A Brief History of the Private Life of Elizabeth II (24 page)

But there had been other preoccupations. In April 1982, Argentine forces suddenly seized the Falkland Islands, a British dependency in the South Atlantic to which they had
long laid claim. The government in Buenos Aires, attempting to divert attention from a surging economic crisis, expected a cheap victory because a nation 8,000 miles away would not – or could
not – fight to recapture them. They had seriously underestimated the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, who came into her own in this crisis. Without hesitation the British Government
assembled a task force and sent it, in whatever vessels could be scraped together, to the rescue of the islanders. While America tried to settle the dispute peacefully through exhaustive shuttle
diplomacy, the toughest members of the British Armed forces – marines, paratroops, ghurkas – made the long voyage southward. Also in the task force was Prince Andrew, the Queen’s
favourite child. A Sub-Lieutenant aboard HMS
Invincible
, he had recently qualified as a pilot on Sea King helicopters. Although his skills were needed in the conflict, the Ministry of
Defence had wished to shunt him out of danger into some administrative job. It was the Queen who insisted he take the same risks as his comrades, and so he went. Yet again, she drew on personal
courage.

The campaign (neither side ever actually declared war) lasted for 74 days. It cost the lives of 257 British personnel and more than twice that number of Argentines, as well as three local
people. There were moments of tragedy, horror and triumph, and there was considerable heroism among men fighting in difficult terrain and conditions. Andrew fulfilled the tasks he was set:
anti-submarine patrols, evacuating casualties and – not without danger – acting as a decoy for Exocets. His mother, like that of other servicemen, avidly and apprehensively watched the
television news each day. Since this was heavily censored and gave little real information, she also gleaned all she could from the other sources at her disposal – the Ministry of Defence,
the Admiralty and Downing Street.
Once the war ended, on 14 June 1982, she was able to speak to him by telephone in the capital, Port Stanley, and asked him to convey her pride
and gratitude to all of those there. When the task force arrived back in Portsmouth, the Queen and Prince Philip were waiting, as were thousands of others, to greet them. In this conflict it had
been Mrs Thatcher who played the role of Elizabeth at Tilbury, but Elizabeth II had expressed her people’s anxiety and pride. Her son had been the first of the born-Royal family members to
take part in action since her father had been at Jutland in 1916. One wonders how she – and the nation – would have reacted had he been lost.

Just after 7:15 on the morning of 9 July 1982, Her Majesty awoke at the Palace to find a strange man in her bedroom, drawing the curtains. He sat on her bed. Agitated and
rambling, he was barefoot and wore jeans. His right hand was dripping blood onto the counterpane and he held a broken glass ashtray. He spoke to her about his personal problems, which involved
complex family relationships. The Queen kept him talking, but pressed a bell that connected with the police control room. Nothing happened. She tried another that linked with the corridor outside.
Again, there was no response.

She was not normally alone. Her husband, with official duties that day, had slept elsewhere so as not to disturb her when setting off early. A policeman guarded her bedroom every night, wearing
slippers so that his footsteps would not disturb her, but he had gone off duty at six o’clock as usual. At that time he was replaced by a footman, who was at that moment walking the corgis in
the gardens. A maid who might have heard the bell was cleaning in a nearby room with the door closed. When the man asked for a cigarette, the Queen seized the opportunity by telling him she had
none but could find some. Opening the door into the corridor she encountered the maid, who famously exclaimed: ‘Bloody hell, Ma’am! What’s he doing here?’ Just then the Page
returned and,
keeping the visitor calm with promises to find him a drink, led him through a door and grabbed hold of him. The police arrived, about 10 minutes after the first
of the Queen’s calls. As an officer appeared in the corridor, Her Majesty shouted ‘Get in there!’ and the man was apprehended.

The kidnap attempt on Princess Anne, the shots in the Mall and now this. The Royal Family has been fortunate that, given the scale of international terrorism in recent years, the occasions on
which their personal safety has been most compromised have all involved not sophisticated or fanatical political operatives but solitary obsessives who have either not sought to kill or have lacked
the means to do so. This one was the least harmful of them. Michael Fagan was an unemployed, 31-year-old schizophrenic. He had, it transpired, visited the Palace before, climbing through an open
window and taking a bottle of wine. On this occasion, he had got over the garden wall and in through a window that proved to contain George V’s stamp collection. Unable to open a locked door
into the corridor, he had exited through the window and, climbing a drainpipe, entered another – ironically, finding himself in the office of the man responsible for the Queen’s
security. He wandered along a corridor, having acquired the ashtray, which he broke. He passed a housekeeper and greeted her, and he found his way to Her Majesty’s bedroom (which has a
name-card on the door). He had apparently thought of committing suicide there, slashing his wrists with the glass, but decided that after all this ‘wasn’t a nice thing to do’. His
mother later said that he was a great admirer of the Queen and had probably just wanted to tell her his troubles.

The public was outraged. The Prime Minister apologised for the lapse of vigilance. Several police officers were abruptly removed from the Palace. It was discovered that Fagan had been seen
entering the grounds by an off-duty officer who had reported him, but that he could not be found when a search was made. It was also learned that the alarm the Queen had
twice
pressed was not taken seriously because it tended to go off by accident. ‘It’s that bloody bell again!’ said the man on duty in the control room – switching it off for the
second time.

Her Majesty was much admired for her handling of the situation. She had experienced every woman’s nightmare, and had had no idea if Fagan was armed or determined to harm her. Yet she made
light of the experience, quipping: ‘Well, I meet so many mad people that it didn’t surprise me so much.’ Once Fagan had been taken away, she apparently returned to bed and drank
her morning tea. She had wanted no word of the incident to be made public, but the press found out and it became one of the major news stories of the year. A very considerable review of security,
needless to say, followed. Apart from anything else, the officer outside the Queen’s door at night was now armed.

Protection of the Royal Family has to be unobtrusive. In the USA, the presence around the President of large men with sunglasses and bulging jackets is seen as a useful deterrent to evil-doers.
The Royal Family prefer discretion, and wish to look as ordinary as possible. Protection officers dress according to their surroundings – wearing tailcoats at Ascot, for example – and
are remarkably difficult to identify or to distinguish from the other men who surround the sovereign. Individual members of the Family, both past and present, have hated the sight of uniformed
officers in their vicinity and have wanted their police attendants to be invisible.

For the whole of the 1980s, and for the first time, her Prime Minister was a woman. Some in the media had predicted that the two ladies would enjoy a warm rapport, for they
were not only the same gender but also the same age. Once the working relationship had begun, however, it was widely rumoured that the atmosphere was frigid, even hostile. The truth is somewhere in
between. Because their dealings lasted more than 10 years, there will naturally have been ups and downs, moments of
agreement and empathy as well as aloofness and irritation.
It is unarguable that they were entirely different personalities, and had very little in common (though the Queen Mother, whose opinions carried great weight with her daughter, thoroughly approved
of Mrs Thatcher). Like her predecessor, Edward Heath, the Prime Minister had no liking for small talk. She was not interested in racing or country pursuits, and did not enjoy visits to Balmoral.
She also had a commanding manner, which, while it had made her an effective party leader, could tend to seem like lecturing when she explained policy at weekly audiences. The Prime Minister’s
gender will not have been helpful, for the Queen happens to prefer dealing with men – her senior advisors have all been – and she does not like having to share the stage with other
high-profile females. Nevertheless, Mrs Thatcher was a devout monarchist and admired the Queen’s sense of duty. Her Majesty has always been punctilious in respecting the choice of the
electorate. Each was therefore inclined toward willingness to cooperate, no matter what their personal feelings may have been.

Relations, however, depended to a large extent on the shifting circumstances of a very stormy decade. It is likely that the Queen approved of Mrs Thatcher’s stand over the Falklands, while
the nadir was perhaps reached in 1983 when American forces invaded Grenada – part of the British Commonwealth – without informing London. The Queen was reported to be incandescent, and
demanded to see Mrs Thatcher at once to discuss the situation. So insistent was she that the Prime Minister was obliged to leave halfway through an emergency Cabinet meeting on the matter to go to
the Palace.

There were other causes of friction. Mrs Thatcher’s refusal to support sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa was a massive disruption at the 1985 Commonwealth Heads of
Government Conference, over which the Queen presided. The British Prime Minister’s unyielding opposition to the use of such measures, in the face of overwhelming contrary
opinion, caused such ill-feeling that it threatened to destroy – by provoking widespread boycotts – the Commonwealth Games in 1986. The Queen, whose commitment to good
race relations was unimpeachable, was at best anguished and at worst furious.

It was reported, in a
Sunday Times
article in 1986, that Her Majesty was horrified by the Prime Minister’s authoritarian personal style and her confrontational approach to
industrial relations, that her methods were ‘divisive’ and that she ‘lacked compassion’, especially towards the less privileged. This was speculation, even though the source
of information was believed to be the Palace Press Office. It is safe to say that the Queen was indeed horrified by strikes and riots during those years – who would not have been? – and
that she deplored any threat to the stability of her realm, but it can also be said with certainty that she would never have expressed views on the governance of the country that could have been
heard by anyone, let alone communicated to the press. To do so would have been a breach of her carefully maintained political neutrality, and to leak such notions to the media would surely have
cost someone in her Press Office their job.

The perception of hostility between monarch and Prime Minister was heightened considerably by a Channel 4 programme broadcast in 2009. Part of a series on the Queen, it dramatised the
relationship with a good deal of invented dialogue (Prince Philip sneers at ‘That bloody grocer’s daughter’, while Her Majesty crows that ‘I actually managed to get a word
in edgeways!’ at a weekly audience). Between scenes, there were interviews with political figures whose memories seemed to support the thesis. It is worth remembering that even if the quoted
outbursts were true, it is not unlikely that the Queen – in the heat of the moment and the privacy of her home – might say such things, without these being taken as permanent views or
official pronouncements. It is also worth remembering that Her Majesty was to attend Mrs Thatcher’s
70th birthday party, and that she would make her a Baroness – an
honour that, according to the Palace, ‘would not have been given without the utmost respect for the recipient’.

On 23 July 1986, the second royal wedding of the decade took place. Prince Andrew, a career naval officer, married Sarah Ferguson, a young woman he had known as a child. She
was the second daughter of a former Household Cavalry major who was polo manager to Prince Charles. She was also a friend of Princess Diana, whom she had met when she was 14. Diana, feeling out of
place in the Family, saw the benefits of bringing in this lively and compatible girl as an ally, and was active in putting her in Andrew’s way, though Sarah was vivacious enough to catch his
eye in any case. The couple sat together at lunch at a Windsor house party during Ascot Week in 1985. Flame-haired and boisterous, Sarah was patently good company for him. They shared a somewhat
knockabout sense of humour, and mutual attraction was swift. Their engagement was announced the following March. This couple were entirely unlike the Waleses. There was no gap in years. Both were
the same age, with Sarah a few months older, and there was no danger of introspection – or high cultural awareness – on the part of either.

This time the wedding was at Westminster Abbey. As befitted a more modest event, things were on a smaller scale: the television audience was 500 million and the bride – who arrived in the
Glass Coach just as Diana had done – had a 17-foot-long train. Shortly before the ceremony, the groom was created Duke of York, a title traditionally given to second sons and last held by the
Queen’s father. At the ceremony, Sarah looked splendid – even if there were unkind mutterings about her weight – and she pleased traditionalists by promising in her vows to
‘obey’ her husband, not least because this was a phrase Diana had omitted. She was popular with the public, which had taken to using her nickname, ‘Fergie’, and which saw
her
as a no-nonsense, sensible country girl whose sense of fun would save her from being infected by the stuffiness of the Court. The Queen liked her, too. They often rode
together at Windsor (the Yorks lived at nearby Sunningdale), and Her Majesty sometimes referred to her as ‘my daughter’.