Elizabeth the Queen (58 page)

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 excess.

That August the royal family took
Britannia
on its final Western Isles cruise on their way to Balmoral, a sentimental journey with the usual stop at the Castle of Mey. “Lilibet” and “Philip” put their signatures in the Queen Mother’s guest book commemorating
Britannia
Day for the last time, followed by Andrew and his two daughters; Anne and her second husband, Tim Laurence, with her son and daughter; Edward and his girlfriend Sophie Rhys-Jones; Margaret’s daughter, Sarah, and Sarah’s husband, Daniel Chatto; as well as Margaret’s son, David Linley, and his wife, Serena. The traditional luncheon was “somewhat melancholy,” but they all rose to the occasion with their usual ship-to-shore exchange of doggerel as
Britannia
, accompanied by two destroyers, steamed past the coast twice before disappearing over the horizon.

The Queen Mother’s verse was written by her friend Ted Hughes, Britain’s poet laureate, and said, in part:

         
With all our memories of you, so happy and dear

         
Whichever course your captain takes
,

         
You steer into this haven of all our hearts, and here

         
You shall be anchored forever
.

The Queen’s sixteen-line reply from
Britannia
to the Queen Mother’s “castellated pad” marveled:

         
Oh what a heavenly day, happy glorious and gay

         
Delicious food from the land

         
Peas shelled by majestic hand

         
Fruit, ice cream from foreign lands

         
Was it India or Pakistan?

A
S THE
Q
UEEN
, her family, and friends fell into the leisurely pace of Balmoral life, they were confronted each morning with a display of newspapers on the drawing room table carrying stories of Diana’s escapades. Since the divorce, the princess had presented a brave face to the world, taking on important new causes such as banning the use of land mines. But her emotional life was more turbulent than ever as she attached herself to men who were increasingly unsuitable. She doted on William and Harry and tried to expose them to everyday life as much as possible, giving them, as she said in her
Panorama
interview, “an understanding of people’s emotions, people’s insecurities, people’s distress, and people’s hopes and dreams.” Yet she also began to burden her sons—William in particular—with too much information about her boyfriends and her problems.

She hit a new low in mid-July when she took up with Dodi Fayed, the son of Egyptian tycoon Mohamed Fayed, who had been repeatedly denied British citizenship by the U.K. government. Mohamed Fayed had befriended Diana as a generous benefactor of several of her charities. He appealed to her, according to Andrew Neil, a sometime consultant for Fayed, “by cultivating the idea that both were outsiders and had the same enemies.”

Diana met Dodi while she and her sons were staying at the ten-acre Fayed estate in Saint-Tropez. At age forty-two, Dodi was a classic case of arrested development: spoiled, ill-educated, unemployed, rootless, and irresponsible, with a taste for cocaine and fast cars. He showered Diana with extravagant gifts, including an $11,000 gold Cartier Panther watch, and sybaritic trips on his father’s plane and yachts. From the moment the story of their romance broke on August 7, the tabloids covered the couple’s every move with suggestive photographs and lurid prose. William and Harry, who were at Balmoral with their father, mistrusted Dodi, and they were embarrassed by their mother’s exhibitionistic behavior.

At around 1
A.M.
on Sunday, August 31, a call came through to Robin Janvrin at Craigowan Lodge from the British embassy in Paris with a chilling message: Diana and Dodi had been in a horrific car crash in the tunnel underneath the Place d’Alma. Janvrin immediately hustled to Balmoral Castle for urgent conferences with the Queen, Philip, and Charles. Shortly after 4
A.M.
they received word that Diana was dead at age thirty-six, along with her lover and the driver of the car.

They decided to let William and Harry sleep, and the Queen wrote a note to be shown to her mother when she awakened. At 7:15
A.M.
Charles told his sons, then aged fifteen and twelve, about the tragedy. From that moment on, Elizabeth II alternated between consoling her two grandsons and working with her senior advisers to make arrangements for honoring their mother.

Robin Janvrin stayed with the Queen at Balmoral while her other courtiers set up a makeshift command center at Buckingham Palace in the Chinese Dining Room overlooking the Victoria Memorial. David Airlie called off his trip to Italy, Lieutenant Colonel Malcolm Ross, the comptroller of the Lord Chamberlain’s office, flew in from Scotland, and Robert Fellowes came down from Norfolk. At the same time, Tony Blair and his top aides began managing what they perceived as a “global event like no other” and a fast-moving crisis for the monarchy.

By the time Blair spoke with Elizabeth II that morning, the Palace had issued a terse statement: “The Queen and Prince of Wales are deeply shocked and distressed by this terrible news.” She told the prime minister she had no plans to say anything further about the deaths. Blair found her to be “philosophical, anxious for the boys, but also professional and practical. She grasped the enormity of the event, but in her own way, she was not going to be pushed around by it.” When Blair told her he planned to make a comment before church, she raised no objection. Reading from some scribbles on the back of an envelope, he indelibly called Diana “the People’s Princess,” described how he felt the public’s pain, alluded to “how difficult things were for her from time to time,” and applauded those who “kept faith” with the deceased princess.