A couple of years ago, the Queen revealed to a group of visiting American students that she is keeping a diary. “My husband reads in bed,” she is reported to have told them, “and so does Prince Charles. But I write my diary – and it’s far more truthful than anything you’ll ever read in the newspapers!”
It is a tantalising prospect. The Queen has been on the throne for 36 years. She has dealt with eight different prime ministers. If this monarch is anything like as penetrating on paper as she is said to be in conversation, it will be a unique insight into our times.
What, for example, are the Queen’s private comments about the woman who has been her prime minister now for almost a decade? We shall have to wait at least 50 years to find out. Contemporary evidence suggests they may well be explosive.
Take the events of the past two weeks. Future chroniclers of relations between the Royal House of Windsor and Thatcher will find plenty of material in the entries for November 1988. Three, in particular, should prove fascinating.
The first is Friday 11 November. On that evening, the Queen, accompanied by her lady of the bedchamber, the countess of Airlie, and her private secretary, Sir William Heseltine, attended a dinner hosted by the Speaker of the House of Commons, Mr Bernard Weatherill. The occasion was to commemorate the tercentenary of the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The 35 guests who sat down to eat in the Speaker’s House in the Palace of Westminster represented the cream of the British parliamentary establishment.
There was the present Lord Chancellor, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, and his predecessors, Lords Havers, Hailsham and Elwyn-Jones. Mrs Thatcher and Mr Kinnock were there. So were Lord Callaghan, Lord Wilson and Mr Edward Heath.
During the course of the evening the Queen took care to have a private word with most of those present, including Mr Kinnock. They were observed by several fellow guests in animated conversation, with the Labour leader laughing and joking. The Scottish Nationalist Party – which, in the early hours of that morning had overturned a Labour majority of 19,500 to win the Glasgow Govan byelection – was the main political talking point of the evening.
At some stage, to someone (there were several versions doing the rounds at Westminster last week), the Queen expressed her concern at the result. She does not like the nationalists’ threat to the unity of the United Kingdom. She reportedly remarked that the voters of Govan had rejected the two main parties because “they have nothing – they have got nothing”, adding: “I know because I have sailed Britannia there.”
What makes the remarks embarrassing is their ring of authenticity. The Queen did sail to Glasgow in Britannia three months ago, and travelled through Govan on her way back to the Royal yacht.
More significantly, the remarks fit into a pattern of reports that the Queen is privately concerned at the growing divisions of wealth in her kingdom.
On 20 November, the Sunday Express informed its readers that she had told Kinnock of her “alarm” at the Govan result. But in the event, the Express report – subsequently amplified by other, more detailed accounts later in the week – was drowned out by a much bigger story landing on the morning’s royal breakfast table: that the Queen was to be advised by Mrs Thatcher that she should not accept any forthcoming invitation from the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, to visit Moscow.
This is an affront to the monarch on a number of levels. It breached the convention that the prime minister’s advice is strictly confidential. It suggested that the Queen was Mrs Thatcher’s catspaw – that a visit by Elizabeth II is a seal of approval to be bestowed upon grateful foreign nations by the prime minister as and when she (and not some mere jumped-up monarch) sees fit.
That, in turn, touched on an even more delicate, but largely unspoken, problem in relations between No 10 and the palace: that we have become a nation with two monarchs, and that, in her housewife/superstar progress around the world, Margaret Thatcher has steadily become more like the Queen of England than the real thing.
If the disclosure was sanctioned by the prime minister, it badly backfired. Her embarrassment was evident in the House of Commons last Tuesday, when Dennis Skinner, the left-wing Labour MP for Bolsover, demanded to know why she was “stopping the queen from going to Russia”. An uncharacteristically flustered Mrs Thatcher replied (in her entirely characteristic royal plural) that “We do not discuss the matter. [It] has not been addressed in any way at all.”
Finally, on Wednesday evening, the Queen and her over-mighty first minister came face to face in Buckingham Palace at the premier’s regular weekly audience. Such encounters are normally utterly discreet, but – in a rare break with precedent – palace sources let it be known that the issues of protocol had indeed been raised and that Mrs Thatcher had been obliged to apologise.
Of all the eight prime ministers of her reign so far, Thatcher is said to be the one with whom the Queen has the coolest relations. “Pragmatic” is the kindest word one well-informed MP can come up with.
Her first PM, Winston Churchill, a romantic royalist, worshipped her and the two gossiped happily about racehorses. Harold Macmillan charmed her. Harold Wilson – the first of her prime ministers to come from outside the traditional ruling class – established a relationship of mutual respect.
“I shall certainly advise my successor to do his homework before his audience,” he said on his retirement in 1976, “or he will feel like an unprepared schoolboy.” His successor, James Callaghan, enjoyed even closer relations. In his veneration of the monarchy he was the embodiment of working-class conservatism.
Why, then, should Margaret Thatcher enjoy less of a rapport with the Queen than her Labour predecessors? Partly it is a matter of temperament; the two cannot relax in one another’s company.
The Queen has only been over the threshold of 10 Downing Street three times in 36 years: once for Churchill’s retirement dinner in 1955; again for Wilson’s in 1976; and, most recently, in December 1985 for a banquet to mark the building’s 250th anniversary.
On that occasion – attended by Macmillan, Home, Wilson, Heath and Callagahan, as well as Thatcher – the Queen spoke, to knowing laughter, of “the party games which some of you have so nobly endured at Balmoral”.
It was a joke Mrs Thatcher cannot have appreciated. According to one fellow house guest, the royal family’s compulsory after dinner games of charades left the notoriously unrelaxed prime minister “almost rigid with horror” during one of her annual visits.
On another famous trip to Balmoral, in the early 1980s, Mrs Thatcher was required to join the royal family on a picnic. A participant recalled how “afterwards the Queen insisted on washing up, in a little hut. Margaret was appalled and wanted to do it herself, but the Queen wouldn’t let her, because it was the one day of the year she can pretend to be a real person.”
There are many such stories of royal amusement at the prime minister’s extravagantly low curtsies, for example, or of the Queen’s rebuff when Mrs Thatcher suggested a system for making sure they didn’t wear the same clothes at the same function (“Her Majesty,” came the reply, “does not notice what other people are wearing.”)
This is all trivia, of course. But the stories add up to a convincing picture of two powerful, intelligent women, each unsure of how to handle the other.
Twenty years ago, the Labour politician Richard Crossman asked one of the Queen’s advisers, Godfrey Agnew, “whether she preferred the Tories to us because they were our social superiors”. According to Crossman, “he said, ‘I don’t think so. The Queen doesn’t make fine distinctions between politicians of different parties. They all roughly belong to the same social category in her view.’”
But if social differences have largely melted away since the Queen assumed the throne, the ideological gulf has become much wider. A substantial body of evidence has accumulated over the past few years suggesting that the royal family does nurse some private doubts about the nature of the policies being pursued in the Thatcher revolution.
This is partly a matter of concern for the nation’s social cohesion. During the miners’ strike four years ago, the Queen let it be known that she wanted to see more vigorous attempts to settle it by the government. She expressed worries about the deliberately engineered mass unemployment of 1981-82. She is said to be fearful of the divisions between north and south. Her reported remarks about Govan fall into the same category.
There have been equally well-publicised disagreements over foreign policy. Mrs Thatcher is scornful of the Commonwealth; the Queen is devoted to it. Mrs Thatcher is opposed to South African sanctions; the Queen is more sensitive to the feelings of Black Africa.
When the Americans invaded the Commonwealth island of Grenada, a furious monarch summoned her prime minister to Buckingham Palace and is said to have left her standing throughout the audience.
Prince Charles’s doubts about the Thatcherite philosophy are even more well documented. He does not share the prime minister’s faith in an untrammelled market as the solution to man’s problems. A similar scepticism underpins his attacks on the Thatcher government for doing too little to combat acid rain and inner-city decay.
The conclusion is inescapable: the sovereign and her heir are old-fashioned “wets” who would find no place in the present Cabinet.
Instead, a looking-glass world has been created in Britain: a world where the Queen frets with the leader of the Labour party over the loss of a byelection; where hard-left Labour MPs defend the right of Her Majesty to travel wherever she pleases; where Downing Street takes it upon itself to cite the murder of the Tsar 70 years ago as a reason why the Queen shouldn’t visit Russia, whilst 81% of the population urge her to go.
Not the least of Mrs Thatcher’s achievements is that she has stood the British establishment on its head. Whoever would have predicted that three of the institutions most inimical to a Conservative government would prove to be the Church of England, the House of Lords and the monarchy?
Robert Harris was political editor of the Observer from 1987 before leaving in the 1990s to become a Sunday Times columnist and concentrate on his bestselling thrillers
