Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II. Photo: EPA-EFE/ROBERT PERRY

A new book about the British monarch’s diplomatic activities recounts how Queen Elizabeth “hid behind a hedge” in the garden of London’s Buckingham Palace to avoid having to meet Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife during their controversial state visit to Britain in 1978.

The book says Queen Elizabeth agreed to host Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu under pressure from the UK Foreign Office but – after hosting the protocol carriage ride and state dinner – had no intention of exchanging another word with them.

“While out walking her dogs in the Buckingham Palace garden the next day, she spotted the Ceausescus coming the other way … And, as she later revealed to another guest, she hid behind a bush in her own garden to avoid them”, Robert Hardman writes in Queen of the World, as cited in the UK Daily Mail.

The book describes the Ceausescu visit as an embarrassment from the word go.

The Foreign Office soon regretted its impetuous decision to invite the infamous duo to the UK, but by then it was too late.

Worries in London mounted after French President Giscard d’Estaing telephoned the palace to warn them that the Ceausescus had behaved like “burglars” on their visit to Paris, and had stolen a number of items from the Elysée.

The French leader warned the Queen to remove any items from their rooms in London that could be removed or even unscrewed.

The Queen followed the advice carefully, among other things removing the eminently steal-able silver-backed hairbrushes from the Belgian Suite in the palace.

But the troubles mounted when the British ambassador in Bucharest warned royal officials that the title-hungry Mrs Ceausescu would expect top-level academic degrees from the UK to bolster her fake claim to be one of the world’s great scientists.

Embarrassingly, Oxford and Cambridge refused to offer her any honours at all – an example followed by all other universities in the UK.

As a result, the best that Foreign Office pressure could come up with was an honorary professorship, squeezed out of an obscure sub-university-level college in London.

The Romanian state visit has since gone down in history as one of the most discreditable in Britain ever.

The British motives were unashamedly venial; the then cash-strapped UK government was desperate to sell a fleet of aircraft to Romania’s Tarom airline – and Ceausescu had demanded a gold-plated trip to London as part of the deal. In the end, the Romanians never paid up.

During the trip, the Queen gave the Romanian dictator an ancient English honour, the Order of the Bath – which wags soon nicknamed the “Order of the Bloodbath”, in reference to his appalling human rights record.

The then foreign minister, David Owen, later admitted the whole trip had been a huge mistake. “I try to pretend it never happened,” he told Hardman. The Queen “made it very clear she intensely disliked having Ceausescu to stay”, he added.

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