banner banner banner
Shadows of a Princess
Shadows of a Princess
Оценить:
Рейтинг: 0

Полная версия:

Shadows of a Princess

скачать книгу бесплатно


The theme of sex was a standard feature of her joke repertoire. She seemed immune to the embarrassment it might cause others. Careful never to exceed the bounds of good taste while in the public eye, her reticence was thrown to the winds as soon as she felt she was in relatively safe surroundings. Even then her judgement was erratic. Many times I cringed as her crude jokes and braying laughter scandalized the delicate ears of outsiders such as Queen’s Flight crews, diplomats and charity officials. The desire to shock outweighed any possible pleasure she might have gained from the humour of what she said.

The same desire was apparent in her infantile mockery of other members of the royal family – though only behind their backs. Thus her husband was referred to as ‘The Boy Wonder’ or ‘The Great White Hope’, while her father-in-law was labelled ‘Stavros’ and her in-laws generally as ‘The Germans’.

Even the objects of her compassion were considered fair game. All this I could laugh off, however uneasily, as her way of coping with stress. However, the looks of worried disbelief on strangers’ faces – and those of junior staff too, worst of all – made me realize that other people’s feelings were less important to her than her desire for gratification.

By the time we were back at the Palace front door the Princess was cool and controlled again. We stood awkwardly, waiting to be dismissed. Each in turn, she held our eyes and inclined her head. We bowed.

This, I learned, was when she looked back over the day and judged our loyalty. If she failed to make eye contact – ‘blanked’ you, in the jargon – you had been weighed in the balance and found wanting. Suddenly the jokes in the helicopter seemed a long time ago. I tried to guess if I had laughed enough.

‘Thank you all very much,’ she said, her voice now carefully neutral. But I got the message. Yes, I can be fun, but I can also choose to be an imperious madam – and now I own you.

She disappeared back up the stairs. In the silence I heard her footsteps once again, heading towards her bedroom. The door slammed. Slowly I let out my breath. This job was going to be interesting.

I drove home slowly, my mind filled with images of the day. Most vivid, of course, were those of the Princess. I had to admit, I was surprised. From that first lunch and, I suppose, from the gossipy things I had read about her, I had expected a well-meaning but essentially shallow person, perhaps in need of my manly support and worldly wisdom – a sort of royal super-Sloane. Instead, what I had seen was a polished and confident performance from a professional celebrity. Every gesture, every glance and every word – at least in public – had been consciously planned. Sometimes the planning had taken only a split second, but that simply showed how quickly she thought and how sharp were her public-pleasing instincts.

There was no doubt about it. Behind the good looks and the expensive grooming there was much more than the bimbo caricature to which her critics – even then – would have liked to limit her. That first day I saw, from her effect on the people she met, that she had a powerful, even hypnotic, charisma. Later I learned that it had the ability to conceal many flaws, or at least compensate for them.

Of all the day’s new impressions, it was perhaps the Princess’s fondness for crude humour that sat least comfortably with the public image which until now had been my only guide to her personality. When she was relaxed, the Princess’s vocabulary and verbal mannerisms were pure Sloane Ranger. Consonants were an optional extra, so words often emerged in a lazy drawl. This suited the subject matter, which in private was not always very elevated. The cruder the humour, the more her verbal discipline deserted her, as if it shared our wish suddenly to be far away, preferably with someone not expected to ascend the throne.

When she was serious, however, she commanded phrases and delivery that could make her a witty and clever conversationalist. Her speaking style was that of the verbal sprinter not the marathon runner. I doubt if anybody ever suffered a Princess of Wales monologue, except possibly when seeing her on Panorama, but many will remember – most with pleasure – being on the receiving end of one of her quicksilver one-liners.

These deserve special mention because they played a key part in shaping the impression she left. On public occasions, amplified by the hushed, deferential expectation which is the royal visitor’s usual reception, her spontaneity cut through the self-conscious small talk that thrives on British social nervousness. She reacted instinctively against pomposity – and just think how much of that she had to endure. Her favoured weapon was the verbal pinprick that released the speaker and the audience from the tension which paralyses truthful communication.

She might sit with an audience of drug addicts (or mental patients or battered wives) listening to a turgid briefing on their problems from an overly earnest therapist before leaning forward with a smile and perfect timing to whisper loudly, ‘Does he always go on like this?’ In the laughter that she knew would follow, pent-up emotion was suddenly released and contact made between Princess and pariah. As an added test – or entertainment – the turgid speaker could pretend to laugh too.

This technique, honed in a hundred hospitals, drop-in centres, outreach projects and community facilities, gave her public that feeling of intimate knowledge which is the secret ingredient of devotion. Also, like all really effective spontaneity, it knew its own boundaries. Even her wittiest remark contained a nugget of sympathy, understanding or concern. She may have been short of O levels, but she never dropped a public clanger, never mocked disability or disfigurement.

Except in the car going home, of course. Then the stress of so much emotional giving could be relieved with some pretty unedifying outbursts. By then, however, she had done her duty, left hope with the hopeless and smiles on stricken faces. We told her so, since nobody else was going to, swallowing our scruples to join in the desperate humour that she often called on in place of joy.

It was a very different world from the one I was used to. I was already beginning to learn that early impressions – whether of my new boss or my new surroundings – must never be taken at face value. I also knew that I was not there as a reward. I was there to work. Thus I quickly began to comprehend that being in royal service might provide a rather luxurious working environment, but only at my peril would I ever feel in any way entitled to it. The order of things had been made clear in the Princess’s glance as we waited to be dismissed at the end of the day: she owned us, not the other way around.

In the years that followed there were times when the grandeur and privilege of my surroundings seemed to mock my efforts at running the newest royal household. I realized, though, that it was a healthy sign sometimes to be at odds with those surroundings. In fact, I came to view with suspicion anyone who seemed to take to them too easily. I already had an idea that our royal employers could be jealous of their inheritance and suffered our intrusion only as long as we were useful – or amusing. I resolved to be both to the Princess of Wales, given the chance.

During that first day out with her, I had been surprised by her conflicting displays of compassion and indifference. I had been shocked by her crude humour when out of the public eye, some of it at the expense of those she was visiting, but I had also recognized its value as a safety valve for the stresses of spending so much time being sympathetic to those in desperate suffering or need. Even so, it would have been hard to serve someone who was so ready to find humour in such tragic situations. Luckily for my own peace of mind, I quickly learned that much of the Princess’s compassion was very definitely the genuine article.

As I watched her at a dying child’s bedside, holding the girl’s newly cold hand and comforting the stricken parents, she seemed to share their grief. Not self-consciously like a stranger, not distantly like a counsellor, not even through any special experience or deep insight. Instead it just seemed that a tranquillity gathered around her. Into this stillness the weeping mother and heartbroken father poured their sorrow and there, somehow, it was safe. The young woman with the smart suit and soulful eyes had no answers for them, but they felt that somewhere inside she knew at least a part of what they were feeling. That was all the moment needed.

The Princess did have some experience of what they were feeling, and she usually managed to let it appear rather more, but the suffering she felt had none of the merciful clarity of bereavement. As I slowly discovered, it was dark and complex and grew from years of stunted emotional growth. The compassion she showed others was not drawn from some deep supply within her. Rather, it was a reflection of the attention she herself craved. Once we had returned her to the lonely privacy of her palace, I sensed she had little left over for herself.

Instead, she increasingly settled for the illusion of compassion. Reading about herself as ‘the caring Princess’, she felt a soothing glow of achievement, but the reality was that her compassion came to be reserved largely for the cameras. It was not exclusively so, because along with a cynical use of her saintly reputation there was an erratic but genuine kindness. Even this struggled to remain anonymous, however. The surprised recipients of flowers or sympathetic messages after some well-publicized tragedy might justifiably have suspected that their good fortune – artlessly shared with a local newspaper – just added to the overall illusion.

As for the cumulative, corrosive effect of this on her own sense of self-worth, I was to discover that it could be severe. Even at the outset I could see that receiving credit for virtues she did not possess could not satisfy the hunger for recognition that burned within the Princess of Wales.

Gradually I slipped into my new routine, wearing the same few suits, parking under the same tree in The Mall, giving the same cheery greeting to Gladys the St James’s housekeeper, and offering up the same daily prayer for continued survival. Richard took his beer mat to his new office, the Princess began to ask for me instead of him, and I began to look forward to opening the return Bag with something less than panic.

After my first day out with her, my urgent priority was to gain confidence in planning the Princess’s public appearances. An early milestone came with my first solo recce itself. The engagement was to be quite a routine London affair – the official opening of an office and resource centre for a small children’s charity, followed by a reception to meet the usual mixture of fundraisers, charity workers and local officials.

In later years the recce might have taken me three-quarters of an hour – 15 minutes for the recce itself and 30 minutes to chat up and generally get the measure of the hosts. As the rawest apprentice, however, I must have spent nearly two hours pacing out every inch of the route, nominating press positions and marking places for individual presentations.

Then I changed everything and started again. I failed to get the measure of the hosts as well, but I think it can be safely concluded that they were very patient people.

From this I learned the importance of not hesitating to change my mind if I thought it necessary. However tempting it was to cultivate an air of infallibility, complacency was a risky companion when planning a royal visit and often led me into embarrassing U-turns. Such was my spurious authority – and their customary good manners – that few hosts objected and some, I think, even enjoyed the chance to prolong the royal experience. Generally, though, changing my mind – like confessing to my mistakes – was a pleasure to be indulged in sparingly.

Again and again I felt my lack of experience, but surprisingly quickly the time I spent on recces began to shrink. Even 15 minutes eventually became too much for some engagements. By then I knew what would work and what would not. The extra time was needed only to reassure myself that my distilled experience as passed on to the hosts would be treated like the politely phrased commandments I felt them to be.

I knew, for example, that the Princess refused to be rushed when meeting people. If time was limited the only option was to reduce the number of people she met – not, as some hosts seemed determined to try, merely to persuade her to hurry up. Nothing was more calculated to make her slow down even more.

I had seen that she liked to be punctual and well briefed, preferably in humorous, bite-sized chunks. ‘YRH will remember Mr X. Last time you visited he forgot to bow; he curtsied instead!’

She also liked plenty of elbow room when she was in the public eye. Apart from a protection officer, she preferred the gaggle of officials and dignitaries who inevitably accompanied her to keep well out of her way. I sometimes thought the equerry and lady-in-waiting were mainly there to conduct a type of genteel crowd control. With sharp elbows and distracting small talk, we became expert in buying our boss the uncrowded stage she needed to perform at her best.

I knew where the arrival line-up should be positioned, where the girl with the posy should stand, where the ribbon should be cut and where the press pen should be sited. The Princess liked short line-ups, preferably with spouses excluded. The girl with the posy should be at the end of the line, well positioned for the cameras because there was always a moment of amused miscommunication – small fingers reluctant to let go at the crucial moment – as the flowers were handed over. If not, she would laughingly contrive it. The flowers should be in neutral colours, in theory to avoid clashing with the royal outfit, and unwired.

She liked the ribbon (or the plaque or the sapling or the pharmaceutical research laboratory) to provide a backdrop that identified the cause being supported and, ideally, someone very young or very old on hand to ‘assist’ photogenically with the cutting, unveiling or digging. She preferred the press to be well penned, unobtrusively positioned and silent but for the whirr of their motor drives. Muffled yelps of delight were permitted and not infrequent, but groans and calls of ‘Just one more!’ usually met the same contrary response as requests to hurry up.

She did not like the press party – unkindly termed the ‘rat pack’ – to get too close. Cameras, flash guns and the dreaded boom microphone could all ruin the carefully arranged spontaneity that we tried to make her trademark. But nor did she like the pack too far away. She traded skilfully on the knowledge that they needed her just as much as she needed them, so she theatrically ‘endured’ their presence and could be sharp with her staff if any cameraman got too far out of line. All the players in this game knew it was a mutually advantageous conspiracy, however, and played by the rules accordingly. She gave them the shots both they and she needed, and they responded with enduring devotion.

I learned the crucial importance of seeing all planning decisions through royal rather than mortal eyes. In my ignorance I had imagined that, as with some naval chores, royalty regarded public duties as just that: duties which had to be performed as a matter of necessity, to be enjoyed if possible, to be endured if not and all to be accomplished with a noble appreciation of the greater good being served – or at least with the satisfaction of a job well done. Now it slowly dawned on me that the process was more complex and allowed the intrusion of other personal considerations. While some might see only the outward appearance of royal concern – in, say, a children’s hospice – the equerry has to allow for the emotional toll exacted by 90 minutes’ close involvement in a dozen harrowing accounts of family distress.

The engagements which required the greatest display of outward compassion (hospices were a case in point) were often those that drew deepest on the Princess’s reserves of inner goodwill and determination. I came to understand that, while showing sympathy with those in distress sometimes rewarded her with a virtuous glow, it also emphasized the loneliness with which her personal unhappiness had to be faced.

Surprisingly often, even the most efficient and well-run organization seemed unable to understand the simple practicalities of designing a visit programme. Often it was the humblest charity which had the clearest idea of how long could be spent talking to a certain number of patients and how welcome would be the obligatory shaking of influential but otherwise ungripping hands.

Watching it wrestle with such small considerations frequently seemed a measure of how well a management knew its own people. I quickly learned that the priority was not just to allocate the required number of minutes to a particular event. Frequently it was more important to practise ego-management, as a touchy official or departmental head hotly insisted on more time as if it were a measure of his importance or even – in extreme cases – his virility. Always to be pitied were those who would bear disappointing news home to their wives about the limit on line-up numbers, to the equal dismay of local hat-sellers.

Best of all were the organizations who simply explained what they hoped would happen during their royal visit and then left the rest to us, the assumed experts. Less welcome were those who had considered every detail and were then unwilling, understandably, to accommodate changes made for reasons that I could not tell them, such as the fact that the Princess would probably prefer to climb straight on the plane home rather than sit next to an old bore like you during lunch. Least welcome were those who introduced their plan with the words, ‘Now, you won’t have to help us with any of this. We know the ropes. We had the Duchess of Blank here in 1971 and it was a huge success …’

A lexicon of soothing phrases, excuses and explanations quickly became part of my visit-planning toolkit as ministers, matrons and monks were lulled into complying with a programme whose constraints they might often have found eccentric, trivial or even offensive. Over time, however, the necessary mannerisms of speech accumulated into an oleaginous patina which proved hard to shake off when talking to people outside my narrow field of work. Thus can courtly talk slip into insincerity.

The final step in the planning process was to walk the course. An obvious precaution, you might think, but with surprising regularity it was possible to encounter host organizations who had overlooked elementary considerations such as the time actually spent walking from one part of a building to another.

To be fair, this was partly because their minds were quite properly concentrated on the people at the expense of less exciting aspects such as timing or camera angles. Also, until you had experienced it, it was difficult to estimate accurately just how quickly a 26-year-old Princess with the ground-covering abilities of a mustang could move between the car and the briefing room, the lab and the packing centre, the day room and the chapel, the royal box and the touchline, the presidential jet and the guard of honour, and so on. It did sometimes seem, however, that concerned hosts were expecting a visitor with the frailty of the Queen Mother rather than a young woman whose athleticism was becoming legendary.

FOUR (#ulink_7cd87ab0-1e30-5af8-8219-9fcdd649ec31)

DOUBLE UP (#ulink_7cd87ab0-1e30-5af8-8219-9fcdd649ec31)

Once I had achieved a shaky confidence in organizing the Princess’s UK engagements, I could look forward to the challenge of planning her overseas visits. I remembered pictures I had seen of the Princess looking cool and compassionate in a dozen exotic foreign locations. This, I thought, would be where my new job started to become a bit more glamorous. The reality, of course, was that it took a lot of very unglamorous hard work to reach the media-friendly results that she – and her public – expected.

I have always taken undue pleasure even from aimless travel, and to be offered transport and accommodation on such a royal scale and be paid to indulge my puerile desire seemed the best part of the job description. During my early days at St James’s I heard an endless travelogue of tour stories, some of dizzying tallness. As I was to learn, even in exaggerated form these tales struggled to convey the reality of transporting our royal circus to foreign countries. Not to be outdone, over the years I developed my own improbable repertoire of traveller’s yarns from which, if nothing else, my audiences learned that the overseas tour encapsulated in concentrated form all the best and worst aspects of life with the Waleses.

Tours were a big challenge for our royal employers too. The task of representing the country overseas as a kind of super-ambassador makes great demands on their reserves of diplomacy, tact, confidence and patience – not to mention the royal sense of humour, digestion and general physical and mental constitution. There are therefore big demands for both external comforts and internal strength. These must somehow be supplied from the foreign surroundings in which duty has deposited the royal traveller and from internal resources, reinforced by years of heredity and training. However gilded the cage, though, no guest palace provides the familiar, reassuring touches of home.

To help achieve the external comforts, the Waleses usually travelled with a surprisingly large entourage. On one of my first tours the party totalled 26. As well as more senior officials such as private secretaries and press secretaries, the cast included a doctor, four policemen, three secretaries, a butler, a valet, an assistant valet, a dresser, an assistant dresser, two chefs and a hairdresser.

Not surprisingly, we also needed a baggage master to look after the small mountain of luggage. In order to achieve the desired result of making the Prince and Princess feel that their temporary accommodation was a real ‘home from home’, an extraordinary amount of personal kit had to be carried with us. Everything from music equipment to favourite organic foods had their special containers – and came high on the list of priorities.

In-flight meals were seldom straightforward either. In later years when travelling on solo tours, the Princess was happy enough to choose from standard airline menus. This also applied to journeys with the Queen’s Flight, who usually found reliable airline caterers whatever the exotic destination. Before the separation, however, the Princess took a leaf out of her husband’s rather more fastidious book, and while their accompanying staff demolished the output of the British Airways first-class flight kitchen, our employers would pick at home-grown organic concoctions in Tupperware boxes like pensioners on an outing. They were a lot slimmer and fitter than most of us, of course, but it still looked like a pretty joyless experience.

Meanwhile, host government officials, Embassy staff and senior members of the Wales household (the collective term for private secretaries and other top management) laboured to produce a programme befitting the stature of the visitors. The planes, boats, trains and cars – as well as the cameras, crowds, guards of honour and banquets – combined to create the overall theatrical effect without which no royal visit can be really royal. Adjusted for scale, the same principles apply equally to a visit to a crèche as much as to a continent. Add the scrutiny of the press and the unpredictability of foreign hosts’ resources, and it is little wonder that touring is seen as one of the greatest tests royal service can provide. Little wonder either that it demands the full set of royal stage props to achieve its full effect.

Every month or so a list of forthcoming engagements was circulated in the office. For many excellent reasons it was treated as a confidential document, though whether to thwart terrorists or merely to baffle the Queen’s Flight was never fully explained. Its colloquial name was Mole News, since it was assumed that its list of dates and places would form the leaker’s basic fare. By the time of my arrival, however, the leaking was beginning to emanate from more exalted sources such as royal ‘friends’ and other thinly disguised mouthpieces for the Prince and Princess themselves. Eventually Mole News practically lost its original innocent purpose as a simple planning aid and became instead just another piece on the board game of misinformation in the intelligence war between them. As they drew up their diaries with more and more of an eye to the media impact of their activities, information on each other’s future movements became vital in the popularity contest that they were both beginning to wage.

Soon after my arrival I had scanned this programme eagerly, looking for my first chance of an overseas trip. Disappointingly it seemed that I would have to wait almost a year before I could join the veterans whose briefcases sported the tour labels which I so coveted. I was scheduled to accompany Their Royal Highnesses on a tour of the Gulf States in March 1989. At least, I thought, it was a part of the world I knew slightly and liked a lot. Also it would be hot and I would at last have an excuse to wear that expensive tropical uniform – the preferred choice of most officers who had seen Top Gun.

In Mole News joint engagements were indicated with an asterisk. What had not yet been widely noticed, however, was that asterisks were becoming a rarity. In fact, by the late eighties joint appearances at home were already mostly confined to set-piece events such as the Queen’s Birthday Parade, the Garter Ceremony, Ascot and the staff Christmas lunch. The same trend of disappearing asterisks was visible in the overseas programme. Solo expeditions had always been a feature of royal overseas work, but the Waleses were noticeably beginning to make more and more of their overseas trips alone. This was bad for publicity – it just fuelled rumours about the state of the marriage – but for staff in the firing line it was also a bit of a relief. The coup de grâce was finally administered to joint tours by the Korea trip of November 1992, but the signs of a terminal divergence of interest were already perceptible in January 1989 when I joined the Gulf recce party at Heathrow.

Just as joint engagements gave the Prince and Princess the chance to work together (however reluctantly), so they drew their respective staffs into cautious co-operation. When they were on form, we saw our employers put on a double act which carried the world before it. For our part, we enjoyed the opportunity to put aside the growing estrangements of the office and reclassify our differences as merely interesting variations of technique.

The Prince’s team provided the lead. Under the direction of the private secretary or his deputy, His Royal Highness’s press secretary and senior personal protection officer (PPO) were joined by either his own or his wife’s equerry, depending on whose turn it was to swap the pressures of the St James’s office for the pressures of its temporary foreign equivalent. On the tour itself this would mean that I would primarily be in attendance on the Prince, particularly if any of the engagements called for military uniform to be worn. The Princess would take a lady-in-waiting and forgo the services of her equerry unless he could negotiate his absence from the Prince’s entourage, a loss which His Royal Highness bore with increasing fortitude as time passed.

The gloss on my picture of royal tours soon began to look pretty patchy. I would be junior boy on the recce team – the private secretary’s scribe, memory and general bag-carrier. On the tour I would also be responsible for transport, accommodation, the travelling office and a million undefined administrative details. The horrifying truth slowly dawned that I would take the rap for the great majority of potential cock-ups, and so it proved.

I found myself treading on eggshells even before I had left the UK. Taking leave of the Princess was never easy, even when going abroad ‘on duty’ as I would be for this recce. Arrivals and departures were important to her. They were landmarks in an otherwise monotonous landscape of public and private routine. They presented opportunities for her to make a point. The simple exchanges involved often gained an extra theatrical value as she expressed delight with a greeting or wistful regret at a parting. Her natural ability to influence moods was at its strongest when first and last impressions could be created. This was a characteristic ideally suited to the life of transitory encounters that she led in public.

Also, I found that I missed her. This was partly sentiment – employed to serve and, metaphorically, to defend her, I sometimes felt a vague sense of negligence if separated from her for long. As I grew less impressionable, this was supplemented by a healthy suspicion of what she might be doing or saying in my absence.

In her moments of greatest doubt, any absence for any reason could be exploited to support a passing prejudice. Thus going away on holiday could provoke an envy bordering on resentment, apparently impervious to her own frequent absences on ski slopes or beaches. She paid lip service to the need for staff ‘R and R’, but seldom missed a chance to make you feel just a little bit guilty for taking it. Going away on recces was scarcely less suspect. Even when I knew I was heading for a tough recce far from home in an inhospitable land, she somehow managed to make me feel like a truant, if not an actual deserter.

She would look up wearily from a desk that had suddenly become conspicuously crowded and give me a well-practised, reproachful look. ‘It doesn’t seem fair on you’ – by which she meant her – ‘to be sending you away. We’re so busy at the moment.’ (We were always ‘so busy’.)

‘Well, Ma’am, you know I can’t get out of it – I’m duty for this tour. And everything’s up to date here …’ She looked meaningfully at the papers on her desk. ‘And I won’t be away for long. I’ll phone.’

‘That would be nice.’

‘And take pictures. Then you can see what I’m letting you in for!’

‘Hmm.’

That was obviously an idea too far. I had failed to lighten the atmosphere and it took the application of several airline gin and tonics to ease the feeling that I was abandoning her.

That feeling never entirely left me and, if anything, it got worse as the years passed and her position in the hierarchy began to be threatened. She once memorably had me paged at Heathrow as I was about to leave for a decidedly non-recreational recce of Japan. Expecting some nameless catastrophe, I took her call with a heavy heart. She knew exactly where I was and that I was about to miss my plane, yet she spent 10 minutes cross-examining me on a minor diary item months in the future. Of course I had none of the paperwork with me and my memory refused to come to my rescue in the crisis. From her voice, the Princess’s loneliness was transparently obvious, even when expressed in the reassuringly familiar format of chiding her scatterbrained private secretary. A call that began with contrived recrimination ended with genuine good wishes for my success and a quick return. No wonder I felt a heel.

Especially when feeling beleaguered – not uncommon – she would sometimes wonder aloud whether a protection officer could not achieve just as much as the private secretary now shuffling in front of her, visibly champing for his club-class dinner. In some households it was true that an experienced PPO could more than adequately organize security, logistics and even domestic arrangements, but the requirements of the Waleses and their entourage demanded attention to a range and depth of subjects that were beyond the reasonable capacities of any single person.

Local British Embassies could also not be expected to shoulder more than the already considerable extra workload our visits entailed. A sensible rule was therefore followed by all with responsibility for royal programmes: ‘Never recce anything you’re not going to visit, but never visit anything you haven’t recced.’ There was nothing more unsettling than arriving blind at an unknown destination for a high-profile engagement.

The other golden rule – ‘Avoid surprises’ – was one you broke at your peril. Whatever the hardships (or compensations), everything that could be recced was recced, regardless of raised eyebrows from envious office-bound colleagues or royal employers scenting a skive. The office folklore of recce excesses provided rich pickings for anyone wishing to believe that these foreign planning trips were not all work and no play. In due course I could add to them myself, albeit discreetly.

It was perfectly true that recceing gave you the chance to experience many royal delights twice over – and without the attentions of the press pack. Had I not flown all over the bush in Zimbabwe in search of the right refugee camp? Or lunched alone with six Indonesian princesses anxious to practise their royal conversational skills? Or even risen at dawn to see the sunrise from a frontier fort in the Khyber Pass? Too much of this kind of reminiscence could produce jaundice in the most tolerant listener, and the Princess seldom fell into that category except when on duty. I sometimes unfairly felt that there was nothing like another’s good fortune to cloud her sunny outlook. Nor was there anything more guaranteed to stir up royal displeasure than the thought that those travelling on their coat-tails were enjoying the ride.

So if the Princess asked, apparently kindly, if your room in the guest palace was comfortable, it was wise not to make too much of its huge TV set, bottomless minibar or big fluffy towels. She was not really that interested, except to find reasons for feeling resentful or exploited.

It could have gone either way, therefore, but when I said goodbye to her on the eve of my departure for the Kuwait recce she was touchingly solicitous, concerned for the hard work I faced and anxious to let me know that I would be missed. This reflected her good nature. It also reflected her tendency to see duty on her husband’s behalf – which this would largely be – as an unenviable hardship. I later concluded that it was also evidence of her foresight in realizing that this was not going to be one of those recces that anyone would sensibly envy.

Twenty-four hours later I lay in the darkness and shivered. I had not expected to feel cold in the Persian Gulf and this dusty chill had a penetrating quality. I was dog tired, but sleep was impossible. The Embassy residence was quite small and, as a junior visitor, I had been given a room that could have been used in the fight against government cuts as convincing proof that there was no feather-bedding in this corner of the Diplomatic Service. I soon started rummaging in my suitcase for extra clothes that I had not packed. My thoughts turned enviously to my companions who, because of the lack of official accommodation, had been exiled to the nearest five-star American hotel.

The shivering was not just caused by the cold. The Ambassador’s anecdotes, though intended to amuse and inform, had also contained warnings about the pitfalls awaiting us in the protocol departments of our later destinations in Bahrein, Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Saudi Arabia.

I felt oppressed by our responsibilities, especially my own. I was scared stiff, in fact. I have never needed much excuse to indulge in a good bout of worrying and it often has the beneficial side effect of displacing my habitual lethargy. This time, however, I realized I had better reason than usual to feel apprehensive. A tour could be judged as successful against a host of different criteria – there were as many opinions as there were observers and any credit could therefore be widely distributed. No such latitude applied to the unsuccessful tour. I knew that if the verdict on our Gulf expedition was unfavourable, in the scramble to avoid the ensuing derision I would be at a disadvantage. Royal displeasure is an unstable pyrotechnic, but I had already observed that it favoured soft targets – and I was pretty sure that they came no softer than the apprentice equerry.

Even more worrying was the discovery that this regal wrath could be directed almost at will by those whose domestic responsibilities kept them closest to the royal person at its less royal moments. It may be true that no man is a hero to his valet, but it was a law of Palace survival that only a hero (and a foolhardy one at that) would disoblige a royal valet and expect to escape the inevitable explosion. I now had almost unlimited power to disoblige valets and their ilk. One poisoned word from them would drop me deep in the mire. Two poisoned words, and I might as well run away to sea, assuming the Navy would have me back.

The reason we gave to sceptical hosts when they politely queried our extensive and precise domestic requirements was that to give of their best our employers had to feel that a little piece of KP was awaiting them at the end of an arduous day’s hot and dusty engagements. In this need for domestic predictability they perhaps echoed the travel-weary businessman’s preference for hotels whose location in the world is easily guessed from the name given to the bar, or the bartender.

Both being rather exacting in their personal requirements, the Prince and Princess induced an understandable nervousness in the valet and dresser, who would bear the brunt of any shortcomings. They in turn developed powers of critical invective that would be the envy of Michelin inspectors. Their judgement in such matters was absolute and would be shared sooner or later by the Prince and Princess. It was thus the equerry’s over-riding task on the recce to ensure that they never had cause to exercise their awesome power to turn cold toast (or a sticking window, or a hard mattress) into a tour-wrecking catastrophe.

As I dozed fitfully on my own lumpy Embassy mattress, I scared myself into a cold sweat with visions of royal domestic disaster. Missing baggage, inadequate transport, unpopular room allocations, unacceptable food … the list was endless. It was so unfair. Luck seemed to play such a huge part in deciding my success or failure. Every time – as the dream descended into nightmare – the vision ended with a posse of iron-wielding valets pursuing me, mouthing damning judgement on the arcane arrangements over which I had sweated blood.

I greeted my travelling companions blearily at breakfast. Their tasks all seemed so straightforward by comparison. No wonder they had all slept so well. Then I noticed John Riddell’s expression. The normal half-amused, donnish detachment was missing, replaced by a look of unusual preoccupation. It might have been the Kuwaiti version of an English breakfast staring back at him from his plate, but I preferred to believe, with relief, that he shared some of my anxiety.

In the exotic surroundings of the desert state – and with the excuse of jet lag and general mental disorientation – it was a struggle to remember that the basic rules of recceing were basically unchanged from those I was learning to apply in more mundane surroundings in Britain. To counteract this, I acquired the knack of dismissing my surroundings, however diverting, in order to concentrate on the simple staples of timing, route, press, protocol and security.

Begun as an act of self-preservation, it became a habit that eventually passed for professionalism. Sadly, it also meant that I was often oblivious to which great event or personality I was trying to organize, save for the need to contrive my courtier’s patter into a form I judged least provocative to the local culture. It is only now, years afterwards and without the benefit of even the sketchiest diary, that this lid of detachment has been edged aside by memories which have stood the test of time. Having remained so vivid, they are probably the only ones worth having – a thought that somewhat justifies my slothful scorn of the assiduous diarist.

Assiduous was not a description I felt I could apply to my performance on the Kuwait recce, except perhaps in comparison with our delegation as a whole. I was probably applying attitudes still shaped by the demands of the Navy, however, and had yet to realize fully the deceptive way in which the courtier’s imperturbable outer calm could be mistaken for ennui.

Against this background, you can perhaps imagine the trepidation with which I set off after breakfast to recce the Salaam guest palace. In an ominous development, none of my colleagues felt able to tear themselves away from their own duties in order to accompany me. The message was clear: this was definitely the equerry’s job and I was welcome to it.

Salaam means ‘welcome’ and nobody could doubt the sincerity of the Kuwaitis’ hospitality. Nonetheless, as I stood in the grandiose marble hallway of the Salaam palace my senses slowly alerted me to the fact that however grand the title, and however warm the welcome, our temporary home was going to give the entourage plenty on which to sharpen their critical faculties.

The livid green carpet emitted an unidentifiable musky odour, which was taken up and queasily repeated in the chemical whiff I caught from voluminous drapes and curtains that billowed in the air conditioning. Insecticide, I thought. Drains, I thought, as I checked the bathrooms. What’s that? I thought, as I peered into the subterranean kitchens.

Circular in design and labyrinthine in its floor plans, the guest palace offered a bewildering range of permutations when it came to allocating rooms to the tour party. There was, of course, a formula to guide ignorant equerries in this exacting science. Distance from the royal bedroom was not arbitrarily assigned and paid no regard at all to what an outsider might think the appropriate order by seniority. It was your job not your apparent status that determined your room.

Some, such as PPOs and valets, had to be close by. Most of the rest could be parked in an outer zone from which a short sprint could bring them to the door of the royal apartments, where they could cool their heels awaiting the summons. Others still were banished to the Intercontinental hotel down the road. These were the true fortunates, unless you counted royal proximity above reliable plumbing, crisp sheets, a minibar and direct-dial phone. Few did.

The days of the recce passed in a flurry of planning visits to clinics, palaces, museums, crèches, schools and even a camel race track. Everything had to be planned in minute detail – the protocol, the press, the security and the transport. Everything became blurred by fatigue and desert sand; and by the aftereffects of an intensive round of ex-pat entertainment. Down the Gulf the pattern was repeated, in Bahrein, Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Saudi Arabia.

Punch-drunk with planning and giddy with jet lag, I returned to London and managed to sell the draft programme successfully to the Princess, even though at times it threatened to remain just a confusing, technicolour jumble of memories.

It was six weeks before I returned to the Middle East. This time I was in charge of the small advance party that flew out ahead of the Prince and Princess to check on last-minute arrangements. To my dismay, instead of a few minor adjustments, I discovered that the programme needed quite major surgery. Since the recce, our hosts had made various ‘improvements’ which, though undoubtedly well intended, nevertheless posed a serious threat to the delicate structure of compromises that made up the final version approved by the Prince and Princess.

The Ambassador and his staff worked heroically to explain this and placate our puzzled hosts. At last a compromise was reached which left our original programme broadly recognizable, but I was still apprehensive as I prepared my uniform for the royal arrival next day. As if sensing my mood, several buttons chose that moment to come loose on my jacket. I clumsily set to work with the hotel repair kit, assailed by visions of bursting undone at a bad moment.

Later, I gave up the unequal struggle with my needle and thread and tackled the last of my chores for the evening. I phoned the Princess, as we had agreed I would. I imagined her at KP making her own last-minute preparations for departure in the morning. It seemed harder to imagine her waiting expectantly for me to phone.

This would not be an easy call, I thought, as I dialled the familiar number. The agreement was that I would tell her how I was getting on in general and, in particular, what she could expect to find when she finally stepped off the plane in Kuwait. She knew the programme was liable to change at short notice and, like any element of uncertainty in her public life, she found that very unsettling.

Should I tell her the changes I had been forced to agree to on my own initiative? Pre-tour morale – hers and mine – was fragile and I had no wish to incur her severe displeasure at this late stage. If I just presented her with a fait accompli when she arrived, however, I might face accusations of keeping her in the dark – a cardinal sin, if sometimes a necessary one. Perhaps I could fudge it…

‘Patrick!’ came a breathy voice. ‘I thought you must have fallen down an oil well. Where have you been?’ She giggled expectantly.

This was terrible. Often it was worse if she was nice. Goodwill expenditure was carefully noted in the royal ledger and there was usually a price to be paid sooner or later. Still, it might be worth testing. Should I tell her that new joke about the camel who applied for a sex change? Or would any sign of levity be seen as damning proof that I had been living the life of Riley in the sunshine?

‘Did you hear the one about the camel who—’

‘Patrick! I haven’t time for your smutty jokes now. Have you managed to sort the programme out? Assuming you haven’t been sitting by the pool all day.’