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her Government’. Lastly, the Queen was ‘obliged to treat her communications with the
Prime Minister as entirely confidential between the two of them’. It was ‘preposterous’
to think that the Queen after thirty-four years’ experience would have departed from
those basic principles, he wrote. He admitted that the Queen’s Press Secretary, Michael
Shea, had talked to Simon Freeman, the journalist concerned, but claimed that he had
‘said nothing which could reasonably bear the interpretation put upon it by the frontpage
article of July 20’. The claim that the contents of the article were based on
information coming from Palace sources close to the Queen ‘constitutes a totally
unjustified slur on the impartiality and discretion of senior members of the Royal
Household’.
The idea that Shea could have been authorized by Elizabeth to ‘leak’ the views
attributed to her in the Sunday Times piece was, as Heseltine said, ‘preposterous’.
Michael Shea, ex-Gordonstoun, ex-Edinburgh University, a former diplomat and
Director-General of British Information Services in New York, had been recruited by the
Palace after Elizabeth’s successful bicentenary visit to the United States and had joined
as her Press Secretary in 1978. A writer in his spare time, he was a different breed from
the Eton–Sandhurst brigade of Guards–City traditional Palace elite. An intelligent and
approachable man of liberal views, he had shared rooms at university and later in
London with David Steel, leader of the Liberal Party, and had been best man at Steel’s
wedding. Shea was well aware of Commonwealth concerns and in close touch with
Commonwealth sources, who later described him as having been ‘betrayed’ by Freeman.
He did not know Freeman, had never met him and the interview had not been face to
face but over the telephone in response to Freeman’s request for an interview on the
general theme of ‘The Monarchy in 2011’. According to Shea, the journalist extrapolated
what he said into sensational claims about Elizabeth’s unhappiness with Mrs Thatcher’s
policies. The interview had run on the lines of ‘Is the Queen concerned about the
Commonwealth?’ ‘The Queen is always concerned about the Commonwealth.’ ‘Is the
Queen unhappy about the coal strike?’ ‘The Queen is always unhappy when the country
is in turmoil.’ People close to Mrs Thatcher at the time, however, believe that, although
Shea certainly never consulted Elizabeth about any inspired ‘leak’ of her views and that
she would never have authorized any such thing, ‘there is no smoke without a fire’. They
are convinced (although Thatcher herself refused to believe it) that there was hostility to
Mrs Thatcher at the Palace.
No one at No. 10 Downing Street at the time suspected Elizabeth of being involved in
any way, but they did think it unlikely that Shea would have taken it upon himself to
brief this journalist without any consultation with his colleagues, i.e. that there was
some conversation with some member of the Private Secretaries Office and an
agreement that a carefully placed hint might ‘do some good’. ‘We thought we were
being rubbished by the Palace,’ one insider said, ‘but Mrs T. was determined not to
believe it.’ Among those suspected of being anti-Thatcher were the Private Secretaries
and professional staff (but not Sir William Heseltine, the Principal Private Secretary),
‘real courtiers’, i.e. those holding posts in the household and ‘friends of the Queen’.