Her Majesty (33 page)

The Queen’s dealings with her subsequent prime ministers – all men – appear to have been more straightforward. ‘I found the audiences much more comfortable than I imagined,’ says Sir John Major. ‘The meetings always had a touch of formality, but it becomes a very easy relationship. And, inevitably, the more one exchanges confidences, the more comfortable it becomes. I don’t want to give you the impression it’s in any sense over-familiar. The Monarch is the Monarch and prime ministers are there as their public duty. But audiences were conducted very informally. They became a very relaxed series of exchanges.’

It was Major who had to help the monarchy through some of the darkest moments of the nineties. He had his own problems, too, not least the economic crisis of 1992. ‘I was at Balmoral in the days leading up to Black Wednesday and other economies were in terrible trouble, too,’ he remembers. ‘I was talking to a European prime minister and it was a rather difficult conversation because there was a piper walking up and down on the lawn outside playing the bagpipes. And the prime minister kept saying “What’s that noise? What
is
that noise?”’

As far as Major is concerned, though, some of the happiest moments of his Downing Street years were spent with the Queen, not least the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day on the Normandy beaches. ‘When the Queen took the salute at Arromanches, officials tried to put a limit on the number of old soldiers who could be there and they failed absolutely. They were there in their thousands and thousands, all these elderly men who’d been in the war, lucky enough to survive it, proud of what they’d achieved. So long was the march past that we were terribly worried we would be beaten by the tide, but the Queen remained until every last soldier had passed. It was one of the most moving sights I have ever seen in my life. It was just magical. I’ve never forgotten it.’

The Queen’s relationship with Tony Blair is perhaps the one which people feel they know best. That is because it was the subject of the film
The Queen
. The Palace will not confirm whether the Queen has even watched it. Tony Blair insists that he has not, although he fears that some people have taken it all a little too literally: ‘Particularly in America, I’m constantly getting people saying to me “I did like you in that movie.”’

Of all the Queen’s British prime ministers, Blair has also been the most frank in describing the nature (though not the contents) of his
meetings with the Monarch in his book
A Journey
. Recalling his first audience following the Princess’s funeral, he writes: ‘I talked perhaps less sensitively than I should have about the need to learn lessons. I worried afterwards she would think I was lecturing her or being presumptuous and at points during the conversation she assumed a certain hauteur; but in the end she herself said lessons must be learned and I could see her own wisdom at work, reflecting, considering and adjusting.’

The Blair years were undoubtedly challenging ones for the monarchy as the New Labour project took root after eighteen years of Conservative administration. The party’s manifesto included some of the most dramatic constitutional reforms since the suffragettes, not least the removal of the hereditary peers from the House of Lords. Blair had made a specific point of including a line in his party’s 1997 election manifesto: ‘We have no plans to replace the monarchy.’ The very fact that the point was made did not go unnoticed inside the Palace. So what was he thinking? ‘We had no plans to change it so it didn’t occupy a lot of our time,’ says Blair, sitting in the offices of his new Tony Blair Faith Foundation in central London. But, looking back, he admits he can see why there might have been worries. ‘We were doing a lot of changes. And because we were changing the House of Lords – getting rid of the hereditary peers – there was a worry among some that I was just a cleverer revolutionary. But, actually, I wasn’t!’ He also believes that part of the royal anxiety was simply down to lack of familiarity. Blair had got to know the Prince of Wales and his team during his time as Leader of the Opposition but the Queen’s office at Buckingham Palace was another matter: ‘I was a lot closer to Prince Charles than I was to any of the other royals at that time.’

Blair had never voiced any criticisms of the monarchy himself, although some of his Cabinet colleagues and backbenchers certainly had. In some cases, this had involved a spot of youthful rebellion – like the republican cross-Channel awayday to Boulogne to ‘avoid’ the 1981 Royal Wedding. Among those on board were future Labour luminaries Harriet Harman and Lord Mandelson. Senior figures like Jack Straw had also advocated urgent modernisation of the monarchy from the comfort of the Opposition benches. Once in office, though, they all rather appreciated their trips to the Palace. As Home Secretary, Jack Straw would even appear in morning dress for the swearing-in of bishops (‘if there’s a dress code,’ he explains, ‘you should follow it’).

For many others on the Labour benches, though, removing a hereditary head of state was a logical aspiration following the removal of the hereditary element in the Lords. Palace wariness was heightened by the fact that the Royal Family had been dragged into the election firing line by
a tiny issue which, none the less, was a headline-grabber on the campaign trail: the future of the Royal Yacht
Britannia
. The Conservatives had pledged to build a new one. Labour was opposed. Douglas Hurd goes as far as describing the entire saga as the greatest mistake of the Tory government in which he served.

In 1994, John Major’s Conservative government announced that it would decommission the forty-one-year-old Yacht when she reached her next major overhaul. Ministers announced that they would retain an open mind on the merits of a replacement but there were few signs of enthusiasm. Given recent controversies over royal finances and domestic troubles, the Queen and the Royal Family remained silent on the matter.

The Yacht issue was definitely one for the government, whatever the family’s own private thoughts. Sir John Major remains resolute on this matter: ‘During the early nineties, the monarchy went through a very difficult time. Ask yourself this question: in the midst of the recession, with the British people facing economic hardship, how popular would it have been to announce a £50 million spend on a new yacht for the personal use of the Royal Family? How would that have been portrayed by the media? I had not forgotten the storm two years earlier when I announced the rebuilding of Windsor Castle.’ He also argues that
Britannia
had been designed for a long-gone era of ocean-going royal tours. Air travel, he says, had rendered her semi-redundant.

There were sound reasons for building a new ship, however. When plans for
Britannia
were first announced in 1951, she was to be designed with a twin role in mind – royal residence and wartime hospital ship. The latter was never a serious option. Without a helipad,
Britannia
could never be a proper hospital ship and her royal status would always make her a target, however prominently a red cross was painted on the sides. Later on, however, she developed a serious peacetime role as a trade promotion platform. On any tour, she would spend more time on commercial than royal duties for the simple reason that it worked. No royal passengers were necessary. If a British trade delegation invited a bunch of Wall Street titans to a business breakfast in a New York conference room, then attendance would be sparse. Who wanted yet another hotel buffet? If the same guests were invited to the same meal in the dining room of the Royal Yacht, then a full turnout could be expected. Similarly, if a British ambassador in the Gulf invited his most senior contacts for a drink aboard the Yacht – and, crucially, included spouses on the invitations – then he was suddenly the most popular diplomat in town.

In 1993, British businesses based in India were informed that
Britannia
would be stopping in Bombay. Any companies with contracts ready for
signature were welcome to invite their Indian opposite numbers to attend a signing ceremony on board – and in the Queen’s own drawing room to boot. There were no members of the Royal Family within a thousand miles, yet the royal setting was enough. Deals which had been languishing for years suddenly enjoyed a new lease of life. Protracted haggling over the small print miraculously gave way to constructive dialogue. Minor legal squabbles were suddenly resolved. ‘The Yacht thrashed about in the Bay of Bombay,’ Lord Hurd recalls, ‘and millionaires trooped aboard and signed up.’ By the end, contracts worth £1.1 billion were signed. ‘I went to a similar event with the Prince of Wales in Kuwait to educate the Kuwaitis about privatisation,’ Lord Hurd continues. ‘They all came on board, had a good luncheon and billed and cooed. It was a very, very valuable appendage.’ On one trip, Rear-Admiral Sir Robert Woodard,
Britannia’s
captain, found himself receiving a bearhug from a West Midlands industrialist who had just sold a £1.5 million sausage machine on the back of a
Britannia
reception in the Caribbean.

Such occasions were a powerful antidote to the routine criticisms of the Yacht’s £11 million annual running costs.

Sir John Major says that he explored all the commercial arguments. ‘All kinds of different options were discussed and examined,’ he says. ‘As a trade vessel, the Royal Yacht still had quite a cachet. But when you examined it more closely, a good enough case couldn’t be made. Would I, personally, have wished to retain her? Of course I would. But one has to be pragmatic about such things and I don’t think such a decision would have been very helpful to the monarchy at that particular time. If it had been economically practical to keep her, without the risk of heaping more grief on the Royal Family, we would certainly have wished to do so.’

But the primary purpose of having a Royal Yacht was not an economic one. Nor was it that tired old catch-all excuse of ‘security’, although
Britannia
was undoubtedly a secure place to berth a monarch abroad. The main arguments for maintaining the Royal Yacht were political and emotional ones. Many people believed that Britain, as a maritime island nation, should have a national flagship, especially one that was recognised around the world. ‘
Britannia
was brilliant at projecting influence rather than power,’ says one of our most senior ex-ambassadors. ‘And we are in the influence game.’

Lord Hurd describes his ocean-going tours with the Queen and Prince Philip as the ‘most pleasant’ moments of his entire career as Foreign Secretary. ‘With the Queen on board, it underlined the fact the monarchy was different and not like the Prime Minister,’ he says. ‘I travelled a lot with Margaret Thatcher and John Major and you were in hotels but it
wasn’t the same. There was a magic about
Britannia
which had nothing to do with magnificence because she wasn’t a magnificent ship. She was a homely ship in the proper sense – and extremely effective – because the Queen was at home.’

Britannia had her enemies, though. Some MPs – mostly Labour but with some Conservatives among them – regarded her as an expensive, embarrassing anachronism. The Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont could find the £60 million needed for a replacement easily enough but he did not want the special pleading from every other arm of government if he produced it. His Treasury officials, never the most romantic breed, certainly disliked having this anomaly on their books. Within the Ministry of Defence there were top brass from all the Services who resented the special status of the Royal Yacht Service – a one-ship fleet. With much weightier matters on his mind, John Major pushed the whole issue to one side until the 1997 general election was imminent. With less than four months to go, the Defence Secretary, Michael Portillo, suddenly produced a new policy and got it past a weary Cabinet on the cusp of defeat: if re-elected, the Tories would build a new Royal Yacht. But Portillo omitted to follow one important convention regarding royal issues. He did not clear the plan with the Labour Opposition. As a result, Labour campaigners had every right to attack it. And they did. A much-loved royal institution was now a hot political issue. Day after day on the election trail, old-style Labour politicians like John Prescott made a virtue of scrapping what was presented as a millionaire’s toy. The fact that
Britannia
had originally been commissioned by a Labour Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, was never mentioned.

As the Duke of Edinburgh observed to Gyles Brandreth some years later: ‘Attlee did it properly. He got the Opposition on board.’ The Duke was less impressed by the Tory tactics in 1997: ‘Major was blocked by Lamont and didn’t get the Opposition on board. And then Portillo got involved and made a complete bollocks of it. Absolutely idiotic.’

Lord Hurd accepts some responsibility himself. ‘I blame myself somewhat because as Foreign Secretary I ought to have made sure that the Opposition – Blair and Robin Cook and so on – had some experience of
Britannia
and knew what it was about. But they didn’t. They weren’t asked to things on board. And that was a mistake because they threw away a huge asset for the country as a whole. They didn’t have that experience of what the ship could do and why she was unique in the world.’

His contrition is well founded. It now turns out that it might all have been very different after Labour won its landslide victory in May 1997. ‘I’ll tell you this,’ says Tony Blair, lowering his voice, ‘I didn’t want to
get rid of it [
Britannia
]. After we’d agreed to get rid of it, I actually went on it and I remember, as I stepped on, thinking: “That was such a mistake to have done that.” And I think it was Prince Charles who was showing me around and I could see him thinking: “Thank you for that.”’ With a new government buzzing with pent-up reformist energy, Blair did not have the time for this sort of eccentric distraction. Besides, Gordon Brown’s Treasury advisers were desperate to kill off the Yacht once and for all. ‘I don’t put this on Gordon Brown,’ he says, ‘but the Treasury were saying: “This is just ridiculous” and so forth.’ Tellingly, he adds that the Queen never raised the issue with him. Not once.