Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch

FIFTEEN

Family Fractures

AMID THE WEDDING CELEBRATIONS, THE QUEEN HAD TO CONFRONT news reports that raised serious questions about her professional conduct. On Sunday, July 20, 1986, Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times splashed a sensational page-one story claiming that Elizabeth II was dismayed by the policies of Margaret Thatcher. The Queen purportedly took issue with her prime minister’s opposition to the Commonwealth’s advocacy of economic sanctions against South Africa to bring an end to apartheid, her tough tactics to break the miners’ union during a long and violent strike in 1984 and 1985, her granting the United States permission to refuel at British airbases before launching a bombing mission against Libya the previous April, and her assaults on entitlement programs that had been supported by a “consensus” of Tories and Labour since the end of World War II. According to the Sunday Times report, the Queen not only regarded Thatcher’s approach to governing as “uncaring, confrontational and divisive,” she had become an “astute political infighter who is quite prepared to take on Downing Street when provoked.”

Elizabeth II’s senior advisers were dining at Boodle’s, the men’s club on St. James’s Street, with the private secretaries to sovereigns of eight countries on Saturday night when a call came through that the story was breaking. The courtiers dispatched an assistant press secretary to Victoria Station to grab copies of the newspaper as the truck delivered them at eleven o’clock. “It was like a scene out of Trollope,” said one of the courtiers. “This serene dinner with dignitaries was going on, and at the other end of the room one private secretary was on the phone with Buckingham Palace, another with The Sunday Times, and another with Downing Street trying to defuse the story.”

“Margaret Thatcher was very upset,” said Charles Powell. “She was furious that someone put that in the papers, but she didn’t think it was the Queen.” More than anything, the prime minister worried that “ordinary people” would be offended that she could be “upsetting the Queen.” Elizabeth II was angry as well. She called Thatcher on Sunday from Windsor Castle to say that the allegations were completely untrue, and the two women “commiserated with each other,” according to a senior courtier.

Palace press secretary Michael Shea issued a swift denial. He was more distraught than his colleagues, and they began to suspect that he had been indiscreet. A graduate of Gordonstoun with a doctorate in economics from the University of Edinburgh, he had served for fifteen years as a diplomat before joining the Palace in 1978 to run the press office—an appointment that raised eyebrows at the time because he was said to have a skeptical view of the monarchy.

There had been press reports in previous weeks speculating that Elizabeth II was concerned that some members could leave the Commonwealth over Thatcher’s South Africa policy. At the October 1985 meeting of Commonwealth leaders in Nassau, Thatcher had vigorously opposed a package of harshly punitive economic sanctions, arguing that they would lead to black unemployment in South Africa, harm the exports of British businesses, and push the white minority government headed by P. W. Botha even further to the right. The Queen had encouraged Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney, who was serving as chairman of the Commonwealth, to work with the other leaders to find a unified position in their efforts to end apartheid.

Elizabeth II offered no opinion about sanctions. But as in Lusaka six years earlier, she dispelled tensions in her individual meetings with the leaders, this time in her stateroom on Britannia, emphasizing the “moral obligation” to keep talking. Thatcher eventually compromised by signing the group’s communique denouncing apartheid, calling for curbs on bank loans and trade missions, and establishing a group of seven leaders to meet in London the following August to consider further actions. The Sunday Times article landed only days before the so-called mini-summit was scheduled to begin.

The newspaper’s sweeping claims about domestic as well as foreign policy ran counter to the Queen’s ironclad rule, which she had followed for the thirty-four years of her reign, to be utterly discreet about political matters. “She never expressed her views on sensitive topics,” said one of her senior advisers. Nor did she have any foreknowledge of the Sunday Times article, which her private secretary, William Heseltine, emphatically denounced as false. The question became not only who would leak such an account, but why.

To shield its informant, The Sunday Times had misleadingly said it had multiple sources, but by the end of the week the culprit was unmasked as Shea. He admitted that he had spoken to reporter Simon Freeman on a background basis several times by telephone, thinking he was briefing him for a speculative story on the monarchy in the twenty-first century. Shea said he talked in general terms and that Freeman and the newspaper’s political editor, Michael Jones, had “misinterpreted” his words. Freeman insisted that Shea had specifically attributed left-of-center opinions on a range of issues to the Queen, and that the story had been cleared by the press secretary before publication. Shea countered that Freeman had withheld “crucial parts” when he read back the story.

The press secretary’s colleagues, none of whom had known about Shea’s dealings with the Sunday Times reporter, concluded that Andrew Neil, the newspaper’s editor, had cooked up a provocative story line, that Freeman had used a combination of cajolery and flattery, and that Shea had gone overboard in a burst of ego and vanity. Even Rupert Murdoch told Times and News of the World columnist Woodrow Wyatt, “I think he has megalomania.” Shea was also venting his own liberal views that friends had heard him express at dinner parties. “He personally didn’t go for Margaret Thatcher,” said Elizabeth II’s friend Angela Oswald. “He put words in the Queen’s mouth that she never said. She was brought up never to get involved in party politics. She would never imply that she favored one politician over another.”

A week after the story was published, the Queen and her prime minister were at Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh, where Shea was seated between them at a luncheon. He apologized to Thatcher, who simply said, “Don’t worry, dear.” Later that day in a phone conversation, Woodrow Wyatt told Thatcher that the Queen should fire Shea or force him to resign. “Well, I can’t do anything about that,” she said. “It’s up to her. But we will have to see whether new arrangements are made to prevent such a thing happening again. I think they will be.” In a matter of months Shea left his job at the Palace to work in private industry.

On August 4, 1986, Elizabeth II hosted the first “working dinner” of her reign when she gathered the seven Commonwealth leaders at Buckingham Palace after their first round of mini-summit meetings at 10 Downing Street. Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe called it a “deliberate act by the Queen … to remind us all of our commitment to get on with each other.” Earlier that day, Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda had strenuously attacked Thatcher, unfairly accusing her of sympathizing with apartheid. Deploying remarkable sangfroid, Thatcher calmed him by taking his arm and saying, “Now Kenneth, we must get ourselves lunch before we have another vigorous discussion this afternoon.” That night at dinner, the Queen glanced at Kaunda and said with a twinkle to Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, “How is the emotional one?”

“There was no doubt that Her Majesty sided with the Commonwealth,” said Brian Mulroney. “But she couldn’t speak out. You had to understand the nuances and body language. She did it by allusion and by indirection. At the dinner she was a great moderating influence on everyone. She led us through an elevated discussion of human rights. I don’t know how much opinion she expressed, but she would nudge everyone in a certain direction.” By the end of the conference, Thatcher joined the other six leaders on a set of recommendations to be presented later to all forty-nine Commonwealth members. “What saved the day,” recalled Brian Mulroney, “was that Margaret was aware Her Majesty certainly wanted some kind of resolution. So we were able to put in three or four financial things that Margaret accepted, which allowed us to move on to the next meeting without rupture.”

AFTER THEIR ANNUAL Balmoral holiday, the Queen and Prince Philip traveled to the People’s Republic of China in mid-October, the first time a British monarch had visited the Chinese mainland. The planning had begun several years earlier. The Queen read extensive briefs on history and culture, as well as on the habits of Deng Xiaoping, the country’s eighty-two-year-old leader, including his bridge playing and incessant smoking. The royal couple’s itinerary took them from Beijing to Shanghai, Kunming, and the ancient city of X’ian, where they walked among the vast army of life-size terra-cotta warriors that had recently been unearthed by archaeologists.