Elizabeth the Queen by Sally Bedell Smith

Author:Sally Bedell Smith [Smith, Sally Bedell]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-679-64393-7
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-01-09T16:00:00+00:00

“No one could curtsy lower

than Margaret Thatcher.”

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher curtsying to the Queen at 10 Downing Street, December 1985. Tim Graham/Getty Images

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

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