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The Queen at the Derby – both glum and jubilant (Les Wilson/Rex) (#litres_trial_promo)
The Queen and Duke of Edinburgh meeting flag-waving children (Tim Graham) (#litres_trial_promo)
The Queen arriving at Bristol on the Royal Train (Tim Graham) (#litres_trial_promo)
Princes William and Harry sharing a joke on the balcony at Buckingham Palace (Les Wilson/Rex) (#litres_trial_promo)
Introduction (#ulink_0cade27c-75a9-56ab-8cf9-b17ada722451)
Once upon a time kings and queens ruled the land. There was nothing mysterious about it; some of them invaded to take up the throne, others inherited via one route or another, but once installed they governed, they were the executive, they were all-powerful, they had their own armies and they chopped off the heads of anyone who thwarted them. People may not have liked their monarch, they may have grumbled about taxes or the extravagance of the court, or been tired of endless skirmishes with France, but no one was ever in any doubt about what their monarch was for.
Twelve hundred years later, after many changes (and a brief period in the seventeenth century when there was no monarch at all), we have a Queen who has no executive power, who acts entirely on the advice of ministers, who reads speeches that others have written, and who relies upon government for her keep. Four years after she came to the throne, a poll suggested that 34 per cent of the population believed that Elizabeth II had been chosen by God. Today you’d be hard pushed to find anyone who believed that God was involved in the process – it’s becoming enough of a challenge to find people who believe in God, full stop. Under these circumstances, in an age when our social order is based upon merit rather than inheritance, it is not surprising that we should ask what monarchy is for. Most children haven’t a clue, wouldn’t recognize members of the Royal Family and probably couldn’t care less. Their local football team or the latest contestants in I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out Of Here! are more relevant to their lives. There is indifference among the younger generation that must make the future of the monarchy highly questionable.
Republicanism is nothing new. There has always been a minority chipping away at the credibility of the monarchy, and although they seem to be increasingly vocal, they are still very much in the minority. But today even monarchists are beginning to question whether the institution, steeped as it is in history and tradition, can survive in the current climate of indifference and disrespect towards institutions and authority. And perhaps more importantly, as the newest member, the controversial figure of Camilla Parker Bowles is finally welcomed into the fold, as HRH the Duchess of Cornwall, whether the Royal Family, as individuals, can survive the ever more intrusive and destructive demands of the modern media.
The world has changed during the course of the present Queen’s reign, arguably more radically in the time span than at any period in history. Television was in its infancy when the Queen came to the throne in 1952. Many families, my own included, bought their first television set to watch the coronation – tiny little black and white sets that had to warm up before you saw a picture which then shrunk to a white dot when you turned them off. Fifty-two years later even the most modest mobile home has a colour television with a satellite dish on the roof, and in most households people would sell their granny before parting with the TV. It sits in pride of place, chattering away every waking hour, and defines our view of the world. News rolls seamlessly into drama, fact into fiction and all that is remembered is the sound bite.
And what television has created is the cult of the celebrity. People whose faces we recognize from the screen are the new idols, no matter whether they have talent, wit or wisdom. If their face has been on the box often enough for it to become familiar, they have instant status and national fame. And the public is greedy to know everything about its celebrities – which is where newspapers come into their own.
Newspapers have also changed since the fifties. When the Queen first came to the throne the newspapers, reflecting the age, were deferential towards the monarch. Proprietors could be relied upon to keep any whiff of royal scandal out of the papers. There were two court correspondents employed by the Press Association who went to Buckingham Palace for briefings – dressed in morning dress and top hat – and meekly lapped up official notices and announcements.
Today’s equivalent is a tabloid ‘rat pack’ charged by their editors with finding exclusives – gossip, scandal and as much personal detail as possible, and, in some cases, by whatever means possible. And the Royal Family is considered to be fair game, as the Countess of Wessex discovered to her cost when a reporter posing as a Middle Eastern sheik tried to employ her PR company. Actors, footballers, pop stars, politicians – many have suffered similar stings or found themselves unwillingly making headline news. And for a family that is dependent upon an army of staff to run their lives, it was only a matter of time before some of them became disgruntled or found irresistible the opportunity to make money by speaking to the press.
This is the environment in which today’s monarchy has to operate. It needs the oxygen of publicity no less than actors, entertainers and politicians, or anyone else with something to sell. The Queen understands this only too well, from history as well as her own experience. Never has the monarchy been so unpopular in modern times as when Queen Victoria vanished from sight after Prince Albert’s death in 1861. In her grief, she hid herself away at Balmoral and, although she carried on the affairs of state perfectly well, she did not make a public appearance in London for three years. The people were furious and when they did finally catch sight of her they pelted her carriage with stones. It was apparently not enough that she saw to her constitutional duties. The present Queen stayed away from London after the death of the Princess of Wales – she was also at Balmoral – and the public was again furious. They wanted to see their Queen. The newspaper headlines during the week before the funeral were the most critical of her reign and it was not until she returned to London and spoke to the nation on television, both as a grandmother and as Head of State, that the crisis, possibly the most serious of her reign, was averted.
The question is why? Why did so many thousands of people flock to Buckingham Palace in their grief rather than to Kensington Palace, which was where Diana had lived after all? Why did the nation want to see the Queen so badly? Strictly speaking, at the time of her death Diana was no longer a member of the Royal Family, and anyway, ought it not to have been her former husband to whom they should have looked?
The reason, I suspect, goes to the very heart of what monarchy is all about. It goes far beyond the constitutional. The Queen provides the focus for the nation’s emotion. When the nation is in mourning, it looks to the monarch to lead the process. In every major disaster, from Aberfan in 1966, where schoolchildren were buried beneath tons of coal slag, to 9/11, in 2001, when al-Qaeda suicide bombers flew passenger aircraft into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, or the Asian tsunami that killed over 120,000 people on Boxing Day in 2004 and left millions homeless, the Queen or another close member of the Royal Family has been there to express the nation’s grief. When the nation is jubilant at having won the World Cup or gold medals at the Olympics, the Queen congratulates and honours the winning teams on our behalf. When the East End of London and other cities were bombed during the Second World War the Queen’s parents, George VI and Queen Elizabeth, went to visit the devastation and much of the warmth that attached to the Queen Mother throughout her life came as a result of the solidarity and concern she and the King showed to the people of London.
The magic of monarchy is in the seeing. And it is magic – despite what cynics might say. Many of the people who work for the Queen and accompany her on away days and foreign tours describe their jobs as being the ‘Feel-Good Business’. And there is no doubt that people do feel good when they meet her. It doesn’t seem to matter that the papers have been filled with tawdry details of her children’s domestic disasters – the day she comes to town they stand for hours in all weathers clutching Union Jacks. They cheer when her gleaming Bentley with its royal flag on the roof appears with its police motorcycle outriders down the car-free high street. They cheer again when she steps out, smiling and waving; they reach forward at perilous angles to offer flowers and posies, proffer their children, and click frantically at their pocket Pentaxes when she comes within range. Everyone is smiling, everyone is elated and everyone takes away with them a memory to treasure for the rest of their lives. And for those who strike lucky and are the ones the Queen stops and talks to, they will probably never have an experience to match it.
Of course, the people who want to see the Queen on these visits already like her and probably approve of the institution. If they didn’t they wouldn’t bother standing and waiting in all weathers. But there are other occasions on which the Queen meets people when that is not the case. Not every worker in a factory, hospital or school is a monarchist; not everyone who is invited to a garden party or a reception at Buckingham Palace is a devoted fan, but there are not many who fail to be impressed when they meet the Queen, or who are indifferent to the recognition of their work and worth that such a meeting implies.
Recognizing, thanking, praising and rewarding citizens for their bravery, dedication, charity or work is another part of the monarch’s job. At one end of the scale outstanding service is rewarded to an individual with a peerage or a knighthood – although most of that is on the Prime Minister’s say-so and overtly political – but at the other end a visit to a factory is no less significant, and for the people on the production line to be asked to explain what they do by the Queen or the Prince of Wales, her heir, or even another member of the Royal Family, is a real fillip. It’s like as a schoolchild being singled out for praise by the headmistress when you didn’t even think she knew your name. People feel that their effort has been noticed and is appreciated, and in the lower-paid jobs that tend to be vocational, such as nursing or care work, that matters.
During the nineteenth century the family became an important part of monarchy, as Benjamin Disraeli, Prime Minister in 1868 and again from 1874 to 1880, acknowledged: ‘The influence of the Crown is not confined merely to political affairs. England is a domestic country. Here the home is revered and the hearth sacred. The nation is represented by a family – the Royal Family; and if that family is educated with a sense of responsibility and a sentiment of public duty, it is difficult to exaggerate the salutary influence they may exercise over a nation.’
Walter Bagehot was the first to note this. A Victorian economist and political analyst, Bagehot is often quoted from his book The English Constitution, first published in 1867 and which still provides the most enduring analysis of monarchy to date. ‘A family on the throne is an interesting idea,’ he wrote. ‘It brings down the pride of sovereignty to the level of petty life. No feeling could seem more childish than the enthusiasm of the English at the marriage of the Prince of Wales. They treated as a great political event, what, looked at as a matter of pure business, was very small indeed. But no feeling could be more like common human nature as it is, and as it is likely to be.’
The Prince of Wales he was referring to was the future Edward VII and the marriage that of Edward to the Danish Princess Alexandra in 1863, but he could just as easily have been writing about the first marriage of the present Prince of Wales to Lady Diana Spencer in 1981, 112 years later. There was a great display of childish enthusiasm for the event: the newspapers talked about little else for weeks beforehand, London’s Oxford Street hosted the biggest street party in the world in the couple’s honour, there was a massive fireworks display in Hyde Park and celebratory beacons were lit up and down the country. On the day of the wedding – declared a public holiday – millions lined the route between Buckingham Palace and St Paul’s Cathedral; the first arrivals had staked their claim to a piece of pavement three days before the wedding and an estimated seven hundred million more watched it on television. The Royal Wedding, as it was referred to for many years, notwithstanding the fact it had not been the only one, was a major landmark in most people’s memories, and until the cracks began to show it was an event that reaffirmed the monarchy’s place in people’s hearts.
Those were halcyon days. For the first thirty-five years of the Queen’s reign the Royal Family had been everything the nation could have wished for, a model for us all. But since then three of her four children have been through a divorce, with all the tawdry details paraded by the press, and the influence they exercise over the nation today is perhaps less than salutary. The troubled private life of the Prince of Wales, who finally, in February 2005, announced his intention to marry Camilla Parker Bowles, has made international news on and off for nearly twenty years. The breakdown of his marriage to Diana – according to her because of his obsession with Camilla – her revelations about their life together, his admission of adultery on prime-time television, their divorce and her subsequent death, split the nation’s loyalty. Some people recognized it to be an ill-starred match from the start and felt nothing but sympathy for everyone involved. Others, for whom Diana was an icon, roundly blamed the Prince, as Diana had done, for having destroyed her happiness. And the question of whether he should marry Camilla Parker Bowles, the figure at the centre of it, caused even greater division in the country.
But their private lives are a distraction. What the Royal Family does do, divorced or not, is work tirelessly for the people of Britain. First and foremost they give an inestimable boost to charity. The Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and each of their children, as well as several more distant relations, are all attached to charities – hundreds of them – to which they give time and support, and those charities benefit demonstrably from their royal connection. The profile goes up and so too do the donations; and there are many areas of national life, including education and health, that rely heavily upon the charitable sector.
Then there is tourism. Again, it is demonstrable that having a real live Royal Family who walk the corridors of Buckingham Palace, the Palace of Holyroodhouse and Windsor Castle is much more of a draw to visitors than empty buildings steeped in history; in Britain visitors get the best of both worlds. Hotels, shops, restaurants, pubs, trains, planes, taxis, car hire firms, not to mention galleries, museums and the regular tourist attractions and street stalls, all reap the rewards of having a town full of tourists.
But there are other functions of monarchy. Representing the nation to itself is another important one. The fact that the Royal Family has been a fixture in the life of everyone born and bred in either Britain or one of her dominions means that we associate the Royal Family with our roots, with home. They are familiar, just as red telephone boxes and double-decker buses are familiar, or driving on the left-hand side of the road, and for many people those familiars are comforting and define who we are and what we stand for. You may dislike buses, think phone boxes old-fashioned and think we would be better off driving on the right, but those fixtures still denote home and form part of our identity.
And because they are a fixture and change only imperceptibly, their very presence creates stability and continuity. The Queen has appeared in our living rooms on Christmas afternoon for more than fifty years; she has been Trooping the Colour on her official birthday on Horse Guards Parade for as long, and laying a wreath at the Cenotaph every 11 November. She and the Royal Family spend August in Scotland, Christmas at Sandringham, Easter at Windsor Castle and the Queen hasn’t missed Royal Ascot since 1945. It takes a birth, a death or a disaster to alter the routine of the Royal Family, and when so much else in life is turning upside down, that permanence and predictability provides an anchor, a national reference point, which makes people feel secure.
But her most obvious role is Head of State; she is also Supreme Governor of the Church of England, Colonel-in-Chief of the Armed Forces and Head of the Commonwealth. As a constitutional monarch, the Queen has no executive power – everything is done on advice from her ministers – and she reigns rather than rules, but she has great capacity for influence. She keeps her ministers in check and the system keeps the monarch in check. She undertakes ceremonial duties such as opening Parliament – and has the prerogative, among other things, to close it too should the need arise – she receives visiting heads of state, goes on state visits to other countries, receives diplomats, holds investitures and keeps abreast of affairs of state by weekly audiences with her prime minister and ‘doing the boxes’, her daily digest of Cabinet papers, Foreign and Commonwealth telegrams and ministerial papers. And having spent more than fifty years steeped in state papers, travelling the world, visiting cities, towns and villages, meeting everyone from presidents to farm and factory workers, she has more experience than anyone else in government. She has worked with eleven prime ministers and was discussing affairs of state with Winston Churchill before Tony Blair was even born.
That, in a nutshell, is what monarchy is for. Its critics say the system is outdated, that the hierarchical and hereditary nature of the institution is unacceptable in modern society, that the Royal Family lives a life of privilege and luxury at public expense and does nothing to earn it; individuals have been accused of abusing their position. All points that need to be addressed in assessing whether the monarchy is relevant in twenty-first-century Britain and whether it is likely to have a future beyond the reign of Queen Elizabeth II.
What follows is highly subjective. Having written about the Royal Family on and off for more than twenty years I have seen a lot of change, met a lot of people who have worked with and for members of the Royal Family, and seen the effect that they and their work and activity have had on individuals and society as a whole. I was not a dedicated monarchist when I started twenty years ago, and I am certainly not without criticism now. Nor am I without fears for the future. But I am convinced that this system that has stood the test of time, hierarchical and hereditary though it is, enriches our community beyond measure and Britain would be a poorer place without a monarch at the helm. And this is why…
ONE (#ulink_1c9d194a-ff76-5f31-8281-2b82b687e207)
An Extraordinary Way to Live (#ulink_1c9d194a-ff76-5f31-8281-2b82b687e207)
My first encounter with Buckingham Palace was in 1981. The Prince of Wales had just married Lady Diana Spencer in a spectacular ceremony at St Paul’s Cathedral; the country had been in a fever of excitement for months and I had been commissioned to write a biography of the bride. I approached the Palace and was instantly rebuffed. A letter on thick cream paper with Buckingham Palace at the top of the page, embossed in red, but with no address, informed me that they would not be able to help in any way. It was signed by Michael Shea, Press Secretary to HM The Queen – a very nice man, I subsequently discovered, an ex-diplomat, who is now an author himself, although not of royal books.
Four months later I wrote again and Michael Shea invited me in to see him. I will never forget the sensation of scrunching across the pink gravel at the front of Buckingham Palace, watched by dozens of Japanese tourists and busloads from Burnley, and stepping through the Privy Purse door at the extreme right of the building, into a world where time seemed to have stopped. Outside were guards standing stock-still in scarlet coats and black bearskins, with rifles beside their right ears, which immediately brought to mind A. A. Milne’s refrain about changing guard at Buckingham Palace. Inside were footmen in red waistcoats and tails and I was invited to wait in a room beautifully furnished with antiques. A copy of The Times – I am tempted to say, crisply ironed, but that would be a lie – lay on a table.
Michael Shea appeared, friendly palm outstretched, and took me down wide red-carpeted corridors into his office, another room beautifully furnished with antiques; not as one might have expected the communications centre of the British monarchy to have looked in 1981. But then there was no great tradition of helping the media at the Palace. Up until just thirteen years before, the man in Shea’s shoes was known as ‘The Abominable No Man’. Commander Richard Colville hated the press and for the twenty years he held the job he made no secret of his contempt. Newspapers didn’t even bother ringing the Palace when a royal story cropped up because they knew there would be no comment. Every other organization I had dealt with took public relations seriously; press officers went out of their way to help journalists and writers get the material they needed, aware that a good relationship could be extremely useful all round. Michael Shea was charm itself, but I wasn’t convinced that the Palace had come far from the days when the colour and fabric of the Queen’s outfit was their stock in trade. And in the absence of reliable guidance, journalists were apt to make mistakes, and in extremis to make things up.
These days they are more inventive. On 20 November 2003 the Royal Family awoke to the news that for the last two months they had had an impostor in their midst. Ryan Parry, a Daily Mirror reporter, had applied for a job as a trainee footman at Buckingham Palace, and, despite giving dodgy references, had been given a job which brought him into direct contact with members of the Royal Family. He was given a security pass that allowed him access to all areas and within days he had been shown the hiding place for skeleton keys to open every door in the Palace. He was still in situ when President Bush arrived on his state visit, amidst one of the tightest and most expensive security operations ever mounted in Britain. Not once was Parry questioned and not once were bags that he brought into the Palace checked. For two months he carried a camera in his pocket and the photographs he took of private areas, including bedrooms, were spread across the pages of the Daily Mirror for two days until the Palace sought an injunction to stop any more material being published.
It was a terrifying breach of security. Parry repeatedly pointed out that, had he been a terrorist, he could have killed the Queen or any member of the Royal Family. He could even have killed the President of the United States.
But as Edward Griffiths, the Deputy Master of the Household who employed the man, points out, he wasn’t. ‘He was neither a criminal nor had links with terrorists. In that sense he passed all the security checks.’ What the system doesn’t allow for is journalists posing as would-be terrorists.
Parry’s stunt was dressed up as a security alert. And, post 9/11, terrorism is a very real threat, although I’d have thought today’s suicide bombers are unlikely to go through the charade of applying for a post as an under-footman at Buckingham Palace. There must be quicker and more spectacular methods of blowing up the Queen or annihilating the British Royal Family. This was simply the most audacious assault yet on the Queen’s privacy and the privacy of other members of her family. And that was what had copies of the Daily Mirror flying off the shelves and newspapers and television channels all over the world reproducing the pictures. It was nothing more noble than the desire to see how the most famous family in Britain, notoriously secretive about its private life, actually lives. And the surprise was that the Queen, who lives in such grand palaces and castles, wears priceless diamonds and jewels and is reputed to be one of the richest women in the world, keeps her breakfast cornflakes in plastic Tupperware boxes, and when she’s not hosting state banquets for 160 she has supper in front of the television watching serials and soaps.
The word dysfunctional has often been used to describe the House of Windsor and it’s hard to find a better word. It’s equally hard to know why they behave so strangely. It is not that there is a lack of affection. The Prince of Wales has a tricky relationship with his father but that aside, the family are all very fond of one another, and in private there are great displays of affection when they meet and a lot of jokes and laughter. But they don’t talk to one another in the way that most families who enjoy one another’s company do. They don’t pick up the phone when they have something to say, and would never dream of saying ‘What a brilliant speech you gave last Wednesday’ – praise for each other’s achievements is not something they go in for – or ‘I’ve got a free evening, what are you up to?’ They write memos to each other or liaise through private secretaries.
And yet it seems to be only contact within the family that they find so difficult. They all make phone calls perfectly happily to courtiers, friends, government ministers and the people running their charities. Indeed, the Prince of Wales is seldom off the phone, as his private secretaries, and more particularly their wives, know all too well. He often makes calls himself – although ever since he announced who was calling and the voice at the other end said, ‘Yes, and I’m the Queen of Sheba’, he has said it is his Private Secretary calling until he is certain he has the person he wants.
The inter-family formality is perhaps a result of there being no clear distinction between their business and personal lives. They are on duty so much of the time and live so much on top of the job that they see more of their private secretaries than they do of their spouses or children. Yet although the relationship with their private secretaries is close, it is almost never a personal one. While the private secretaries are in post they are indispensable, not just in running their principals’ lives but also as sounding boards and occasionally confidants. They know everything that goes on, everything that passes through their bosses’ heads. But they are never friends, and as soon as they have gone, and someone else is in post, with very few exceptions they are lucky if they get a Christmas card.
The time of my first meeting with Michael Shea in 1981 were heady days for the House of Windsor. The wedding had been a triumph – ‘the stuff of which fairy tales are made’ as the Archbishop of Canterbury had said in his address. Diana, who was tall, leggy and gloriously photogenic, was on her way to becoming a superstar, and after months of recession, depression and inner-city riots, extravagant though it was, a full-blown state wedding with grand coaches and all the paraphernalia was just what the country needed. For most people it was a welcome distraction, a wonderful opportunity to celebrate; it was a boost to the nation’s morale, to tourism and to the security and popularity of the monarchy.
Diana had very exceptional qualities. I remember watching her during her first visit to Wales with the Prince, immediately after the honeymoon. As she climbed out of the car at their first stop, she looked briefly to her husband for reassurance and then set off into the crowds with a big smile on her face and arms outstretched to shake as many hands as she could reach. She was a natural; there wasn’t an elderly person in a wheelchair or a babe in arms that she didn’t notice and single out for attention. A thirty-second conversation is going to be banal at the best of times, but she seemed to find just the right words. ‘What nice shiny medals,’ she said to one hunchbacked old soldier, and then to his beaming wife, ‘Did you polish them for him?’ And when a seven-year-old boy called out from a couple of rows back, ‘My dad says give us a kiss’, she smiled and responded, ‘Well then, you’d better have one’, and leaning right forward gave the boy a kiss on the cheek.
The crowds were contained behind barriers on either side of the street, as with all such visits, leaving the middle clear for the royal party. Diana and Charles took one side each and there were audible groans of disappointment when people realized that they would get Charles rather than Diana. It was no secret that the enthusiasm and the flowers were all for Diana. ‘Do you want me to give those to her?’ Charles said time and time again as people held posies aloft and looked longingly in her direction. ‘I seem to do nothing but collect flowers these days. I know my role.’ He was laughing, and I have no doubt at all that at that time he was terribly proud of his wife and pleased that people liked her, but as time went by and the pattern repeated itself endlessly, his laughter began to ring hollow.
He was not used to sharing the limelight. He had been the centre of attention wherever he went for thirty-two years – and he was being eclipsed by his wife. His work, his speeches, his visits, everything was being overshadowed by Diana; and through no fault of her own. Later it became a deliberate ploy but at that time she was as surprised as anyone by the mania which gripped the nation. Every day some trivial story provided an excuse to have her on the front page of the newspapers. Charles began to lose heart – and who can blame him? There were so many serious and important issues that needed airing but no one seemed to be listening. All they seemed to care about was Diana’s wardrobe. Diana wore pearl chokers that had scarcely been seen since the nineteenth century and suddenly the shops were full of them. She wore culottes on honeymoon and culottes returned to fashion; high necks and they too flooded the market; and her hairstyle was copied in every high-street salon.
Diana’s popularity was phenomenal but it was not the first time that the nation, or indeed the world, had fallen in love with a beautiful royal princess. The Queen is good-looking now in her seventies – as the young Princess Elizabeth she was breathtakingly pretty. She was not tall and rangy like Diana, and her style was quite different, but she had flawless skin, a good figure and the most radiant smile that won hearts as surely as Diana’s did thirty years later. When the mania over Diana was at its height, one of the Queen’s courtiers said, ‘Ma’am, you will never have seen anything like the publicity Charles and Diana are having.’ ‘You were not around,’ she said witheringly, ‘when Margaret and I were having our future husbands talent-spotted for us. In comparison with the width and breadth and depth of the media in those days, it was just as great if not greater. Daily we were being lined up with some new suitor.’ ‘I couldn’t argue,’ he says. People turned out in their thousands not just in Britain but in the countries she visited all over the world to see Princess Elizabeth and cheer her. Monarchy at that time was revered in a way that the youth of today would find incomprehensible.
Her marriage in November 1947 to the Greek Prince Philip, a tall, blond, handsome naval officer, riveted a nation still in the grip of post-war austerity. It was broadcast on the radio in forty-two countries, millions of people sat glued to their sets, thousands lined the route to Westminster Abbey, dozens camped out in the Mall overnight to be sure of their place, and all over the country there were parties, fireworks and celebrations.
At her coronation six years later the traffic jams in London, into which people had begun flooding ten days before the ceremony, were so bad that the police had to ban all but priority and public service vehicles from entering an area within a two-mile radius of Westminster. ‘Never has there been such excitement,’ wrote Jock Colville, her Private Secretary, ‘never has a monarch received such adulation.’ Sir Charles Petrie, the monarchist historian, concurred. ‘For the first few years of her reign,’ he wrote in 1961, ‘she was the subject of adulation unparalleled since the days of Louis XIV.’
The excitement of the coronation went on for weeks, and the adulation for perhaps the first ten years of her reign, but as the Queen’s biographer Ben Pimlott observed, ‘Popularity is not normally seen as a reason for self-appraisal – it is more likely to encourage a belief that the existing formula is a successful one … Hence in the mid-1950s, on the back of the fragile post-war recovery, and cosseted by governments that were happy to bask in the reflected glory, the monarchy wasted its most bountiful years – taking what it was given in mindless admiration as its due.’
Elizabeth II was never going to be a radical monarch in any event. Her personality didn’t allow it. She was too shy and introverted, too conservative, too responsible to risk rocking the boat. She stepped into King George VI’s shoes when she was just twenty-five, a young mother with two small children and a passive acceptance of her destiny but no burning ambition to change either the world or the monarchy. She hero-worshipped her father and he was her role model; he was not the most charismatic of men, he was shy and had struggled with a stammer all his life, but he cared about people, about the less privileged, and with Queen Elizabeth beside him he had been an exemplary monarch, and perfect for restoring confidence in the monarchy after the trauma of his brother’s abdication. He was also perfect for the period when Britons pulled together against a common enemy; and in identifying himself so completely with their difficulties helped to stimulate a spirit of social solidarity which his daughter inherited. In the immediate aftermath of her coronation, there was no obvious need for change; and so along with his quiet, dutiful manner, she also inherited his courtiers, his palace and his way of working.
The young Elizabeth’s personality was both her handicap and her saviour. It may have prevented her from moving monarchy forward in those early years, but it also prevented her from believing her own publicity. It would have been very easy to let the adulation go to her head; to take it personally, as Diana, thirty years later did. The Queen never fell into that trap. She has always managed to differentiate between the public persona and the private one. In public she is Queen, Head of State, Supreme Governor of the Church of England, an office that she has the privilege to hold by virtue of her birth. And when people cheer and shout and proffer gifts and flowers, she knows they are only doing that because of the office she holds. If she were plain Mrs Windsor no one would turn a hair as she walked down the street. The face she presents to the outside world is the public face. Privately she is a wife, mother and rather doting grandmother, with a passion for dogs, horses, the countryside and traditional country sports.
With Diana there was no such demarcation; there had been no long preparation for a public role in life. Since the age of ten the Queen had been aware of the future that lay ahead and her education was tailored to that end. Diana started seeing the Prince of Wales in the summer of 1980; she was young and unsophisticated. She had come away from school with few qualifications, she had been briefly to finishing school in Switzerland, she had danced a bit, been a nanny for a while and was working as an assistant in a nursery school when she was suddenly, and unceremoniously thrust into the limelight. Less than a year later, on 29 July, just a month after her twentieth birthday, she had become the Princess of Wales, one of the most famous faces in the world. The Queen was used to the cameras, used to the publicity, used to being the centre of attention. She was a steady character from a secure and loving background. Diana was not. Aristocratic blood may have coursed through her veins but she was vulnerable and needy; she came from a broken home, with all the resultant insecurities. She had been parted from her mother when she was six years old and was desperate to be loved.
The media idolized Diana and public affection and adulation became a substitute for real-life emotions and personal relationships; but the public are fickle in their affections and the media brutal in its treatment of heroes who prove to have feet of clay.
It was not long before the great wave of popularity on which the Waleses and the monarchy rode at the time of the wedding collapsed into a deep trough and the media began to criticize the Princess it had once proclaimed so perfect. There were a hundred and one reasons why the fairy-tale match didn’t work but the Diana years, both good and bad, had a major effect on the monarchy and more change has probably come about since Diana married into the Family Firm – and quite a few since her death – than in all the years of the Queen’s reign put together.
TWO (#ulink_6dc17fc2-1675-55f0-ae0b-e1e0b1dc7ae8)
Keeping House (#ulink_6dc17fc2-1675-55f0-ae0b-e1e0b1dc7ae8)
The old-fashioned names haven’t changed – visitors are still met by a footman in red waistcoat at the Privy Purse door when they arrive at Buckingham Palace – and the protocol and ceremonial are just as they have been for centuries, but everything else behind that famous façade has undergone a major revolution and what was once an overstaffed, anachronistic and expensive rest home for landed peers and retired brigadiers in the heart of London has been quietly turned into a lean, mean, monarchy machine.
The monarchy is never going to be run exactly like any other business; it is obviously unique. It has to deal with everything from counting swans on the River Thames to making arrangements for visiting foreign potentates, but it is a business. The modern family regards itself as a working outfit, and Buckingham Palace is first and foremost the company’s head office. It is no cosy home and anyone who would like to evict the Royal Family and install the homeless, or whatever other change of use has been suggested for Buckingham Palace over the years, would also be evicting more than a hundred employees who live in the Palace, several hundred more who come in daily to work there, and yet more who come in on a casual basis when there are ceremonial events to marshal or big dos to cater. Buckingham Palace is not just a luxury home for the Queen and her family, where they are waited on hand and foot by flunkies with absurd-sounding names like Silver-Stick-in-Waiting and Ladies of the Bedchamber. Several members of the family have apartments there, where they stay during the week when they are in London, but it is not a home in any real sense and the Queen certainly doesn’t regard it as such.
The Palace is like a small village; it even has its own post office, doctor’s surgery and travel agent. Accommodation takes up a high percentage of the building: there are 52 royal and guest bedrooms, 188 staff bedrooms, and 78 bathrooms and lavatories; also 19 glorious state rooms and 92 offices. There are rooms for courtiers to sleep in if they are kept at the Palace late at night, and rooms for ladies-in-waiting and other members of the Queen’s household to stay in when they are on duty; there are suites for visiting heads of state and their entourages, and, of course, apartments for immediate members of the family. Prince Charles no longer has one – he moved out soon after his marriage and has always had a base in London since, but his sister and two brothers all have their own quarters on the second floor, quite separate from their parents. The rest of the Palace is given over to all the paraphernalia that goes with running a huge catering and hospitality operation: giant kitchens, store rooms, cellars, boiler rooms and a labyrinth of underground passages with great pipes and heating ducts, not unlike the lower decks on an ocean-going liner.
During the Middle Ages, the Norman and Plantagenet kings and their successors lived at the Palace of Westminster, which was rebuilt and now forms part of the Houses of Parliament. For two centuries, from the reign of Henry VIII to that of William III, Whitehall took its place but that was destroyed by fire and in the eighteenth century the Hanoverian kings used St James’s Palace, which Henry VIII had built as a hunting lodge. And although George III bought – in 1761 – and lived in the house that became Buckingham Palace, the ceremonial centre of the court remained at St James’s, which is why foreign ambassadors are still accredited to the Court of St James two centuries later. It was George IV who decided to convert Buckingham House (where his father had lived) into a palace and employed the architect John Nash for the job. George IV died before the work was completed – and Nash was sacked for financial incompetence – and the palace completed by William IV and the architect Edward Blore. But William never lived there. Queen Victoria was the first monarch to use Buckingham Palace when she came to the throne in 1837, and soon decided to extend it. None of the rooms was big enough for a court ball and after her marriage to Prince Albert she needed nursery space and so a new wing was built, on the eastern side of the building in the space where Nash had erected a decorative marble arch at the entrance to the forecourt. The arch was subsequently moved to the top of Park Lane and is the Marble Arch of fame from which distances to London are still measured.
So although it is not as old as the Queen’s other official residences, Buckingham Palace has been home to six monarchs and the focal point of the nation for more than 160 years. It is where visiting kings, queens and presidents are made royally welcome, where sumptuous state banquets are held, the tables adorned with antique glass, gilt, silver and priceless porcelain. It is where ambassadors and diplomats come to present their credentials, where the Prime Minister comes for his weekly audience, and where investitures are held, garden parties, informal lunches and lavish receptions. It has high ceilings, wide corridors and sweeping staircases, marble columns, miles of red carpet, and sumptuous furnishings. Fabulous paintings and etchings hang on the walls, giant crystal chandeliers dangle precariously from the ceilings; even the corridors are furnished with intricate inlaid cabinets, ornate clocks, sparkling mirrors, elegant tables, gilt-framed banquettes, delicate statues and tapestries centuries old.
It is probably one of the busiest buildings in London and one of the most versatile. And the reason it is only open to the public for six weeks of the year is because that is when the Queen is away and the only time of the year when the state rooms are not in constant use. Fifty thousand people are entertained in Buckingham Palace every year and the state rooms have a fast turnaround. It requires a small army to service those kinds of numbers and exceptional organization. There can be no off-days, no slip-ups. Everyone invited to the Palace, whether it is for a meal, a glass of wine or a cup of tea and a bun in the garden, will remember the experience and it has to be perfect.
The guards are largely ceremonial these days. It’s the armed policemen on the gate who form the first line of defence and, since 9/11, security has been stepped up. Visitors now need to have photographic proof of identity when they arrive, and their appointments must be known to the footmen at the Privy Purse entrance, but otherwise it is surprisingly relaxed. The Queen is not prepared to turn her home into a fortress. She accepts security as a necessary evil of the modern world, but she doesn’t like it, any more than the rest of the family; and she takes a pragmatic view of the matter – the only sensible thing to do in her situation. If someone wanted to kill her I have no doubt they could. One former minister says he would scrap security altogether. ‘I’m very fatalistic about these things,’ he says. ‘It’s part of being royal; you are at risk. No security is absolute.’
The Prince and Princess of Wales lived in an apartment in Kensington Palace, where they were neighbours of Princess Margaret, Prince and Princess Michael of Kent, Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester, and the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester. After their divorce Diana stayed at KP, as it is known, and Charles moved into York House, a part of St James’s Palace, where he and the Princess had their offices. And after the Queen Mother’s death in 2002 he took over Clarence House, across the courtyard from St James’s and a four-minute walk from Buckingham Palace. Clarence House was a sentimental return for him to a house filled with good memories. He lived there until the age of three when his mother became Queen and the family had to move to Buckingham Palace. None of them wanted to go. They loved Clarence House; it was a family home but Winston Churchill, who was then Prime Minister, insisted upon it and according to Michael Parker, the Duke of Edinburgh’s Private Secretary at the time, who travelled with the family as they left for Buckingham Palace, ‘there was not a dry eye in that car’. It then became Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother’s home and Charles, who adored his grandmother, was a constant visitor both as a child and adult.
The Queen has five residences in all – Buckingham Palace is head office, and where over half of all the 650 or so people who work for her in these various residences are based. Windsor Castle, in Berkshire, is where she goes at weekends and the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh, where she spends a week in the summer. If she is at either of those in her official capacity, the court travels with her. If it is informal, she takes minimal staff but always a Private Secretary. These three residences are all official and effectively owned by the state. Sandringham House in Norfolk and Balmoral Castle in Deeside are privately owned and the Royal Family traditionally spends several weeks after Christmas at Sandringham and two months in the summer at Balmoral.
The most senior member of the Queen’s household is the Lord Chamberlain, currently Lord Luce, a former Conservative minister, a charming, popular and clever man with perfect credentials for the job; but arguably the more powerful individual in Buckingham Palace at any one time is the Queen’s Principal Private Secretary. In an ordinary company he would be the equivalent of managing director or chief executive, and the Lord Chamberlain chairman. The Private Secretary is the one who advises the Queen, who structures her programme, who writes her speeches and who is the interface between her and 10 Downing Street; also with her governments in the seventeen Commonwealth countries in which she is sovereign. And the current incumbent, Sir Robin Janvrin, is generally agreed to be a very good thing.
The Queen has worked with eleven prime ministers in Britain and since devolution now meets the Scottish First Minister for regular audiences too, and after more than fifty years there is very little to surprise her in politics. John Major met her almost every week for the six and a half years of his premiership and spent a weekend at Balmoral each summer with his wife Norma, as prime ministers traditionally do. Insiders say she liked Major. Margaret Thatcher never seemed to relax; Tony Blair she finds easier.
‘The monarch’s power is not raw power but influence,’ says Major; ‘influence and access.’
Politicians have taken the power away from the monarchy for the last three hundred years. Charles II came back post-Cromwell with few of the powers of Charles I. It has lessened ever since. There are residual powers; if the country was deadlocked after a general election the Queen would have to decide who to send for; but that’s not to say the Queen doesn’t express opinions to the Prime Minister, delicately. She wouldn’t say ‘x is good and y is bad, you ought not to appoint them’, but she does ask questions about policy. The Queen would pose questions that other people might not necessarily ask the PM and he would not be able to say to the Queen, ‘I’m sorry I can’t tell you that’, because there is nothing barred in those conversations. They talk freely, no one records the meeting, nor is any note taken. It is entirely private; on both sides there is a total block on the detail of what is discussed. Because of that, there can be, and in my experience is, total freedom of expression between the Monarch and her Prime Minister about what is happening, what it means and what might follow from it. There is humour too, and in privacy, personal vignettes. I found my discussions with the Queen immensely valuable. First, because one could talk to the Queen in a way you could talk to no one else. I can’t tell you how useful that is. A sounding board, partly, yes, but what she gave was a completely dispassionate point of view. Whenever a PM talks to his ministers, unless he has a very close relationship, of the sort I had, say, with Douglas Hurd or Ian Lang, you don’t have the total certainty that you have an absolutely unbiased answer coming back. The more self-opinionated the PM is the less you are likely to get a proper answer, but I don’t think the Queen would be unwilling to give a proper answer or express a view. She wouldn’t charge in and say ‘I think you’re making a complete mess of this policy’, she would ask about it, how it affected people, how it would work, what its implications would be. She would have a sense of value too: ‘Isn’t that going to be very expensive?’ And that’s extremely valuable because in my case – although this might vary with other PMs – I would talk about the principles of the policy sometimes even before I put it to the Cabinet or anywhere else. My Audiences with the Queen were a breath of fresh air.
During the difficult and unpredictable days when the royal marriage was unravelling, Sir Robert Fellowes held the post of Private Secretary. It was a tough call since he was also Diana’s brother-in-law, married to Diana’s eldest sister, Jane. He was the son of the Queen’s land agent at Sandringham, and very much of the aristocratic, Old Etonian, ex-Army, ex-City, hunting, shooting, fishing brigade and therefore someone with whom the Queen was entirely comfortable. He looked ‘the part’ as John Major would say, ‘but he was never a stuffed shirt’. Others describe him as Bertie Wooster-ish, after the P. G. Wodehouse character, and to outsiders he seemed to embody so much of the stuffiness that the Princess of Wales complained about in the royal household. But as everyone who knows Sir Robert says, his looks are deceptive: he was actually a modernizer and greatly behind the move for change. He is very able, sensitive, shrewd and hugely underestimated. ‘He’s got a lot of realism, an ability to get things done, to embrace ideas even if they are not his own, and be open to suggestion,’ says a former colleague. ‘When you went into battle with him on your side you knew you might be shot on the field of battle but by the enemy, not your own team. That’s a nice feeling.’
However, for much of the time during the 1990s the Prince of Wales didn’t share the same warm feeling about his mother’s Private Secretary, and by no means always felt he was on his side. He felt that Fellowes was out to scupper him and there were times of virtual warfare between his office in St James’s Palace and Buckingham Palace, particularly over the matter of Camilla Parker Bowles. Fellowes disapproved of the Prince’s relationship with Camilla. It was his conviction that all the difficulties that had befallen the House of Windsor in recent times had been because of the Prince’s determination to hang on to Camilla, and there was a lot of truth in that.
THREE (#ulink_ee15f1fc-78d3-5bee-bef2-c548499df7bd)
Winds of Change (#ulink_ee15f1fc-78d3-5bee-bef2-c548499df7bd)
When Robert Fellowes retired in January 1999 after twenty-two years with the Queen, some of the most difficult of her reign, for a lucrative life in the City, his deputy, Sir Robin Janvrin, stepped into his shoes. Janvrin, now in his late fifties, is a departure from his predecessors, and relations with the Prince of Wales’s office have improved since his appointment. He has no landowning background, no country pile. The son of a vice admiral, he was educated at Marlborough and Brasenose College, Oxford, where he studied, fortuitously given his current job, under the constitutional historian Dr Vernon Bogdanor, who is still a good friend and useful ally. He then followed his father into the Navy for a ten-year stint before joining the Foreign Office, and in 1987, at the age of forty-one, began work in the Buckingham Palace Press Office. He is another clever man, but wears it lightly. He is cautious; he likes to think things through before making a decision, but his style is relaxed, he doesn’t panic, his colleagues love him and he has an air of normality which so many courtiers of yore never had. One could imagine him running for a bus, hanging from a strap on the underground, or washing the family car – all everyday Middle England things that if the Queen herself can’t do, then those around her certainly should.
In the late 1950s Lord Altrincham (later John Grigg, the historian and biographer) had attacked the Queen for surrounding herself by hunting, shooting and fishing types – many of whom wouldn’t have known where to find a bus. He wrote a stinging critique of the monarchy in a journal he edited called National and English Review, and, coming at a time when no one said or wrote anything derogatory about the monarchy, it caused outrage. He said it had become complacent and hidebound, that the Queen had failed to take the opportunity in this ‘New Elizabethan Age’ to make changes. His ideal was a ‘truly classless and Commonwealth Court’; George V had shaped the modern institution and borne a ‘classless stamp’, the Queen and her sister, by contrast, largely because of their conventional aristocratic education, bore ‘the debutante stamp’ and, by favouring ‘the “tweedy” sort’, bolstered the court’s ‘social lopsidedness’. He went on to attack the Queen’s speaking style, ‘which is frankly “a pain in the neck”’, and said that ‘The personality conveyed by the utterances which are put into her mouth is that of a priggish schoolgirl, captain of the hockey team, a prefect, and a recent candidate for Confirmation.’
The utterances, of course, were put into her mouth by her Private Secretary, at that time Sir Michael Adeane, who was fiercely clever but ultra-conservative and a courtier to his boot straps. He had been Assistant Private Secretary to George VI from 1937 and stayed in post with the Queen for nineteen years. However, the whole episode provided ample proof of how very influential the Private Secretary was, and still is. He determines how the sovereign’s reign is viewed by the public and ultimately posterity. He sees the Queen almost as much as her husband; they meet every morning to go through correspondence and paperwork, he briefs her on the day’s programme and the people she will meet, and they discuss anything that is relevant in the news or of constitutional or political interest. She relies upon him to be her eyes and ears and to give her sound advice and guidance.
Today the Principal Private Secretary has two deputies and one of the three of them will always be with the Queen. He will travel with her on major engagements away from the Palace and will be on duty wherever she is in residence, even during holiday periods like Christmas and Easter in case anything unforeseen happens. Robin Janvrin was on duty the night of Diana’s fatal accident in Paris. He was asleep in a cottage in the grounds at Balmoral when a call came through from the British Ambassador in Paris. It was Janvrin who had the unenviable task of breaking the news to the Queen and to the Prince of Wales, both of whom were also asleep in the castle. And it was he during the following week – which so very nearly brought about disaster – who tried to persuade the Queen to let a flag fly over Buckingham Palace. Robert Fellowes has been blamed for the failures of that week but it was the Queen, backed up by the Duke of Edinburgh, who was refusing to listen to advice. Fellowes was in London and could see at first hand what was going on outside the gates of Buckingham Palace and the damage being done by the Queen remaining silent and stoic in the Highlands.
The Queen is said to regret her delay in visiting Aberfan in 1966, recognizing with hindsight that it was a mistake not to be there immediately to comfort the grieving and express her sorrow; I suspect she regrets her instincts during that week after Diana’s death, too. Her first thoughts were for her grandsons, and for once she put family before duty. It was a mistake, however, to let the nation believe that neither she nor any other member of the Royal Family cared about the tragedy that had pole-axed the nation. She misjudged it. Shut away in Balmoral she was insulated from the real world; she couldn’t feel the raw emotion that those in the streets could feel, particularly in London around the palaces where tributes, flowers and teddy bears were being piled high. She thought that the answer to the mass hysteria was to stay calm and to keep on doing what the family had always done, safe in tradition. A flag had never flown at half mast over Buckingham Palace, not even for the death of a sovereign; it would be wrong to do it for Diana. The Queen only ever broadcast to the nation in times of national emergency and on Christmas afternoon; why speak now when Diana was no longer even a member of the Royal Family? What they all learned that week was that doing things in a certain way, because it was the way they had been done in the past, was not the safe formula they had hoped. They wisely changed, just as they had wisely changed a decade earlier.
In the mid-1980s the monarchy had hit a low patch. The honeymoon was over, both for the royal marriage and the revived fortunes of the institution. The media were becoming critical of the younger members of the family and the Labour Party was becoming ever more critical of the cost. The flash-point was It’s A Royal Knockout, a television programme aired in June 1987, which marked the Royal Family’s descent to celebrity showbiz status. It was a one-off special of the then hugely popular but very silly BBC game show It’s A Knockout. It was Edward’s idea for raising money for the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award’s 30th anniversary. The show parodied royal ceremonial and he persuaded Princess Anne, Prince Andrew and his new wife Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, to join him in dressing up in mock Tudor costume and making complete fools of themselves alongside celebrities like Barbara Windsor, Les Dawson and Rowan Atkinson. The ratings soared through the roof and the event raised over £1 million, which was divided between the Award, Save the Children, the World Wildlife Fund and the International Year of Shelter for the Homeless. But it came at a terrible price for the dignity of the monarchy. To make matters worse, at a press conference afterwards, as embarrassed journalists tried to find some way of being polite when asked what they had thought of it, twenty-three-year-old Edward, at that time very arrogant, lost his temper and stormed petulantly out of the tent. The following day’s newspapers led with the inevitable headline ‘It’s A Royal Walkout’.
It is incidents like this that have cemented attitudes over the years. Prince Edward has never been allowed to forget his mistake and understandably he resents the press as a result which simply reinforces the impression that he is arrogant, and it becomes a vicious circle.
Princess Margaret was always perceived as spoilt because of her behaviour when she was young and that label stuck, yet the people who knew her say while she could be imperious, she was actually very kind and caring. Prince Philip is thought of as a reactionary old fool who always puts his foot in it. He has made some howlers in his time, there is no escaping it, but he is about as foolish as a fox. History will show him to have made a very serious contribution to the success of the Queen’s reign – as well having been a prime mover in the field of conservation. Yet whenever he makes a joke that falls flat – usually done in an attempt to put some stranger at their ease – out comes the catalogue of blunders from the past and suggestions from some nonentity of an MP that he should stay out of public life. The Prince of Wales once admitted to talking to his plants and has been ridiculed as the loony Prince by his detractors ever since. Princess Anne is about the only one who has managed to turn round her early image and having once been one of the most unpopular members of the Royal Family is now seen as one of the hardest working and best liked.
It will be interesting to see whether Prince Harry will be able to shake off the labels that have already been attached to him. Of all his misdemeanours, choosing a Nazi outfit to wear to a friend’s fancy dress party in January 2005 was the most idiotic. The underage drinking, the partying, the marijuana, the girls, even taking a punch at a photographer outside a London nightclub were forgivable. He was young, not thinking, he’s had an unsettled childhood; any or all of these could have happened to any teenager or twenty-year-old. As could the Nazi episode. Today’s young are blissfully unaware of history (some of them aren’t even taught it in our schools). None of his contemporaries at the party noticed anything wrong, and the person who sent the photos to the Sun hadn’t even realized the significance. They thought the interesting picture was the one of Prince William dressed as a lion.
The problem is that Harry isn’t just any twenty-year-old. He may not feel any different from his mates but he can’t afford to behave like them. He is third in line to the throne and, like it or not, he is living in a goldfish bowl. Wherever he goes – even to the most private of parties – where there is a mobile phone, there is a camera. And after this the tabloids will be sitting with cheque books open waiting for the next cracking picture. They have had Harry tailed in the past and they can do it again; it may not be fair but it sells newspapers and some of those are always happy to have a pop at the monarchy.
During the eighties there were two key people in the household who realized that if there was to be a secure future change was imperative. Both were newly in post. In December 1984, David, the thirteenth Earl of Airlie, had become Lord Chamberlain in place of Lord ‘Chips’ Maclean, twenty-seventh chief of Clan Maclean, the last in a long tradition of well-bred amateurs. David Airlie may have been aristocratic, and with a family castle and sixty-nine thousand acres in Scotland he was undoubtedly ‘tweedy’, and he may have been a Scots Guard for five years, but he was no amateur. He was a highly successful merchant banker with thirty-five years’ experience – he had just stepped down as chairman of Schroders when he came to the Palace – and, according to one colleague, was ‘marvellous, canny, and a wise businessman’. Better still, he was an old friend of the Queen – they are less than four weeks apart in age and have known each other all their lives. His family home was five miles from Glamis Castle, where the Queen Mother grew up, his wife, Virginia, was and still is one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting, and his younger brother was Sir Angus Ogilvy, who sadly died recently but who was married to the Queen’s cousin, Princess Alexandra. He was just what the House of Windsor needed: a delightful, wise and down-to-earth man who could gently steer the monarchy away from the treacherous rocks towards which it was surely headed.
Two years later Sir Philip Moore retired as Private Secretary – the last of the ancien régime – and was replaced by Bill Heseltine, who had been patiently waiting in the wings. He was the Australian who had succeeded Commander Richard Colville as Press Officer at the end of the 1960s and revolutionized the Palace’s relationship with the media. The two men were of one mind: the growing criticism had to be addressed; the world had moved on – just about every other major company and business in the Western world had reorganized itself; streamlined, modernized and introduced best practices. The Firm needed to be firmly nudged into the twentieth century.
It was George VI who first referred to the House of Windsor as The Firm and the name stuck – although some have called it Monarchy plc – and when David Airlie was appointed it was still run along lines that George VI and probably even Queen Victoria a century earlier, would have recognized and felt comfortable with.
When Michael Colborne, a naval chief petty officer, arrived to look after the Prince of Wales’s office in 1979, he was the only person at his level in the Palace who had not been to a major public school. ‘If you didn’t go to the right school you didn’t fit; you didn’t speak the language. It could be very uncomfortable for people like me. They called me the “Rough Diamond”. I lived there for six months and I felt so lonely in the Palace.’
‘It was all rather stuck in the mud, in a time warp,’ remembers someone else. ‘The Palace was still recruiting from certain sections of society and the Queen hadn’t been particularly well served. There was a country house atmosphere; things were being done in the same way they’d been done for twenty, thirty or nearer a hundred years – since Prince Albert’s time probably. There were some excellent individuals there, who had no doubt wanted to move things forward a bit, but there had never been the concerted pressure to do it.’
David Airlie provided that pressure. He already had experience of modernizing companies and had learned lessons in the process which were invaluable in the mammoth task before him at Buckingham Palace. He had done it at General Accident and Schroders, in both cases bringing in outside consultants to report on whether best practices were being followed; he recommended to the Queen that they go down the same route. And so in February 1986, by which time he had a good idea of what needed to be done – and it included first and foremost getting rid of excessive government interference – he called in the City accountancy firm Peat Marwick McLintock, who were already the Palace auditors, to overhaul the finances and look at the workings of the household from top to bottom. He was anxious that the Treasury should take the findings seriously and Peat Marwick had the necessary clout to impress them. It was vital, he felt, for the report to be paid for and carried out internally and not financed by government money; the Treasury could see the report but they were not to be involved. The man who conducted the study was Michael Peat, a partner in the family firm then in his mid-thirties. His father, Sir Gerrard Peat, had been auditor and assistant auditor to the Queen’s Privy Purse since 1969 and Michael had frequently worked alongside him in the past so was already familiar with the Palace’s finances, and, crucially, already knew David Airlie.
It was a major undertaking which took a full year, but in 1987 Peat came up with a report that ran to 1383 pages, with no fewer than 188 recommendations for change. They were wide-ranging but fundamentally changed the working practices of every department in the Palace, from the dining arrangements to the way in which the private secretaries operated.
Michael Peat gives all the credit to David Airlie, on the grounds that identifying what was wrong was the easy bit; persuading the Queen and everyone else in the Royal Family and the household to accept it and to agree to change, was quite another matter. And, to his lasting credit, David Airlie achieved it, although he is equally modest and says that Michael Peat was the mastermind. In truth they were a formidable double act who both became extremely unpopular in the process. It was an unhappy time in the Palace with everyone uncertain about their future. One of Airlie’s stipulations was that there would be no job losses – natural wastage yes, but no one would find themselves out of a job. That was paramount because he could not put the Queen in a position where she had to sack people – they couldn’t afford bad publicity during this process – but there was a lot of uncertainty and edginess nevertheless and a feeling that each department was the next for change. But between them they achieved what many thought was the impossible.
FOUR (#ulink_b39d75e2-cd6a-50c1-8502-854a05cec48f)
188 Recommendations (#ulink_b39d75e2-cd6a-50c1-8502-854a05cec48f)
I can’t help thinking about A. A. Milne again and his wonderful poem, ‘The King’s Breakfast’ in which the King laments the lack of butter on his breakfast table. He isn’t a fussy man but he knows what he likes. And so he tells the Queen and the Queen tells the dairymaid who goes to tell the cow. But the cow wants to go to sleep and suggests he try marmalade on his bread instead of butter. So back goes the suggestion from the cow to the dairymaid and the dairymaid to the Queen and from the Queen to the King. But the King is forlorn and sobs and whimpers and when the news reaches the cow, via the Queen and the dairymaid, the cow relents and gives him milk as well as butter. And the King is so delighted he does a little jig.
I am not sure that the dairymaid actually attended the royal breakfast before Lord Airlie called in Peat Marwick McLintock to see how Buckingham Palace might be modernized, but the royal household was certainly overrun with flunkies – ‘Why have I got so many footmen?’ the Queen was said to have asked when she saw the report. And whether A. A. Milne knew it or not, milk and butter for the royal breakfast does come from a royal herd of Jersey cows in Windsor Great Park, delivered to the Palace each morning before dawn.
The Palace dining arrangements were definitely in need of an overhaul and Peat and Airlie discussed them but decided this was one change too far for the immediate future. In the grand scheme of things, five tiers of dining and waiting staff in tailcoats was a mere detail compared with the other 188 problems they had earmarked for change, and they feared that coming between their colleagues and their comestibles might be the straw that broke the camel’s back.
It was a very quaint system nonetheless and one which was only changed a couple of years ago. The most senior members of the household ate in the grandest dining room; that included the Lord Chamberlain, the private secretaries, the Master of the Household, ladies-in-waiting, press secretaries, and chaplains, senior Women of the Bedchamber, the Mistress of the Robes and the Keeper of the Privy Purse. A second dining room was the province of senior officials such as the assistants to the Master of the Household, the Chief Housekeeper and the Paymaster. Then there was one for the officials – secretaries and assistants, clerks, press officers, typists and administrative personnel. Next rung down were the stewards: pages, yeomen, the Queen’s dressers and her chauffeur. And below stairs – in the basement – was the fifth and final dining room for the most junior members of the domestic staff: under-butlers, footmen, chefs, maids, porters, postmen, plumbers, gardeners, grooms and chauffeurs.
The first summer the Palace was opened to the public, the most senior of the dining rooms was given over to the summer opening administrative staff which involved some very unpopular rearrangements. The occupants of that room took over the room belonging to the next tier down, and they in turn were forced to double up with the junior staff in the basement. Some of them had never ventured into the basement and so many got lost en route that they had to put up signs to direct them. August was not a happy month.
When change finally came, in June 2003, the four dining rooms were reduced to two. The household continues to eat separately, except during the summer opening and on a few other occasions, and everyone else has a snazzy new self-service restaurant. There is also a separate room with comfortable chairs for coffee and tea which is also open to every grade of employee. Since so many work shifts and odd hours it was the only sensible solution, and in a stroke attacked the rigid hierarchy that most enlightened companies abandoned years ago.
The organizational structure Lord Airlie discovered inside Buckingham Palace when he arrived there as Lord Chamberlain in 1984 was unique. And although he implemented well over 160 of 188 recommendations for change to make it more efficient and businesslike – including the role of the Lord Chamberlain – it remains unique to this day. Nothing compares, and yet the monarchy is more of a business today than it ever was in previous reigns. In a typical company you have a chairman, a chief executive who reports to the chairman, and four or five departmental heads who report to the chief executive. All of these posts exist in the royal household, by one name or another, but in the final analysis the Queen is the one who makes the decisions about the day-to-day affairs and so the departmental heads have direct access to the Queen over the head of the Lord Chamberlain. ‘The Lord Chamberlain is a sort of hands-on chairman of a company with one shareholder’ is the way it was described to me. The departmental heads do report to him and he chairs regular meetings with them all, but he does not get involved in the detail of whether the Queen goes to New Zealand or Birmingham, who she invites to lunch or which state coach she uses for a state visit. Before Lord Airlie took up the post there was no cohesion at the top of the household, no communication and no reporting structure, and although it is still not set in stone because of the Queen’s role in the decision-making process, it is a lot more efficient than it was before.
