Through the longest reign in history, she certainly entertained some unsavoury characters. They included the dictator whose wife smuggled her pet dog inside Buckingham Palace, the former terrorist who had tried to kill her family and the fellow monarch who had kept her waiting in the desert heat for hours.
So my initial response to the claim, in a brilliant new book serialised in the Daily Mail, that Elizabeth II found Donald Trump ‘very rude’ was to think of other world leaders, including one or two US presidents, who had surely been worse.
In his eagerly anticipated study, A Voyage Around The Queen, my colleague Craig Brown says that after a visit from the former US president, ‘she confided in one lunch guest that she found him “very rude”: she particularly disliked the way he couldn’t stop looking over her shoulder, as though in search of others more interesting.’
The story has already prompted Trump to hit back, saying that the Queen had never had ‘a better time, a more animated time’ than when in his company. He also told Mail Online that he had heard that he was her ‘favourite president’.
I would beg to differ on that point, having recently written Elizabeth II’s biography, Queen Of Our Times. The late monarch studiously avoided a ‘favourite’ anything unless it involved animals. And, for all Trump’s charisma, I can think of many occasions when she had a ‘more animated time’.
The Queen with US President Donald Trump during his state visit to Britain in 2019
The Queen chats to Donald Trump at an event to commemorate the D-Day landings in 2019
This latest remark attributed to the Queen is so intriguing because on those occasions when she did complain about rudeness, it was usually rudeness to others, not to herself.
When the late King Hassan II of Morocco was berating one of her private secretaries, she delivered a stern riposte: ‘I’ll thank you not to speak about my staff like that.’
Courtiers might be appalled at breaches of protocol in the presence of the monarch – like a failure to bow or curtsey or, indeed, someone looking over the Queen’s shoulder – but it seldom bothered her. She was perfectly used to people lapsing into the oddest behaviour when introduced to her. Some would even lose the power of speech.
So, she might well have thought that Donald Trump was ‘very rude’ about someone else, as he certainly was when he came to stay at the Palace in 2019. The then Foreign Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, recalls greeting Trump off the presidential jet, Air Force One, at Stansted Airport.
As Hunt told me: ‘We waited for him to emerge for some time. I presumed it was because he was freshening up after an overnight flight. The real reason he wasn’t getting off the plane was because he was tweeting furiously against Sadiq Khan.’ The Mayor of London had been rude about Trump who, in turn, called him ‘a stone-cold loser’.
The Queen waits for King Hassan in Marrakesh during her state visit to Morocco in 1980
As soon as he had set foot on British soil, however, Trump maintained an uncharacteristic Twitter silence for the duration of his stay with the Queen. He was determined not to do anything which might look disrespectful to her.
They had first met the year before when Trump and his wife Melania were on an official visit to the UK and came to Windsor for tea. It is always reported that he committed a great faux pas by walking in front of the Queen while inspecting the guard of honour, though it was nothing of the sort. King Charles lets his guests do the same.
The Trumps then had tea with the Queen – alone – in the Oak Room in her private wing. If it had not been going well, it would not have overrun by 20 minutes. Aides later said that the two heads of state bonded happily over a shared connection: they both had Scottish mothers and both owned a fair chunk of Scottish soil.
Their next encounter was when Trump paid a state visit to the UK a year later. It would actually be the Queen’s last. I doubt that Trump was looking over her shoulder before the banquet because the host and state visitor would always stand side by side when greeting all the guests and then talk properly one-on-one over dinner. There would then be mingling afterwards over coffee and drinks in the Blue and White Drawing Rooms. The whole point of the after-dinner reception is for the state visitor to meet other guests, not to remain attached to the monarch. The Queen would have wanted to circulate too. However scintillating Trump’s dinner anecdotes about property development and golf, I suspect that she would have been ready to share him with the other 130 guests by the time they had ‘gone through’.
While writing the Queen’s biography, I examined other state visits involving other US presidents and there were plenty of incidents which could be interpreted as ‘rudeness’. After her 2011 state banquet for Barack Obama, the Queen had been keen to go to bed but Obama was busy talking to other people (not to her). So she asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, to nudge things along. ‘I just said: “Yes, Ma’am”,’ Osborne told me later. ‘I could see Obama with a drink in hand, and I was thinking: What do I do? I couldn’t just interrupt and say: “Oh, the Queen wants you to go to bed.”’ Step forward the Queen’s then-private secretary, Sir Christopher Geidt, who had a discreet word with his White House counterpart. But, as far as we know, the Queen never complained that Obama was ‘rude’. She also retained a long-standing affection for his wife Michelle Obama.
The Queen and Prince Philip with US President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle in 2011
Surely President Gerald Ford was ruder still. He invited the Queen on her 1976 state visit to the USA in honour of the bicentenary of American independence. After the White House banquet, he led the Queen on to the floor for the first dance, at which point the band struck up: ‘That’s Why The Lady Is A Tramp’. Ford was incandescent afterwards. And the Queen? She thought it was hilarious.
The Queen dances with US President Gerald Ford at a White House Banquet in 1976
Of all the supposed rudenesses inflicted on Elizabeth II by US presidents, none, though, could surpass that of Ronald Reagan. He actually invaded one of her own realms, Grenada, in 1984 without even telling her. Margaret Thatcher was furious on the Queen’s behalf. Yet no one has reported the monarch complaining about Reagan’s manners.
In any case, if Trump was ‘rude’, then where did that leave Sir Edward Heath? When the Queen attended a dinner to mark his 80th birthday, the former prime minister actually nodded off while sitting next to her. As the host Sir John Major told me: ‘I remember saying to Her Majesty: “Ted’s fallen asleep.” And she said: “I know, but don’t worry. He’ll wake up soon.” And he did. And the Queen just merrily went on chatting to him.’
The Queen, Prince Philip, John and Norma Major and Edward Heath at his 80th birthday dinner
None of the above, though, even begins to match the conduct of so many others. Let’s return to the late King of Morocco. During the Queen’s 1980 state visit there, he arranged a royal lunch in desert and then left the Queen waiting for hours before turning up. Later, when she held a banquet for him in the Royal Yacht, he was 54 minutes late and arrived with gatecrashers.
There have been plenty of similar moments at home, too. In 1973, President Mobutu of Zaire was offered a state visit because the Heath government hoped Britain would secure a big contract for a huge electricity plant (it didn’t). What really upset the Queen, however, was the fact that Mobutu’s wife, Marie-Antoinette no less, smuggled her pet dog inside the Palace in flagrant breach of Britain’s strict anti-rabies quarantine laws.
The Queen with President Mobutu of Zaire and his wife Marie-Antoinette in 1973
The Queen and Prince Philip with Romania’s leader Nicolae Ceausescu and wife Elena in 1978
Other unappealing guests – all foisted on her by the government – included Uganda’s homicidal despot, Idi Amin. Later, came a man who had devoted much of his adult life trying to kill her. In 2014, a beaming Martin McGuinness, former IRA commander, came to the state banquet for the President of Ireland at Windsor Castle. McGuinness first met the Queen when she visited Belfast in 2012 and thrust out his hand. She shook it. The then-Prime Minister, David Cameron, told me that he regarded this magnanimous act as a masterclass in diplomacy and had said as much to the Queen. Her reply? ‘What was I meant to do? Of course I shook his hand. It would be awkward not to.’ There, in a nutshell, was her philosophy about meeting anyone, good or bad: ‘It’s not about me. It’s what I do.’
Worst of all was the arrival of two monsters in 1978. Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu controlled Romania with ruthless brutality but Jim Callaghan’s Labour government had high hopes of securing a big aerospace contract. It fell to the Queen to lay on the party. Convinced that their rooms were bugged, the couple conducted all their conversations outside in the Palace gardens. Ceausescu was the coldest of cold fishes, while an official Foreign Office briefing note to the Queen, which I have seen, warned that his wife was ‘a viper’. So when the Queen spotted the couple while walking her corgis, she hid behind a bush rather than spend a moment more than necessary in their company. Years later, after the Ceausescus had met their end before a firing squad, the Queen described the dictator to another lunch guest as ‘that frightful little man’. Crucially, she was not complaining about the Romanian despot’s behaviour towards her but to others.
In short, if Donald Trump was ‘rude’ to our late monarch, then he stands right at the back of a very long queue.
A Voyage Around The Queen by Craig Brown (HarperCollins, £25). Queen Of Our Times by Robert Hardman (Pan, £10.99).
