Her Majesty (60 page)

When in London, he always likes to see the Queen. And, in Oman, the seventy-year-old bachelor has twinned his Palace with the Tower of London. He is also the proud owner of the world’s only camel-mounted bagpipe band.

His immaculate Royal Cavalry – much like Britain’s Household Cavalry – escorts the Queen into the capital, Muscat, past thousands of cheering onlookers. It is spectacular but a little sterile, an unspoken tension in the air. The onlookers have all been vetted and divided into male and female sections wearing colour-coordinated robes. They stand at specific points. Elsewhere, the streets are empty. The Sultan seems wary of his general public.

The Queen is staying at the Al-Alam Palace, newly decorated with half a dozen landscapes from London’s Tate Gallery which have been lent to Oman to mark the Sultan’s jubilee. Someone has included a landscape by Gainsborough. By happy coincidence, it is of the Sultan’s adoptive British county. ‘Ah, I know Suffolk very well,’ he declares as the two monarchs inspect the pictures together. ‘I lived near Bury St Edmunds.’ The Queen is more taken by the Stubbs –
Mares and Foals –
and discusses the artist’s pioneering technique in animal portraiture. ‘He was the first to paint the legs properly,’ she says. Horses will be a recurring topic of conversation. Both the Sultan and the Queen adore them. He has arranged an equestrian spectacular for the Queen at the Royal Cavalry’s showground where 840 horses and 3,340 riders, singers and musicians are on parade. It is a stunning production with dancing horses, bowing horses – and even bowing goats. Acrobatic riders, some of them straddling two or three horses, jump fences at the same time. One horse gallops past with its rider doing a handstand in the saddle. ‘The Queen will be loving this,’ whispers one of the entourage. ‘The Royal Mews will be getting a long memo as soon as she’s home.’ The event concludes with a colossal carriage being pulled by a record-breaking team of twenty-nine horses. The Duke of Edinburgh, a veteran carriage driver who is more used to four-in-hand, is glued to his binoculars.

Bizarrely, the Sultan had wanted to restrict the entire event to the Queen, the Duke and himself. Palace officials explained that the Queen likes to share these things so a few hundred expats have been invited to create a semblance of an audience. It’s a slightly strange way to mark a jubilee. Apparently, there will be more public events in the days ahead. For now, the Sultan is keen to give his undivided attention to the Queen. Again, there are the mandatory elements of every state visit including a garden party at the British ambassador’s clifftop residence. It is the hottest ticket in Oman.

There is also the customary state banquet but the Sultan dispenses with speeches or television cameras – because he can. He has commissioned a gold vase and a Fabergé-style musical egg with dancing horses as a gift for the Queen. She has spent a lifetime being given great treasures but is evidently thrilled. Her gifts to the Sultan are less spectacular but equally appreciated – an eighteenth-century book on clocks, one of the Sultan’s great passions, and the Royal Victorian Chain, an exalted honour reserved for selected monarchs and very special courtiers. It goes with the GCB she gave him back in 1979. Every detail is being watched by hawk-like officials on both sides, every note of diplomatic mood music being absorbed and savoured. And there is much to savour. Instead of flying home at the end of her visit, the Queen and the Duke stay an extra
night for an extra private dinner with the Sultan – just as Prince William recently dropped in here for a private dinner while returning from Afghanistan. The Sultan does not bid farewell at his palace, as he does with most visitors, but accompanies the Queen to the steps of her plane and waves her off from the runway. It is particularly gratifying for the man a little further back down the plane, the Foreign Secretary, William Hague. The British Government’s Gulf charm offensive is coming along nicely. The Palace team are pleased, too, that two back-to-back state visits have passed off successfully without any discernible strain on the oldest state visitors on the international circuit.

As well as having travelled further than any monarch in history geographically, the Queen has crossed more boundaries than all her predecessors in other ways. She has been the first reigning monarch to visit a mosque or a Hindu temple. She has been the first to meet a pope, the first to visit the Vatican and the Sikh holy of holies, the Golden Temple of Amritsar. It is worth noting that, in the first year of the Coalition Government alone, she visited or entertained four fellow heads of state – three of them from Islamic countries plus one pope. Just as the story of the Commonwealth is almost entirely contiguous with her reign, so too is the story of multicultural Britain.

Britain had seen little immigration beyond the arrival of 50,000 French Huguenots during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and 300,000 Jewish refugees during the nineteenth and early twentieth. The first Commonwealth migrants to Britain arrived from Jamaica aboard the MV
Empire Windrush
less than four years before the Queen came to the throne. Five years into her reign, Commonwealth immigration still amounted to just 36,000. Since 1963, however, some 2.5 million people have arrived from the Commonwealth, not to mention those from the European Union and other parts of the world.

It is by far the greatest demographic change in the country’s history and the importance of the Queen as a force for unity throughout cannot be overstated. ‘I think she’s had perfect pitch really,’ says the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams. ‘It’s partly the Commonwealth experience. The fact that she is head of a multicultural, diverse, worldwide association means that she’s never felt any instinct to panic about multiculturalism. That’s part of the message her Christmas broadcasts have given almost subliminally over the years: “Britain is changing. It’s OK. We can cope. Faith is a good and constructive element in this. You know where I’m coming from. I’m a Christian. But there’s room for others.” And that’s been a steady message.’ The former Home and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw says that affection for the Queen runs deep among
the large numbers of his Blackburn constituents from Asian backgrounds. He also sits on the board of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, of which the Prince of Wales is patron. ‘It’s very much Prince Charles’s baby and he’s been absolutely fantastic on this,’ says Straw. ‘He’s got a much better understanding of Islam in society than a lot of politicians I can think of.’

‘People who come to live here have seen symbols of Britishness and they want to feel part of that,’ says David Cameron. ‘What the Royal Family have done, especially with people from the Commonwealth, is give them a shared bond.’ Growing up in the sixties and seventies as the London-born child of Jamaican parents, Wesley Kerr came to regard the Queen as something of a hero figure. ‘The Queen has been a revolutionary monarch,’ says the writer and broadcaster. ‘As a child, she was the only public figure whom I regularly saw in the news with black people. And they were never deferential to her but equals, people like Nyrere [Julius Nyrere, father of Tanzanian independence] and Kenneth Kaunda [former President of Zambia].’

On that 1947 tour of southern Africa, George VI was horrified to be barred from decorating black servicemen in South Africa and made a point of doing so in British-controlled territories elsewhere. Princess Elizabeth and sixteen-year-old Princess Margaret became acutely aware of the privations of the black population of South Africa, ‘though [as Princess Margaret wrote home] one mustn’t say so too loudly’. One could say so more loudly once South Africa had become a republic. When the Queen danced with President Nkrumah of Ghana in 1961, she was denounced in the South African press for consorting with a ‘black pagan’ and saluted by Ghana’s Marxist media as ‘the world’s greatest Socialist Monarch’. On the 1954 tour of Australia, during which Aboriginal Australians had little more than a token role, she pointedly referred to ‘my peoples’ in the plural and there was grumbling when she was deemed to have spent too long talking to a group of Torres Strait Islanders. There were ringside seats, too, for many handicapped children who had never enjoyed any sort of public prominence before. The Queen has only ever been able to deal in gestures. But she has been consistent with them. ‘Of all the sovereigns since Queen Victoria,’ says a former Private Secretary, ‘the Queen has been the most clearly party-blind, colour-blind and race-blind.’

She has proved to be one of the more conscientious Supreme Governors of the Church of England. Monarchs also take a separate oath to preserve the Church of Scotland and it is their duty to send a Lord High Commissioner to its annual General Assembly. The Queen has been the
first to send herself. She is an assiduous Sunday churchgoer wherever she is in the world (in 1994, a Sunday visit to a Guyanese rainforest had to include a diversion to a mission church for morning service). Her Christmas broadcasts always contain unashamedly Christian messages. Indeed, the Archbishop of Canterbury has noticed the religious theme becoming more explicit in the last ten years. ‘The Queen has a very powerful sense that the Monarch is bound up with the religious heritage of the country,’ says Dr Williams. ‘That’s been thinning out quite a bit in the street in the last twenty years. My guess would be that she’s deliberately set out to redress the balance.’

It is striking that a nation which can tie itself in knots over the tiniest religious symbolism in public life – even agonising over the appropriate use of the word ‘Christmas’ – is entirely comfortable with a national figurehead whose own approach to religion is clear and uncompromising. She does not preach. What she does do is give faith, of all kinds, a certain respectability or, as the Archbishop of Canterbury puts it, a ‘canopy’.

‘People feel that if the Christian faith is secure in this country, so are they,’ says Dr Williams. ‘It’s not competing for territory which is why some of those assumptions that “Oh, non-Christians will be offended by this” are so completely off-key.’

‘She is a person of faith and it matters a lot more to her than people understand,’ says Tony Blair, one of the more overtly religious occupants of Number Ten Downing Street in many years. As he discovered in office, the public can be uncomfortable with a Prime Minister who brings religion into his work. Not so with the head of state. Other nations are often struck by the way in which Britain can weave religion into a state occasion without blinking. Lord Hurd was talking to his French opposite number, Alain Juppe, as they accompanied the Queen at the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day in 1994. ‘We discussed the different ways we did these things and he said: “The difference is that you British bring religion into it and we don’t dare do that. We are a secular country but you have hymns and a blessing.” And he’s right. There’s always a bishop somewhere around.’

‘The Queen’s religious belief is very important in the way she does her job and sees her role,’ says Charles Anson. ‘She’s got that calmness you find in people who are quite naturally religious. There’s an official role but there’s a lot she falls back on.’ A senior aide was surprised to discover a deep well of Christian charity at a time when others might have been less than forgiving: ‘I detected it when I had to go to talk to her about the latest issues with the Princess of Wales. There were moments when she could have become exasperated but she didn’t. There
was a Christian element, a belief that it’s wrong to make too many judgements.’

The Archbishop of Canterbury senses that the Queen is someone with a ‘powerful, coherent set of values or ideals … a deep sense of vocation … a dogged confidence that there is a divinity that shapes our ends’. In short, he says: ‘It goes deep.’

The Queen is very open about the existence of her faith but, like most people, very private about its nature. We know that she likes Matins, that she seldom takes Holy Communion in public and that, given the chance, she prefers to worship in a smaller church like All Saints in Windsor Great Park rather than sit above the ancestors in mighty St George’s Chapel. She does not like a great fuss. When aboard
Britannia
, she was happy to let the rear admiral take Sunday prayers rather than summon a clergyman. In many ways, she is a no-nonsense, traditional Anglican. She prefers the Book of Common Prayer on Sundays and made much of the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible in her 2010 Christmas broadcast. She follows Church politics closely. Jack Straw, who would join the Queen for the swearing-in of new Bishops in his capacity as both Home Secretary and Lord Chancellor, talks of the ‘granular details’ of her discussions afterwards. She sees her Archbishops several times each year for what Dr Williams calls ‘uncluttered time to talk’. He finds the Supreme Governor ‘refreshing, perceptive, warm and deeply supportive’. But she does not seek to mould her Church to her tastes.

Her predecessors were bossier. Queen Victoria was an arch-meddler. ‘She was quite capable of writing to the Prime Minister and saying, “I want so and so as Bishop of Gloucester. He’s a good chap,”’ says Dr Williams. Edward VII instructed one Archbishop of York that his duty was ‘to keep the parties in the Church together and to prevent the clergy from wearing moustaches’. George V had similarly robust views. ‘Wonderful service,’ he remarked after his Silver Jubilee service at St Paul’s, ‘but too many damn parsons getting in the way.’ Prince Philip can be equally forthright when it comes to long sermons. As he once remarked: ‘The mind cannot absorb what the backside cannot endure.’ The Archbishop of Canterbury knows the form. ‘I’m always reminded when I preach in the presence that he prefers eight minutes,’ admits Dr Williams. ‘I don’t always obey. My natural length is twelve minutes for a sermon but, on state occasions, I do try and trim it a bit.’

The Queen’s approach is different. She prefers to send out what the Archbishop of Canterbury calls ‘visible messages’, like inviting the Roman Catholic Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster to preach at Sandringham. Indeed, Dr Williams believes that a recurring message through this reign
has been: ‘Roman Catholics are not foreign eccentrics.’ There has been much talk of amending the Act of Settlement on the grounds that it debars the Royal Family from marrying Roman Catholics – but leaves them free to marry members of any other faith. Understandably, this has led to charges that the institution is inherently sectarian. Labour’s Jack Straw, who has explored the possibility of amending the legislation, disagrees: ‘They won’t thank me for saying it but one of the difficulties is with the Church of Rome because they automatically excommunicate Anglicans. So it’s one in which we need the help of the Church of Rome.’