Tramping through sodden heather should hold no terror for experienced hiker Theresa May, who is expected to make her first official visit as prime minister to Balmoral this weekend.
Games of charades, however, could be testing for a Conservative party leader and new prime minister who usually restricts any outward hint of frivolity to her colourful footwear.
Parlour games, along with the tartan rugs, bagpipes at breakfast, Prince Philip’s barbecues, draughty corridors adorned with mounted antlers and clouds of ravenous midges are all part of the Balmoral experience.
And such games have been, to use the Queen’s own words, “so nobly endured” by all of her prime ministers during her long reign.
Love it or loathe it – Margaret Thatcher initially regarded trips to Balmoral as akin to “purgatory”, according to the Queen’s biographer, Ben Pimlott – the autumn weekend in the Scottish Highlands is a non-negotiable fixture of the prime minister’s political diary.
The Queen, as always, will have personally checked the room prepared for May and her husband, Philip. Well-chosen books, thought to be of interest to the couple, will have been plucked from the Balmoral library and left by the bedside. The weekend usually consists of a formal dinner and, weather permitting, an informal barbecue. Walking, fishing and deer stalking are all on offer.
The canny politician packs for all eventualities; rain won’t stop the outdoorsy royals.
Thatcher is said to never have arrived with suitable footwear, often borrowing wellington boots. One former Whitehall official, witnessing the prime minister’s awkwardness at one of Philip’s famed barbecues, described the scene thus to Pimlott: “Monarch and consort cooking sausages for the disconcerted premier and her husband on a windswept hillside, each couple trying desperately to be informal.” On the last day of the visit, Thatcher would arrange to leave at 6am. “She couldn’t get away fast enough,” noted the official.
The Labour prime minister Harold Wilson loved his visits, reverting to boy scout-style foraging for firewood for the barbecue. Edward Heath less so. “He was always short of breath trying to keep up,” said the historian and biographer Hugo Vickers.
Tony Blair has described Balmoral weekends as “a vivid combination of the intriguing, the surreal and the utterly freaky”. Preprandial drinks with the strength of “true rocket fuel” made it easier to relax, he revealed in his autobiography. Clearly it worked, as his wife, Cherie, famously conceived their son Leo on one such sojourn.
Describing the royals washing up after one of Philip’s barbecues, Blair continued with wonderment: “You think I’m joking, but I’m not. They put the gloves on and stick their hands in the sink. The Queen asks if you’ve finished, she stacks the plates up and goes off to the sink.”
Thatcher once sent the Queen a gift of rubber gloves, having observed the monarch washing up without a pair.
The ultimate status symbol for any guest is whether the Queen offers to drive you around the Royal Deeside estate herself. Such an honour was accorded recently to Carole Middleton, the mother of the Duchess of Cambridge, and to the late King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, where women are banned from driving. “She took great pleasure in driving him around at a tremendous rate,” said best-selling author Robert Lacey. “I think it fell a bit flat, though, because he was in favour of women driving anyway. But she was definitely making a point.”
Unwelcome headlines were “one of the perpetual embarrassments” while staying at Balmoral, Blair recalled. “Sunday papers laid out in the drawing room as you had pre-lunch drinks.” He blamed mischief-making editors for trying to hijack his visits. Front-page pictures, fanned out on the table, of Cherie yawning widely at the Highland games, of which the Queen is proud patron, did not help.
David Cameron enjoyed his bracing walks – “a bit of a change from running in the park,” the Queen once told him in a moment captured by documentary makers. And fishing on the river Dee – “probably too bright for fishing, really,” she mused on the same occasion.
However, Cameron would not have enjoyed the strained Balmoral breakfast 11 days before the Scottish independence referendum, with all the papers laid out reporting a YouGov poll giving the yes vote the lead.
One of John Major’s abiding memories of Balmoral was of the difficulties of handling urgent business while there. On one occasion, he said recently, there was a crisis and he was talking to the Italian prime minister on the phone. “After a while he said, ‘What on earth is wrong with this line, I can’t hear a thing?’. It was the bagpipes, I had been there a few days and utterly forgotten that they were being played, but they were. I’d shut them out, but he couldn’t. [It was] a very difficult conversation with him.”
This is the Queen’s summer retreat, and it has a homely rather than grand atmosphere. Monarch, usually attired in tartan skirt and cardigan, and premier mull over important events in the sitting room clutter of paper piles, books, china ornaments and family photographs, in front of a thistle-tiled fireplace hosting an incongruous electric heater. There is even a cushion embroidered with the words: “It’s good to be Queen”.
The clever politician, said Lacey, sees a visit to Balmoral as an opportunity to extend the “audience” process between prime minister and monarch, and to further develop trust. “Here is one person you can relax with in a totally trusting way, and to go up to Balmoral and to be superior about it and to consider it a bore is a terrible mistake,” he said.
Vickers agreed. “Stalking – I don’t expect May to do that. Walking – certainly, if she wants. And going to Crathie Kirk on Sunday. But it is those informal conversations that are terribly important,” he said.
It seems inconceivable that the issue of Brexit issue will not arise, as well as its implications, including for Scotland, and Northern Ireland, which intimately involve the monarchy.
The Australian republican prime minister Paul Keating serves as a good example of how not to play Balmoral. During his visit in 1993 – six years before the referendum on becoming a republic was lost – he used his visit to inform Her Majesty she was an “anachronism”.
Ever the perfect host, the Queen took it in her stride, according to Keating’s biography. Vickers, however, detected from sources a hint of sang-froid. “Keating arrived expecting a banquet. Instead he got the full Prince Philip barbecue experience, midges flying everywhere.” And then, claims Vickers, during the audience, “the Queen politely reminded him not to use the monarchy as a football”.
