Cunliffe-Lister sent seventy pages of briefings: rundowns on the people she would meet, descriptions of the places she would see, and menus and seating plans for a luncheon in the Guildhall. Palace officials produced a seventeen- page single-spaced schedule that included every step the Queen would take.
To minimize disruption to the rail system and ensure an on-time arrival, Elizabeth II and Philip spent the night before their visit on the Royal Train near Hull. The shiny maroon train, a staple of royal travel since Queen Victoria ordered the first version in 1842, is endearingly old-fashioned, its functional decor dating from the 1970s. The Queen and Philip each have a separate carriage—“saloon” in royal parlance—divided into a bedroom, bathroom and sitting room with a desk and small dining table. The furniture is blond wood, the floors are covered in plain wall- to-wall carpet, and the plastic walls are adorned with Scottish landscapes and Victorian prints of rail journeys.
When the train pulled into the Hull station at 10:20 A.M. on March 3, the Queen and Philip were greeted on the platform by the predictable lineup of dignitaries that the Palace calls the “chain gang,” so named for the ceremonial chains and other regalia worn by the lord mayor, the high sheriff, and beadles in their robes, knee breeches, buckled shoes, and plumed hats. The royal retinue was small—a lady-in-waiting, an assistant private secretary, an equerry, and several personal protection officers—but there was a large local security contingent.
At the Queen’s request, she met more ordinary people than luminaries. Waiting nearby was the royal Bentley (transported the previous day in a truck) with the hood ornament of St. George slaying the dragon and the distinctive shield bearing the Queen’s arms attached to the roof. After a five-minute walkabout of approximately twenty paces along the barriers outside the station, Elizabeth II was driven to the Queen’s Center for Oncology and Haematology, where she spent nearly an hour talking to patients, doctors, and nurses.
Phil Brown, the forty-nine-year-old manager of the Hull City football team, sat next to the Queen at the Guildhall luncheon. “She has an amazing ability to scan right across the classes, to come to my level and to go back to being regal,” he said. She talked across the table to a “lollipop lady” (a school crossing guard), an ambulance driver, and an “environmental community volunteer.” Maria Raper, the crossing guard, was transfixed not only by the sight of the Queen applying lipstick after polishing off her Tian of Triple Chocolate Mousse, but by the way she “was picking at her bread roll the whole time. She opened it and picked little bits off, and at the end of the meal there was her bread plate with a collection of small bits of bread.” Throughout the day, Elizabeth II smiled frequently and moved unhurriedly, mindful of Martin Charteris’s edict to “spread a carpet of happiness.” The next morning’s
SEVERAL WEEKS LATER she shifted her focus to the international sphere for a state visit by Felipe Calderon, the president of Mexico. After hosting ninety-six state visits, the Queen was no less attentive to the minutiae of ceremony and protocol. Every place setting for the state banquet in the ballroom was precisely measured, and all the fruit on the table was polished to a high gloss.
In the middle of the Mexican visit, the Queen and Prince Philip hosted a reception at Buckingham Palace for twenty world leaders attending the G-20 summit. Before the reception began they had their first meeting with the new American president, forty-seven-year-old Barack Obama, and his forty-five-year-old wife, Michelle.
Although Gordon Brown had spent many summers vacationing in Provincetown on Cape Cod, his relationship with the United States was not as close as that of Blair, who had forged personal ties with both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Obama had also shown a coolness toward the “special relationship.” Shortly after taking office, he returned the bronze bust of Winston Churchill that George W. Bush had proudly displayed for seven years. The British government had lent the bust after 9/11 “as a signal of the strong transatlantic relationship,” and Obama decided to discontinue the loan.
But the forty-fourth American president and his wife had an air of expectancy when they arrived at the private Garden Entrance of the Palace. The first lady even confided to a courtier that she was nervous about meeting the sovereign. The Queen arranged to have her American lady-in-waiting, Ginny Airlie, greet the couple before Master of the Household David Walker escorted them upstairs to the private apartments, where they had twenty minutes of congenial small talk with Elizabeth II and Philip. The royal couple presented their standard gift—a signed framed photograph—and the Obamas gave the Queen a video iPod loaded with forty classic show tunes, photographs, and footage of her 2007 and 1957 visits to the United States, as well as the audio of the president’s speech to the 2004 Democratic National Convention and his inaugural address, along with a selection of inaugural pictures.
Elizabeth II and Prince Philip greeted the rest of the heads of state visiting for the G-20 summit in a receiving line before they made their way into the Picture Gallery, with its extraordinary array of paintings, including works by Canaletto, Rubens, Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Holbein. “The Queen knows when she enters the room she is the most compelling head of state in the room,” former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney once observed. “She is number one even though her country is not number one.”
The atmosphere was electric with concentrated power as the Queen informally circulated among the world leaders, with no need for introductions by her equerries and ladies-in-waiting, who lingered nearby mainly to engage guests as they waited for a chance to speak. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was working the room like a political candidate, stopping at one point to talk to French president Nicolas Sarkozy over the Queen—a maneuver that Elizabeth II doubtless thought “frightfully funny,” said one of her ladies-in-waiting.
With the American president standing six foot one and his wife nearly as tall, the Obamas towered over nearly everyone. As Michelle Obama and the Queen were talking, they turned toward lady-in-waiting Susan Hussey to remark on their disparity in size. The first lady wrapped her arm around the Queen’s back, and Elizabeth II responded in kind, lightly placing her arm around Michelle’s waist. After ten seconds, the Queen dropped her arm to her side, but the first lady kept her hand in place and even gave the sovereign’s shoulder a reassuring rub.
“It happened spontaneously,” said Peter Wilkinson, the Queen’s videographer, who recorded the moment. “The Queen and Michelle were lifting up their heels to compare the size. The Queen came up to Michelle’s shoulder, and when they put their arms around each other, the Queen jokingly looked skyward. Sue Hussey was laughing. They sort of did it together as they compared their heights.”
The newspapers grabbed Wilkinson’s footage off the television screens and made a fuss about an “unthinkable” breach of protocol by the first lady. But after the Queen’s encounters in the United States and Australia in recent years, not to mention her hugs and kisses with close friends, she was more relaxed about gestures of familiarity. Palace officials hastened to say there was neither an offense nor a faux pas in what a spokeswoman described as a “mutual and spontaneous display of affection and appreciation.” “You can’t analyze it,” said a courtier. “It just happened. We’d never seen it before, but the Queen was happy, the event was going so well, which is why there was a spontaneous happy expression.”
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THE FOLLOWING NOVEMBER Elizabeth II was off on her big foreign tour of the year—two days in Bermuda, followed by a three-day state visit in Trinidad and Tobago combined with the biennial meeting of Commonwealth leaders. They were sent on their way, according to custom, at Heathrow Airport by the Queen’s Lord Chamberlain, William Peel, the 3rd Earl, a ritual that invariably prompted Philip to exclaim, “Mind the shop!”
At age eighty-three, the Queen studied her briefs as conscientiously as ever—biographical summaries of all the people she would meet (with difficult pronunciations phonetically spelled out) along with Foreign Office guidance on questions that the foreign leaders might raise. Her itineraries, prepared by the host countries and Palace officials, had been approved in detail by the Queen, with time splits down to the half minute. Every conceivable scrap of information was included in a four-by-six-inch spiral-bound blue book called the “Mini”—names, logistics, security details, dress requirements, and the number of paces from point to point (13+7 signifying 13 steps, a pause, then 7 steps), rehearsed repeatedly by her staff during a series of reconnaissance trips.
The visit to Bermuda was to mark the four hundredth anniversary of the island’s settlement by English voyagers marooned after a shipwreck. It was fifty-six years to the day since she had first set foot on her distant territory in the Atlantic as she began her coronation tour.
After her eight-hour flight with no time to nap, she arrived in mid-afternoon to a ceremonial welcome led by Bermuda’s governor, Sir Richard Gozney (resplendent in a white uniform and white cocked hat decorated with swan feathers) and Premier Ewart Brown, followed by a walkabout and a ninety-minute cocktail party with 150 prominent Bermudians at Government House, the governor’s Italianate home on the island’s north shore.
The Queen was a smiling icon moving through the crowd at the reception, careful not to engage too much. For all her expansiveness in private, her remarks in these settings seemed to escape like wisps of vapor. After
