The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor (26 page)

The end of the Second Lesson, from St Matthew, was the cue for the Queen to distribute the second half of the Maundy to those on the north side of the cathedral, then, after prayers, another hymn and the National Anthem – an hour in all – the frozen souls outside caught another glimpse of the Queen before she disappeared into a reception in the Lady Chapel for a further half-hour before finally coming to walk along the length of the police barrier collecting flowers and tributes and talking to her loyal and doting subjects.

There must have been several hundred people in the crowd immediately outside the cathedral that Thursday in Liverpool. Most of them were local and there were big groups of schoolchildren, but about thirty of them were royal groupies, who travel hundreds of miles from their homes to watch the Queen carry out her public engagements. After the Queen had left I was chatting to Peter Wilkinson, an ITN cameraman who is on permanent secondment to the Palace to film the Queen’s activities. She knows him and likes him and is comfortable with him hovering over her shoulder or rapidly walking backwards just a few feet in front of her. He shares an office at Buckingham Palace with Peter Archer, the court reporter for the Press Association; one Peter provides film footage for all the TV networks, the other puts news stories out on the wires. As I turned to go, I heard my name called and turned to see four or five people left behind the barriers. The whole area was emptying fast; the show was over and all that remained was the odd crisp packet and flag lying in the street. I went across to talk to them; they were curious about what I was doing. They had seen me in Cheltenham two weeks before and in Surrey the week before that. Was I writing a new book?

They were a fascinating bunch and more joined us as we
talked. The youngest was a small boy of seven who had been coming to royal engagements with his mother since he was seventeen days old. They were the only ones related to each other. The rest, guessing wildly, were probably in their thirties, forties and fifties, most of them women; they were bright, articulate and at great pains to convince me they were neither mad nor sad. This is their hobby, a strange one, they admit, but one that gets them out of the house, takes them all over the country to parts they otherwise might never visit, and provides them with friends from all over that they enjoy meeting up with. They know where the Queen will be from a list published on the internet and when their families and friends go off to football matches or on shopping trips, they pack up their picnic gear, their warmest jackets, hats, scarves and gloves and set off to watch the Queen and, less frequently, other members of the family, too. Some of them lived so far away they had had to spend the night in a bed and breakfast in Liverpool; others had set off well before dawn. They were all hugely knowledgeable about the Royal Family and great admirers of the Queen but not unconditionally so. One of her long-standing ladies-in-waiting had died a couple of weeks before and they were disappointed that the Queen had not gone in person to her funeral. ‘She should have done. She should have been there.’

The Queen recognizes her fans and has spoken to them all several times, and also to the little boy – and remarks to his mother about how much he has grown. There are other regulars too who are more obsessive. One man who dresses in funny hats with Union Jacks on them is always giving the Queen poems, and engages her in conversations from which she clearly finds it difficult to extricate herself.

Meeting the public in these circumstances is one of the least enviable parts of the job. There are always many, many more
hands outstretched, posies offered and children thrust to the front than the Queen or anyone else can possibly acknowledge: old faces, young faces, people in wheelchairs and pushchairs, people in woolly hats and anoraks, in uniforms and in their Sunday best, all of them looking expectant, excited and hopeful that they will catch the Queen’s eye, that she will stop beside them and say something they can tell their family and friends about and remember for ever. There are hundreds of eyes on her and dozens of cameras. People seem to feel the need to capture their moment in the Queen’s gaze for posterity and very often the Queen is left trying to communicate with faces hidden behind flashing instamatics. But she is used to it and seems unfazed by anything that anyone says or does, moving slowly along the line, smiling, taking flowers and passing them to her lady-in-waiting or her equerry, who are never far from her side. She doesn’t take everything that is offered, doesn’t respond to everyone’s pleading, doesn’t pick out every elderly or handicapped face at the front and doesn’t sign autographs. It is inevitable that people will be disappointed – that is the nature of walkabouts – there are just too many people and she doesn’t have youth on her side. But some people get lucky and their day is made, all the hours of standing in the cold rewarded in a thirty-second exchange.

The Queen does not have youth on her side. On that Thursday she was two weeks short of her seventy-eighth birthday; the Duke of Edinburgh, who is beside her and supporting her on every engagement, talking to dignitaries, talking to people in the crowd as she does, was two months short of his eighty-third birthday. Most people of their age have been retired for years, and many do nothing more strenuous with their days than potter in the garden, do the crossword or play with the grandchildren.

The Queen has supposedly slowed down a little. The Prince
of Wales has done a number of foreign tours on her behalf, particularly the long-haul ones, and he conducts an increasing number of investitures, but that week you would never have known it and there is absolutely no chance of the Queen retiring to potter anywhere. When she was nearing sixty, her then Press Secretary had his knuckles rapped; he rang the Queen from the squawk-box on his desk and told her that Queen Juliana of the Netherlands had just abdicated. ‘Typical Dutch,’ said the Queen and hung up on him. Even if she became incapacitated in some way it is still unthinkable that she would abdicate; far more likely that a regency would be adopted. She promised at her coronation to give her life, whether it be short or long, to the service of her country and that is the premise on which our hereditary monarchy is based. She, Prince Charles and Prince William all understand that, and although it asks a lot of the individual, to have a Head of State who has been in the post for over fifty years, been around the world several times, met most other heads of state, witnessed events and observed and absorbed more than fifty years of national and international politics is a priceless commodity. And one that often seems to be better appreciated outside Britain than it is at home.

France, for example, which shed its monarchy more than two hundred years ago, greets the Queen with rapture. At the beginning of the week that I saw her in Liverpool she had been on her fourth state visit to France and it had been a dazzling success. Her previous state visit, in 1992, happened to begin the day after the first instalment of Andrew Morton’s book,
Diana: Her True Story
, in the
Sunday Times.
Robin Janvrin and Charles Anson had been across to recce the tour some months before. They were given the red-carpet treatment themselves. They went to a huge meeting with the chief of protocol and a collection of very senior officials in a
magnificent glittering state building. The chief of protocol opened up a book and said, ‘This is how we do state visits.’ Then he closed the book firmly and in front of a hundred functionaries said, ‘Now, what would the Queen like to do? Just tell us, we’ll do anything she wants.’ When the Queen arrived in Paris on the Monday the British press were in a frenzy, desperately trying to get a reaction to Morton’s revelations. No one would speak to them. The French – officials and ordinary people in the street alike – couldn’t have been less interested in the story that was sending shock waves the length and breadth of Britain. ‘Listen,’ they said, ‘we’ve got the Queen here. We’re not interested in this story – it’s just gossip, just someone writing a book.’ Their entire focus was on the Queen, who they regarded as a very special visitor.

Her visit in April 2004 was to celebrate the centenary of the Entente Cordiale – celebrations that concluded with a return visit by the French President Jacques Chirac to Britain the following November. It had been a hundred years since her great-grandfather Edward VII had sailed across the Channel to set in train the ‘special agreement’ that put an end to years of hostility between the two countries. When he arrived he had been booed, but by the time he left Parisians were crying, ‘
Vive notre Roi
’. The Queen arrived to a much warmer welcome than her great-grandfather and her journey was very much more comfortable. She and the Duke of Edinburgh travelled with Eurostar in a specially named train –
Entente Cordiale
– its nose freshly painted with the flags of both countries with two drivers, one French, the other British. The symbolism of having come through the Channel Tunnel, which now links the two nations, was not lost on either side.

Rail workers had sprayed the tracks with melon-scented air freshener by way of welcome and schoolchildren waiting on the platform at the Gare du Nord cheered. At the place de la
Concorde, the very spot where King Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette lost their heads during the French Revolution, she was accorded full military ceremony – proof that while the French may have dispensed with their monarchy they still treasure some pomp and pageantry – and 150 mounted members of the Republican Guard trotted behind her as she progressed through the streets of Paris. In the Champs-Elysées she inspected the Guard of Honour, but security was so tight that only a few schoolchildren could see her. The French had deployed 2400 uniformed officers and an unspecified number of plain-clothes policemen to guard their special guest. Sharp-shooters on the rooftops tracked her movements and the shops she visited in the rue Montorgueil had been thoroughly searched beforehand. The last time France had had a state visitor, security had been so intense with roads blocked off and diversions everywhere that any goodwill that might have been generated by the sight of a foreign president in the city evaporated in the chronic traffic jams. The Queen hates the security she is forced to live with, as do all of the family. She recognizes that, sadly, it is a necessary part of modern life, but insists that it shouldn’t come between her and the public who want to see her. She specifically asked for the security in Paris to be low key and, as if to prove the point, went on a short walkabout outside the Elysée Palace where hundreds of Parisians had gathered to cheer.

‘I believe that we mark this week a most significant anniversary for our two nations,’ she said at the state banquet held in her honour at the Elysée Palace.

If I may be allowed tonight one small British understatement, our historical relationship has not always been smooth. For centuries we fought each other fiercely, often and everywhere – from Hastings to Waterloo, from the
Heights of Abraham to the mouth of the Nile. But since 1815 our two nations have not been to war. On the contrary, we have stood together, resolute in defence of liberty and democracy, notably through the terrible global conflicts of the twentieth century.

This was far from inevitable when we reflect on how close we came to war over our colonies at the end of the nineteenth century. That we turned away from conflict to the path of partnership was due to the single-minded efforts of a small number of enlightened individuals dedicated to Franco-British rapprochement. Their immense achievement was the Entente Cordiale signed one hundred years ago this week. I am proud of the part my great-grandfather, King Edward VII, played in this historic agreement. It was his initiative, and that of your President Loubert, to insist on reciprocal state visits in 1903 which did so much to create the popular atmosphere for the successful political negotiations to settle our colonial disagreements the following year.

I hope that this state visit, and the season of Entente Cordiale celebrations closing with your visit to London, Mr President, in the autumn, will likewise contribute to a new era of Franco-British partnership. Our circumstances a century on are perhaps not entirely dissimilar.

For just as our statesmen and my great-grandfather realized a hundred years ago, we too need to recognize that we cannot let immediate political pressures, however strongly felt on both sides, stand between us in the longer term. We are both reminded that neither of our two great nations, nor Europe, nor the wider Western Alliance, can afford the luxury of short-term division or discord, in the face of threats to our security and prosperity that now challenge us all.

Of course we will never agree on everything. Life would be dull indeed, not least for the rest of the world, if we did not allow ourselves a little space to live up to our national caricatures – British pragmatism and French élan; French conceptualism and British humour; British rain and French sun; I think we should enjoy the complementarity of it all.

Exchanges of visits by heads of state have been happening for centuries as a way of demonstrating friendship between two countries – and one of the earliest was with France, when in 1520 Henry VIII invited Francis I of France to join him in the Field of Cloth of Gold to put a seal on a new treaty of friendship between them; Edward VII’s treaty, so far, has been altogether more successful. The convention until recent times was that sovereigns only made one state visit each way during the course of their reign, unless the head of state changed, but since there are now more republics than monarchies and presidents change more frequently than monarchs, the rule has become more relaxed. The Queen usually makes two state visits a year and has two incoming visits from heads of state, selected after discussions between the private secretaries of the Queen, the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary. There used to be three a year but Margaret Thatcher reduced the number when she was Prime Minister, partly because having been on the throne for forty years the Queen had already entertained most long-term heads of state, and partly on the grounds of cost – which is borne by the government. The cost is considerable: £0.7 million in the year to 31 March 2004, and that’s not counting the cost of police and Army security and of the Armed Services ceremonial. The Queen made just one visit abroad during that year, to a Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Nigeria, and received two visiting heads of state – the President of the Russian Federation,
Vladimir Putin, and the United States President, George W. Bush, the security for which was the tightest ever mounted, and therefore one of the most expensive visits ever made.