Her Majesty (57 page)

Those close to the Queen say that another reason for this bond is her sense that she has ‘earned’ it. Everything else – her throne, her Church, her estates – was inherited, but on her watch the Commonwealth has gone from infancy to maturity as a global institution. It is her equivalent of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, her Prince’s Trust. It will undoubtedly come to be regarded as one of the defining elements of her reign. And it is why, in bright November sunshine, she has crossed an ocean with a heavy cold to preside over another gathering of ‘The Club’. The Commonwealth leaders meet every two years and, this time, it is the turn of Port of Spain, the capital of the Caribbean twin-island nation of Trinidad and Tobago. Most of The Club are represented by their prime ministers although a few have sent their foreign ministers instead. Some Commonwealth nations are so unstable that it can be risky for leaders to leave their own shores – as the Prime Minister of Vanuatu is about to find out. By the time this three-day conference ends, he will be the ex-Prime Minister of Vanuatu, having been ousted in his absence. Two countries are missing. Fiji is suspended for refusing to hold a democratic election and tiny Nauru (population: 10,000) has not paid its bills.

Politicians fly in from all over the world and drive straight from the airport to the heavily fortified Hyatt Regency hotel from where they will hardly stir. There aren’t enough beds in town, so the thousands of lobbyists, Commonwealth associations, charity workers and the media are all berthed on a pair of large cruise ships. In years gone by, the Queen would have stayed in the Royal Yacht. Since
Britannia
is now a Scottish tourist attraction, she is staying in a newly opened boutique hotel. The Carlton
Savannah is so new that the paint is still drying and some of the light fittings have not been completed. The Queen is staying in an eleventh-floor apartment called the ‘Wow Suite’ – as its future occupants will, no doubt, remark when they are told who stayed there first.

Unlike the politicians, the Queen will actually be out and about among the ordinary people during her time here. She is not only here as Head of the Commonwealth but as Queen of Great Britain, in which capacity she will also pay a state visit to Trinidad and Tobago. When she became Queen, it was a colony. When she first visited in 1966, it had gained independence but had kept her as Queen. By her second visit in 1981, it had voted to become a republic. Third time around, though, the welcome is just as exuberant. Port of Spain is the city which invented the steel drum and calypso. Its carnival ranks alongside those of Rio and New Orleans and is the model for Notting Hill’s. Each spring, half the nation join carnival bands and parade past the other half. Six months on, the champion junior band are back in their costumes to greet the Queen outside the country’s old national theatre, the Queen’s Hall. More than 150 children are dressed in a riotously imaginative collection of costumes – birds, flowers, fish, phantoms and much else. They are all under fourteen but some stand twelve feet tall, swaying on stilts. One poor boy falls off during the long wait but no damage is done and he is propped back up again. Many are from a local children’s home. Their carers explain that being in a prize-winning carnival band – and meeting the Queen – will be defining moments in their lives. Anywhere in the world, organisations like this boil down to a few indefatigable volunteers with big hearts and limitless patience, women like Rosalind Gabriel who spent a year sewing and gluing all these costumes together. She is a ‘must’ on the list of people for the Queen to meet. More children are inside the theatre, either to welcome or perform for the Queen. Adults are not much in evidence, which is how the Queen likes a lot of her engagements these days. ‘She’s been almost everywhere in the world and she doesn’t like spending every visit talking about “the last time I was here”,’ explains one of her team. Even so, it’s nice to see a few old faces. Among those in the greeting line is Thora Dumbell, eighty-five, a former ballet star who once danced with Fred Astaire and choreographed the rally for the Queen in 1966. She must have made an impact. ‘Back then, I was invited to have coffee with her, and Prince Philip said: “I wish I could put you in a little pot and take you back to England.” I still think of her as
my
Queen.’

The Monarch is dressed for the occasion in a bright red floral dress and white jacket. Rosalind’s carnival band shimmers and dazzles and drums and whistles. It has to be persuaded to shut up so that the Queen can
hear Timel Flament-Rivas, aged nine, sing a new calypso written by local composer Larry Harewood: ‘Welcome to our twin islands, a nation under the sun/A glimpse of your schedule shows your work is never done. May God pour his richest blessings, keep you in good health./And may you remain the Head of the Commonwealth.’ Veteran royal watchers can tell that the Queen is enjoying this because she is tapping her foot. She is not, as a rule, a great foot-tapper. Timel, it turns out, has several verses. It all goes on rather longer than the organisers planned. There is nervous watch-checking among the suits but the Queen is in no hurry. In his little tuxedo and bow tie, Timel is entirely relaxed, too. His mother, Jeaniffer, speechless with pride, turns out to be a former ju-jitsu world champion who once hospitalised two muggers. Nerves of steel run in the family.

Inside the auditorium, the audience – almost all children – scream hysterically as the Queen walks in. Even though it’s a Saturday, they are all in neat school uniforms. If anyone totted up the hours the Queen has spent watching ‘local cultural entertainments’ in her life, it must amount to months if not years. But she is not merely watching this youth concert. She is sitting forward in her seat, enthralled.

Afterwards, she walks outside to meet the long-suffering carnival band which has now been standing in the sun for more than two hours. It explodes into life, gyrating to the drums and whistles. ‘Flap any harder and you’ll take off,’ the Duke of Edinburgh tells a golden humming bird. The Queen is enchanted. She meets Rosalind Gabriel and discusses the challenge of producing 150 costumes. ‘Do you reuse them?’ asks the Duke. ‘No, we make them new,’ says Rosalind. ‘He was blown away by that,’ she says later, a little blown away herself. Thora Dumbell is glowing. ‘I think the Queen was looking better today than when I first met her. She looks fantastic,’ she says. ‘I reminded her of the rally in 1966 and she said: “You came to see me afterwards.” So she remembered me!’

In the Queen’s younger days, a state visit like this might have lasted a week. As the oldest monarch in history, her schedules have been trimmed back a little but there’s always a state banquet. In Trinidad, it takes place on the lawn of President’s House, the former colonial residence. There is much excitement that the Queen is wearing an Angela Kelly dress embroidered with the national birds and flowers of Trinidad and Tobago. Once the Queen gets home, however, the beads and crystals will be unthreaded and re-embroidered in a maple leaf pattern for next year’s tour of Canada. Her team call this ‘credit crunch couture’.

By way of hospitality in return, she hosts a reception for the great and good of Trinidad and Tobago in her hotel. Football star Dwight Yorke gives her a signed football. ‘Very nerve-wracking,’ he says. Cricket legend
Brian Lara gives her a signed bat. There’s another reception on the British High Commissioner’s lawn where the Queen meets more West Indies cricketers, including Willie Rodriguez, Daren Ganga and Deryck Murray. Talk turns to the new genre of Twenty20 cricket. It is clear that the Queen is not a fan. ‘I have a friend who can’t bear it,’ she remarks, deploying time-honoured royal shorthand for a personal opinion. ‘He says: “I won’t watch it!”’ This is the sporting corner of the party. Rodriguez ignores the old canard that one should never ask the Queen a question (it all depends on the question) and points out that the Queen’s horse, Barber’s Shop, has been running in England that very afternoon. How did the horse get on? ‘No one’s told me it won,’ she says in mock despair, ‘so I presume it has not.’ (It has come seventh.)

The Duke is introduced to a group of Red Cross workers, among them Tanya Wood from Britain. ‘I was sent here for my sins,’ she says. ‘And what were your sins?’ asks the Duke. He has his own mini-state visit to perform on this tour. Just to make sure that the people of Tobago do not feel overlooked, he flies to the smaller island for a day. The Queen, however, has a Commonwealth to attend to.

This summit is the organisation’s sixtieth birthday party but the arguing starts early. The host, Trinidad’s Prime Minister, Patrick Manning, wants to make global warming the big issue of his summit. But many of the lobbyists and activists here want the Commonwealth to ‘get real’ and focus on issues it can actually do something about, namely human rights abuses by its own members. The President of Gambia has just imprisoned a Scottish missionary for calling Gambia ‘hell’ and has informed political reformers: ‘I will kill you and nothing will come of it.’ Swaziland is spending more than half its aid budget on a private jet for the King. And Uganda is passing laws to extend the death penalty to homosexuality (which is already illegal in forty Commonwealth countries).

Manning does not want his moment as saviour of the planet soured by such matters. ‘These are domestic issues,’ he declares at the opening press conference. ‘They need not detain us here.’ The human rights campaigners are outraged.

Meanwhile, the Commonwealth is under attack from its own fan club. The Royal Commonwealth Society (Patron: The Queen) has conducted an extensive global survey on what people think about the Commonwealth. The results are not comfortable reading. Most people have no idea what it does, aside from the Commonwealth Games, and most people in countries like Australia, Canada and Britain – which fund it – would not be bothered if it disappeared. It clearly needs to decide what it’s
for –
and make itself more relevant instead of engaging in what RCS chairman
Peter Kellner calls ‘earnest futility’. It’s a dilemma not unfamiliar to the Queen. The Commonwealth Secretary-General and his staff are rather cross about this survey and try to bury it. Privately, though, many delegates agree that it is a ‘timely wake-up call’. Certainly, no one is objecting in the royal camp. The monarchy knows what happens to organisations which allow themselves to stagnate.

The Queen takes centre stage at the opening ceremony, a colossal production at the brand-new National Academy for the Performing Arts. It’s a very expensive, very shiny new addition to Port of Spain’s landscape, a Caribbean answer to the Sydney Opera House. It is so new that the cement mixers only stopped working two hours before the Queen’s arrival. There is an air of happy chaos. There are no programmes as they are still being printed. Apparently, they will arrive a few days after the grand event is over. As a result, no one is entirely sure what is happening. Despite the climate change agenda, each delegation from each nation arrives at the grand entrance in an individual motorcade. Every government leader is applauded on to the stage, quiz show-style, by a hand-picked local audience. The hosts put on a dizzying cultural
tour de force
involving 935 actors. It’s the indoor equivalent of an Olympic opening ceremony. Everyone is genuinely impressed.

The Queen, her voice croaking from a combination of her cold, the air conditioning and jet lag, delivers a speech which chimes entirely with the environmental mood of the national leaders. She urges them to ‘lead’ the world in fighting climate change, noting: ‘The Commonwealth can be proud of the fact that in each of its six decades, it has shaped the international response to emerging global challenges.’ The media are so excited about ‘Green Queen’ headlines that they miss her thinly veiled support for those who want to give the organisation a big shake-up. ‘This diamond anniversary year is an important time for the Commonwealth to look forward,’ she says. ‘Like any good organisation, we must continue to pay close attention to the things that give it distinctive character.’

The leaders go back to the conference room to carry on arguing. Manning has persuaded President Sarkozy of France to drop in en route from South America and lend his support to the Commonwealth’s planet-saving declarations. Not everyone is happy. France is not a member – and it means having to find some interpreters. The Queen keeps her distance. She invites all the new leaders who have never attended a Commonwealth summit to drinks at her hotel. She also meets the organisation’s youth wing, the Commonwealth Youth Forum, led by an articulate young Australian lawyer, Matthew Albert, twenty-nine (‘youth’, in Commonwealth terms, stops at thirty). His briefing to the Queen is more polished
than some of the stuff she hears from the heads of governments. She must be impressed because she includes Albert and his colleagues in her Christmas broadcast a few weeks later.

It is also an occasion for the Queen to catch up with some of her own prime ministers. John Key, the Prime Minister of New Zealand, has asked for an audience and is summoned to the ‘Wow Suite’ for a chat. He is enjoying his first Commonwealth summit and, for some reason, has been seated next to President Kikwete of Tanzania at three consecutive meals. Far from running out of small talk, the two men have become friends and have hatched a plan. Key has agreed to send some Kiwi farmers to help Tanzania set up a new agricultural institute. Kikwete has promised him two cheetahs for a New Zealand zoo in return. You don’t get that sort of quickfire diplomacy at the G20. The Queen immediately asks Key about plans for Prince William to open Wellington’s new Supreme Court building. ‘The first thing she said to me was to make sure I look after William when he comes down to New Zealand,’ says Key afterwards. ‘She seemed very amused by the fact that we were going to abandon the state dinner for a barbecue with the All Blacks.’
^*

Talk turns to one of Key’s coalition partners, New Zealand’s minority Maori Party. The Maori community has always believed that when it signed the original 1840 peace treaty with the first European settlers it was dealing with Queen Victoria, not the settlers. ‘There’s always been a sense from Maori that their historical relationship is with the Crown,’ says Key. ‘We’re in partnership with them and it’s one of the things the Queen asks about every time I’ve seen her. She always asks how the relationship’s going and she was pleased that we did it.’ It’s a fascinating little constitutional insight. As in Britain, so in New Zealand, the Queen is positively enjoying the latest flourishing of coalition politics.