The royal family on the Buckingham Palace balcony after the wedding of Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips, November 1973.
ELEVEN
“Not Bloody Likely!”
IN JUNE 1970, HAROLD WILSON CALLED A GENERAL ELECTION ON the assumption that he could bolster Labour’s majority in Parliament. But he misread the opinion polls as well as public dissatisfaction over rising prices and an increase in unemployment. The Conservatives won decisively in a surprising upset. Fifty-three-year-old Edward Heath came to Buckingham Palace on the 19th to kiss hands, the first Tory premier to be elected by his party rather than appointed by the Queen.
That night Elizabeth II gave a grand ball at Windsor Castle to celebrate the seventieth birthdays of the Queen Mother; the Queen’s cousin Dickie Mountbatten; her uncle Harry, the Duke of Gloucester; and Henry Somerset, the 10th Duke of Beaufort, who had been her ceremonial Master of the Horse since the beginning of her reign.
The ball was a Patrick Plunket production, with the castle floodlit and fuchsias in pots lining the Gothic entrance hall. Many of the guests were celebrating the Tory victory. “We had been expecting to put up with Wilson and his loathsome mob for another five years,” wrote Cecil Beaton, “and quite dramatically all was changed.” When the new prime minister arrived like a conquering hero, the guests cheered. “I was told that he blushed to his collar,” Beaton recorded.
Yet Heath, who was Wilson’s exact contemporary, proved to be heavy going for the Queen, who was ten years his junior. Like his Labour predecessor, his origins were modest. He had excelled in the grammar school system and earned his degree at Oxford. Heath’s provincialism had a cultured gloss from his expertise in classical music and skill as a yachtsman, although neither was a fruitful source of small talk with Elizabeth II. A confirmed bachelor described as “celibate” by Philip Ziegler, his official biographer, Heath was at best indifferent to women and at worst contemptuous of them.
The Queen’s sixth prime minister had a reputation for being brusque, even rude. Wilson described him as “cold and uncompassionate.” He lacked Wilson’s bonhomie and instinctive deference. Even worse, from the Queen’s standpoint, he was humorless and remote. She could find traits to admire: certainly his political talent and accomplishments as well as his determination and his honesty. But given his personality, Heath’s unfailing courtesy to his sovereign could be cloying at times.
Heath learned quickly to appreciate the Queen’s value and found their audiences rewarding, especially since he had no spouse in whom to confide or share his frustrations. He described her as a patient listener when he unburdened himself “a good deal” beyond the agenda drawn up by their private secretaries that she kept on a card placed on a nearby table. “The fact that she has all these years of experience and is imperturbable is a source of encouragement in itself,” he said. Heath also found that extensive correspondence with foreign leaders made her “very useful … particularly on overseas stuff.”
He did not, however, share her passion for the Commonwealth, which led to tensions between them. From the moment of his election, Heath was determined to pick up Macmillan’s quest for admission to the Common Market after French president Charles de Gaulle had twice rebuffed Britain’s application. Heath applied a messianic zeal to the task of persuading French president Georges Pompidou, who continued to hold the veto power. To demonstrate to France that his country was truly European, Heath downplayed the importance of the Commonwealth. He also antagonized a number of its African members when he dropped the arms embargo against South Africa enacted by Wilson in 1967 and resumed weapons sales to the apartheid regime. Both Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia and Julius Nyerere of Tanzania threatened to leave the Commonwealth.
Fearing confrontations at the Commonwealth leaders’ meeting in Singapore in January 1971, Heath banned the Queen from attending. As he expected, the Africans pummeled him, but nobody bolted. According to Heath biographer John Campbell, the Queen was “deeply unhappy with Heath’s undisguised disrespect” for her beloved Commonwealth and “greatly upset by the rows which disfigured” the 1971 meeting. Martin Charteris said that if she had been allowed to attend, the acrimony would have been reduced if not eliminated. “It’s like Nanny being there,” he said. “She demands that they behave properly in her presence.… She knows them all and they like her.” She resented being excluded and “she was determined it was not going to happen again.”
The United States was also given short shrift by Heath in his pursuit of stronger European connections. Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, wrote that not only did the prime minister fail to cultivate the “special relationship,” he “actively sought to downgrade it.” Nixon did everything he could to establish good rapport with Heath, and to please the Queen as well. On the heels of his dinner for Philip, the president invited Charles and Anne to the White House in July 1970—their first trip to America and the fourth such visit by a Prince of Wales since 1860.
Elizabeth II’s two older children were being introduced to the round of royal duties, much as she had been instructed during her childhood. “I learnt the way a monkey learns—by watching its parents,” Charles once said. During Anne’s trip to New Zealand with her mother and father in March 1970, royal image maker William Heseltine modernized the Queen’s regular routine by adding the “walkabout”—taking a casual stroll to chat and shake hands with ordinary people. Her daughter was expected to follow suit. “At nineteen years old suddenly being dropped in the middle of the street,” Anne recalled. “Suddenly being told to pick someone and talk to them. Fun? No I don’t think so. A challenge.”
Nixon laid on an ambitious program for Charles and Anne’s two days in Washington: lunch on the presidential yacht
Nixon set aside a half hour to meet Charles in the Oval Office. In a briefing paper, Kissinger advised him to solicit the twenty-one-year-old prince’s views on the Commonwealth, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, his impression of Canada, and of the “hopes and aspirations of his generation.” They ended up talking for ninety minutes on a wide range of topics. When Nixon urged Charles to be a “presence” while not completely avoiding controversy, the prince “pointed out one must not become controversial too often otherwise people don’t take you seriously.” Charles added in his diary afterward, “to be just a presence would be fatal.… A presence alone can be swept away so easily.”
The following October, Nixon was back in Britain for consultations with Heath. The Queen, who was on vacation at Balmoral, expressed concern that she would seem discourteous if she did not see the American president during his brief stay. Her advisers considered an invitation to Windsor or Buckingham Palace, but decided that neither place would be “suitable for entertaining a large party at short notice.” Instead, she accepted Heath’s invitation to fly down from Scotland and join Nixon for luncheon at Chequers—her first visit to the prime minister’s
