The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor (19 page)

In April 1966, the small coal-mining community of Aberfan in South Wales was struck by disaster when a slag heap collapsed and engulfed the village school, killing 146, most of them children and all from the vicinity. The Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, hurried there immediately, as did Lord Snowdon, then married to Princess Margaret, who surprised the Prime Minister by his emotion. As he wrote in his diary, ‘Instead of inspecting the site, [he] had made it his job to visit bereaved relatives … sitting holding the hands of a distraught father, sitting with the head of a mother on his shoulder for half an hour in silence.’ The Queen issued an immediate statement of sorrow, but, despite continuous prompting from her advisers, didn’t visit Aberfan for six days on the grounds that her presence would cause a distraction from the rescue work. It was a plausible excuse, but a mistake. The people of Aberfan wanted their Queen, and when she did arrive the healing effect, by all accounts, was palpable. She stayed for two and a half hours, and had told the police not to keep people back. Everywhere she went she was surrounded by silent groups of villagers, dressed in black. A little girl presented her with a bunch of flowers with a card that read, ‘From the remaining children of Aberfan’. ‘As a mother,’ she said to bereaved parents, ‘I am trying to understand what your feelings must be. I am sorry I can give you nothing at present except sympathy.’

‘There were tears in her eyes as she talked to us,’ said one woman. ‘She really feels this very deeply. After all, she is the
mother of four children. We had four too and now we have only two.’ After placing a wreath at the cemetery where eighty-one children had been buried, she and the Duke of Edinburgh had tea in the home of a couple who had lost seven relatives in the disaster. ‘She was very upset,’ said her hostess. ‘She was the most charming person I have ever met in my entire life. Really down to earth.’

The indiscriminate shooting of six-year-old schoolchildren in the small Scottish town of Dunblane on 13 March 1996 was another local tragedy that transfixed the nation in horror, and where a royal visit – the Queen and the Princess Royal visited the families, poignantly, on Mothering Sunday – not only helped the healing process but in some way helped express the nation’s sympathy; the Queen and her daughter’s obvious distress mirrored the distress of the nation.

The dreadful event had started to unfold just as the first lesson of the morning was about to begin. A lone forty-three-year-old gunman, armed with four guns and 743 rounds of ammunition, walked into the gymnasium of Dunblane Primary School and, without uttering a word, fired rapidly and continuously at children and staff alike. He killed sixteen pupils and their form mistress and wounded many more, before killing himself. It had all the ingredients of every parent’s worst nightmare, and, like Aberfan, ripped apart a small community. A great media debate about guns ensued, which resulted in a Firearms Bill being rushed through Parliament that led to a total ban on handguns. Given that there were 160,000 handguns in the country, most of them owned by perfectly sane and law-abiding members of shooting clubs, the ban caused huge controversy.

Speaking on Radio 5 Live ten months after the tragedy, as the Firearms Bill was going through the House of Lords, the
Duke of Edinburgh, in his inimitable way, caused outrage by stating rather bluntly what seemed to many to be glaringly obvious: that banning otherwise legal handguns would do nothing to stop guns falling into the hands of criminals. ‘I can’t believe that members of shooting clubs are any more dangerous than members of a squash club or a golf club or anything else,’ he said.

I mean, they are perfectly reasonable people, like the great majority of the population in this country. If a cricketer, for instance, suddenly decided to go into a school and batter a lot of people to death with a cricket bat, which he could do very easily – I mean, are you going to ban cricket bats? I sympathize desperately with the people who are bereaved at Dunblane, but I’m not altogether convinced that it’s the best system to somehow shift the blame on to a very large and peaceable part of the community in trying to make yourself feel better. This transfer of blame on to the sport shooters, I think, is a little unreasonable. I can understand the fury and unhappiness. But these are sensible people who belong to these clubs.

The gun lobby applauded him for his courage in speaking out but he won no friends in Dunblane, or among the gun-law reformers, and played straight into the hands of republican MPs. Alex Salmond, leader of the Scottish National Party, said he should keep out of it; his comments were ‘crass, insensitive and typically Prince Philip’. Tony Banks, Labour MP, said that ‘as ever, the Duke of Edinburgh has got it wrong … This man is insensitive, selfish and ham-fisted. A prolonged period of silence on his part would be much appreciated.’ And Alan Williams, a Labour colleague, concurred: ‘I think it is very ill-advised of the Prince at this delicate stage in the fortunes of
the monarchy to come blundering in on an issue on which most members of the public, as well as most MPs, would disagree with him. He has done his cause no good, nor the reputation of the monarchy.’

This was a highly political issue, and, technically, Messrs Salmond, Banks and Williams were absolutely right; the Royal Family should not get involved in politics, but I have to confess to a sneaking admiration for Prince Philip. He is not the monarch with a constitutional obligation to remain above politics – the Queen is and she does so, religiously. He is an intelligent man, better informed than most, who finds it incredibly frustrating to have to bite his tongue when every other man in every pub in the land is able to sound off about controversial issues that have divided the country.

At the same time, it is a perfect demonstration of why the monarch has to be above politics. The Queen represents the entire nation, whatever their colour, creed or politics, whatever their status or situation, whatever their age. She is a unifying force within the country, the glue that keeps us all together, and that is her great strength. She belongs to everyone, no one voted for her – and no one gave their vote to someone else. If she expressed an opinion that could be claimed by a political party, she would immediately alienate a section of the population and that would be divisive; and so she doesn’t. She is utterly inscrutable. And in my view, provided she remains neutral, her husband lobbing the odd grenade merely opens up the debate and adds to the gaiety of nations. And as it happens he was quite right. There are now more illegal handguns in the hands of criminals in Britain than ever before and gun crime has gone up. According to Home Office figures, in 1996, the year of the Dunblane tragedy, there were 3347 firearms offences in England and Wales involving handguns. In 2002–03 there were 5549.

There are many more examples of tragedies over the years where the Queen has played an important role in representing the nation to itself. None more so in recent times, perhaps, than the shocking, horrifying events of 9/11 which we saw unfold on our television screens. Played over and over again on that unforgettable day in September 2001, we saw the two hijacked airliners plough into the Twin Towers and smoke billowing into the sky as the buildings collapsed like cards taking thousands of office workers with them. The Queen had watched it herself, she said, in ‘total shock’ and ‘growing disbelief’.

‘These are dark and harrowing times for families and friends of those who are missing or who suffered in the attack, many of you here today,’ she said in a message to the memorial service for British victims held in New York. ‘My thoughts and prayers are with you all now and in the difficult days ahead. But nothing that can be said can begin to take away the anguish and pain of these moments; grief is the price we pay for love.’

A separate service was held in London at St Paul’s Cathedral, for which she and members of the family were out in force. She had been at Balmoral when the tragedy occurred and remembered all too well the last time tragedy had struck during her summer holiday. She immediately sent a personal message of sympathy to President George Bush, while Malcolm Ross, the master of all matters ceremonial at the Palace, pondered the problem of how to affect a two-minute silence – the obvious way to mark Britain’s solidarity with America – during the Changing of the Guard. His solution, to play both the American and the British national anthems, with a two-minute silence in between, and American music as the guards marched down the Mall, worked a treat. Spectators outside the Palace that day, many of them Americans, wept as they heard the familiar tunes.

On 31 August 1997, the night Diana’s car smashed in a tunnel in Paris, the Queen’s reactions had been less popular. Her life has always been a juggling act between the private and the public roles – that is the nature of monarchy; the one merges into the other in a way that it does for no other human being in any other position in the land. And on that Sunday morning, as she woke up to the fact that her two vulnerable young grandsons had just lost their mother in the most violent and unnatural of circumstances, she allowed the private to override the responsibilities of the public. She closed her ears to what her advisers were saying; she chose to deal with her personal, family grief rather than the grief of the nation. The fact that this was her son’s ex-wife and not a gymnasium full of six-year-olds in a primary school of which she had never heard, obscured the picture. And the nation was angry and confused. People may have said and thought they wanted some display of grief from the Queen because she was Diana’s former mother-in-law – the one that Diana had always said was so cold and indifferent. But that wasn’t it; what they were really missing was the figurehead who could direct and focus their heightened, uncontrolled and rather frightening emotions. They needed the Queen in the same way that those families in
the East End had needed her mother and father, fifty-seven years before, when the Luftwaffe was destroying their homes and killing their loved ones.

And so they congregated around Buckingham Palace, where people have always congregated in times of national mourning or celebration; none more so than on 8 May 1945 when the war in Europe was over and the King, Queen and Princesses, accompanied by Winston Churchill, came out on to the balcony again and again to the roar of cheering crowds in the Mall below. Fifty years later the Queen, the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret were there again to celebrate the anniversary and, despite the lapse of time, tens of thousands of people came to watch and to cheer. The building, as familiar to most Britons as the Queen herself, has been the focus for national identity for generations. There was, of course, a link between Diana and Buckingham Palace; but as she was divorced from the Prince, the logical place to have gone and to have laid flowers and tokens was Kensington Palace, the house where she had lived. Millions of flowers were left there, certainly, but they were feet deep outside the gates of Buckingham Palace too and that was where hundreds of people were standing around waiting for some sort of lead from their monarch.

When the Queen finally returned to London, and on the evening before the funeral spoke about Diana, live on television, only the second time she had broadcast to the nation other than at Christmas time (the first being during the Gulf War in 1991), the crisis very quickly passed.

Since last Sunday’s dreadful news we have seen throughout Britain and around the world, an overwhelming expression of sadness at Diana’s death.

We have all being trying in our different ways to cope. It
is not easy to express a sense of loss, since the initial shock is often succeeded by a mixture of other feelings: disbelief, incomprehension, anger – and concern for all who remain.

We have all felt those emotions in these last few days. So what I say to you now, as your Queen and as a grandmother, I say from my heart.

First, I want to pay tribute to Diana myself. She was an exceptional and gifted human being. In good times and bad, she never lost her capacity to smile and laugh, nor to inspire others with her warmth and kindness.

I admired and respected her – for her energy and commitment to others, and especially for her devotion to her two boys.

This week at Balmoral, we have all been trying to help William and Harry come to terms with the devastating loss that they and the rest of us have suffered.

No one who knew Diana will ever forget her. Millions of others who never met her, but felt they knew her, will remember her.

I for one believe that there are lessons to be drawn from her life and from the extraordinary and moving reactions to her death.

The Queen’s words were what people wanted to hear, and they were delivered in the nick of time, but she does not have her mother’s gift. The Queen Mother exuded charm and empathy; her smile, her wave, her eyes – no one who stood within a sizeable radius of Queen Elizabeth, whether she spoke to them or not, ever felt they had been excluded. They knew she had noticed them and her look spoke volumes. Diana had the same gift, in a much more informal, modern way and her laugh charmed the birds from the trees. She had no fear of people’s emotions. She invited them to open up, and was not
afraid to hold a hand for longer than normal or to put a comforting arm around someone in need. The Queen finds it very hard; it is partly her character and partly a generational thing. She was brought up, as people were in the 1920s, with a stiff upper lip; she was taught not to wear her heart on her sleeve and to keep her emotions to herself. ‘Nowadays people think differently,’ says a former courtier of the same age, ‘but if that’s what you’ve been taught, as we all were, it lives with you. It might appear that we are not as simpatico as we might be, but it’s just that we don’t show our feelings and that’s the way it is. It doesn’t mean we don’t care. It was demonstrated at the time of the Princess of Wales’s death. It’s the generation gap. A stiff upper lip is not all bad; it gets you through difficult times. You can’t cry all the time.’ The Prince of Wales has more of his grandmother than his mother in him in that respect; he is a deeply spiritual man and not alarmed by what lies beneath the surface – but, like his mother, he has sometimes taken some convincing to believe that his presence will help. He was once persuaded to stop at a school in Middlesbrough on his way to Teesside, where a child had been brutally murdered the day before. He was afraid he would be intruding on private grief but his Private Secretary said firmly not; this was what was expected of monarchy. The press were out in force and he talked to the headmaster and the parents of the murdered girl. Then, quite unexpectedly, the headmaster asked whether he would talk to the girl’s classmates. Unprepared, but unable to say no, he spoke to them, told them about his own experience, how he had learned to cope with the murder of Lord Mountbatten. It was monarchy at its best.

Prince Charles drew on personal experience again when he went to Omagh in Northern Ireland in 1998, just after twenty-nine people, many of them women and children, had been killed by a Real IRA bomb. More than two hundred were
injured, many of them seriously; one of the doctors performing amputations said afterwards that he had done so many he had lost count. Charles spent five and a half hours in Omagh, talking to the injured and relatives of the dead, meeting doctors, nurses and the people from the emergency services who had had the grim task of collecting the body pieces. And he visited the site where the twenty-nine had died. It was an emotionally draining day, he found everything he saw and heard deeply upsetting, but, like his grandmother, he appears to absorb other people’s pain without cracking up himself. When asked how he does it, he says, ‘It’s fifteen hundred years of breeding. It comes from being descended from Vlad the Impaler!’ Again, he was worried that he might be intruding on other people’s grief but nothing could have been further from the truth. About a thousand people came to see him, all of them saying again and again how grateful they were that he had come. And it was clear in Omagh, as it is in the aftermath of every tragedy, that a royal visit helps. When a politician turns up, cynics can always say he or she is doing it to win votes. The same can never be said about a member of the Royal Family.

But if ever proof were needed that these aspects of monarchy were valued, the public reaction to the deaths of the Princess of Wales and, four years later, the Queen Mother, must surely have been it. Two very different reactions but, in their own ways, both equally as strong. I don’t pretend for a second that I understand what was going on in the public psyche when Diana died – even psychiatrists have tried and failed to explain the extraordinary display of grief for someone who most of those grieving, some so badly they needed counselling, had never even met. It wasn’t just the shocking way in which it happened, or just the fact that she was so young and beautiful and leaving behind two young children. I don’t even think it
was the tragic end to what had been a very tortured and tragic life. I think she provided on a small scale what monarchy provides in the wider picture. People seemed to identify with her, they felt that she spoke for them and cared about them, and was a part of their lives, utterly familiar, her face seen time and again, part of their identity, part of the national identity.

The Lord Chamberlain, the Earl of Airlie, who was responsible for organizing Diana’s funeral, which had to be done from scratch with no precedent to follow, went out into the crowds outside Buckingham Palace on two separate occasions during the days after her death to try and understand what was going on. He concluded that there were two distinct groups of people among the mourners. There were the modernists, who were desperately unhappy, crying in the streets and wanting to demonstrate their feelings in the various ways they did; and there were the traditionalists, quiet, low-profile, who didn’t openly express their views – very upset, no doubt, but not likely to have been milling around outside Buckingham Palace. It proved an important factor in deciding what sort of funeral procession to devise, one that took into account both the modernists and the traditionalists. The result was a cortège with Welsh Guardsmen on either side of the coffin to provide the formal, ceremonial and a bit of military; but to have all Diana’s charities following behind higgledy-piggledy, which was perfect, and perfectly judged. The procession alienated no one.

Any fears that the public reaction to the Queen Mother’s death when it finally came on 31 March 2002 – she was a hundred and one, had two new hips and up until the end looked as sparky and indestructible as ever – would be insignificant by comparison with their reaction to Diana’s were simply not borne out. The BBC misjudged it badly. They did interrupt a programme in the early evening to make the
announcement but the newscaster who delivered the news, Peter Sissons, was wearing an everyday burgundy-coloured tie (following BBC guidelines), and for the main evening
News At Ten
was still wearing burgundy rather than black – and was much criticized for it. There was no hysteria as there had been over Diana’s death, but Diana’s death had been unnatural and untimely; the Queen Mother’s was a peaceful conclusion to a long, full and largely very happy life. But there was no shortage of mourners. Thousands of bouquets were left on the lawns at St George’s Chapel in Windsor, and the queue for the lying-in-state in Westminster Hall, where each of the Queen Mother’s four grandsons – Charles, Andrew, Edward and Princess Margaret’s son, Viscount Linley – stood vigil, stretched for more than three miles. So many people wanted to pay their respects that the doors of the Hall were left open all night.

Prince Charles, who had been in skiing in Klosters with William and Harry, was distraught and on his return gave a very personal and moving tribute on television to his ‘magical grandmother’. How much they had learned from the experience of four years ago. Then there had not been so much as a statement from Balmoral, and the family had all gone to church within hours of hearing the news, which looked, in this godless day and age, for all the world as though nothing momentous had happened.

Plans for the Queen Mother’s funeral – Operation Tay Bridge – had been drawn up years before and were very straightforward compared with the complexity of Diana’s. Queen Elizabeth’s was a full-blown state funeral with full ceremonial regalia; and ceremony is something that The Firm does exceedingly well. One million people lined the route on the day of the funeral and one billion around the world supposedly watched it on television.

Why? Because of what she represented. She was an old woman with a penchant for pastel coats and matching feathery hats; a complete tyrant, rumour has it, but a much-loved mother, grandmother and great-grandmother. Bill Tallon, or ‘Backstairs Billy’ as he was known, her butler for many years, also loved her unreservedly. People of all ages, all religions and all colours queued in the cold for hours to walk past her coffin because she had touched their hearts, just as Diana had. She was part of their identity, the nation’s identity, as familiar to them as the language, November fog or cancelled trains.