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Others included members of the royal family who were ‘fed up with opening hospital
wards only to have them closed and then receive hundreds of letters as a result’. Shea,
they thought, must have believed himself to be expressing a widespread opinion within
the Palace; much of Freeman’s article appeared to be conjecture, but ‘the nub of the
story – about the Commonwealth – was true’. The Queen loyally stood by her Press
Secretary. At Holyrood House just after the story broke, Shea sat between Elizabeth and
Mrs Thatcher, both of whom told him to pay no attention to the media rumpus, but none
the less his position in relation to Downing Street had become difficult. Accompanying
Elizabeth on the state visit to China, during which Philip made a widely publicized
remark about ‘slitty eyes’, Shea became involved in a televised scuffle with Chinese
security guards. He decided that he had had enough and six months later left to join
Hanson plc.
Eighteen months previously in 1984–5, Thatcher had taken on the British coalminers
in a prolonged battle which ended in defeat for the National Union of Mineworkers. It
had been a period of anguish for Britain, with horrendous violence between the pickets
and the police, tales of families’ divided loyalties, of thuggery and poverty. At the very
end of the strike Elizabeth and Philip visited The Times on the occasion of the
newspaper’s bicentenary. While Prince Philip, in his customary forthright way, is
alleged to have denounced the miners’ leader, Arthur Scargill, as ‘a shit’, Elizabeth was
introduced to the paper’s labour editor, Paul Routledge, as the man covering the miners’
strike. She volunteered that she had been down a coal mine in Scotland that had closed
soon afterwards and, after a pause, added, ‘It’s all about one man, isn’t it?’ Routledge
replied that perhaps it wasn’t about one man and that, knowing the miners and having
been brought up among them, he didn’t think one man could bring out 100,000 men on
strike for a whole year. ‘There was a pregnant pause,’ Routledge recalled, and the party
moved on. Eight years later, having written an unauthorized biography of Scargill, he
had become more familiar with the megalomaniac tendencies of the man. ‘With the
hindsight that has come from writing this book,’ he admitted, ‘I now feel that I owe the
Queen an apology. By that stage, at any rate, the strike was about one man. Scargill
may not have started the strike, but one word, one signal from him could have called it
off before the struggle plumbed the depths of misery, violence and failure to which it
sank… The Queen was right.’ 18
Elizabeth, therefore, did not blame Thatcher for the miners’ strike. No one has ever
discovered what her feelings were when Mrs Thatcher took the salute of the returned
Falklands veterans in the parade through the City of London in October 1982. She may
have reflected that the Falklands victory was very much Mrs Thatcher’s, but other
people thought it odd to see the Prime Minister standing on the dais instead of the
Queen who is head of the armed forces. Not one member of the royal family was invited
to be present at this ceremonial occasion, in contrast to the 1945 parade celebrating the
end of the Second World War, when the King took the salute with Churchill and Attlee at
a discreet distance. Mrs Thatcher did not, however, attend the fortieth anniversary
celebrations of D-Day in 1984 because she considered it very much the Queen’s occasion