a British television producer called Alan Hart, who had made several television documentaries in Iran. Thatcher told Hart, ‘I would be ashamed to be British if we could not give the Shah refuge’. The Shah hoped to move into Stilemans, a large equestrian estate he owned in the stockbroker belt of Surrey.15 Both the queen and Prince Philip, as well as the queen mother and Princess Anne, had all regularly visited their fellow royal when he sat upon his oil-rich throne. According to journalist, William Shawcross, the queen had been discreetly lobbying for the Shah, as she felt Britain should show him loyalty for the long years in which he had supported British interests in the Middle East. ‘She believed that states must recognise personal as well as national obligations.’16
However, the post-election political climate was hardening against the Iranian imperial family, and the Foreign Office started making objections. They feared the Shah’s life would be at risk from the thousands of Iranian students currently studying in the UK, thus adding a significantly large security bill to the logistical headaches. The tabloids ran stories of tank traps at Stilemans that made the neighbours nervous. There were also economic objections – if the Shah was granted a home in England, the new Iranian regime might block British trade, including oil. The loss of jobs to British workers could be enormous.17
Mrs Thatcher looked as if she was going sweep away any objections to the Shah retiring to the United Kingdom. However, what tipped the balance was the fear that the British Embassy in Tehran might be seized, and the ambassador and his staff held hostage, allowing the Iranians to demand that the Shah be traded for them. Lord Carrington, then Foreign Secretary, stated, ‘The ambassador in Tehran sent me a telegram saying that if you offer asylum to the Shah, the 1,100 British citizens who are in Tehran will be shot.’18
Therefore, the ‘Iron Lady’ buckled under pressure, devastating the Shah, who felt betrayed. For the rest of his life spurned by those who had once fawned over him her searcher for a permanent home.
Back in London, during a dinner party with former government minister, Lord Shawcross (father of writer William Shawcross), the queen expressed her anger towards Margaret Thatcher for reneging on a promise to grant the Shah asylum. ‘Once you give your word,’ the queen said, ‘that’s it.’ It was not a good start to the relationship, and a rare indiscretion by the queen.19 Lord Carrington also felt sorry for the Shah. ‘I always felt rather bad about it, because we’d been on very good terms with the Shah, and I was rather sorry for him, and he wasn’t the evil man that people made out.’20
Another incident saw a clash of cultures between the old school Establishment and the new Thatcher model. This time it centred on the Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, Sir Anthony Blunt, who had acted as a Russian spy while working at MI5 during the 1940s. Mrs Thatcher was fascinated by the work of the secret services and was a fan of Frederick Forsyth novels (she preferred the hardliners of MI6 to the ‘wimps’ of the Foreign Office). However, the new prime minister was shocked to learn that Blunt, who was at the heart of the British Establishment, had been a ‘mole’ for Russia.
In 1964, Blunt had been offered immunity from prosecution provided he co-operated in the inquiries of the security authorities. Buckingham Palace was also briefed on the immunity deal, which enabled Blunt to continue in royal service for the next fifteen years.21 According to Peter Rawlinson, the government’s solicitor general who arranged the immunity deal, the queen knew for years that he was a spy. He explained, ‘it was essential to keep him in his position at Buckingham Palace looking after the queen’s pictures. Otherwise, Russia would have realised that his cover had been blown.’22 Palace officials knew Blunt’s secret long before his public exposure. In 1948, former army officer Philip Hay attended Buckingham Palace for a job interview. After passing Blunt in the corridor, Sir Alan Lascelles, the king’s private secretary told Hay, ‘That’s our Russian spy’.23
Thatcher discovered the deal in 1979, when a book by Andrew Boyle, The Climate of Treason, hinted at who the mole was and led to questions in the House of Commons.24 Instead of playing it safe, Margaret Thatcher overruled the director of MI5, Sir Michael Hanley,25 and the cabinet secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong,26 and went public on Blunt. Armstrong maintained that it would only ‘shed light into corners best left publicly dark’. No corner was darker than Blunt’s palace connections which helped him protest his innocence and even threaten writs, right up to the time of Mrs Thatcher’s statement.27 Former Labour Foreign Secretary David Owen said that Thatcher felt ‘… that the secrecy was being used to protect people, she is a radical, and she was confronted by the knowledge that Blunt had been pardoned in this sort of extraordinary way. So she did break it.’28
Thatcher’s statement, which exposed Blunt, caused an international sensation.29 As a story it had all the exciting elements needed to sell newspapers: class, spies, the Establishment, royalty, homosexuality and a villain who had betrayed his country. Satirical magazine Private Eye suggested that Blunt’s royal connections had secured him immunity from prosecution.30 The front page of the Daily Mail said it all, ‘Traitor at the Queen’s Right Hand’. In the Daily Express, columnist John Junor described him as a ‘treacherous Communist poof’. The Daily Telegraph said Blunt had been a hopeless army officer and hinted at cowardice.31 This, as Conservative MP Alan Clark confessed in his diary, was a lucky break for the government, as the story diverted attention from ‘the really alarming manner in which our economy seems to be conducted’.32
Blunt, a crashing snob and homosexual, was the so-called ‘fourth man’ in the infamous Cambridge spy ring which included Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Kim Philby. After leaving MI5, he had become a distinguished art historian who was made director of the Courtauld Institute and advised the queen on the royal collection. He was also a third cousin of the queen mother (Blunt’s mother was a second cousin to her father, the Earl of Strathmore). Blunt used to take tea with her and occasionally shared her box at the opera. She was rather fond of him.
Anthony Blunt had, on occasion, also performed the odd tricky ‘diplomatic mission’ on behalf of the ‘family’. In the summer of 1963, only a few months before his confession, he had quietly acted on behalf of the Windsors to buy a series of drawings that Stephen Ward had made of Prince Philip.
Ward was a key witness in the infamous Profumo Scandal, named after John Profumo, the Secretary of State for War. Profumo had damaged Macmillan’s Conservative Government by carrying on an affair with Christine Keeler, a London party girl, while she was also sleeping with Yevgeny Ivanov, a naval attaché at the Soviet Embassy in London. The ramifications for national security were grave. Stephen Ward, a fashionable osteopath and party arranger for the aristocracy, had introduced Keeler to Profumo. Ward had been charged with living off the profits of prostitution and committed suicide by overdosing on sleeping tablets on the last day of the trial. Any connection between such a notorious individual and Prince Philip, whom he met through the Thursday Club, was not desirable.
One of the many theories surrounding Anthony Blunt is that he obtained his immunity from prosecution by threatening to expose that the Duke of Windsor had been plotting with Hitler and the Nazi Party during the Second World War. In 1945, Blunt was sent by the Secret Intelligence Service to the Schloss Freidrichshof, the castle home of Prince Philippe of Hesse to recover potentially incriminating letters. Hesse, a cousin of the British royal family, was a great-grandson of Queen Victoria. The fact that the duke had been in favour of pursuing a pro-German appeasement policy with Hitler had long been an embarrassment to the royal family. Provided with official documentation and an army truck, Blunt set out for Germany with George VI’s private librarian, Owen Morshead, to recover the letters. The official story was that Blunt was sent to recover private correspondence between Queen Victoria and her daughter Victoria, the Princess Royal, who became German Empress and Queen of Prussia.33
Arriving at the castle, Blunt and Morshead found it occupied by American forces and Prince Philippe in Allied custody for having served as a senior officer in Hitler’s Third Reich. The American senior officer in charge was unimpressed by both Blunt’s arrogance and his royal credentials, and refused to accept his demand to remove the papers. Determined to complete his mission, Blunt sought out the remaining Hesse family, recently evicted from the castle and now housed in a nearby village. Prince Philippe’s mother, Princess Margaret of Prussia (a granddaughter of Queen Victoria) briefed Blunt on how to slip into the castle by means of a back staircase, which he did that night, providing him with a letter that instructed the loyal castle servants to help the two Englishmen. Blunt and Morshead removed two crates of documents from the castle’s attics and drove off with them in a truck towards the safety of the British zone before the Americans discovered the theft. A week later, the documents were safely deposited in Windsor Castle, never to be seen again.34
In August 1947, a rumour surfaced that the Duke of Windsor had communicated with Prince Frederick William, the son of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had also acted as an emissary for Hitler. Again, Blunt and Morshead were sent to the Continent, this time to Huis Doorn, the late Kaiser’s residence in Holland, tasked with finding any more potentially embarrassing royal documents.35
Whatever Blunt’s past services had been to the royal family, within minutes of Thatcher’s statement to the House, Buckingham Palace announced that Blunt was being stripped of his knighthood.36 It was as though the queen had just heard of the scandalous state of affairs for the first time.37 Within days, Blunt’s academic titles, honorary doctorates and fellowships all began to disappear38 as he was cast out of the Establishment. The whole messy business illustrated MI5’s ineptitude and the ability of the upper classes to protect one of their own.
Thatcher’s statement to the House of Commons raised several questions: Had other traitors been offered immunity from prosecution in return for a confession? Why had immunity been offered to Blunt when other spies, who were not related to a member of the royal family and who did not hold positions at the palace, had been sent to prison? How much information did the queen know about the affair? The scandal, although something of a diversion from the daily work of politics, did raise issues about the relationship between Buckingham Palace, the government and the intelligence services.39
Mrs Thatcher believed that Blunt had ‘by his own admission committed serious offences’.40 Sir Bernard Ingham, her private secretary while she was at Number 10, had little doubt. ‘I believe she did it because she didn’t see why the system should cover things up,’ he says. ‘This was early in her prime ministership. I think she wanted to tell the civil service that the politicians decide policy, not the system. She wanted them to know who was boss.’41 Alan Clark said that the whole affair was:
… disreputable; one of those episodes that indicated a kind of close society in the palace circle that regards itself immune for the norms of appropriate behaviour … My view is that Anthony Blunt should have been executed because he had contributed by his actions to the deaths of our agents.42
Margaret Thatcher herself seemed personally affronted by Blunt’s immunity. She had no time for liberal interpretations of his motives, which suggested he was fighting fascism. In her mind, a traitor was a traitor, and she found the whole episode thoroughly reprehensible and reeking of Establishment collusion.43 Others felt Mrs Thatcher’s decision to break the seal of confidentiality on Blunt’s immunity deal was a home goal. The useful mechanism of offering a former spy immunity from prosecution in return for co-operation with the authorities would never again be trusted if they were going to be exposed later.44 The head of MI6, Maurice Oldfield, had been against the move.45
Later that year, the newspapers disclosed the story of Blunt’s mission to Germany, and it sparked imaginative speculations. Were the crates of documents merely the correspondence between Queen Victoria and her daughter, or final proof of the Duke of Windsor’s Nazi sympathies? The royal family maintained their silence in public.
When the queen was asked about Blunt, she replied, ‘I just can’t remember whether they told me or not’. Perhaps she was dissembling, but she does have a known ability to put unpleasant facts out of her mind.46 As for the queen mother, just after Blunt’s exposure there was a lunch at Lady Perth’s to which she had been invited. Gossip, of course, centred on the subject of Anthony Blunt and whether anyone dared ask her about it when she eventually arrived. As she swept into the room, Harold Acton had the audacity to ask the queen mother what she thought. ‘Lovely day, isn’t it?’ she replied inscrutably, with her face fixed.47 After Blunt’s death she spoke to Sir Isaiah Berlin, the political theorist and historian. Berlin remembered that she spoken ‘rather kindly’ about him and that she was fond of gay men. She said, ‘One can’t blame them all. A lot of people made terrible mistakes, one shouldn’t really go on persecuting them.’48
In 1987 Peter Wright, a retired British Intelligence officer with MI5, published a book called Spycatcher, that Thatcher banned in the UK. He revealed that he had interviewed Anthony Blunt, with colleague Arthur Martin, over a period of eight years with a wide remit to uncover his treachery. However, there was one subject Wright was not allowed to investigate. The palace emphatically insisted that any questioning of Blunt about his mission to Germany for George VI was out of bounds. Apparently Lord Adeane, the private secretary to the queen during the first twenty years of her reign, told MI5, ‘From time to time … you may find Blunt referring to an assignment he undertook on behalf of the palace, a visit to Germany at the end of the war. Please do not pursue this matter. Strictly speaking it is not relevant to considerations of national security.’49 Wright would later comment:
In the hundreds of hours I spent with him I never did learn the secret of his mission at the end of the war … the palace is adept in the difficult art of trying to bury scandals over several centuries, while MI5 have only been in business since 1909 …50
Mrs Thatcher’s actions had unwittingly exposed the involvement of the old guard in a very British piece of hypocrisy which directly involved the queen. It was not a promising start so early on in their relationship, as it led to unwelcome criticism of Her Majesty.
International affairs again turned up the heat on the relationship between Elizabeth and Margaret. Three months after taking office, the newly minted prime minister found herself confronted with a surprisingly assertive queen, who apparently wasn’t going to play by the constitutional rule of always ‘acting on the advice of her prime ministers’.
The queen was deeply upset and annoyed by Mrs Thatcher’s ill-concealed dislike of her beloved Commonwealth.51 Elizabeth’s parents had been the last self-styled Emperor and Empress of India, so it was hardly surprising that the queen should have grown up with a strong sense of her ‘imperial responsibilities’. On her 21st birthday, as Princess Elizabeth, she had made a wireless broadcast not just to Great Britain, but to the entire empire. It was delivered not from London but Cape Town. In this speech she declared, ‘That my whole life, be it long or short, shall be devoted to your service and to the service of our great Imperial Commonwealth to which we all belong’.52 These were words that she sincerely meant, and she has gone on believing them, long after the political reality of the British Empire had vanished.
The Commonwealth is a world-straddling organisation as illogical as the British monarchy itself, and it embraces a curious mix of republics, despotisms and democracies. Historian Andrew Marr called it ‘a strange half-empire’ and successive prime ministers have all paid lip-service to this idea, largely for reasons of politeness. Mrs Thatcher, however, wasn’t so tactful about this royal anomaly, and came to regard the Commonwealth as a pointless hangover from the days of empire, in which third world dictators would use the institution to hector properly elected leaders of democracies,53 such as herself. In her mind, they were a bunch of greedy beggars looking for a handout. ‘I think that she had very undeveloped views about almost all Commonwealth issues,’ said David Owen. He pointed out that Margaret felt it was:
Just talking shop, with no real morality, that ignores human rights when it’s convenient to them. That it has an unrealistic view of South Africa, thinks we should effectively take economic sanctions but won’t think through the consequence of economic sanctions for South Africa with already very high black unemployment and all this. And she has a rational case, no doubt about that.54
For the queen, the Commonwealth remains a viable institution capable of doing much good for its member nations. It was also a key part of her inheritance from her father. George VI saw the Commonwealth’s potential to give the British monarchy enormous global prestige, something that the bicycling royal families of northern Europe didn’t have, and Elizabeth was always her father’s daughter. She saw her responsibilities as reaching far beyond Britain and merely British interests. Even at times when the British Government was at odds with individual member states, she was able to understand their viewpoint without taking sides and managed to convey that to them. It was this idea of the Commonwealth as a family that had the capacity to disagree without breaking up that was alien to Mrs Thatcher, who viewed it as a tiresome obstacle to realistic foreign policy.
The queen finds herself at the heart of this institution because the Victorian builders of empire wanted to knit together existing social hierarchies across the globe into one overarching system. The Victorians had learned from the American colonies, which had declared independence in 1776, of the danger in allowing countries to think about alternative ways of organising themselves.55 These empire builders fostered a world of deference to one’s superiors with local monarchies receiving their status from a central king-emperor or queen-empress based in London. In India, 500 maharajahs and other princes responded by accepting the recognition of the British Empire, building themselves vast new palaces and staging elaborate ‘durbars’ to show themselves off to their public. By the late nineteenth century, governing the vast empire through its local rulers was the only practical way forward, and where there was no local royalty, Britain invented one.
Winston Churchill claimed to be a kingmaker when he stated that Emir Abdullah of Jordan was, ‘one of my creations’.56 Royalty became the most exclusive club in the world. At the coronation of Edward VIII, King Lewanika of Barotseland, a tiny British protectorate in southern Africa, remarked rather grandly, ‘When kings are seated, there is never a lack of things to discuss’. Although such institutions and arrangements may seem irrelevant in the modern world, that has never prevented Elizabeth II from trying the bolster them up. There was nothing Her Majesty enjoyed more than sailing around the former empire in the royal yacht.
The divergent attitudes towards the Commonwealth caused an early crack in the relationship between the queen and Margaret Thatcher that would soon develop into a full schism. The battle appeared to be shaping up between the two women, with Her Majesty even referring to her prime minister as ‘that woman’ in front of Commonwealth leaders whom she considered old friends.
One of the biggest events in the royal calendar is the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM), held every other year, which the new prime minister viewed as a complete waste of her time. One was due to be held in Lusaka, the capital of Zambia, just after Thatcher’s election. The main issue for discussion at Lusaka was Rhodesia, where the white government led by Ian Smith had negotiated a power-sharing agreement with the moderate black party under a new prime minister, Bishop Abel Muzorewa. However, Black Nationalist guerilla leaders such as Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo, who had been excluded from the electoral process, regarded Muzorewa as Ian Smith’s stooge, and the international community, particular many of the African regimes, were hostile to his government. 57
Mrs Thatcher had promised to bring Rhodesia to independence ‘with wide international acceptance’. The plan was for the Commonwealth leaders meeting at Lusaka to endorse a peace conference between Ian Smith and the guerilla factions, and prepare for free elections. Mrs Thatcher, however, regarded the guerillas as terrorists58 and, because Mugabe and Nkomo were operating out of bases in Zambia, the prime minister felt it would be inappropriate, even dangerous, for the queen to go to Lusaka.
In a radio interview, the prime minister called into doubt the visit of the queen to the Lusaka conference by claiming the right to advise the monarch about whether it was safe for her to attend.59 Thatcher was speedily told to mind her own business, and reminded that the queen was free to take advice from all the appropriate Commonwealth leaders, of which Thatcher was only one.60 Elizabeth II had been prevented from attending the Singapore meeting eight years earlier by Prime Minister Ted Heath, and she didn’t intend to let such a thing happen again. The queen was now at her most determined, and on 2 July, Buckingham Palace announced that she would go to Lusaka. The prime minister was flying home from a trip to Tokyo and Australia. On her arrival in London, Mrs Thatcher said she had not yet seen the security arrangement for the Lusaka conference and, until she did, she was not sure whether she would advise Her Majesty to go. The queen had outmanoeuvred the prime minister, and the two conflicting statements highlighted the disagreement between the two women.
Mrs Thatcher would have liked to recognise the new Smith–Muzorewa regime fully. She did not want the Commonwealth heads of government, much less the queen, to go to Zambia in August, because any boost to the world stature of President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia at the time would not have pleased the white, moderate, power-sharing Rhodesian Government whom Thatcher instinctively favoured.61
As David Owen explains:
She was treading into an area that the queen does consider her own, not totally her own, but cancelling her attendance at a Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting is a joint decision between the queen and prime minister. It is not one made unilaterally by the prime minister through press briefings. And I’m convinced the counter-briefing in the press from the palace was authorised by the queen. Now whether or not it ever went into the audience with the queen, I don’t know. I doubt it was necessary actually. I think the vibes had got through, and Margaret Thatcher, who was inexperienced but a quick learner knew she had gone too far on that. And it again showed her complete misunderstanding of the queen’s relationship. The idea that the queen going to Lusaka with Kenneth Kaunda, who adored her, was going to be under threat and things like that was ridiculous.62
To make a delicate situation more tense, Kaunda, the host of the Commonwealth Conference, had a close relationship with the guerrilla leader Joshua Nkomo, whose headquarters-in-exile was Lusaka. Indeed, a state of war existed between the two countries and the city of Lusaka had been bombed recently by Rhodesian planes.63 The British Government, by recognising the internal power-sharing settlement, had caused Kaunda considerable bitterness.64 Thatcher had little political sympathy with Africa’s struggle for liberation, and disliked the hypocrisy of African leaders who preached democracy while operating one-party states, reviling Britain one moment and then demanding an increase in international aid the next. She stated forcefully, ‘Many of us do not feel quite the same allegiance to Archbishop Makarios or Doctor Nkrumah or to people like Jomo Kenyatta as we do to Mr Menzies of Australia’. Seldom has a point been more bluntly put.65 She started referring to CHOGM (Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting) as ‘Compulsory Hand-Outs for Greedy Mendicants’.66
Her husband, Denis, went further, having been foolish enough to roar with laughter when an Australian journalist said that CHOGM stood for ‘Coons Holidaying on Government Money’.67 Journalists on the satirical magazine Private Eye were quick to see the comic opportunity that Denis Thatcher presented, and started running their ‘Dear Bill …’ letters, a fictional spoof correspondence between Denis Thatcher and his close friend, Bill Deeds. The column was such a popular success that it became a stage play called Anyone for Denis? The Thatchers, to prove they did, in fact, possess a sense of humour, went to see it and hailed it, probably through gritted teeth, as a marvellous farce. However, Denis only put his foot in it further by mistaking an actor who played a stage policeman for the real thing. He went on to compliment him and his fellow officers for sorting out ‘Fuzzy wuzzies going on the rampage down in Brixton’, referring to the notorious race riots that were taking place in the south London suburb, largely provoked by unemployment levels of 60 per cent among young blacks.68
After this incident, Denis was careful to stay out of the public eye, rather than become an embarrassment to his wife, unlike the queen’s husband, Prince Philip, who was prone to notorious gaffes. These included telling British students during a state visit to China that they would become ‘slitty-eyed’ if they remained in the country too long, and reducing a teenage boy to tears by advising him to lose weight if he wanted to become an astronaut.
Newspapers in Africa branded Mrs Thatcher a racist. She even contemplated not going to the conference, and prepared for her arrival in Lusaka by donning dark glasses, fearful that acid would be thrown in her face. The Zambia Daily Mail compared Mrs Thatcher very unfavourably with the queen’s ‘extraordinary loving heart’. Indeed, Thatcher seemed bent on splitting the organisation apart while the queen worked hard to make herself the focus of unity.69 Her Majesty, in contrast to her prime minister, was sympathetic to the black cause, both in Rhodesia and South Africa.70 Indeed, many of the political leaders in the Commonwealth were old colleagues, and she had grown up with Kaunda and Nyerere. After her favourite refuge at Balmoral, it is said that the queen is always at her most relaxed when she is with the Commonwealth leaders.
Mrs Thatcher sympathised with the white population in Rhodesia and the power-sharing agreement with Bishop Muzorewa. But the Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser, tried to persuade Thatcher not to accept this settlement. After being warned by the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, that Margaret would never change her mind he found the queen more pragmatic, and the Commonwealth leaders saw that she was for a compromise. In an interview, Fraser compared the contrasting approaches of the queen and Mrs Thatcher:
With Her Majesty … there wouldn’t have been any argument because she had a sense of these things, knew what it was all about from a very long involvement with an innate instinct for justice … So [there were] two enormously different people with enormously different reactions, and you know one of the difficulties for Her Majesty must be the convention under which the monarch operates in Britain, at times living alongside a head of government with whom one disagrees.71
Constitutionally, the queen found herself in a potentially difficult position with split loyalties. Her title, Head of the Commonwealth, is a title held in the person of the monarch, not in the office of the monarchy. This subtle distinction is little known even in Britain.72 As Head of the Commonwealth, the relationship to her prime minister is different from that pertaining to her role as queen of the United Kingdom. In Commonwealth affairs, Mrs Thatcher, as head of Britain’s government, has arguably no more constitutional power over the monarch than does the President of Zambia or Prime Minister of Canada. Journalist Malcolm Rutherford, in the Financial Times, identified the potential source of trouble as the Commonwealth secretariat in London.73 Because the queen receives advice on the Commonwealth directly from its Secretary General and not through the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, the chances of a Britain vs. Commonwealth clash are, therefore, quite likely. It is a nightmare royal advisors fear.74
Enoch Powell always attacked the constitutional folly of having a monarch who was British, but not exclusively British, with the result that two distinct lines of authority from London could exist, devolving from both the government and the queen. Powell felt the queen was obstinate in refusing to accept reality, and thought that in any dispute she was honour bound to side with the British Government rather than her beloved Commonwealth, but his analysis failed to take into account her personal popularity and influence. Her royal tours, although infrequent, gave Commonwealth countries the perception that she was still their head of state, emphasising to citizens of the Commonwealth around the world the fact that the queen was someone who cared.75
The queen was determined to use her position to save the Lusaka Conference, and a former Secretary General of the Organisation, Chief Emeka Anyaoku, claimed it was only the direct intervention of Buckingham Palace that rescued it. Sir Sonny Ramphal, Secretary General of the Commonwealth secretariat in London, persuaded Joshua Nkomo to declare a ceasefire during the royal visit.76
On 27 July 1979, two days before Mrs Thatcher arrived, Elizabeth II landed in Lusaka, having spent the nine previous days touring the region, visiting Tanzania, Botswana, and Malawi, as well as Zambia. What she heard made her increasingly concerned that a number of African countries might leave the Commonwealth. She immediately urged President Kaunda to subdue the anti-British rhetoric in the local press. During the four day Commonwealth Conference, she followed the usual routine of hosting a banquet and reception for the nations’ forty-two leaders. However, that evening she stayed until midnight ‘quartering the room and talking to various heads of government,’ said Chief Emeka Anyaoku of Nigeria. ‘I am convinced that the intervention spurred the organisation, which was on the point of splitting up, on to compromise.’ Her informal role, holding private talks with every leader in turn in her bungalow, was to convey sympathy for their position without explicitly stating her own. The leaders were impressed by her knowledge, and the temperature of the conference was reduced.
To her credit, Mrs Thatcher saw a way to emerge with some concessions, but without what in her mind would be surrender, a compromise that Lord Carrington and Malcolm Fraser had urged her to. The African leaders also yielded some ground, agreeing to consider a formula for white representation in Rhodesian’s new government.77 The conference even ended with the improbable sight of Margaret Thatcher dancing with Kenneth Kaunda. Mrs Thatcher was also far too polite to mention that, on returning to her accommodation, she found the ceiling had collapsed, and there was no running water.78
Thatcher signed the Lusaka Accord calling for a constitutional conference at Lancaster House in London in September, and she enthusiastically embraced the peace process which led to an agreement in December 1979, calling for a cease-fire and free elections. There was no recognition of Muzorewa as the interim authority. Observers thought the prime minister looked a little downcast at the end of the conference. The queen, in contrast, seemed elated.79 At the time, it was a success of real substance for Margaret Thatcher and the Foreign Office that she so disliked. What was less recognised was the indispensable groundwork and the atmosphere of goodwill what had been achieved by the queen.80
Rhodesia declared independence in April 1980 as the Republic of Zimbabwe, the forty-third member of the Commonwealth, with Robert Mugabe as prime minister. Margaret Thatcher was upset that Zimbabwe ended up with Mugabe, but the political realities were on the side of the guerillas and she recognised that the Muzorewa Government could never have brought peace.81 It quickly became apparent that Mugabe was a corrupt dictator. He crushed all political rivals and drove out the white farmers, destroying the agricultural economy while at the same time proving that Thatcher’s fears about the regime were true.82 As David Owen points out:
She [Thatcher] lived with Mugabe during all her period in office basically knowing that he had committed huge crimes and became very disillusioned with the settlement, but didn’t want to denounce it because it was a considerable triumph for her. But that fed through to her views on the Commonwealth and its refusal, to denounce … this sort of thing.83
1 The Iron Lady, John Campbell (Penguin, 2009).
2 Queen Elizabeth II: Her Life in Our Times, Sarah Bradford (Viking, 2012).
3 Daily Mail, 15 December 2013.
4 Internal Downing Street memo, sent by Caroline Stephens to Clive Whitmore, 24 July 1980. (Obtained by the Daily Mail under the Freedom of Information Act.)
5 Daily Mail, 15 December 2013.
6 Ibid.
7 The Queen: Elizabeth II and the Monarchy, Ben Pimlott (HarperCollins, 1996).
8 Always Right, Niall Ferguson (Kindle Single, Odyssey Editions, 2013).
9 ‘Why I Wanted to Make The Audience Public’, Peter Morgan, Guardian, 13 January 2013.
10 The Royals, Kitty Kelly (H.B. Productions Inc., 1997).
11 Independent, 13 April 2003.
12 A View from the Wings, Ronald Millar (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1993).
13 Interview, Lord Carrington, 2013.
14 Interview, Edwina Currie, 2013.
15 The Shah’s Last Ride, William Shawcross (Chatto & Windus, 1989).
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
18 Interview, Lord Carrington, 2013.
19 The Shah’s Last Ride, William Shawcross (Chatto & Windus, 1989).
20 Interview, Lord Carrington, 2013.
21 Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality, Jonathan Aitken (Bloomsbury, 2013).
22 Elizabeth, the Queen, Sally Bedell Smith (Penguin Books, 2012).
23 ‘Last Secrets of the Queen Mother’s Favourite Traitor’, Geoffrey Levy, Daily Mail, 27 June, 2009.
24 The Climate of Treason, Andrew Boyle (Hutchinson, 1979).
25 Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality, Jonathan Aitken (Bloomsbury, 2013).
26 The Windsors, Piers Brendon and Phillip Whitehead (Pimlico, 2000).
27 Ibid.
28 Interview, David Owen, 2013
29 Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality, Jonathan Aitken (Bloomsbury, 2013).
30 Ibid.
31 Anthony Blunt: His Lives, Miranda Carter (Pan, 2002).
32 Diaries, Alan Clark (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1993).
33 Hidden Agenda, Martin Allen (M. Evans & Co, 2002).
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid.
36 Anthony Blunt: His Lives, Miranda Carter (Pan, 2002).
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid.
39 Elizabeth: The Woman and Queen, Graham Turner (Macmillan/Daily Telegraph, 24 May 2002).
40 Blunt letter, Margaret Thatcher to Ted Leadbitter, 1 July 1980. (Margaret Thatcher Foundation.)
41 Author’s correspondence with Sir Bernard Ingham, 2013.
42 Diaries, Alan Clark (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1993).
43 Conspiracy of Silence, Barrie Penrose and Simon Freeman (HarperCollins, 1987).
44 Anthony Blunt: His Lives, Miranda Carter (Pan, 2002).
45 Conspiracy of Silence, Barrie Penrose and Simon Freeman (HarperCollins, 1987).
46 The Windsors, Piers Brendon and Phillip Whitehead (Pimlico, 2000).
47 ‘Last Secrets of the Queen Mother’s Favourite Traitor’, Geoffrey Levy, Daily Mail, 27 June, 2009.
48 The Windsors, Piers Brendon and Phillip Whitehead (Pimlico, 2000).
49 Spycatcher, Peter Wright (Viking, 1987).
50 Ibid.
51 The Iron Lady, John Campbell (Penguin, 2009).
52 The Queen: Elizabeth II and the Monarchy, Ben Pimlott (HarperCollins, 1996).
53 On Royalty, Jeremy Paxman (Penguin, 2006).
54 Interview, David Owen, 2013
55 On Royalty, Jeremy Paxman (Penguin, 2006).
56 Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire, David Cannadine (Allen Lane, 2001).
57 Queen Elizabeth II: Her Life in Our Times, Sarah Bradford (Viking, 2012).
58 Elizabeth, the Queen, Sally Bedell Smith (Penguin Books, 2012).
59 Margaret, Daughter of Beatrice, Leo Abse MP (Jonathan Cape, 1989).
60 Ibid.
61 Elizabeth, the Queen, Sally Bedell Smith (Penguin Books, 2012).
62 Interview, David Owen, 2013
63 Our Queen, Robert Hardman (Hutchinson, 2011).
64 Elizabeth, the Queen, Sally Bedell Smith (Penguin Books, 2012).
65 Eminent Elizabethans, Piers Brendon (Jonathan Cape, 2012).
66 The Windsors, Piers Brendon and Phillip Whitehead (Pimlico, 2000).
67 Ibid.
68 The History of Modern Britain, Andrew Marr (Macmillan, 2007).
69 ‘Africans Blast British at Lusaka Commonwealth Meeting’, Executive Intelligence Review, 7–13 August 1979.
70 Queen Elizabeth II: Her Life in Our Times, Sarah Bradford (Viking, 2012).
71 The Windsors, Piers Brendon and Phillip Whitehead (Pimlico, 2000).
72 George VI, Sarah Bradford (Penguin, 1989).
73 Financial Times, 19 July 1986.
74 The Queen: Elizabeth II and the Monarchy, Ben Pimlott (HarperCollins, 1996).
75 Ibid.
76 Queen Elizabeth II: Her Life in Our Times, Sarah Bradford (Viking, 2012).
77 Elizabeth, the Queen, Sally Bedell Smith (Penguin Books, 2012).
78 A Journey with Margaret Thatcher: Foreign Policy under the Iron Lady, Robin Renwick (Biteback Publishing, 2013).
79 The Windsors, Piers Brendon and Phillip Whitehead (Pimlico, 2000).
80 Ibid.
81 A Journey with Margaret Thatcher: Foreign Policy under the Iron Lady, Robin Renwick (Biteback Publishing, 2013).
82 Elizabeth, the Queen, Sally Bedell Smith (Penguin Books, 2012).
83 Interview, David Owen, 2013.