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The names of the posts, however, are still from another era. The Lord Chamberlain is not, as the name might suggest, in charge of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office. That is the Comptroller’s job – currently held by Lieutenant Colonel Sir Malcolm Ross, a thoroughly charming old Etonian of sixty plus, who spent twenty-three years in the Scots Guards and the remainder of his career in the royal household. He is a wonderful product of the two and perfect for the job of running the ceremonial side of the monarchy, which he does except when there are ‘issues of import’ such as the Princess of Wales’s funeral to be arranged. In that event, the Lord Chamberlain swings into action and takes charge of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, which is where you would have expected him to be in the first place.
Once he had completed the report, Lord Airlie arranged for Michael Peat to stay on at the Palace for the next three years to help him develop and implement the recommendations Peat had made. The two men had worked very closely together during the writing of the report and got on well together; Airlie’s past experience at Schroders and General Accident had taught him that it was vital for the chairman to work closely with the consultant. Airlie knew that many of Peat’s ideas would never fly and he was able to say so right away and eliminate unnecessary work. The entire thing was the art of the possible and some reforms had to be sacrificed in the interests of progressing more important ones.
Among the most important was sorting out the Civil List. This is the sum voted by Parliament to pay for the sovereign in carrying out her duties as Head of State, and for the running of the royal household. It is much misunderstood and has caused more grief over the years to the monarchy than anything else. It is worth putting the cost into perspective. The monarchy costs £36.8 million a year to run; the Atomic Physics Particle Research Laboratory, by comparison, costs about £100 million, the Welsh fourth television channel (S4C) about £74 million a year, the British Museum about £40 million. But where the comparison falls down is that the last three are paid for by the taxpayer, and the taxpayer doesn’t actually pay for the monarchy at all. It is paid for by the revenue that comes from the Crown Estates. The taxpayer doesn’t pay a penny. After the Norman Conquest in 1066 all the lands of England belonged to William the Conqueror and he and his successors received the rent and profits from the land, which they used to finance the government. Over the years monarchs sold bits of land or gave away large estates to nobles and barons in return for military service until, by 1702 (historians must forgive me for simplifying the story), there wasn’t enough income from what remained to pay for the cost of the government (which had grown in the intervening seven hundred years) and the royal household. Parliament therefore introduced an Act to stop the Crown selling off more of its land, and took over management of the estates. When George III came to the throne in 1760 he relinquished his right to the revenue in return for a fixed annual sum of money from Parliament, which became known as the Civil List. The Crown Estate still belongs to the sovereign ‘in the right of the Crown’, which means it is not her private property, but at the beginning of each reign the new sovereign traditionally hands over the revenue from the Crown Estate to the Exchequer for his or her lifetime.
It is a huge business. The Estate owns more than 250,000 acres of agricultural land throughout England and Scotland: 7500 acres of forestry at Windsor, another 7500 at Glenlivet, more in Somerset and smaller amounts elsewhere; and it owns Windsor Great Park – a further 5313 acres which includes Ascot Racecourse. It also has urban estates, mostly in central London – residential property in Regent’s Park, Kensington and Millbank; and commercial property in Regent Street, Victoria Street and in the City, including the site of the Royal Mint. It also owns more than half of the United Kingdom’s foreshore and almost all the seabed to a limit of twelve miles from the shore, which is used for everything from marine industries to leisure activities.
All of this is run by a Board of Commissioners which employs experts in various fields of estate management, and under the Crown Estate Act of 1961 has a duty to maintain and enhance the value of the Estate. Management fees are taken out of the revenue, but the remainder – about £150 million – goes to the Treasury. Thirty-six million pounds from that sum is paid to the Queen, and the government pockets the rest to meet general government expenditure.
Even with my limited grasp of mathematics, the Queen is not the leech we have been led to believe. She does not cost the country a brass farthing, but is actually saving the taxpayer something like £114 million. If that money wasn’t coming from the Crown Estate you can bet your boots it would come from the taxpayer, and, indeed, if the Queen went mad and splashed out on a new aircraft, or a flashy new coach and spent too much the taxpayer would have to pay more for the shortfall. Parliament decides how much money the sovereign should have, and in that respect acts like a trustee of an old family trust, which in a constitutional monarchy is just as it should be. Parliament needs to make sure the Queen isn’t more of a financial burden than she has to be, not because it has to pay for her if she is, but because the more money there is left over after paying the Civil List, the more there is for general expenditure.
When Airlie arrived the Civil List was paid and reviewed annually, and this had been the arrangement since the 1970s when inflation had started running rampant. Some years it was running in double figures and each year there were increases in the Civil List, announced in Parliament, in line with inflation. From the public relations point of view this was bad news. It looked as though the Queen was being voted a 10 or 15 per cent pay rise, which, of course, was nonsense but made a very provocative headline. In practical terms it was disastrous too; government was so heavily involved in the detail and the everyday running of the organization, checking and rechecking expenditure to the point where it was impossible to make any long-term decisions and impossible to do what they wanted to do with the money. Airlie and Peat wanted the Treasury off their backs and were determined that the royal household should be master of its own destiny.
Their plan was to get the Civil List agreed for a ten-year period and be allowed to manage the money themselves, free from government interference. The Treasury agreed in principle; the difficulty was agreeing a figure, which, even if inflation continued to rise, would not leave the household short of funds. The Treasury’s refusal to acknowledge the existence of inflation made life difficult, but they found another way. They calculated the average rate of inflation during the past ten years, which was 7.5 per cent – acceptable to the Treasury – and settled on a figure for the ten-year period from 1 January 1991 of £7.9 million. If they had taken too much money, there was a deal that the surplus would roll over into the next ten years’ allowance. The Earl of Airlie took a punt. At the time, inflation was running at 9 per cent. If it had continued to rise the household would have run out of funds before the ten years were up and caused untold damage to the monarchy. As it was, inflation went down during the nineties and David Airlie was roundly praised for having struck such a good deal. Little did anyone know how very concerned he was that it might so easily have gone the other way.
Having stayed at the Palace on secondment from his own family firm for three years to implement the first round of changes and to work on the Civil List negotiations, Peat was persuaded to join the household for another three years to see in those changes which were announced by Margaret Thatcher in the House of Commons in 1990. For the first three years he had been called Administrative Adviser; but for the next three years, as a member of the household, he was called director of Finances and Property Services, a new title Airlie created to oversee a whole new business that was another calculated gamble.
Having established that the household had a ten-year Civil List to manage, it seemed sensible to bring the maintenance of the occupied palaces, run by yet another government department, under Palace control. And so they created a department called Property Services which covered not just the maintenance but everything involved in running the occupied royal palaces, from heating and cleaning them to mowing the lawns, training personnel and meeting fire, health and safety regulations. All of this had been farmed out many years before to the Department of the Environment (which became and is now the Department for Culture, Media and Sport) and they were spending over £20 million on the palaces. Peat and Airlie reckoned they could do it more cost-effectively themselves. It was yet another cry to be masters of their own destiny. They knew the buildings, knew what they wanted and knew whether a tap worked or not; why not take it over? And so once again they stuck their necks out. It was a mammoth undertaking, and, as they are the first to acknowledge in retrospect, quite brave. They had no expertise and, apart from the odd plumber on the books, no manpower; and there are a lot of occupied palaces – Buckingham Palace, St James’s Palace, Clarence House and Marlborough House Mews, the residential and office areas of Kensington Palace, the Royal Mews and Royal Paddocks at Hampton Court and Windsor Castle and buildings in the Home and Great Parks at Windsor. But they pulled it off. They effectively started up a brand-new business, contracted out some of the services such as cleaning, took on staff for other jobs, employed specialists and, while reducing the amount that was spent on the palaces, nevertheless carried out a huge number of improvements and came in well under budget. It was, and still is, paid for by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport by way of Grant-in-Aid, but the savings and improved efficiency have continued. For the last five years funding has remained at £15 million – savings of around £50 million since Peat took it over in March 1991.
By the time Michael Peat was due to return to Peat Marwick McLintock (by now renamed KPMG), in 1993, there was a great deal going on in which he was heavily involved. Fire had devastated Windsor Castle; another new department – Royal Enterprises, the trading arm of the Royal Collection – was just coming on-stream; there were plans for Royal Travel, Communications and the Historic Royal Palaces – all changes that he had recommended in his report – and he was far too busy to leave. KPMG, who had been paying him a very generous partnership share all the while, began to get restless and Peat had to make a choice: to stay at the Palace and see through what he had begun, or go back to a very lucrative number in the City and amass a fortune for his declining years. To his family’s chagrin he opted to stay, becoming Keeper of the Privy Purse, and has so far resisted all enticements to return. Indeed, in 2003 he took on the ultimate challenge and became Private Secretary to the Prince of Wales, just in time to field the fallout from the Burrell trial.
Peat is not universally liked; he is frequently described as lacking charisma, being a faceless accountant, a cold fish; but new brooms are seldom liked and it’s too easy to attach damning labels. He was effecting radical change in a cosy, hierarchical environment and interfering with working practices that no one has questioned for decades. He disturbed some well-feathered nests. No wonder he upset a few people along the way. As he has been heard to say, ‘We changed a huge amount in terms of the head; whether we changed the heart I don’t know.’ The heart was easier to change in those areas where staff were better educated, among those who come into the Palace in administrative posts – finance, press, property, private secretaries – but it was more difficult to change the heart in the domestic areas, the Mews, the Master of the Household’s department, areas where there was a very strong military background.
Educated at Eton and Oxford, Peat is tall and slim, a year younger than the Prince of Wales and two years younger than Robin Janvrin. I first met him in April 2003, shortly after his move to St James’s Palace. He was impeccably mannered, charm itself and as cool as a glacier; I was happy then to believe what people said about him. But I have changed my view; I had known and liked Mark Bolland – and Peat was making a break with the past and the methods of the past. I was probably seen as part of that and I think he was expecting hostility. He was in a new job, he had the reputation of being a ruthless accountant, and the Prince’s staff, members of which had always enjoyed a more luxurious life than their counterparts across the Mall, were extremely wary. First impressions were misleading. Peat is far from glacial and far from grand; he makes his own calls and answers his own telephone (as opposed to routing calls through his secretary, as many at his level do); he gets around London on a bicycle; and he has a real life outside the Palace with a wife, three children and a farm in Berkshire. Given what he has achieved over nearly twenty years, he is remarkably self-effacing.
During the period of his secondment, in 1991, Peat began working on new tax arrangements for the Queen. He had decided not to mention tax in his report, but, having looked at her finances from top to bottom during its preparation, he felt strongly that the Queen could and should be paying income tax. He knew it was a matter that needed careful handling; the Queen had never paid tax, but that was not a tradition that went back generations. Queen Victoria and Edward VII had both paid tax, George V and George VI had paid tax on investment revenue, and complete exemption only began at the start of the present Queen’s reign in 1952. However, the feeling in the household had always been that the Queen could not afford to pay tax and maintain her current lifestyle, given her outgoings: she was paying for her children and other members of the Royal Family, paying for the upkeep of Balmoral and there was the small matter of horseracing. There was also a fear that any change would involve time-consuming legislation.
But the tax issue was inflicting grave damage and David Airlie was in full agreement with Peat. The monarchy was coming under heavy fire from the media on a number of counts, but the underlying malaise was its expense. The Waleses were at war with one another, Prince Andrew had married Sarah Ferguson, who was proving to be too much the girl next door and had an appetite for parties and holidays, and Prince Edward had shown himself to be arrogant and petulant. People were beginning to question why the taxpayer should be paying for the Royal Family to live the life of Reilly when they were patently no better than anyone else. The Palace had always been very coy about how much the Queen was worth, and in the absence of hard information journalists speculated. She was consistently reported to be worth billions; in 1989 the American business magazine Fortune placed it at £7 billion, making her the world’s richest woman and the world’s fourth richest individual. It was wildly inaccurate, but in PR terms it didn’t matter. While the rest of the country paid tax on their comparatively meagre incomes, she was exempt; and the Prime Minister’s announcement in 1990 that her income from the Civil List was to be increased by more than 50 per cent as part of the ten-year deal simply added insult to injury.
Peat’s first challenge was to convince the household that the Queen could in fact afford to pay tax and still maintain a lifestyle commensurate with her position as sovereign, and then to convince the Treasury and the Inland Revenue that this could be done without a change in the law. Once he had Airlie’s support, neither challenge proved insurmountable; and in February 1992 he set up a small working group with representatives from both the Treasury and the Inland Revenue to work out the detail. The plan was to announce the scheme in April 1993.
On 20 November 1992, however, five months before the proposed announcement, catastrophe struck. Fire broke out at Windsor Castle, the oldest of all the royal residences and the only one that has been in continuous use since William the Conqueror selected the site for a fortress after his conquest of England in 1066. The fire began in the Private Chapel when a curtain that had accidentally been touching a spotlight for a prolonged period burst into flames. By the time the alarm was raised fire had taken a firm hold of the north-east wing and smoke was billowing from the roof. It took fifteen hours and a million and a half gallons of water to put out the blaze. Mercifully no one was injured, and thanks to the Duke of York, who hastily organized a rescue operation, most of the artwork was moved to safety, but the fire caused millions of pounds’ worth of damage to a glorious and historic building that was uninsured. Nine principal rooms and more than a hundred others over an area of nine thousand square metres were damaged or destroyed by the fire – approximately one-fifth of the castle area.
The Duke of Edinburgh was in Argentina at the time and spent hours on the telephone trying to console the Queen. She had stood watching her childhood home burn, a small, sad figure in a mackintosh with the hood pulled over her head. She was clearly distraught and the nation felt huge sympathy. But that sympathy quickly evaporated when the Heritage Secretary, Peter Brooke, announced that since the castle had been uninsured the government would foot the bill for the repairs, estimated at between £20 and £40 million. ‘When the castle stands, it is theirs,’ wrote Janet Daley in The Times. ‘But when it burns down, it is ours.’
And so, when John Major rose in the House of Commons six days after the fire and announced that from 1993 the Queen and the Prince of Wales would pay tax on their private income and that Civil List payments of £900,000 to five other members of the Royal Family would cease, it looked as though the Palace had been bounced into paying tax as a placatory measure. How the tabloids crowed.
It was very bad luck, because all they had actually been bounced into was making the announcement earlier than they had intended – and instead of gaining brownie points for having volunteered the idea, the Palace was once again caught on the back foot apparently reacting to bad publicity. In fact Airlie and Peat had not yet talked to the Queen about the detail of their proposals. She knew that they had undertaken a study into the feasibility of her paying tax but the whole business had been enormously complex and, although they had almost completed it, it was not yet entirely ready when the flames took hold.
In the end the restoration work at Windsor Castle was completed at no extra cost to the taxpayer – and in a round-about way at considerable pleasure to visiting tourists. The irony was that, having worked so hard to become masters of their own destiny, the newly formed Property Services department was landed with the awesome task of repairing the damage. It took five years to complete and turned out to be the biggest and most ambitious historic-building project to have been undertaken in this country in the twentieth century. Privately it was a nightmare. First, all the debris had to be cleared and the salvaged pieces sorted, dried out and numbered. Next the building had to be stabilized, then re-roofed. Some of the rooms were restored and reinstated as they had been before the fire to accommodate the original furnishings and works of art that had been rescued. Other areas, such as the Private Chapel where the fire had started, were so badly damaged they had to be built from scratch. Miraculously, it was completed six months ahead of schedule and came in £3 million below budget. The final cost was £37 million. To help pay for it, Michael Peat suggested opening the state rooms at Buckingham Palace to the public. This could only be done for eight weeks of the year, during the summer when the Queen was in Scotland, but it proved so popular that it paid for 70 per cent of the total cost of the work. The shortfall was met by the annual Grant-in-Aid funding by Parliament for the maintenance and upkeep of the occupied palaces. But it was a very difficult period and one on which everyone looks back in horror.
FIVE (#ulink_865fd061-e331-5b49-8a05-78e9e4d062c1)
Communication (#ulink_865fd061-e331-5b49-8a05-78e9e4d062c1)
Another major fault highlighted in Peat’s report was communication; and it was certainly my experience over the years that the right hand never knew what the left was doing. Press officers seldom appeared to know what the private secretaries were briefing and vice versa, and there was no sense that the various members of the family were all working either for the same outfit or towards the same goal. Peat didn’t criticize the private secretaries in other respects, but he found the idea of forward planning or discussing arrangements for their principal with other households within The Firm anathema. It was perfectly possible, and certainly not unknown, for two members of the family to have been visiting the same town on the same morning and know nothing about each other’s visit until they met in the high street.
There was another problem. They were constantly being caught on the wrong foot, always reacting to problems and situations, waiting for criticism rather than pre-empting it. The solution, devised by David Airlie, Michael Peat, Robin Janvrin, then the Queen’s Deputy Private Secretary, and Charles Anson, her Press Secretary from 1990, was The Way Ahead Group, which first met in September 1994. Hard to believe that so simple an idea had to wait until 1994. It was an informal meeting which took place every six months between the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, the Prince of Wales, the Princess Royal, the Duke of York and the Earl of Wessex plus their private secretaries and other senior courtiers to map out the coming half-year and discuss anything of importance. According to a leaked agenda from a meeting in 1996 that could mean a discussion about the possibility of abandoning primogeniture – and allowing the firstborn, whether male or female, to inherit the throne – abolishing the ban on heirs to the throne marrying Roman Catholics, ending the monarch’s position as Supreme Governor of the Church of England and reducing those working for the Family Firm to include only the consort, children and grandchildren directly in line. The constant surprise is that the Royal Family doesn’t discuss any of these sorts of topics with one another on their own; it takes prompting from their courtiers and the structure of a formal group. Privately their talk tends to revolve around the domestic scene: dogs, horses, sporting pursuits and Estate matters, interspersed with dirty jokes and nudges in the ribs. This is not a family that enjoys debate or intellectual conversation. ‘Some people regard “bugger” as a term of abuse,’ says a former courtier. ‘The Royal Family uses the word “intellectual” in much the same way.’
‘They do communicate in the oddest way,’ agrees another, echoing everyone I have known who has ever worked for the Royal Family. ‘It’s a very close family, but they don’t communicate directly. They let other people take soundings; they never say “I’ll talk about it with whomever” over the weekend. They do it through private secretaries or press secretaries. It’s very cumbersome.’
‘They used to write each other memos all the time, but that’s changed a bit,’ says one lady-in-waiting. ‘They no longer commit anything to paper that they wouldn’t want to see on the front page of the Daily Mail.’ Unfortunately for the Prince of Wales, an inveterate memo writer, old habits die hard. An internal memo sent to Mark Bolland, his Deputy Private Secretary at the time, about a secretary he thought ‘so PC it frightens me’ turned up in an industrial tribunal and was on the front page of every newspaper as recently as November 2004 and sparked off a massive row about education. The then Secretary of State for Education, Charles Clarke, weighed in and openly criticized the Prince of Wales for meddling in something he knew nothing about, thus breaking the convention that members of the government never criticize members of the Royal Family in public. In fact the Prince of Wales knows a damn sight more about education than most politicians, but it would be a shame to let the facts get in the way of giving the Prince a good kicking.
It has to be said that safe methods of communication are diminishing. The Duke of Edinburgh has seen his private letters to the Princess of Wales published for public consumption courtesy of Paul Burrell and his book, and the Prince of Wales knows all too well about the dangers of mobile phones, after finding his amorous late-night ramblings intercepted and dished up for the world’s entertainment. No wonder he doesn’t use email.
The Prince, in fact, still writes everything in longhand, pages and pages with plenty of underlining for emphasis. He fires off memos to his staff and to his charities – Julia Cleverdon at Business in the Community calls them ‘black spider memos’ because of the colour of his ink and the frantic scribbling as his pen tries to keep up with his thoughts. And he writes letters, a habit he acquired long ago, with no apparent thought about them falling into the wrong hands.
Says a former courtier:
He’s one of the great letter writers, except he needs an editor; his letters are far too long. But most people find letters of condolence the most difficult things to do. He would just sit down, pick up his pen and do four pages, or whatever, and it was always absolutely brilliant. He’s a very emotional man and his emotions, unlike ‘British’ emotions, are right there, available and articulated. That’s why he likes the descendants of Winston Churchill so much; they’re very given to tears. He likes the idea of people breaking into tears.
Charles finds he can express himself with a fountain pen. He has never used a computer and has no plans to start now, but his Luddite tendencies are not reflected elsewhere in The Firm. His father, now in his eighties – nearly thirty years older than Charles – was probably one of the first people in the land to own a laptop and has been writing letters on it and using email for as long as email has existed. Even the Queen is ahead of her eldest son. During a trip to Brunei in 1998 she remarked to the Sultan’s family, ‘I can’t write any more. I can only write on computers. You can rub things out. It’s so simple.’ The Duke of York is another devotee and has all the very latest hand-held wizardry, like his younger brother. Having worked in the film business, Edward is entirely familiar with computers and better than most at knowing how they work. Wandering into the Press Office at Buckingham Palace one day he found Ailsa Anderson, Assistant Press Secretary to the Queen, staring forlornly at a dead screen and immediately fixed it for her. The surprising thing about Edward is that for all that exposure to the real world, and all the nice touches that people report time and again, he is the most regal of all his siblings and in some respects the least relaxed about royal protocol.
The brainstorming that produced The Way Ahead Group threw up another good idea: the creation of a department that has no ties with the past and is staffed by no one with a military career behind them. The Coordination and Research Unit (CRU), which was set up in 1995, is currently run by Paul Havill, a civil servant who came from the Office of Fair Trading and is on secondment for three years, which has since been extended. He is the third incumbent. His two assistants are always from the private sector – usually from companies like Price Waterhouse or Arthur Anderson – and stay for a year, perhaps two. ‘The idea is to keep the fresh thinking and dynamism from the private sector coming into the heart of the private secretaries’ office.’ He works directly for Robin Janvrin, his assistants for Janvrin’s deputies.
With the best will in the world they need that fresh thinking and dynamism. It is very easy to lose touch with reality if your life is spent at Buckingham Palace. It may be more efficiently run than it ever was, but how many other offices in London have Old Masters on the walls, Georgian tables doubling up as desks and priceless works of art decorating every corridor? It’s only when you catch sight of computers, fax machines and filing cabinets that you realize this is neither a museum nor an art gallery. If you are travelling with the Queen you may visit schools and hospitals and meet a wide cross-section of society but you still travel with outriders, still walk on red carpet, and still, in the main, meet people who are pleased to see you. It is an unreal existence and it’s seductive, particularly when you stay for ten, fifteen or twenty years, as most of the Queen’s private secretaries do. Staff at lower levels are very often in royal service for life.
Michael Peat tried to put an end to that, suggesting short-term contracts of five years or so and retiring most jobs at sixty, although government policy on retirement will up that in future. It was a revolutionary idea and one that has upset some of the old guard. ‘In the old days people went there for life,’ says one. ‘It wasn’t for the money – there never was any – but they were proud to work for the Royal Family, it was a privilege. Today they just go there to get something on their CV; there’s no loyalty any more.’ However, having a constant flow of new blood coming into the Palace, bringing experience of the outside world with them, looking at the business with fresh eyes, not indoctrinated by the protocol or intimidated by the hierarchy, is undoubtedly good. And the fact that they are no longer coming exclusively from the Armed Forces is another giant plus. Loyalty is another issue. In the wake of the Daily Mirror reporter Ryan Parry taking a job inside the Palace – the final straw after a spate of revelatory books from former servants like Patrick Jephson, Ken Wharf and Paul Burrell – the confidentiality clauses in all royal employment contracts have been considerably tightened.
The man in charge of personnel and all matters financial is Alan Reid, the Keeper of the Privy Purse – old title, new man. He arrived in 2002 aged fifty-five, having been Chief Operating Officer at KPMG. A Scot, educated at Fettes and St Andrews, he was one of 234 applicants for the job. As with all senior appointments at the Palace these days a headhunter was used, but the job was also advertised on the open market. One of the applicants, from Australia, either a wag or understandably confused by the job title, said he ‘would be happy to carry Her Majesty’s handbag’.
‘People used to think we couldn’t take action, but we took an injunction out against the Mirror and Ryan Parry, and all staff in the Palace have signed new, tighter undertakings of confidentiality.’ Most of the challenges Alan Reid has faced since he began the job, he admits, have been to do with personnel and security. ‘They could publish in the United States and over the internet here, so it’s not foolproof, but we can and will take action in terms of anyone making money in this country; all money will go to charity. It used to be that if your principal had died, the undertaking of confidentiality died with him or her.’ This is how those people who worked for the Princess of Wales were able to publish with impunity after her death. ‘Now contracts are in the sovereign’s name and the sovereign never dies.’
The point of the Coordination and Research Unit is two-fold, and, unusually for job titles within the royal household, implicit in the title. It coordinates the family’s activities ‘because we want to have a joined-up, working-together sort of family’, as Paul Havill puts it. ‘There was a feeling that the different households didn’t know what the others were doing; each member has their own office and their own patronages and interests and there was a need to bring them together, to be more coordinated.’ Paul goes to all the six-monthly planning meetings when each member of the family sits down with their own staff to map out their diaries for the following six months. He advises everyone of the Queen’s movements. There is a pecking order in The Firm and she is at the top, then the Prince of Wales and so on down the line of succession (excluding, for these purposes, Prince William and Prince Harry who don’t yet carry out official engagements), and their planning meetings are held in order of precedence. Each member needs to work around those higher up the food chain, and if someone is needed to cover for the Queen, a date that she can’t make but an engagement which needs some sort of royal presence, Paul puts in his bid for another member of the Royal Family to take it on. And because he has an overview of what everyone is doing, if there is a disaster somewhere, such as the Madrid bombings, he can find a member of the family to drop everything and go.
And, as the name suggests, the CRU researches. ‘It provides an executive resource for the Queen’s private secretaries’, in civil service-speak; effectively it is a Palace think tank, picking up on what’s going wrong in the Family Firm and coming up with ideas for doing things better. And in the aftermath of Diana’s famous Panorama interview in 1995 – which happened at much the same time as the CRU was being set up – there was a strong feeling among the Queen’s staff that quite a lot was going wrong and the Princess of Wales was stealing a march on them all.
SIX (#ulink_590fe06c-4876-5565-b4e1-23d08d8764fd)
Lessons Learnt (#ulink_590fe06c-4876-5565-b4e1-23d08d8764fd)
The public loved Diana for all sorts of reasons but not least because people felt she was in tune with them; she went down to the Embankment in London and met the homeless, she went to drug rehabilitation centres and she visited AIDS victims and held their hands. She connected with the public in a way that they liked. It wasn’t the royal way. Princess Anne once tetchily remarked, ‘The very idea that all children want to be cuddled by a complete stranger I find utterly amazing.’ She has a point; but Diana’s informality and the raw, controversial causes she adopted, symbolized a humanity that compared badly with the unemotional hands-behind-the-back approach of everyone else.
According to one of the private secretaries involved in the process of finding a new way forward:
That interview showed what a very different model Diana was and would continue to be, and it certainly gave impetus to the work that was going on in the Palace for change. What was their attitude to her style? Less hostility than I would have expected. There was an acceptance she was very popular and I never heard the Queen criticize Diana, but there was almost a sense of bafflement and a feeling that this wasn’t the style of the rest of the family. The Queen had a very strong, admirable sense herself of the need to be herself and not be something different. The Duke of Edinburgh will say, ‘We are not here to electioneer, to tout for short-term popularity’, and there was an understanding that they couldn’t adopt Diana’s style and pretend to be the kind of people they weren’t. But working out how they could be themselves and yet do somewhat different things, and show interest in somewhat different things, was something they needed a lot of help with.
The CRU began trying to steer the Queen and other members of the family towards official engagements that were more closely aligned to what was going on in society. They used MORI and other opinion surveys to track key issues and establish people’s views on a variety of issues. They looked at current polls which showed how many people in the population held republican sentiments, how many didn’t care and how many were staunch monarchists, and discovered that the ratio varied very little. The number of republicans was always between 8 and 12 or 13 per cent; a large majority was neutral and a small number of people were raving monarchists.
The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh have no interest in tracking opinion polls themselves. It’s a form of self-protection they have developed over the years. They read newspapers and the Queen watches the early evening news on ITV so they are well aware of what is being said and written about them, and they pick up the sarky comments in comedy programmes, but they don’t pore over the minutiae, as Diana did, looking to see if they had a good report today.
It’s the Private Secretary’s job to talk these kinds of issues through with the Queen, to discuss the way the monarchy is currently being perceived in the country and to work through the implications, and when and if necessary, recommend change. And it is probably one of the toughest and most crucial parts of the job.
You trod carefully as you would with a minister or Prime Minister, and probably more carefully because it is an intensely personal role. Generally if you are in public life you can console yourself that if you’re being criticized, it’s your official persona that’s being criticized. But it’s very difficult for the Royal Family because that boundary line between being a private and public individual is blurred for them. One of the things I took away from my time at the Palace was a feeling that there needed to be a clearer distinction between the two. I think they’ve learnt to protect themselves from taking the criticism personally to some extent, but only to some extent.
Criticism was at its fiercest, of course, in the days after Diana’s death, and that was the second major impetus for change. By the end of the week, when the family had finally come back to London and the Queen’s broadcast had showed the country that its sovereign was back in the driving seat, no one at Buckingham Palace was in any doubt that the future had been on a knife edge. The Queen pulled it off; catastrophe was averted but it could easily have gone the other way. No one had any illusions about that, and they realized that change in the way the Queen’s programme was organized was now a priority.
First they mapped out how the Queen currently spent her time on official visits; how many organizations in the private sector she went to compared to those in the public sector, what parts of the country she visited; when she went to schools, how many of them were private, how many state; within the private sector, how often did she go to manufacturing companies compared with service companies. And they mapped it against the current structure of society in the economy and discovered, for example, that she was doing a disproportionate amount in the public sector for the number of people employed in it. When she did pay visits to the private sector she tended to visit manufacturers rather than companies in the service industry because it was easier to devise a visit for her when there was something specific being made that she could look at. So even though the service industry accounts for 80 per cent of the private sector she didn’t go there. But the reason she tended to go to more public schools than state schools, they found, was simply because she received more invitations from public schools.
‘What we tried to do was get the maps a bit more aligned, which wasn’t difficult once you tried, and I think she found she was visiting rather fresher places, that were fun.’ She started going to popular, touristy kinds of places, like a Center-Parcs, and an aquarium in Liverpool, an example of new investment in that part of the country. In London, where she had only ever done ceremonial events in the past, the Queen spent a whole day visiting the City of London; she had lunch at the Financial Times, visited an investment bank, a venture capital company, sat in on a Monetary Policy Committee at the Bank of England, bought a copy of the Evening Standard from a vendor outside Holborn underground station and met messengers biking documents all round the City; everyday experiences for most people, all new for the Queen. She spent another day in theatre-land, a huge source of tourist income, and among other things watched a rehearsal of the musical Oklahoma!, and visited the Almeida Theatre in Islington. They became known as ‘theme days’ and were as relaxed and informal as possible. On other days, the Queen has toured television studios and seen something of the world of broadcasting; she dipped into publishing when she visited Bloomsbury and met the Harry Potter author, J. K. Rowling; and last year the entire Firm (this was a first) spent the day visiting tourist attractions all over the country, each member of the family in a different region, culminating in a big reception at Buckingham Palace in the evening for leading lights in the tourist industry.
I was with the Queen on that day and I never cease to be amazed by how very informal she is when she is out and about meeting people. Security is tight but it’s low-key and unobtrusive and in no way puts up a barrier between the sovereign and her people. She doesn’t put on any great show, doesn’t keep a grin on her face in the way that showbiz personalities do when they meet their public. She smiles when something amuses her or if someone hands her something particularly pleasing but her face is often in repose – and therefore quite glum, even when the cameras are on her.
Tourism is Britain’s sixth most important industry. Visit-Britain (formerly the British Tourist Board), which markets the country abroad, estimates that there are 2.1 million jobs in the industry – 7 per cent of all people in employment – and the monarchy, with its palaces, history and pageantry, is one of the principal draws. The top five royal attractions in the country – the Tower of London, Windsor Castle, Hampton Court Palace, Buckingham Palace and the Palace of Holyroodhouse – account for more than four million visits each year. But they also go in their hundreds of thousands to the decommissioned Royal Yacht Britannia berthed at Leith in Edinburgh, to Sandringham, KP, Balmoral, and, more recently, Clarence House; and to watch the annual Trooping the Colour ceremony. The biggest free visitor attraction in London is the Changing of the Guard which happens every morning on the forecourt of Buckingham Palace at 11.00 a.m. and lasts for half an hour. The Guard is mounted by the two regiments of the Household Cavalry – the Life Guards and the Blues and Royals – each of which provides one squadron for a special ceremonial unit in London, which is housed in Hyde Park Barracks with more than one hundred horses, and men who do a two- or three-year stint before returning to their operational units. The man in charge is Major General Sebastian Roberts who sits at the Duke of Wellington’s old desk in the aptly named Wellington Barracks with history all around and the awesome task of ensuring that the military aspect of state ceremonials goes according to plan.
Buckingham Palace is not just a magnet for tourists. It is a rallying point where people instinctively go when there’s a problem or a cause for celebration – either personal or national. When in 1982 a schizophrenic named Michael Fagan had family problems, it was the Queen he wanted to talk to. ‘I was under a lot of stress,’ he said, ‘and just wanted to talk to Her Majesty about what I was going through.’ So he broke into the Palace, found his way to her bedroom and she awoke to discover him sitting on her bed with a broken ashtray in one hand and blood pouring from the other – and, incidentally, needed to make two calls to the police switchboard within the Palace before anyone came to her rescue. When in 2004 a divorced man wanted visiting rights with his children, he dressed up as Batman and scaled the front of Buckingham Palace to stage a protest on a ledge and refused to come down for five hours. He caused a major security alert and the Metropolitan Police commissioner warned that the next time anyone tried a similar stunt they might very well be shot. (The mother of the interloper’s third set of children, meanwhile, walked out on him, saying that he spent twice as much time demonstrating as he ever spent with their children and she’d had it; but that’s not the point. The point is that he made his protest at Buckingham Palace.)
Those of her subjects who don’t drop in personally – and the Queen prefers it if they don’t – tend to write to her. She gets about three hundred letters a day: some of them to do with political matters, some wanting help in solving a local problem such as housing or hospitals – or the difficulty for divorced fathers in seeing their children – and some are straightforward fan letters (and a few abusive), but others are also highly personal, just as Michael Fagan’s conversation was personal.
And that is one of the functions of monarchy: providing a focus for people’s emotions. Two women spend an entire morning each day opening and sorting letters. The Queen doesn’t answer them personally but she sees them and gets a very good feel as a result for the issues that are worrying people. Her other great feeler for the mood of the nation is the conversations she has when she is on away days. People may only have a few seconds with her when she shakes their hand, and some are so overcome with nerves that they utter nothing intelligible, but some come straight out with whatever is on their mind, from Britain’s engagement with Europe to the contentious issue of foxhunting.
The Queen’s other opportunity to meet people outside her own social circle is at receptions and lunches at the Palace. A recent innovation has been themed receptions. There was one for pioneers, for example, to which people like James Dyson, of vacuum cleaner fame, were invited; another for people who had changed the life of the nation, for which the television cook Delia Smith was chosen; and another for women of achievement, which included all sorts from Lady Thatcher to Kate Moss.
The research for all of these activities is done by the CRU. They plan the Queen’s programme and research not only who the women of achievement, for example, are for the receptions, but also which parts of the country are due for a royal visit. They have the latest in IT – researched, you guessed it, by the CRU – and with this they can produce geographical analysis tables of royal visits, and can work out where each member of the family should go in the coming six months.
On one of the days I followed the Queen she was in Surrey, where amongst other things she opened a new orthopaedic wing at Epsom hospital and met a familiar face – Mr Roger Vickers, the surgeon who operated on her knees and the Queen Mother’s hips so successfully. It was no random choice: she had not been to the county for five years. They also do research on patronages; if a charity approaches a member of the family asking them to become patron or president, they check it out. They research new thinking from the private sector, look at policy procedures, work with the Press Office on opinion polls, scrutinize travel plans; the list is endless, and, according to Havill, the unit is constantly changing, constantly modernizing, constantly evolving.
A longer-established tradition are small, informal lunches at Buckingham Palace for assorted members of the great and the good. It was an idea suggested by the Duke of Edinburgh, who has had many good ideas during the course of the Queen’s reign. These lunches were held so that the Queen could meet interesting people and opinion formers who she didn’t normally come across; and, just as importantly, so that they could meet her. The first lunch took place in 1956 and she has been holding them ever since. People who go are generally enchanted, my own father among them. There were ten guests the day he went, a typical number. At the time he was editor and columnist of the Sunday Express; his fellow diners were a Tory MP, Sue MacGregor, then the presenter of Woman’sHour, a High Court judge, an interior designer, the coxswain of the Humber lifeboat and Anne Beckwith Smith, lady-in-waiting to the Princess of Wales. They gathered promptly at 12.50 in the 1844 Room where they were given a drink before lining up to meet the Queen and Prince Philip who came in and shook hands with each of them and engaged in small talk. There were corgis roaming around and my father jokingly asked the Prince whether they were dangerous. ‘You mean are they in danger from you?’ he retorted. He had clearly done his homework and had a journalist in his midst under sufferance.
At lunch my father found himself on the Queen’s left-hand side, the judge was on her right, and throughout the first two courses – salmon, followed by braised ham – she addressed not one single word to him. He was beginning to feel more than a little miffed. At the other end of the table he noticed that the Tory MP was in exactly the same situation. He was on the Duke’s left and for two courses had been completely ignored while Philip lavished attention on Sue MacGregor, seated on his right. The two of them looked at each other and shrugged their shoulders.
But as soon as the pudding arrived the entire table was transformed. The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh both turned to the guest on their left and my father basked in the Queen’s full attention for the rest of the lunch. They chatted, he said, like old friends and he was always certain that the key had been horses. On the way to the Palace his office driver, a very keen punter, had told him to ask the Queen whether her horse Height of Fashion was going to win the Oaks. This is precisely what he did and the Queen immediately lit up and explained that the horse’s legs were possibly too long for the Epsom course but that its chances would be decided by whether the horse ran well at Goodwood. Bingo.
SEVEN (#ulink_657ed7e8-3ce1-5f98-b882-26d0b5e4fc69)
Diana (#ulink_657ed7e8-3ce1-5f98-b882-26d0b5e4fc69)
Someone should have taken them to one side and said, ‘Make this work. Go out on to that balcony, hold hands, smile and when you come back down, one of you turn to the right, one to the left. Take a mistress, take a lover if you want, but for the sake of the boys, the family and the country, stay together.’ No one seemed to have the long view; Diana was a huge asset. She’d have been in her forties by now; and one of the most interesting women in the world, the best ambassador for this country ever. She could have been UNESCO’s child ambassador … Wherever we went people’s eyes widened – her mannerisms, her dress sense. What else did he want? In that position you’ve got to work together. Someone should have said to the Queen, ‘This is the next generation coming through.’ They should never have let her go.
These are not the words of an outsider who didn’t understand the situation. This is someone who worked for the Prince of Wales before his marriage and for both the Prince and Princess for several years after the marriage. He was a member of the royal household for ten years in all and was loyal, devoted and dedicated. He is now in his early seventies and might still have been there in some capacity or other had he not been caught in the crossfire of the warring Waleses. He was enormously fond of both the Prince and the Princess and would have wished the greatest personal happiness to them both, but this was not about personal happiness. It couldn’t be. They were not just any couple; they were royal, they had obligations; and his principal concern is for the monarchy.
There is no doubt that he is right. The monarchy was very seriously damaged by the breakdown of that marriage; it destroyed the respect that a great many people instinctively felt for the Royal Family and it paved the way for much of the intolerable media intrusion that has now become a part of their lives. Charles and Diana would not have been the first couple to have lived separate lives under the same roof; they didn’t even have to be under the same roof – they already had a roof each – Charles at Highgrove in the country, Diana at Kensington Palace in London. Aristocratic families have been doing precisely this for generations: staying married for the sake of their children and their estates, and discreetly taking lovers on the side. It should have been possible for the Prince and Princess, but this was such a mismatch, the relationship so volatile, Diana so unpredictable and the handling of it all so inept that in the final analysis bringing the marriage to an end was the lesser of two evils.
Michael Colborne first met the Prince of Wales in the Navy in the early seventies when, fresh out of Dartmouth, Charles had joined his first ship, HMS Norfolk, as a sub-lieutenant. Colborne was a non-commissioned officer, fourteen years his senior, unfazed by the HRH tag and quite unafraid to speak his mind. He was a grammar-school boy, with a wife and young son, who had joined the Navy at sixteen and been there all his working life. The two became friends and they would sit up at night, talking over a few drinks; Colborne would often pull his leg and when they were on shore leave he would show him the sights. This was the first time the Prince had mixed with people from a different social class and he was fascinated by every aspect of Michael’s life; when the Prince left the Navy in 1977 and became a fully-fledged member of the Family Firm he invited Colborne to help set up his office. Officially he was in charge of his financial affairs, but in practice he became the Prince’s right-hand man, and the only member of his staff prepared to tell Charles the truth, however unpalatable it sometimes was. The Prince welcomed his honesty and made him promise that he would never change. ‘If you don’t agree with something, you say so,’ he had told him, but, of course, on those occasions when Colborne had disagreed and said so, there was all hell to pay.
Like his father and grandfather, George VI, the Prince has a terrifying temper that has reduced strong men to tears; it was that which finally drove Michael Colborne away. Lord Mountbatten, the Prince’s great-uncle and mentor, had once said when he was on the point of leaving in the very early days, ‘Bear with him, Michael, please. He doesn’t mean to get at you personally. It’s just that he wants to let off steam and you’re the only person he can lose his temper with. It’s a back-handed compliment really, you know. He needs you.’
The Prince did need him, not least in helping him cope with Diana. The story of Charles and Diana and their marriage has been analysed and written about ad nauseam – I have done a fair share of it myself – but I am now about to do it again. This is partly because no book about the monarchy can ignore the significance that that marriage and all the consequences of its failure has had on the institution; and partly because, in my view, despite all the books, articles and documentaries, there is still a profound misconception about the whole sorry tale.
Colborne was one of the first people the Prince told about his proposal to Diana. He was the one who organized flowers to greet her on her return from Australia where she had gone while making up her mind about marriage. The Prince had asked him to send her the biggest, most fragrant bunch of flowers he could find and had handwritten a welcome home note to go with them. They had been delivered by the Prince’s police protection officer, yet years later, when the Princess was talking about her rotten marriage, she threw it out as a sign of his callousness: ‘I came back from Australia,’ she told Andrew Morton. ‘Someone knocks at the door – someone from his office with a bunch of flowers and I knew that they hadn’t come from Charles because there was no note. It was just somebody being very tactful in the office.’ Nothing could have been further from the truth.
Colborne became like a father to Diana in her early years in the Palace, but he could see there was going to be trouble from the start. At nineteen, she was little more than a child when she first arrived, totally unprepared for the life that lay ahead and completely out of her depth. She was a romantic, an innocent, she knew nothing of life or work or relationships. The things she knew about were loss and rejection, the product of her parents’ divorce; and she had been fatally damaged by the experience. She had no self-confidence, no stability, just a desperate need to be loved and wanted; and a determination to get what she wanted.
She wanted the Prince of Wales – she had fallen in love with him – but it was the idea as much as the man she was in love with. In reality she scarcely knew him; and he knew nothing about her because she hadn’t let him. She had presented to him a Diana she knew he would be attracted by; a Diana who shared all of his interests, who loved the country, who was easy, loving, funny and uncomplicated. It was only once the ring was on her finger and she found herself transported from her all-girl, giggly flat in Fulham to an impersonal suite of rooms in Buckingham Palace, with no one of her own age for company and a fiancé who was always busy, that the real Diana began to emerge. The happy, easy-going girl became moody, wilful and suspicious. The moods swung wildly; one minute she would be laughing and joking, the next she would be kicking the furniture, displaying a terrible temper that Charles had never seen before. It came from nowhere, along with hysterical tears, and could be gone in an instant. She took sudden dislikes to people she had previously appeared to like, accused them of spying on her or being out to get her; she was jealous of friends and ex-girlfriends (not so surprising); she was even jealous of the Prince’s relationship with his mother, and convinced that the Queen was writing about her in the letters and memos she sent her son.
To begin with Diana and Michael Colborne shared an office and she spent many an hour pouring out her heart to him. A more secure, mature nineteen-year-old might have coped, might have had a better understanding of what she was taking on, but Diana had none. She had a romanticized view of marriage and no experience of commitment. When she had encountered difficulty in her life – a school she disliked, a dancing job she didn’t enjoy – she ducked out of it; no one had ever made her do anything she didn’t want to do. With two sets of parents there had never been any real discipline. Discipline: the key to being a member of the Royal Family. She wasn’t marrying the man, she was marrying the job; she was joining the Family Firm, and, as Michael Colborne tried to explain to her, it was a unique way of life.
One weekend she had been at Royal Lodge in Windsor and had decided to go for a walk without telling anyone. All hell broke loose because of the security implications, and on the Monday morning she told Michael what had happened. She said she didn’t know how she was going to cope.
‘This is going to be your life,’ he had said.
You’re never going to be on your own again. And you’re going to change. In four to five years you’re going to be an absolute bitch, not through any fault of your own, but because of the circumstances in which you live. If you want four boiled eggs for breakfast, you’ll have them. If you want the car brought round to the front door a minute ago, you’ll have it. It’s going to change you. Your life is going to be organized. You open your diary now and you can put down Trooping the Colour, the Cenotaph service, Cowes Week, the Ascots. You can write your diary for five years ahead, ten years, twenty years.
That was the reality. There would be no spontaneity, no last-minute plans, no ducking out of commitments. Her carefree life of being a nobody was over. For a nineteen-year-old that was a terrifying prospect.
Colborne is convinced that if Lord Mountbatten, murdered by the IRA in 1979, had still been alive a year later, Charles and Diana would never have married. He is probably right. Years later, Diana spoke about being the ‘sacrificial lamb’ on the day of her wedding, of how she had wanted to back out of it some weeks before but been told by her sister that it was too late: her face was on the tea towels. If she did have doubts, despite their frank and lengthy conversations she certainly never expressed them to Colborne.
Charles himself had serious doubts about whether he had made the right decision during their engagement, but he kept them to himself. He asked the advice of a number of people – official advisers, friends and family – before he proposed to Diana, aware that this was no ordinary marriage and that he couldn’t afford to make a mistake. Most people counselled for the marriage, including, significantly, the Queen Mother. She was very keen on the match; Diana was the granddaughter of her friend and lady-in-waiting, Ruth, Lady Fermoy, and in every sense, on paper, the perfect match. Ruth Fermoy knew it wasn’t; but, socially ambitious for her granddaughter, she chose to keep quiet. Years later in 1993, only a month before she died, the old lady apologized to the Prince of Wales for failing to warn him. Diana, she knew, had been ‘a dishonest and difficult girl’. Her father, who died in 1991, also admitted he had been wrong not to say something.
And so, having taken soundings, Charles went ahead and proposed, knowing that despite the consensus among those he’d spoken to, in his heart of hearts he was still uncertain. ‘It all seems so ridiculous because I do very much want to do the right thing for this country and for my family,’ he said, ‘but I’m terrified sometimes of making a promise and then perhaps living to regret it.’ He was in a ‘confused and anxious state of mind’, he confessed to one friend. To another, ‘It is just a matter of taking an unusual plunge into some rather unknown circumstances that inevitably disturbs me but I expect it will be the right thing in the end.’
The fact that, when asked on television on the day of the engagement whether he was in love, he replied ‘Yes, whatever love is’, is irrelevant. It was a very tactless thing to say, hurtful to Diana and bad PR, and he should never have said it; but the truth is this was a marriage where being in love was not the most important ingredient. This was a marriage that had to last – look at the number of ordinary marriages that have fallen apart when the pair stopped being ‘in love’ and discovered that there was nothing else holding them together. Look at the number of innocent children who have suffered as a result. The Prince’s own thoughts about this, articulated years earlier, have been quoted many times before but they cannot be bettered:
I’ve fallen in love with all sorts of girls and I fully intend to go on doing so, but I’ve made sure I haven’t married the first person I’ve fallen in love with. I think one’s got to be aware of the fact that falling madly in love with someone is not necessarily the starting point to getting married. [Marriage] is basically a very strong friendship … I think you are lucky if you find the person attractive in the physical and the mental sense … To me marriage seems to be the biggest and most responsible step to be taken in one’s life.
Whatever your place in life, when you marry, you are forming a partnership which you hope will last for fifty years. So I’d want to marry someone whose interests I could share. A woman not only marries a man; she marries into a way of life – a job. She’s got to have some knowledge of it, some sense of it, otherwise she wouldn’t have a clue about whether she’s going to like it. If I’m deciding on whom I want to live with for fifty years – well, that’s the last decision on which I want my head to be ruled by my heart.
So what went wrong? Why did Charles allow himself to make what, by the time he walked up the aisle, he knew was the wrong decision? He took advice before he proposed, but once he had asked Diana to marry him the subject was no longer open for discussion. His old friend Nicholas Soames could see disaster ahead; what worried him was the intellectual gulf between them and the fact that they had so little in common. Penny Romsey, wife of his cousin Norton (Lord Romsey), Mountbatten’s grandson, had an additional fear. She thought that Diana was in love with the idea of being a princess and had very little understanding of what that would involve. Norton agreed with all three observations and had very real fears for the future. He tackled the Prince on several occasions but was firmly told to mind his own business. None of them had the influence over him that Mountbatten had had. Mountbatten was like a father to the Prince – he called him his ‘Honorary Grandfather’ – and although Mountbatten was ambitious on his own behalf and would have dearly loved his own granddaughter to marry Charles, he would have seen that Diana was the wrong person for him to be bound to for fifty years or more. But Mountbatten was dead, and Charles was still consumed by grief, lost without the older man to guide him; and alone.
He couldn’t talk to his own father; he and the Duke of Edinburgh had never been able to talk. If they had this marriage might never have happened, because what prompted Charles to make a decision before he was ready was a letter from Prince Philip. He told Charles he must make up his mind about Diana: he must either marry her or let her go because it was not fair to keep her dangling on a string. Charles took it to mean he must marry her. Friends who saw the letter have said there was no such ultimatum; the Prince misinterpreted his father’s words. Either way, over something so crucial, it is calamitous that they did not sit down and talk about it. And the Queen offered no opinion one way or another.
The Duke had written his letter because of the media frenzy; Diana had been hunted from the day her face first appeared on the front page of the Daily Star with a question mark about her identity. She had been spotted through a pair of binoculars by the paper’s relentless ‘Charles watcher’, James Whitaker, on the banks of the River Dee. She was lounging around while Charles was fishing. He and his photographer, his companion in the bushes that day, quickly worked out who she was and from that moment until the engagement five months later, she was besieged – followed, photographed and occasionally tricked into talking – everywhere she went. And when a blonde was seen boarding the royal train in sidings in Wiltshire late one night, the press assumed, mistakenly, it was Diana. The Duke of Edinburgh realized that her honour was at stake and that any further delay in the Prince declaring his intentions would be damaging.
EIGHT (#ulink_dde431e5-2d66-588f-a1d7-32d4a3dbc804)
The Duty of an Heir (#ulink_dde431e5-2d66-588f-a1d7-32d4a3dbc804)
It is too easy to say that the media is responsible for the whole mismatch between Charles and Diana. It is true that, had James Whitaker not been spying on the Prince of Wales while he fished that afternoon, Charles might have been able to get to know Diana better before popping the question. The media has a lot to answer for, and its behaviour during the most troubled years of their marriage was disgraceful. The war over circulation robbed newspapers of all humanity as they scrabbled to get the juiciest, most damning story and the most intrusive photograph. But what really forced the Prince’s hand was the system – a system that was thoroughly out of touch with modern thinking.
Charles’s one obligation as Prince of Wales and heir to the throne was to perpetuate the House of Windsor. He could have chosen to do nothing with his life while his mother reigned, to make no contribution to the welfare of the country. He could have squandered his income from the Duchy of Cornwall, hunted three days a week, played polo all summer, gambled, partied and drunk himself into a stupor. None of that would have mattered, in theory at least, provided he produced a legitimate heir.
For that he needed a wife and that was more problematic. By the time Charles was old enough to be looking for a suitable candidate in the 1970s, a sexual revolution had taken place in Western society. The contraceptive pill had removed the fear of unwanted pregnancy; we had had the swinging sixties, the age of rock and roll, the Beatles, flower power, free love and the beginning of women’s emancipation. Educated, well-bred women no longer saw marriage as their only goal in life, they went to university rather than finishing school, were independent, capable, smart, and when they married they were no longer prepared to keep house, mind the children and be decorative adjuncts to their husbands. Mrs Thatcher, after all, was about to become Britain’s first woman Prime Minister. Debutantes had had their day; virgins over the age of sixteen were becoming as rare as hens’ teeth.
Yet when Charles and Diana became engaged in 1981, the system – society, the press – still insisted that the Prince of Wales should marry a virgin – nearly twenty years after virginity had ceased to be of importance for the rest of society. And in a piece of advice that owed more to his generation than his personal wisdom, Lord Mountbatten reinforced the need.
‘I believe,’ he wrote to Charles, ‘in a case like yours, the man should sow his wild oats and have as many affairs as he can before settling down, but for a wife he should choose a suitable, attractive and sweet-charactered girl before she has met anyone else she might fall for … I think it is disturbing for women to have experiences if they have to remain on a pedestal after marriage.’
And to help with the sowing of the wild oats, Mountbatten made Broadlands, his house in Hampshire, available to the Prince as a safe hideaway to which he could bring girlfriends, away from the prying lenses of the press for which would-be-princess spotting had become an obsession. One or two of those girlfriends might have made perfect wives for the Prince. Several shared his sporting interests or his Goonish sense of humour and were good friends as well as lovers; they were intelligent, pretty, good company and from suitably aristocratic families. But any ‘past’ always ruled them out as possible brides. Camilla Parker Bowles, or Camilla Shand as she then was, fell into that category. But she pre-empted the problem by marrying Andrew Parker Bowles and in the process dealt a devastating blow to the Prince of Wales. Charles had been very young when that happened; he had met and fallen very much in love with Camilla in the autumn of 1972 when he was almost twenty-four and newly in the Navy. She was a year older and already seeing Andrew Parker Bowles (who was wonderful but hopelessly unfaithful). Her dalliance with Charles was a bit of fun – a brief fling while Andrew was posted in Germany – and it was destined never to go anywhere. She knew that she would not have passed the virginity test and had no desire to be a princess. The man she wanted to marry was her handsome Cavalry officer.
Four years later the Prince fell for another girl, Davina Sheffield, who could have been the soulmate he was searching for. She seemed ideal in so many ways, and they appeared to be very much in love, but she already had a boyfriend when Charles met her, an Old Harrovian and powerboat racer called James Beard. Davina initially rebuffed invitations to have dinner with the Prince, but he was so persistent that she eventually succumbed and the boyfriend soon fell by the wayside. He was subsequently conned into talking about his relationship with Davina by what turned out to be a Sunday tabloid reporter and the story of their affair, complete with photographs of their ‘love nest’, made headline news. It killed the relationship stone dead.
That was not the only time a girlfriend’s past was raked over, but the strong message girls took from all of this was that, unless you wanted the third degree from the tabloids, Prince Charles was not the man to date. By the same token, if your public profile needed a bit of a hike, in the case of actresses and starlets, he was your man.
Unsurprisingly Charles became despondent about ever finding the perfect girl and sought refuge with a number of married women, one of whom was Camilla Parker Bowles. Meanwhile, the press continued to link him romantically with just about every eligible girl he had ever shaken hands with, and went so far as to announce his engagement to one, Princess Marie Astrid of Luxembourg, whom he had never even met. The pressure was almost intolerable and he began to think that no girl in her right mind would ever want to be involved with him, far less marry into the House of Windsor. So when he met Diana in 1979, and found her to be so fresh, funny and delightful, as well as suitably aristocratic, and at just seventeen, suitably innocent, he began thinking of her as a potential wife.
They had first met two years before when Diana was still a schoolgirl and, in his eyes, jolly and fun, but nothing more than the little sister of his current girlfriend, Lady Sarah Spencer. Two years later, when that relationship had ended, they met again and although still very young in some respects, she had surprising maturity in others and clearly seemed to adore him. They had a number of casual meetings, never dates, always with others; and then sitting on a hay bale in the summer of 1980 she had touched him deeply. They were at a barbecue near Petworth, in Sussex, and he mentioned the murder of Mountbatten. She either had compassion that was way beyond her years or knew precisely which button to press. She said how sad he had looked at the funeral in Westminster Abbey; how she had sensed his loneliness and his need for someone to care for him.
Later that summer she went to stay with her eldest sister, Jane, married to Robert Fellowes, the Queen’s Private Secretary, at their cottage on the Balmoral estate; his infatuation deepened and everyone in the household fell in love with her. That autumn he invited her to a house party at Balmoral, after the Queen had left, to see what his friends thought. They were bowled over. As Patty Palmer-Tomkinson said to Jonathan Dimbleby:
