The Queen has been heavily guarded for 70 years – and for good reason

Various individuals and terror groups have sought to assassinate the Queen, with many of the more serious attempts on her life kept quiet for decades. Some very nearly succeeded.

The Queen photographed on October 7 last year taking part in the Queen's Baton Relay in the lead up to this year’s Birmingham Commonwealth Games. Picture: AFP

Lyndon Baines Johnson desperately wanted to become president of the United States. By the late 1950s, he had established himself as the most effective and influential Senate majority leader in history. But John Kennedy, charming and clever, won the 1960 Democratic nomination, and then surprised everyone, especially his brother Bobby, by asking Johnson to join his ticket.

A brilliant and manipulative numbers man, Johnson had a staff member look up how many presidents in the past century had died in office. Of the 20, the answer was five. He told sometime Kennedy adviser Clare Boothe Luce: “Clare, I looked it up: one out of every four presidents has died in office. I’m a gamblin’ man, darlin’, and this is the only chance I got.”

Lee Harvey Oswald delivered three years on. But it goes to show how perilous is the top job. Leaders of countries, heads of state, anyone prepared to stick their head above the parapet, risk becoming a deadly target.

This weekend marks the 70th anniversary of the day Queen Elizabeth II was informed of the death of her father, making her Queen of the United Kingdom and more than a dozen Commonwealth countries, including Australia.

Princess Elizabeth with the Duke of Edinburgh at Treetops, Kenya, in February 1952.

And while it had been centuries since a monarch had been executed, murdered or killed on a battlefield, the dangers of the job were, and still are, very real. For 70 years, the Queen has been among the best-protected people on earth. And for very good reason: more than a few people have tried to kill her and, once or twice, they have come surprisingly close.

For years she was a target for the Irish Republican Army and its numerous offshoots that viewed the divided Ireland as the result of British imperialism. And it doesn’t matter for some that 1998’s Good Friday Agreement mostly ended The Troubles during which, for three decades, a low-level war fought between unionists and republicans claimed 3500 lives.

Republican splinter groups regularly threaten the Queen before she visits Belfast. When she returns home safely, they usually issue a statement giving reasons why they called off the hit. The Queen remains unperturbed: she has visited Northern Ireland at least 24 times. In 2011, she made a historic trip to the Republic of Ireland – no monarch had been for a century. Again she was specifically threatened and 10,000 of the Garda’s 14,000-strong force were used to ensure her safety. Similar numbers were used for the trip three days later by then US president Barack Obama. All up it is ­estimated that security for the ­visits cost more than $57m.

The Queen bravely visited Northern Ireland in her Silver Jubilee year of 1977 – although at that hostile time she stayed offshore on a British warship and was taken in by helicopter – and the IRA had promised “a Jubilee bomb blitz to remember”. There were riots, briefly an IRA roadblock outside Belfast, and a small bomb that hurt no one. Having failed to disrupt the trip, the IRA instead turned to planning the murder of her much-loved second cousin, Lord Louis Mountbatten, mentor to her husband Philip and son Charles.

An IRA team observed Mountbatten, who holidayed annually at Mullaghmore on Ireland’s west coast. They tried and failed to shoot him there the following year. In August 1979, Mountbatten was back. As he set off with family members and others in a small boat to retrieve some crab pots. IRA assassins watching with binoculars from a hill above triggered a 22kg bomb they had planted on the craft the night before. Mountbatten and three others, including a grandson, were killed. Hours later the IRA added an exclamation mark to the day’s activities killing 18 British soldiers in an ambush at Warrenpoint, in Northern Ireland’s County Down.

The Queen still topped the IRA hit list. The closest they came to killing her he was in Scotland on Saturday May 9, 1981, when she ­arrived in remote Sullom Voe, an inlet on the Shetland Islands where a huge oil terminal had been completed by 6000 workers and was processing a quarter of Britain’s North Sea oil. It is almost 500km north of Inverness – windy, wet and very cold. The Sullom Voe site was run by BP, one of whose many employees was a member of the Provisional IRA. His Northern Irish accent would hardly have stood out on site.

Queen Elizabeth II sits in Westminster Abbey, on her coronation day in London. Picture: AFP

His IRA cell posted a bomb to him, more than 3kg of gelignite, and a timing device that could be set for almost a fortnight. It was a tense time in The Troubles; IRA organiser Bobby Sands, who had been leading the hunger strike campaign at the notorious Maze Prison outside Belfast – and who had recently been elected to the British parliament – had died on the Tuesday.

The Queen arrived about the same time as Norway’s King Olav V. As she prepared to give her address inside, some of the attendees heard a loud bang, but it was missed by most people because a band was still playing the two countries’ national anthems. No one had any reason to panic and the event proceeded without further incident. There’d been a blast in one of the power stations, but the detonator had not engaged the bomb proper. BP – which had helpfully published a detailed itinerary for the Queen’s movements that day – lied about the incident, blaming an electrical fault.

Prince Charles speaking at the funeral service at Westiminster Abbey, held in 1979 for the late Lord Louis Mountbatten, an IRA terrorist bomb attack victim.

Investigations revealed that the IRA’s man had been waiting for a second bomb, but it had been held up in the post. Fearing the Special Branch had intercepted it, he planted the first bomb, set the timer and fled. The second, larger bomb was delivered to the site and held at the office to be picked up – but this was kept secret for 30 years.

Later that same year there was another attempt to kill the Queen when 17-year-old Christopher Lewis shot at her as she toured Dunedin on New Zealand’s South Island. At the time, many heard the crack of Lewis’s .22 rifle from an elevated position in a University of Otago building. Local police announced that a street sign had toppled over. Days later, when being interviewed about an unrelated crime, Lewis admitted his attempted murder and took police to the location where they found his spent shell. He said that as he was about to shoot, he had been distracted by two policemen walking across his line of fire. He fired, but the Queen had moved. He served some years in jail and at a psychiatric institution from which he tried to escape when he read that Prince Charles and Princess Diana were coming. He was keen to kill them too.

Queen Elizabeth ll and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, wave to wellwishers from their open car in October 1981 in Wellington, New Zealand.

Three years ago, a former senior Dunedin detective sergeant said Lewis – who already had a record of arson and cruelty to animals and had stabbed a schoolmate with scissors – was charged with low-ranking firearms charges and not attempted murder so as not jeopardise future royal visits. New Zealand had dropped capital punishment in 1961 but it remained on the statues in the case of treason until 2007. A treason trial with Lewis’s life on the line – even if only nominally – would have made world headlines.

In 1996, Lewis dressed as a deliveryman and took a cardboard package to the Auckland home of Tania Furlan. As she bent over to sign for it Lewis battered her to death with a hammer. He wrote out a ransom note and kidnapped Furlan’s six-week-old daughter. It seems he got cold feet, dropped the child at a church and returned to pick up the ransom note. Bloody running-shoe prints led to Lewis. He took his life, aged 33, while in jail on remand.

Christopher John Lewis from Dunedin, shot at the Queen during her trip to New Zealand in 1981. Picture: Supplied

Another covered-up attempt on the life of the Queen and her husband was revealed in 2009 when senior NSW policeman ­Detective Superintendent Cliff McHardy retired. He talked of the time during the Queen’s 1970 tour when the royal couple were to travel from Sydney to Orange by train. Another train reconnoitred the track an hour ahead of their scheduled April 29 trip. It detected nothing and gave the green light. But in the time between that scouting party and the royal carriages coming through, a large log was placed across the tracks near the now closed Bowenfels Station in an effort to derail them. McHardy, who died four years ago, said that as luck would have it the royal train was travelling slowly, having just passed through Lithgow, and a sweeper pushed the log to the side. British security services became aware in 2015 that Welsh-born Reyaad Khan, who had joined ISIS in Syria and boasted of executing “many prisoners”, was planning a series of terror strikes in the UK. They studied the straight-A student’s movements. When he made plans to kill the Queen during the 2015 VJ celebrations in central London, they acted. Then prime minister David Cameron signed off on the next move: a drone attack that fired a rocket killing the 21-year-old as he travelled in a car outside Raqqa.

A masked Jaswant Singh Chail, armed with a crossbow, used a rope to scale the fence of Windsor Castle, where the Queen was in residence.

And last Christmas Day morning, a masked Jaswant Singh Chail, armed with a crossbow, used a rope to scale the fence of Windsor Castle, where the Queen was in residence. Moments earlier he made a video which he uploaded to Snapchat, and in it stated: “I will attempt to assassinate Elizabeth, Queen of the Royal Family.” This was to be revenge for the 1919 massacre of Indian protesters at Amritsar by colonial soldiers.

Chail was within 500m of Her Majesty’s apartment when police grabbed him after he popped up on security cameras. It was the fifth security scare at Windsor Castle in nine months.