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Quotation: They have little say in it. State visits, inward and outward, are decided by the royal visits committee, “with members from the Foreign Office and Buckingham Palace,” said Dr Craig Prescott, a constitutional expert at Royal Holloway, University of London, and author of the forthcoming book Modern Monarchy. “But fundamentally these are decisions made by the government to pursue its diplomatic objectives.”Throughout her long reign, she was so deployed. She was not always grateful. Welcoming Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife to Buckingham Palace in 1978, in line with the government’s agenda, was particularly problematic. “He was among the most difficult of the queen’s guests at Buckingham Palace. The guest from hell: paranoid about his security, about being bugged,” said Joe Little, the managing editor of Majesty magazine.
“The visit was particularly controversial at the time,” said Prescott. “But it aligned with the government’s priorities. The queen found him so frightful that when there was break she was walking through the gardens of Buckingham Palace with her corgis, and Ceaușescu was coming the other way and she hid in some bushes to avoid him. But when it came to ceremonies she did her duty.”
Soft diplomacy costs – massively. The travel for the royals and their entourages is paid from the sovereign grant given to the king. Security costs met from the public purse are not disclosed. “Although I would say if we had an elected president I am not sure the costs would be much cheaper, because this is something that every state does,” said Prescott. “But the royal family are just that little bit different. It was President Obama who said state visits at Buckingham Palace aren’t like state visits anywhere else.”
This will be an unprecedented second state visit for a US president. “One reason we hosted the state visit of Trump in 2019 was our trying to get that trade agreement post-Brexit, though it didn’t materialise,” said Prescott.
“Interestingly, when Rishi Sunak was prime minister and state visits started again after Covid, the king’s two first visits were to Europe. And that was post-Ukraine, and to sort of say the UK might have left the EU but hasn’t left Europe, which is another theme of British government policy.
“You can see what our whole foreign policy is by the state visits that are undertaken,” he added.
| Period | 1 Mar 2025 |
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| Held at | The Guardian, United Kingdom |