Anyone still in any doubt about the lengths to which Queen Elizabeth II was prepared to go in the line of duty might consider the hideous company the role at times foisted on her. In 1991, she had to clink glasses with Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe, and 20 years earlier had dined with Ugandan despot Idi Amin (though she later privately vowed to hit Amin with a sword if he dared to gatecrash her Silver Jubilee). But perhaps none of these grisly encounters was as gruelling as having to host Romanian tyrant Nicolae Ceaușescu and wife Elena on a three-day state-visit, complete with Palace quarters, in 1978.
Though a domestic monster, Ceaușescu’s international stock at the time was high. Ten years before, he’d been the one Communist leader to condemn the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, earning him plaudits in the West. 1977 had seen a terrible Romanian earthquake – more than 1,000 people perished, many more were injured and much of Bucharest’s centre reduced to rubble. Both his plucky stand against the Kremlin and his country’s halo of tragedy opened doors to Ceaușescu in Western countries, for who could refuse? Faced with the Queen’s reluctance, prime minister Jim Callaghan and foreign secretary David Owen urged her that a huge British sale of aircraft and arms was planned for Romania, a state visit the necessary lubricant. The Queen complied with her two ministers but, according to Ceaușescu biographer Edward Behr, never subsequently forgave either. Even noblesse oblige had its limits.
One can understand her apprehensions – the Ceaușescus were a colourfully gruesome pair. The diminutive Nicolae, a former shoemaker, had become the country’s leader in 1965, wasting little time in putting his awful stamp on the place. In 1966, attempting to stoke Romania’s population, he banned abortion and contraception and encouraged women to have at least four children (‘If you don’t want four children, have five’ went the slogan).
One can understand the Queen’s apprehensions – the Ceaușescus were a colourfully gruesome pair
In 1971, returning from North Korea, he instituted a cult of personality similar to Kim Il-Sung’s, festooning virtually every free surface of the country with Ceaușescu portraits and ordering regular events of mass-adulation. The two hours’ television permitted to the Romanians each night were crammed with clips of Nicolae stalking authoritatively through factories, building sites and collective farms: Father of the People, National Genius, Expert in all Fields. As Ceaușescu’s reign went on he would, to rid himself of national debt, starve his people of food, light, heat and water, the terrifying secret police – the Securitate – always on hand to quell protest. Romania, said the dissident writer Alexander Ivasiuc, was where ‘twenty million inhabitants lived inside the imagination of a madman.’
But it was Elena the people especially hated. A semi-illiterate ‘Doctor of Chemistry’, it was said she knew neither the names of basic laboratory instruments nor the simplest chemical formulas. Later awarded the Order of Scientific Merit First Class, Elena also sat on the Communist Party’s Central Committee. Here, snapping, snarling, demeaning and insinuating, she kept up a reign of terror against ministers, their wives and the country beyond. Sloping about on flat feet, spitting acid, the ‘Mother of the Nation’ was loathed.
No one can say the Royal Family weren’t warned about their houseguests. French president Giscard d’Estaing, for whom a Ceaușescu visit was ‘an unavoidable calamity’, gave the Queen a worrying heads-up. On their trip to Paris just before London, d’Estaing advised her, the Ceaușescu contingent had upended their suite at the Marigny Residence, tearing electric wires and phone-lines off the walls to check for secret microphones. They’d also ripped off other things, he informed the sovereign, filching clocks and ashtrays, pocketing whatever they could. The Ceaușescus brought chefs, food-tasters and even their own bedding. Getting a visit from them was like being descended on by the in-laws of one’s nightmares.
When Ceaușescu arrived in London, the Queen found him not without entertainment value. Certainly she was offended by the assumptions of this ‘frightful little man’ that their Buckingham Palace suite would be bugged. But she also tittered quietly at the sight of him paranoically holding ‘unrecorded’ ministerial meetings in the Palace gardens, Ceaușescu (Behr recounts) ‘striding ahead, his aides following like ugly ducklings.’ On another occasion, walking her corgis in the grounds, the Queen (according to biographer Robert Hardman) dodged an encounter with the Romanian president by hiding most unregally in a bush. An atmosphere of almost Ionesco-like absurdism hung over the trip – the Ceaușescus seeming to have packed it with them in their luggage.
Both Ceaușescus gained a lustre from being photographed with Elizabeth II. But what Elena wanted most from the trip was membership of the British Academy, threatening, according to defector Ion Pacepa, that she would not leave London without one. Since being awarded her doctorate she’d toured the world from Mexico to Iran collecting honorary degrees like fridge-magnets. Membership of the British Academy was to elude her, much to her disgust, but the Central London polytechnic stepped up and tossed her the bone of an honorary professorship. A diplomatic crisis was averted.
It’s interesting to watch film of the trip – the first state visit to the UK by a Warsaw Pact leader in post-war history. Victoria Station is bedecked in red carpet, and there are beefeaters, marching bands and busby-ed soldiers, as Ceaușescu – so tiny only his bouffant hair stops the Queen towering over him – waves a flapping hand from the horse-drawn carriage bearing them down the Mall. Yet it’s difficult to imagine more defensive body language than the Queen’s. Her smile is pure rictus, her gestures are curt and she seems, at times, almost to be trying to wash her black-gloved hands of the whole experience. It was impossible to make conversation with the couple and, to top it off, Ceaușescu spoke in a lisping stammer which must have confounded the interpreters. Explaining the impediment, recalling his shoemaker past, Romanians would joke that ‘he keeps a nail in his mouth.’
A few years later, perhaps inspired as much by his London trip as by North Korea, Ceaușescu was to order construction of the biggest palace in the world in Bucharest: Casa Poporului, the House of the People. A brutalist feast of stone, marble, diamond chandeliers and red carpets, slaved on (some to death) by as many as 100,000 of his countrymen, here Nicolae and Elena planned to enjoy the fairy-tale existence of a king and queen themselves. In the event, they never lived there. In December 1989, a starved and supremely beleaguered nation decided they’d had enough. In Târgoviște, a town near Bucharest, the pair were sentenced to death on Christmas Day, their execution broadcast incessantly on Romanian TV.
The Queen reigned for 33 more years. ‘I declare before you all,’ she promised her country in 1947, ‘that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service…’ Looking at the Ceaușescu visit to London – aircraft-contracts, honorary doctorates, bugging anxieties and all – you get some inkling of what, week by week, year upon year, that ‘service’ really entailed. The Queen put up with many people, Lord Owen said, but on this occasion she, like the Romanian people, found her limit: ‘Ceaușescu was too much for her.’
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