Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch

her status as a semiroyal, the Palace took pains to say that she would still be “regarded as a member of the royal family.” Whenever she attended state or national occasions she would rank as an “HRH.”

THE QUEEN FOUND blessed relief from her family travails when Nelson Mandela arrived for a triumphant four-day state visit on Tuesday, July 9. Tens of thousands of spectators—the biggest crowd for a foreign visitor in decades—turned out to cheer the African leader as he and Elizabeth II were driven by carriage to Buckingham Palace after the ceremonial welcome on Horse Guards Parade. At the state banquet that evening, the seventy- year-old monarch paid tribute to the seventy-seven-year-old South African leader as the savior of a country that “has a special place in my heart and in the hearts of the British people.” Her praise for his wisdom and understanding after suffering twenty-seven years in prison was borne out three days later when he met for twenty minutes with his former adversary, Margaret Thatcher—in the spirit, he said, of “let bygones be bygones.”

Instead of the traditional “return” dinner at South Africa House on Thursday night, Mandela chose to bend protocol by hosting a “Two Nations” concert at Royal Albert Hall. Prince Charles helped organize the event starring Phil Collins, Tony Bennett, and Quincy Jones along with Hugh Masekela and other prominent South African musicians. Mandela, who was well known for dancing to the toe-tapping rhythms of South African music, sat with the Queen, Philip, Charles, and other members of the royal family in the royal box. At intermission he took aside Robin Renwick (Baron Renwick of Clifton), who had served as British ambassador to South Africa. “Should I dance?” Mandela asked. “By all means,” said Renwick. “What about the Queen?” said Mandela. “You should do it,” replied Renwick. “Don’t worry.”

When the all-male a cappella singing group Ladysmith Black Mambazo began performing, Mandela, dressed in a black silk shirt, stood up in the royal box and started to dance. Philip tentatively rose to join him, followed by Charles, swaying and clapping along with the music. “To everyone’s surprise,” said Robin Renwick, “the Queen stood up and did a little side by side movement too.” As the Daily Telegraph noted the next day, Elizabeth II “has seldom been known to boogie in public.”

ON AUGUST 28, the Wales divorce became final, to the enormous relief of the royal family. But they had not anticipated that Diana had every intention of staying in the limelight. She forged a strategic new alliance with Tony Blair, leader of the Labour Party and candidate for the general election to be held in 1997. Early in the new year they met quietly at several private dinner parties where the dynamic young politician took Diana’s measure. He was mesmerized by her beauty and charisma, and she offered him advice on photo opportunities for his political campaign, speaking in “fairly calculating terms of how she had ‘gone for the caring angle.’ ”

Blair welcomed her “radical combination of royalty and normality … a royal who seemed at ease, human, and most of all, willing to engage with people on an equal basis.” At the same time he could see that she was “an unpredictable meteor” who had entered the royal family’s “predictable and highly regulated ecosystem.” Although she didn’t specify her political inclinations, he sensed her “perfect fit” with his plans for the Labour Party “in temperament and time, in the mood she engendered.”

Just as Diana created a less formal royal style, Blair flouted political convention by seeking a “Third Way” that defied Labour orthodoxy. Fundamentally, they were both accomplished actors. “We were both in our ways manipulative people,” he later wrote, “perceiving quickly the emotions of others and able instinctively to play with them.” That chameleon quality served Blair well as he fashioned a campaign to defeat John Major’s steady but dull leadership. Blair’s “New Labour” agenda promised youthful vigor and modernization that incorporated market-based Conservative ideas rather than diehard socialism. On May 1, 1997, Labour won in a landslide, and Blair, who took office four days before his forty-fourth birthday, became the first prime minister to be born after the Queen’s accession.

Blair was the product of an upwardly mobile Scottish family. His father, Leo’s, adoptive parents came from the Glasgow shipyards, and his maternal grandfather had been a butcher. Leo worked his way through law school and became a barrister and law lecturer at Durham University in England before turning to Conservative politics—a career cut short by a crippling stroke.

He insisted on the best private education for Tony, sending him to Fettes College, a boarding school in Edinburgh known as the Eton of Scotland. Blair studied law at Oxford and did a stint as a barrister in London where he met Cherie Booth, an ambitious and skilled lawyer from Liverpool who became his wife. He took up Labour politics and won a seat in Parliament in 1983, casting himself as a reformer. Boyishly handsome with a gleaming smile—the Queen Mother slyly observed that he was “all teeth and no bite”—Blair attracted attention with his glib and earnest rhetoric, and he gathered support with his engaging personality. “He had the nicest manners of any prime minister I have come across, in Britain or anywhere else,” wrote conservative historian Paul Johnson.

In 1994, after the death of Labour leader John Smith, Blair revealed his toughness when he won election as leader of the opposition, cutting off his friend and colleague Gordon Brown, who had been lining up support for his own run. Brown accused Blair of “betrayal,” and Blair mollified him with an “understanding” that he would eventually make way for Brown to succeed him. The residue of that deal was a bitter animosity between the two politicians that lasted throughout the years they worked together.

Blair made a memorable appearance at Buckingham Palace for “kissing hands” on May 2, 1997. After receiving his instructions from the Queen’s equerry, he tripped on the edge of the carpet and fell upon the Queen’s outstretched hand he was supposed to brush with his lips. Scarcely missing a beat, Elizabeth II told him that he was her tenth prime minister. “The first was Winston,” she said. “That was before you were born.” Their conversation turned up with some dramatic embellishment in the film The Queen, which also accurately conveyed Blair’s extreme nervousness. “I got a sense of my relative seniority, or lack of it, in the broad sweep of history,” Blair recalled in a 2002 interview. “But it was immediately apparent, even at that meeting … she was someone who took every care to try to make sure that you were put at ease.”

After some twenty minutes of “general guff” about Labour’s legislative plans, a Palace aide brought in Cherie, a militant republican often derided for her failure to give the monarch adequate respect. “I can’t remember not curtsying,” Cherie vaguely recalled, “so I probably did.” The two women discussed the practical logistics of moving a family—the Blairs had three children at the time—into 10 Downing Street, the Queen “generally clucking sympathetically.” Elizabeth II “kept the conversation going for just the right length of time,” the prime minister recalled, until “by an ever so slight gesture, she ended it and saw us out.”

Elizabeth II had quietly celebrated her seventy-first birthday eleven days earlier at Windsor Castle. She went riding, entertained her ninety-six-year-old “mama” at lunch, and contemplated the beauty of the garden at Frogmore in the “hot spring sunshine,” as she described the day to Nancy Reagan.

At an age when most in her generation had settled into comfortable retirement and narrowing views, the Queen’s unique position required her to broaden her perspective to keep abreast of changes in the culture. On March 6, she had switched on the first royal website, containing 150 pages of information on the monarchy. She remarked that the Internet “opens the door to a huge range of knowledge which has no national boundaries.” Still, in other respects, as Blair observed, “there’s a bit of her that is very strongly unchanging”—mainly regarding traditions that preserve “the mystery and the majesty of the monarchy.”

One of the new prime minister’s ticklish early decisions had to do with the forty-three-year-old yacht Britannia. In a cost-cutting measure, the Major government had decided three years earlier to end the royal yacht’s service in 1997. The Tories had been reluctant to finance the necessary ?11 million upgrading as well as escalating yearly maintenance costs. “A lot of people thought Britannia should be kept,” said a former senior Palace official. “A lot of people in the street thought it was important. It was a wonderful symbol of the monarchy.” Some argued that the yacht helped promote British trade around the world with its “Sea Days” for businessmen that brought some ?3 billion to the Treasury from 1991 to 1995. But in the end, Britannia had come to symbolize politically incorrect extravagance and privilege at public expense, and the Queen told the government she was prepared to give it up.

Despite the political sensitivity, the Major government had nevertheless considered building a new state-of- the-art royal yacht that would be less expensive to operate, and the Ministry of Defence developed plans with an estimated cost of ?80 million. When Blair attended the ceremonial handover of Hong Kong’s sovereignty to the People’s Republic of China on June 30, 1997, he was impressed with the value of having a floating embodiment of Britain. After the Union Jack was lowered at midnight, Blair watched the floodlit yacht dramatically sail out of Hong Kong harbor. “What an asset,” he said. But his government soon scuttled any successor to Britannia—a decision that seemed small-minded compared to Blair’s own misguided construction project, the ?750 million Millennium Dome, which came to symbolize pointless big-government