Elizabeth the Queen (63 page)

Elizabeth II, as always, was circumspect about her own views of her tenth prime minister, although once when asked by a friend she said, “I think he’s in the wrong party.” “It was a throwaway observation,” explained her friend, “matter of fact, reflecting a common perception that he was not a traditional Labour Party figure.” Philip was predictably more outspoken, telling Gyles Brandreth that he was a modernizer but “not for the sake of buggering about with things in some sort of Blairite way.”

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2000 the Queen traveled to Australia for her thirteenth visit at a time of uncertainty in the country’s relationship with Britain. The previous November there had been a landmark referendum on the future of the monarchy. By 54 percent to 45 percent, Australians had voted to keep the Queen as their head of state despite opinion polls indicating strong republican sentiment. In the view of many observers, the people had rejected the republican proposal only because it advocated electing a president by both houses of parliament rather than directly by the country’s twelve million voters—reflecting more of a distrust of politicians than an endorsement of the sovereign.

When the Queen had greeted Martin Charteris in his hospital room a month after the vote, “the first thing they talked about was whether Australia would become a republic,” said Gay Charteris. Elizabeth II took the philosophical view that someday the British sovereign would no longer serve as the monarch of Australia. In a speech on March 20, 2000, at the Sydney Opera House, she struck a balance—on the one hand reminding her listeners that she had “felt part of this rugged, honest creative land” since she “first stepped ashore” in February 1954, while frankly acknowledging that “the future of the monarchy in Australia is an issue for you, the Australian people, and you alone to decide by democratic and constitutional means.” She pledged that “whatever the future may bring,” her “lasting respect and deep affection” would “remain as strong as ever.”

The well-being of her mother and her sister remained a major preoccupation for the Queen, especially when she was away for two weeks in distant Australia. “The Queen was always wondering if her mother would be all right, would she fall again, and that poor old leg was never healing,” said her cousin Pamela Hicks.

With the Queen Mother pointing toward her one hundredth birthday in August, Elizabeth II organized a series of unforgettable occasions. The first, a grand ball in the state apartments at Windsor Castle on Wednesday, June 21, also celebrated the seventieth birthday of Princess Margaret, the fiftieth of Princess Anne, and the fortieth of Prince Andrew. The list of more than eight hundred guests included European kings and queens, princes and princesses, leading figures from the British aristocracy, flamboyant international celebrities, and royal estate managers and horse trainers. Longtime royal nanny Mabel Anderson was there, along with Roddy Llewellyn and his wife, Captain Mark Phillips and his new wife, Sarah, Duchess of York, and Camilla Parker Bowles and her husband. Bars were set up in four different rooms, and three dance bands alternated in the Waterloo Chamber while a disco boomed in the Queen’s Presence Chamber.

There had been grumbling four years earlier when the press revealed that the Queen Mother was running an overdraft at Coutts bank of £4 million. Critics questioned the Queen’s acceptance of her mother’s extravagance, and the £643,000 allocated for her annual Civil List allowance. But few begrudged the ninety minutes of pageantry at Horse Guards Parade on July 19 in tribute to the Queen Mother’s century: a cast of thousands in a gaily costumed procession, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, servicemen, choirs, bands, bulls, sheep, chickens, horses, one hundred doves, and an aerial display by vintage RAF airplanes. Earlier that week there had been a service at St. Paul’s Cathedral and congratulatory messages from the House of Lords and the House of Commons.

Two weeks later on August 4, 2000, the day she turned one hundred, the Queen Mother rode with the Prince of Wales in a flower-bedecked carriage up the Mall to Buckingham Palace, where a crowd of forty thousand waited to cheer her arrival. “It was three years after the death of the Princess of Wales and I was struck by how far the monarchy had come,” said Simon Lewis. “I was standing in the forecourt at Buckingham Palace thinking, ‘If there was any question how people feel about the monarchy, there was a sense of joy that day.’ It was a tiny reminder that the institution had come through tough times and was in great shape.”

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LANNING BEGAN THAT
summer for the Queen’s own celebration two years later of her Golden Jubilee, marking fifty years on the throne. The task fell to Robin Janvrin, who had taken over as private secretary when Robert Fellowes retired in 1999. The son of a vice admiral, Janvrin had graduated with honors from Oxford and served as an officer in the Royal Navy and as a diplomat before joining the royal household in 1987. Having witnessed some of the worst years of the Queen’s reign, he had become the leading modernizer among her top advisers.

His first recruit was Simon Walker, head of communications for British Airways, to replace Simon Lewis, who was returning to British Gas following his two years at the Palace. A South African by birth, Walker was outside the classic courtier mold, having worked not only in the Labour Party but for John Major in his last two years at 10 Downing Street. The Queen’s advisers wanted another press manager with an outside perspective and a more realistic idea of how stories would play. After a half dozen meetings with various officials in the household—mainly to determine if Walker harbored republican ideas—Janvrin said, “Only one person can decide if you are right for the job, and that is the Queen.”

Walker’s interview with Elizabeth II was late on a Wednesday afternoon in June 2000. She asked if he minded standing since she had been sitting for a portrait for three hours. As they talked, one of the Queen’s corgis insistently tugged at Walker’s trouser leg, which made standing still a challenge. The Queen didn’t try to stop the dog, nor for that matter did she seem to take notice at all, and Walker began to think that his ability to endure the distraction was meant to test his unflappability.

Their conversation was friendly and informal, and the Queen was well briefed. Her purpose was not to conduct the sort of forensic interview common in private industry, but rather to get a sense of how Walker might fit in and work with her. “There was definitely a subtlety to it,” he recalled.

Walker joined the household in September, when preparations for the Golden Jubilee got under way. He and his colleagues were mindful of “Millennium fatigue” created by Blair’s overhyped approach to the dome. “Under-promise and over delivery were seen to be critical to the Jubilee’s media prospects,” recalled Walker. The festivities would avoid simply copying the Silver Jubilee and its multitude of street parties, emphasizing instead inclusiveness to capture the multicultural changes that had occurred during the Queen’s reign. The focus would be on the Queen herself rather than on the institution of the monarchy, and communities of all stripes would be encouraged to celebrate in their own way, along with the major events forming the centerpiece of the official celebrations in London.

One striking emblem of the modern mood at the Palace was the portrait in progress on the day Simon Walker met the Queen. Of all the depictions of the Queen throughout her reign, it was one of the most controversial. The artist was Lucian Freud, widely regarded as Britain’s greatest living realist painter, and the grandson of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. The idea for the painting had come from Robert Fellowes, whose portrait Freud had painted in 1999. It was a risky commission, since Freud’s portraits (including the one of Fellowes) were often brutal, even grotesque images, rendered in thick brushstrokes. Freud said his goal was to produce “the interior life or ‘inner likeness’ behind such an instantly recognizable face.” For that reason, he remarked that his task was as challenging as “a polar expedition.”

Rather than working in the ornate Yellow Drawing Room at Buckingham Palace looking out across the Mall, where artists over the decades had painted the Queen, Freud insisted they meet in the Friary Court Studio at St. James’s Palace, a room used for painting restoration. He sat the Queen in front of a stark beige wall and had her pose in the diamond and pearl diadem shown on postage stamps and bank notes, which made an odd juxtaposition with her tailored blue suit and usual triple strand of pearls. From May 2000 through December 2001 he painted her in fifteen sittings, a source of frustration for the artist, who was accustomed to many more. At age seventy-seven, Freud worked with a vigor matching that of his seventy-three-year-old sitter.

Because of the diadem’s value, several protection officers stood guard in the studio with them, but Freud found their presence distracting, so the Queen asked them to go outside. She told the artist that she had met one of them while on a shoot at a friend’s estate. She was picking up as she always did when a wounded cock pheasant flew out of a hedge straight at her, flapping and clawing, and knocked her down. There was blood on her clothing from the bird’s scratches, and the detective standing nearby feared she had been shot. He threw himself on top of her and began giving her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. “I consider we got to know each other rather well,” she told Freud. Afterward, she hired the man for her protection force.

The Queen not only proved equal to Freud’s notoriously penetrating gaze, the artist shared with his sitter an enthusiasm for horses. He had been fascinated by the equine personality since his childhood, when he slept in the stables to be near the animals, and he had painted a number of arresting portraits of horses. “Lucian had a whale of a time with the Queen,” said his longtime friend Clarissa Eden. “They talked about racing and horses. She kept on saying, ‘We must stop talking. We must get on with this portrait.’ ”

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EMORIES OF THE
unfortunate escapades of Elizabeth II’s children resurfaced in April 2001 when Prince Edward’s wife, Sophie Wessex, was entrapped in a sting by Mazher Mahmood, a reporter for
News of the World
impersonating an Arab sheikh interested in signing on as a client of her public relations firm. Mahmood secretly taped their conversation, and his newspaper ran the transcript in a sensational “World Exclusive.” The other tabloids reported incorrectly that Sophie called the Queen “an old dear,” the Queen Mother “the old lady,” Conservative leader William Hague “deformed,” and Cherie Blair “horrid.” She said none of those things, but she was indiscreet, telling the fake sheikh that the royal family referred to the prime minister as “President Blair because he thinks he is,” that Hague has “got this awful kind of way he talks.… He sounds like a puppet unfortunately,” and that John Major was “completely wooden.” She called the Labour budget “a load of pap,” and said its “increase in everybody’s taxes is something frightening.”

In an effort to prevent the publication of the transcripts, Sophie gave an interview to the newspaper, with the approval of the Buckingham Palace press office. That was when she denied Edward was gay, and she spoke as well of the pressures created by comparisons to Diana, usually unfavorable. “I have been reduced to tears,” she said. “I don’t deny that we do look alike, and it’s a huge compliment for me when people say that. But I couldn’t ever compete with Diana’s public image. I’m not Diana.” It was an excruciating experience for the novice member of the royal family, and she sent apologies to those she had insulted. But she not only remained in royal favor, she and her husband grew even closer to the Queen. “Sophie first of all respects her as the Queen, then as a mother-in-law, but she also understands that she is a human being and treats her that way,” said the Queen’s cousin Elizabeth Anson.

A few months later, the Queen entertained her tenth American president on July 19 when recently elected George W. Bush arrived at Buckingham Palace with his wife, Laura, for lunch before traveling to Genoa for the G-8 conference. Accompanying them was the Queen’s good friend Will Farish, the new U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. They alighted under the portico of the Grand Entrance, where they stood at attention for “The Star-Spangled Banner” expertly played by the band of the Coldstream Guards. As the forty-third president and the Duke of Edinburgh walked out into the quadrangle to inspect the guard of honor, it began to pour, soaking Bush’s trousers and shoes. Philip got a good laugh, but Elizabeth II tactfully refrained from comment. Ten years after their first meeting in his father’s White House, Bush felt a “natural connection” with the Queen, who created a relaxed and welcoming atmosphere.

The Anglo-American alliance deepened less than two months later when al Qaeda Islamist terrorists carried out the 9/11 attacks. The Queen was at Balmoral, and unlike the reaction to Diana’s death four years earlier, her reflexes were sure and swift. She issued a statement of condolence to President Bush expressing her “growing disbelief and total shock,” and she prepared to return to London for a special service at St. Paul’s Cathedral to honor the nearly three thousand victims, sixty-seven British citizens among them.

Malcolm Ross called Balmoral from London to ask that the Union Jack at Buckingham Palace be lowered to half-staff for the second time since Diana’s death (the Queen had authorized the same gesture of respect the previous October after the death of Donald Dewar, the first minister of Scotland). Ross also made the novel suggestion that at the next Changing of the Guard the American as well as British national anthem be played, with a two-minute silence between. The Queen instantly approved both proposals, and Robin Janvrin asked the American embassy to participate. That Thursday, two days after the attack, Will Farish and Prince Andrew stood at attention in the Palace forecourt as the Coldstream Guards band played “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and a large crowd of spectators wept outside the railings.

The Queen suffered yet another loss on September 11 when her friend of many years, Henry Carnarvon, was stricken with a fatal heart attack at age seventy-seven. Like Elizabeth II and millions around the world, Carnarvon and his wife, Jean, had been watching television as the horrors unfolded in the United States. Just after the second hijacked airplane hit the World Trade Center, he collapsed. In the ambulance on the way to the hospital, he turned to his wife and said, “Would you call the Queen?” He died shortly afterward in the operating room, and his daughter, Lady Carolyn Warren, phoned Balmoral with the news. “The Queen was devastated,” said Jean Carnarvon. “It was so unexpected. It caught us all.”