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17
Family at War
‘We have come to regard the Crown as the head of our morality … We have come to believe that it is natural
to have a virtuous sovereign… But a little experience and less thought show that royalty cannot take credit
for domestic excellence.’
Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution
In November 1990 Margaret Thatcher made a forced exit from Downing Street in an
atmosphere of betrayal, bitterness and back-stabbing, which might have formed the plot
of a Shakespearean tragedy. In July that year she had performed her last act of loyalty
to the monarchy by piloting through Parliament a Civil List increase from £5.09 million
to about £7.9 million a year, which was intended to last for a decade. This ended the
system of yearly increases which had been established in 1975 with its recurrent
accompaniment of hostile articles about ‘pay rises for royals’ in the press. By obtaining
the agreement of the Labour Opposition leader, Neil Kinnock (who in 1975 had voted
against the Labour Government’s Civil List Bill) and announcing the Bill at the end of
the summer session, Mrs Thatcher pushed it through with the minimum of discussion.
MPs learned of it only two hours in advance and were allowed twenty minutes to ask
questions. Increased allowances for other members of the royal family, such as Prince
Edward (from £20,000 to £100,000) were not read out but merely printed in the
parliamentary record, Hansard. None the less, the question of the Queen’s exemption
from income tax was raised by a Tory MP and was, for the first time, to become a
subject for widespread public discussion and to damage Elizabeth’s standing with her
people almost as much as the scandals within her family which were about to erupt. The
family, which should have been a source of strength, was becoming Elizabeth’s Achilles
heel, just as the whole fabric of the monarchy, its cost, even the necessity or desirability
of its existence, was increasingly coming into question.
By 1990 Elizabeth could no longer remain oblivious to the stresses within her family.
The Waleses, on the rare occasions when she saw them together on family holidays or
special celebrations, were openly at war. At Balmoral in August 1990, when the family
gathered to celebrate Princess Margaret’s sixtieth birthday, the atmosphere was notably
edgy. When Fergie and Diana clowned around on a picnic, the Prince of Wales was
heard to mutter ‘little things please little minds’. Even Elizabeth seemed affected,
shouting not only at the corgis but even at Prince William. Both grandparents were