The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor
The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor
Penny Junor
It would be hard to invent a group of personalities more extraordinary than the British Royal Family – known as 'The Firm' by Prince Philip. With an eye on the past, present and future, this book takes a look at how the family really operates and reveals how they behave behind closed doors.This ebook is made from the 2009 edition.With showbiz stars and sporting celebrities now attracting the adulation once afforded to royalty, The Firm questions what monarchy is for.Is it a hangover from the past, an expensive anachronism, a relic of a bygone age of deference and hierarchy, or is it an important and relevant part of Britain in the 21st century – something that gives stability and continuity to the country, and richness and glamour to our national life in ways that a republic never could? If so, do the media mock, hound and criticize the Royal Family at their peril? Has Prince Charles sacrificed the throne for love? Could Prince William decide that the long lenses and the scrutiny of his private life is too high a price to pay?Penny will also look at how the dynamics of the royal household have changed over the last year and what repercussions these changes will have. Whilst in the hardback edition Penny Junor was able to discuss the implications of Charles and Camilla's marriage only two months after it was announced, the paperback promises to offer a host of new surprises and implication for the future of the House of Windsor, as well as an inside view of how The Firm have taken in their newest member.Whatever happens over the next year, we can be sure that Penny will update this paperback edition to make it an essential buy for anyone who has even a passing interest in Britain's most dysfunctional and fascinating family.
PENNY JUNOR
The Firm
The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor
For Lupus
Contents
Cover (#u64fb74cc-7a0e-572e-9545-74f7808f3964)
Title Page (#u2aaa33eb-fbe0-5f5d-8644-a4fde48b454a)
Dedication (#uafa43ee2-9c46-5e43-9afd-d28965de61d2)
List of Illustrations (#u4ca041cd-d3ed-5387-84cf-bdb6bbdae2c8)
Introduction (#u9d247835-75ff-5f1c-b646-d774a87b19a4)
1 An Extraordinary Way to Live (#u402639dc-5912-56c5-a2bf-deb0351987b6)
2 Keeping House (#u6228bb4d-72ca-5230-bc2e-77de3911ba03)
3 Winds of Change (#ue930f7eb-ddec-5b94-9533-765f9f7bced3)
4 188 Recommendations (#ud6267628-9800-5c8f-a90d-0174a4ffdd71)
5 Communication (#u69d052a4-39e6-56da-a820-62bd4e5b746f)
6 Lessons Learnt (#ua971c270-7522-5f5f-80fd-c2da8e09064d)
7 Diana (#u6fbd409f-c9e4-551a-b45f-23adc2e8fd49)
8 The Duty of an Heir (#u8cc04b07-bff3-50b2-aea9-58adf7b56bf7)
9 Not Waving: Drowning (#uc90ea8e6-81b3-5a55-bbf3-7f31d560874b)
10 Camilla and the Future (#ua4b24f15-ec26-5019-af8d-33cbed2b61a1)
11 From Bad to Worse (#u499bb2e4-1498-5b0f-b41d-5462bc12e64a)
12 What If? (#litres_trial_promo)
13 Mrs PB (#litres_trial_promo)
14 Lord Blackadder (#litres_trial_promo)
15 Battle of the Palaces (#litres_trial_promo)
16 Master of Spin (#litres_trial_promo)
17 Planes, Trains and Automobiles (#litres_trial_promo)
18 Beyond the Dreams of Avarice (#litres_trial_promo)
19 All the King’s Horses – The Private Queen (#litres_trial_promo)
20 The Sport of Kings (#litres_trial_promo)
21 Representing the Nation to Itself (#litres_trial_promo)
22 Coming to Grief (#litres_trial_promo)
23 Pomp and Ceremony (#litres_trial_promo)
24 Charity Begins at Home (#litres_trial_promo)
25 The Rough with the Smooth (#litres_trial_promo)
26 A Moment of Madness (#litres_trial_promo)
27 The Key to the Door (#litres_trial_promo)
28 Community Spirit (#litres_trial_promo)
29 A Thankless Task (#litres_trial_promo)
30 Changing the World (#litres_trial_promo)
31 Maundy Thursday and Fixtures in the Calendar (#litres_trial_promo)
32 Pressing the Flesh (#litres_trial_promo)
33 Crossing Continents (#litres_trial_promo)
34 Gongs and Garden Parties (#litres_trial_promo)
35 Voluntary Service (#litres_trial_promo)
36 Media Menace (#litres_trial_promo)
37 Temporary Stand-off (#litres_trial_promo)
38 Burrell (#litres_trial_promo)
39 Allegations and Denials (#litres_trial_promo)
40 Bear Traps (#litres_trial_promo)
41 In the Genes (#litres_trial_promo)
42 Conclusions (#litres_trial_promo)
43 The Way Ahead (#litres_trial_promo)
44 The Camilla Factor (#litres_trial_promo)
Plates (#litres_trial_promo)
Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
List of Illustrations (#ulink_817d458c-806c-5474-afb1-a589aec2ace2)
The King, Queen and Princess on the balcony (Rex) (#litres_trial_promo)
Lady Diana Spencer in see-through skirt (Rex) (#litres_trial_promo)
The Royal Family on the balcony with Diana and young Princes at Trooping the Colour (Tim Graham) (#litres_trial_promo)
The Family on the balcony during the Golden Jubilee (Tim Graham) (#litres_trial_promo)
The Party at the Palace (Tim Graham) (#litres_trial_promo)
The Prince of Wales shooting with Michael Fawcett (Eddie Boldizsar/Rex) (#litres_trial_promo)
Paul Burrell carrying a corgi (Tim Graham) (#litres_trial_promo)
The Queen arriving in Saudi Arabia on Concorde (Tim Graham) (#litres_trial_promo)
The Queen and Prince Philip in the Gold State Coach (Tim Graham) (#litres_trial_promo)
Prince Philip in bearskin (Les Wilson/Rex) (#litres_trial_promo)
Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother with Irish Guards and wolfhound (Tim Graham) (#litres_trial_promo)
The Queen at the Windsor Horse Show (Les Wilson/Rex) (#litres_trial_promo)
The Kiss on the balcony (Tim Graham) (#litres_trial_promo)
Charles and Diana in Korea (Tim Graham) (#litres_trial_promo)
The Princess of Wales with children in her arms (Tim Graham) (#litres_trial_promo)
Princess Anne standing by a cot (Tim Graham) (#litres_trial_promo)
Diana crouching to talk to hospice patient (Tim Graham) (#litres_trial_promo)
Diana in surgical mask (Rex) (#litres_trial_promo)
Prince William with hand to mouth for 18
birthday (Rex) (#litres_trial_promo)
Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation (Rex) (#litres_trial_promo)
Queen Mother’s funeral (Tim Graham) (#litres_trial_promo)
Prince William over a hot stove (Rex) (#litres_trial_promo)
Prince William in school uniform with Union Jack waistcoat (Rex) (#litres_trial_promo)
Prince Edward with Sir Cliff Richard at It’s a Royal Knockout (Rex) (#litres_trial_promo)
Princes William and Harry playing polo on bicycles (Les Wilson/Rex) (#litres_trial_promo)
The Queen wrapped up against the weather with a labrador and spaniel (Greaves/Rex) (#litres_trial_promo)
The Queen with Princess Anne and Zara Philips, all on horseback (Tim Graham) (#litres_trial_promo)
A tearful Queen leaving the 9/11 memorial service (Tim Graham) (#litres_trial_promo)
The Prince of Wales and Camilla Parker Bowles on the evening their engagement was announced (Rex) (#litres_trial_promo)
Prince Charles with Lady Diana Spencer after their engagement (Tim Graham) (#litres_trial_promo)
Prince Charles and Prince William on the 50th anniversary of VJ Day (Tim Graham) (#litres_trial_promo)
Prince Charles and Prince William with cows on the Home Farm (Les Wilson/Rex) (#litres_trial_promo)
Prince Harry being restrained outside a London nightclub (David Abiaw/Rex) (#litres_trial_promo)
The Princess of Wales during the Panorama interview (Rex) (#litres_trial_promo)
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.
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:
We went stalking together, we got hot, we got tired, she fell into a bog, she got covered in mud, laughed her head off, got puce in the face, hair glued to her forehead because it was pouring with rain … she was a sort of wonderful English schoolgirl who was game for anything, naturally young but sweet and clearly determined and enthusiastic about him, very much wanted him.
Imagine his surprise, therefore, when after their engagement she seemed suddenly to hate everything he had thought she loved. He was quite at a loss to understand the change in Diana and thought it must be his fault in some way; that the prospect of marrying him was all too ghastly. And yet he spoke to no one about his anxieties; and when concerned friends tried to talk to him, he refused to listen. Pulling out would have been unimaginable: the humiliation, the hurt, the headlines, the castigation; but in retrospect, it would have been infinitely less painful and less damaging to everyone involved, including the monarchy, than going through with a wedding that he knew was a mistake. At the very least he should have discussed it. As one relation says, ‘In his position he bloody well should have spoken to people because he had to think of the constitutional side as well as the private side. He had chosen Diana with both sides in mind, but equally he needed to think of the consequences for both if it was going to go wrong.’
The trouble is that the Prince of Wales is fundamentally a weak man, and that is what has so incensed the Duke of Edinburgh over the years. He wanted a son in his own image – a tough, abrasive, plain-talking, unemotional man’s man – but those qualities bypassed his first son and settled instead on his daughter. Charles has a generous heart, he cares hugely about the underdog, because, for all his palatial living, he is one, he identifies. He wants passionately to make the world a better place, to stop people feeling hopeless and helpless, to stop modernizers from destroying our heritage, chemicals from destroying our environment, ignorance and greed from destroying our planet, red tape from destroying our lives. He is admirable in so many ways, but he has never been a strong character and has never been able to cope with confrontation. Blisteringly angry at times, certainly, demanding, yes, and on the sporting field no one could question his courage, but he has never been brave when it comes to taking tough decisions. He gets others to do it for him. Perhaps it is because he has always been surrounded by strong women: his grandmother, his mother, his sister – even his nanny. Helen Lightbody was such a terrifying woman that the Queen kept out of the nursery while she was in charge. By the time the Queen had the two younger children Helen Lightbody had gone and Mabel Anderson, her deputy and a much easier character, was in charge, and she and the Queen were good friends and brought the children up together. As a result the Queen had much more contact with Andrew and Edward than she ever had with Charles and Anne, and is still infinitely closer to them today.
In marrying Diana, for all her emotional turmoil and frailty Charles had found himself with another strong, determined woman. He didn’t understand her rages – one day during their honeymoon, when they were staying at Craigowan Lodge, a small house on the Balmoral estate, she lost her temper and went for him with a knife which she then used to cut herself, leaving blood everywhere. That night as he knelt down to say his prayers – as he regularly does – Diana hit him over the head with the family bible. He has never been to the house since. He just couldn’t fathom the emotional rollercoaster, the demands, the insecurities; he couldn’t cope, needed others to help, which of course infuriated her more. Michael Colborne was the first of a long string of members of the Prince’s staff who had to mediate with Diana while Charles backed away. Even during the honeymoon he was summoned to Balmoral to talk to Diana because she was so bitterly unhappy. She was already caught in the grips of an eating disorder, bored by the countryside, made miserable by the rain and baffled by the Prince’s desire to spend his days shooting and fishing. And what was he doing while Colborne spent more than seven hours with Diana while she raged, cried, brooded in silence, ranted and kicked the furniture by turns? He was out stalking with his friends.
That night both men were taking the train back to London; the Prince had an engagement in the south, Diana was staying at Balmoral. As Colborne waited in the dark by the car, a brand-new Range Rover, he could hear a fearsome row going on inside. Suddenly the door flew open and Charles shouted ‘Michael’ and hurled something at him, which by the grace of God he caught before it was lost in the gravel. It was Diana’s wedding ring; she had lost so much weight it needed to be made smaller. The Prince was in a black rage all the way to the train; the new car wasn’t quite as he had specified and so he took it out on Colborne, calling him every name under the sun. Exhausted and defeated by his day with Diana, Colborne simply stared out of the window and let the abuse wash over him. Once on the train, the Prince summoned him. Colborne had just ordered himself a triple gin and was in no hurry to respond. The Prince offered him another. ‘Tonight, Michael,’ he said, ‘you displayed the best traditions of the silent service. You didn’t say a word.’
And for the next five hours or more they sat together and talked about the Prince’s marriage; not yet two months old it was already a disaster. He was mystified by Diana’s behaviour, simply couldn’t fathom what was going on or what he could do to make her well and happy.
NINE (#ulink_106771d7-2880-552b-aead-c8389f613ed3)
Not Waving: Drowning (#ulink_106771d7-2880-552b-aead-c8389f613ed3)
It was never the case that Charles didn’t care. Couldn’t cope, yes; and as the months and then the years went by with no let-up from the unpredictability of Diana’s behaviour, he became hardened and at times downright callous in his attitude towards her. He had found her a top psychiatrist; he had done what he could to appease her. He had cut out of his life the friends she disliked or of whom she was suspicious; good, loyal friends, some of them friends since childhood – and, in typical style, he took the easy way out and did it without telling them. They were left to wonder what had happened when phone calls, letters and invitations to Highgrove and Balmoral simply stopped. He even gave away his faithful old Labrador Harvey because Diana thought he was smelly. None of this seemed to make any difference; and when she burst into tears or launched into a tantrum, nothing he could say seemed to calm her. So he gave up. When she made dramatic gestures he walked away, when she self-harmed he walked away. Not because he didn’t care but because he couldn’t help; he felt desperate, hopeless and guilty and to this day he feels a terrible sense of failure for not having been able to make his marriage work.
That is not to say that there was no happiness. There were moments of intense pleasure, the children brought huge joy and there was laughter and jokes and fun, but not enough to counter the difficulties, and as time went by the gulf between them became no longer bridgeable.
Diana had needs that Charles couldn’t begin to address. Anyone who has lived with someone suffering from an eating disorder (which was very probably in Diana’s case a symptom of a personality disorder and therefore even more complex) knows all too well what an impossible situation he was in. Anorexia and bulimia test and sometimes destroy even the most stable relationships and balanced homes. And all that we know of her behaviour – from her staff, her friends and even her family – fits every description that has ever been written about the disorders. The Prince didn’t stand a chance. And yet to outsiders Diana looked like the happiest, most equable girl you could hope to find. She seduced everyone with her charm and coquettishness, men fell like ninepins, she was playful and funny and oh so beautiful, so young, so glamorous. Just what the Royal Family needed to invigorate it and make it seem relevant to swathes of young people who didn’t see the point of it. She captured the hearts and minds of the nation. No wonder no one wanted to believe that behind closed doors Diana was deceitful, demanding and manipulative, and that the laughter was replaced by tears and tantrums. Much easier to believe that it was all a story put about by the Prince’s friends to discredit Diana. And when Diana accused him of doing as much herself, because the woman he really loved was Camilla Parker Bowles, there was nothing more to be said. Nothing would convince the majority of the British people that Charles was anything other than a villain who used Diana as a brood mare to produce the heir and spare he needed; that their marriage was a sham from the start and the woman he really loved, and continued to bed throughout, was Camilla.
Camilla Parker Bowles has seen a turnaround in her fortunes since Diana died. Having been arch-villain and probably the most hated woman in Britain for a good chunk of the 1990s, people now rather admire her. They have bought into a touching love story. Charles was a bastard for what he did to Diana, so the script goes, but this is a woman he has loved since he was twenty-three. They missed their opportunity to marry then, but the flame still burned bright and now, in middle age, they have finally found happiness together. It doesn’t alter their view of what Charles did to Diana, but Diana has now been dead for nearly eight years, Camilla has behaved with dignity and discretion throughout, he has been true to her (if not to Diana), he’s a pretty decent chap in every other respect: they deserve some happiness.
It’s neat but it’s not the truth, and it is important to state this if only for the sake of William and Harry, who must infer from this version of events that the father they love used, abused and destroyed the mother they also loved. He did not and the impression of their marriage that Diana left on the world, via Andrew Morton and Panorama, and repeatedly rehearsed in documentaries, is grievously unfair.
The Prince of Wales has plenty of shortcomings but he is not a liar; his great misfortune is that he has never been able to be even faintly economical with the truth. There are so many occasions when the smallest, whitest lie would have saved him a great deal of trouble – starting with that fateful answer on the day of his engagement to Diana about whether he was in love. It has come back to haunt him regularly, as for many years did his admission that he talked to plants. And when I interviewed him in 1986 and asked him whether having a wife to talk to who had done ordinary, everyday things before her marriage was an advantage in helping him know how the other half lives, he said he didn’t really talk to Diana about that sort of thing, but conversations with Laurens van der Post were very stimulating from that point of view. His Private Secretary, Sir John Riddell, almost visibly clutched his head in his hands. But the most disastrous example was during his television interview with Jonathan Dimbleby when he was asked about his infidelity. The question didn’t come out of the blue, and his reply was very well thought out.
‘Were you,’ asked Dimbleby, ‘… did you try to be faithful and honourable to your wife when you took the vow of marriage?’
‘Yes,’ said the Prince, and after a brief and rather anguished pause said, ‘until it became irretrievably broken down, us both having tried.’
On that occasion his Private Secretary, Richard Aylard, had reinforced the Prince’s determination to tell the truth, and it was the rest of the world that held their heads in their hands and gasped with incredulity. The Duke of Edinburgh was incensed, the rest of the family flabbergasted, the Queen’s advisers and courtiers stunned, the Prince’s friends appalled, and the blame fell squarely on Richard Aylard for having allowed Charles to make what many regarded as the worst mistake of his life. At the time many people thought it might cost him the throne.
‘It wasn’t being honest to Jonathan that was the problem,’ protested Aylard in his defence. ‘If you want to start placing blame, the fault was getting into the relationship in the first place.’
There is no doubt that Camilla has been an important figure in the Prince’s life since he first fell in love with her at the age of twenty-three. They are the greatest of friends, they have all sorts of interests and enthusiasms in common and they love one another very dearly; it is clearly a warm, comfortable relationship and hugely beneficial to them both, but it hasn’t been an exclusive, obsessive relationship since Charles was twenty-three. He has fallen in and out of love many times since then – probably never more deeply than with Camilla – but he has fallen in love none the less. She was certainly one of the women he was seeing when he started going out with Diana but it was never going anywhere. Camilla was married; even if she had been divorced he could never have married her, not in 1981; a divorcee with two children becoming Princess of Wales? It was unthinkable. Besides, what woman in her right mind would want to?
When Charles first started looking upon Diana as a possible candidate for marriage he talked to Camilla about her; he asked all his close friends what they thought of Diana, and Camilla was one of those who tried to befriend her and welcome her to the group. She invited Charles and Diana to spend weekends at her house. There was nothing sinister in any of this. The fact that Camilla knew Charles was going to propose and hence wrote a friendly note to Diana to await her arrival at Clarence House on the day it was announced wasn’t sinister either. Look at almost any episode of the American TV sitcom Friends: soliciting friends’ approval of the latest girl/boyfriend is par for the course. But the Princess took it as proof that something was still going on between them, and read into Camilla’s friendly invitation to lunch the latter’s desire to find out whether she was going to hunt when she moved to Highgrove, and therefore whether she would be in the way of their plans to meet.
There were no meetings, and virtually no contact until several years into the marriage, and certainly no sex, as the Prince so painfully and honestly explained, until the marriage had irretrievably broken down. And by that time he was close to irretrievably breaking down, too. Towards the end of 1986 he started making contact with friends once again, those he had shut out of his life at Diana’s request some years before. As he wrote to one of them:
Frequently I feel nowadays that I’m in a kind of cage, pacing up and down in it and longing to be free. How awful incompatibility is, and how dreadfully destructive it can be for the players in this extraordinary drama. It has all the ingredients of a Greek tragedy … I fear I’m going to need a bit of help every now and then for which I feel rather ashamed.
He was in such a chronic state of depression by then that they feared for his sanity, and it was Patty Palmer-Tomkinson who engineered a reunion with Camilla, knowing how much she had meant to him in the past. Camilla herself was not particularly happy; she and Andrew Parker Bowles were the best of friends but their marriage was an empty shell with Andrew in London escorting pretty girls all week and Camilla minding the home, dogs, horses and children in the country. At first she and Charles started to talk on the telephone, he pouring out his heart to her, she listening sympathetically, warm, understanding and supportive; then they met at Patty’s house in Hampshire and started seeing each other again, and gradually the relationship developed and they took up where they had left off more than six years before. Camilla was a lifeline for Charles; she brought light and laughter into his life which for a long time had been so very dark.
This was not the outcome Charles had either wanted or anticipated. For years he had longed to be married, to have for himself the family atmosphere that he experienced in his friends’ houses, to have children running around and a companion with whom to share his life. He was lonely; he was surrounded by valets, footmen, butlers, private secretaries and police protection officers. He was never on his own, but ‘he was one of the loneliest men you’ll ever meet. They all are,’ says Michael Colborne. ‘They go out to banquets and dinners and great dos, but when they get home at night they go up to their rooms and they are on their own. There’s no one to have a drink with. They are very independent people; even their friends are mostly acquaintances.’ Charles wanted a soulmate. In a thank-you letter to a friend written on Boxing Day in 1981, when Diana was first pregnant, he wrote, ‘We’ve had such a lovely Christmas – the two of us. It has been extraordinarily happy and cosy being able to share it together … Next year will, I feel sure, be even nicer with a small one to join in as well.’
It had either been a rare moment of calm or wishful thinking. Not long afterwards she was throwing herself down the stairs in a desperate cry for help. The whole situation was a vicious circle. Diana’s chronic need for love and reassurance meant she wanted Charles to be with her 100 per cent of the time – more than that; she wanted his full attention 100 per cent of the time. It was an impossible demand. If she didn’t get it, she raged, and the more she raged the further she pushed him away. Even the most slavishly devoted partner would have found her demands unreasonable; he found them impossible. He was Prince of Wales, he had letters to write, papers to read, speeches to deliver and a diary full of engagements and ceremonial duties stretching ahead for ever. He could have given up all his sporting activities if he had wanted to, but he would never have been able to abandon his work; he simply couldn’t be the husband Diana wanted.
The interesting question is whether he could have been a satisfactory husband for any woman. Charles wanted a wife, he wanted a companion to share his life with, and he needed a wife because he was heir to the throne and had a duty to procreate; but he had no need of a wife in the sense that most other men need wives. Everything was already done for him: his meals were cooked; his clothes bought, laundered and laid out for him; his bath run, his toothbrush pasted; his shopping done; his house furnished, cleaned and polished; and if he wanted four boiled eggs for breakfast and his car brought round to the front door a minute ago, it happened.
Michael Colborne had warned Diana that in four or five years with this sort of lifestyle she would change; she would become an absolute bitch. The Prince of Wales had known no other lifestyle and was perforce supremely selfish. It may be that he would have taken out of a marriage rather more than he put into it. Very few people have ever disagreed with him, still less said ‘No’ to him, or told him anything he didn’t want to hear. He has never had to consider anyone else’s plans or preferences – and still doesn’t. His staff work all hours and are expected to jump when they are called whatever the time of day with little apparent thought for their families.
Materially he was spoilt but emotionally he was needy. And though he longed for a home, a family and security, as she did, like Diana he had never known a normal one and therefore had no model to work from. His parents loved him – there is no doubt about that – and friends remember the Queen sitting him on her knee at teatime when Charles was a small boy and playing games with him but she didn’t spend the hours in the nursery that she did with the two younger boys because she was intimidated by Helen Lightbody, and any sort of overt affection stopped as he grew older. The Duke was and is a bully, and was equally sparing in his affection. He was rough with Charles, and, according to witnesses, frequently reduced the boy to tears. As a result Charles was frightened of his father and always desperate to please him, without ever apparently succeeding. Even now in his fifties, Charles is still eager to please his parents and earn their approval, and much of the time still feels he’s failing. Hard to feel anything else when your father repeatedly makes sarcastic and cutting comments either to you or about you.
The Queen and the Duke were appalled by The Prince of Wales, the book Jonathan Dimbleby wrote about the Prince in 1995 following the disastrous film, and hurt by the picture he drew of his childhood. The Prince had given Dimbleby unprecedented access – which turned out to be decidedly foolish – allowed him free rein with private letters, diaries and even official papers and had given him many hours of his time. One former courtier was utterly bemused that his advisers had ever let it happen:
They released Jonathan Dimbleby and the Prince of Wales on to the Scottish moor together at 9.30 and they came back breathless and excited at 4.30; and when you go for a very exhausting walk with anybody – if you went with Goebbels – after a time the blood circulates, the joints ease up, the breath gets short – you’d pour out your heart to anyone, even Goebbels. Dimbleby has huge maieutic charm. Alan Bennett uses that word in his book Telling Tales; it means mid-wifely. Jonathan Dimbleby’s charms are huge so the Prince of Wales gave him all that stuff about how unhappy when he was a boy – the Queen never spoke to him, the Duke of Edinburgh was beastly to him – and it very much upsets them.
Everyone was told this book would finally show what a marvellous person he was; and people were bored out of their wits by Business in the Community and the Prince’s Trust; they wanted to know about their private life. We’re interested in who they’re going to bed with, except we got rather bored by that because we couldn’t keep up with it.
Superficially the Prince of Wales is a carbon copy of his father; it is as though he has modelled himself on the older man. They walk and talk the same way, hold their hands behind their backs in the same way, they enjoy the same sports, share the same interests, and are both involved in charities with much the same agendas. But according to the Duke of Edinburgh there is a fundamental difference. ‘He is a romantic – and I’m a pragmatist. That means we do see things differently. And because I don’t see things as a romantic would, I’m unfeeling.’
If Charles and his parents had only been able to talk, the history of the last two decades might have been very different and thus also the future security of the monarchy. Prince Philip might have spoken to Charles about the need to make up his mind about Diana rather than sending him a letter which was open to misinterpretation. Charles may have discussed his fears that this marriage was going to be a mistake during the five months of his engagement, so that they could have devised a dignified way of calling the whole thing to a halt. And if all else had failed and they had gone down the aisle and given the public the fabulous fairy-tale wedding that so lit up the world, he might have asked his parents for help when things started to unravel at such terrifying speed. Instead, he said nothing and they said nothing. And, sure as hell, no one else was going to say anything, even though everyone in Kensington Palace and St James’s Palace could see the disaster unfolding before their very eyes.
Sadly, the marriage was never going to have been bliss for either of them, that was clear from the start. There were too many differences, too many unrequited needs, too much loneliness; but they could have kept up a façade for the sake of their sons and the monarchy and the millions of people who had wished them well on their wedding day, identified, empathized and invested such hope in their union. By the time any talking happened it was too late. The Princess had gone public, she was out of control – and scaring even herself – and on course for destruction.
As a former courtier says, ‘You might have thought the Prince could have found a way of dealing with Diana. Have said, “Let’s have a high-level conference over tea to see how we’re going to manage this.” But it’s part of his psychology that he can’t do that, it’s all part of not giving a PR answer, not telling the smallest of white lies, when he should.’
TEN (#ulink_2b67c279-a5ca-5f34-8967-ccfac791866f)
Camilla and the Future (#ulink_2b67c279-a5ca-5f34-8967-ccfac791866f)
The Queen has long held the wish that the earth would open up and swallow her newest daughter-in-law. It is nothing personal – they scarcely met during all the years of controversy – and when they did know one another, in the days when Camilla was a regular guest at Balmoral, Sandringham and Windsor, she was very fond of her. Everyone was very fond of Camilla, particularly the Queen Mother. She was there in those days as the wife of Andrew Parker Bowles, who boasted the unlikely title of the Queen’s Silver-Stick-in-Waiting. It is a title from Tudor times – the incumbent kept close to the sovereign to protect him or her from danger and carried a staff of office, topped in silver. Camilla was easy, friendly, earthy and game for anything; she also loved horses and dogs – the perfect combination to endear anyone to the House of Windsor. But the Queen, like her former Private Secretary Robert Fellowes, believes that with few exceptions everything that has gone wrong for the monarchy in the last twenty years has been attributable to Mrs Parker Bowles. It is hard to disagree.
Whichever story you buy about the relationship – the Princess’s version, that there were three of them in the marriage, so it never stood a chance; or the Prince’s version, that he gave up Camilla before his engagement and there was no physical contact until more than six years later – Mrs Parker Bowles plays a central role. She was certainly the Prince’s lover before Diana appeared on the scene, and she was definitely in place again after 1987. He told us so. Whether activity in the intervening years was all in Diana’s imagination or not is largely immaterial. By 1992 the Princess of Wales was passionately jealous of her rival and wanted the world to know how unhappy she was about it. Her chosen method was through Andrew Morton, a charming, roguish former Daily Star journalist. He wrote a riveting book the like of which has never been seen before or since.
He once told me that he was able to write his book Diana: Her True Story in 1992 because of one I had written the previous year which had incensed Diana. That book was Charles and Diana: Portrait of a Marriage and in it I had said that the marriage was not a happy one for a multitude of reasons – something I had first mentioned in a biography of Charles four years earlier – and they were leading largely separate lives with separate friends, which was sad, but that it was a successful working partnership none the less. They both worked hard, both made a real difference in their charitable activities, were a terrific double act for the House of Windsor and were both excellent parents. Jonathan Dimbleby mentioned my book as a footnote in his own book three years later. He called it ‘a sensitive account of a working partnership which judged that the marriage was, in those terms, “actually very healthy” – a conclusion which, pre-Morton, did not seem so far from the truth as it would do with the benefit of hindsight’. What incensed Diana was the suggestion that, ten years into her marriage, she was happy with this situation; and she set out to tell the world what her life was really like.
Morton used to play squash with a doctor friend of Diana’s, James Colthurst, and he acted as a go-between. The full truth of Diana’s participation only came out after her death. She had spoken into a tape recorder at Kensington Palace during the summer and autumn of 1991 and Colthurst had delivered the tapes to Morton. The result was explosive: eighteen thousand words on tape and a publishing phenomenon. Diana: Her True Story, which ultimately led to the break-up of the marriage, rocked the monarchy to its foundations. It talked about Diana’s troubled childhood, her feelings of abandonment when her mother left, her bulimia, her husband’s indifference towards her, his obsession with his mistress. The authority of the text was bolstered by on-the-record quotes from some of Diana’s closest friends like James Gilbey (of Squidgygate fame) and old flatmate Carolyn Bartholomew. It talked about the Prince’s shortcomings as a father and the loneliness and isolation Diana had felt for so many years, trapped in a loveless marriage within a hostile court, made worse by a cold and disapproving Royal Family. The book was serialized in the Sunday Times. ‘Diana Driven To Five Suicide Bids By “Uncaring” Charles’ screamed the banner headline, while the Palace went into meltdown. So many incidents revealed in the serialization, such as those occasions on which the Princess had self-harmed, happened at Sandringham; plans over who took the children where were discussed in the privacy of their office. Morton’s sources were good; suspiciously good. And it wasn’t the first time that stories had inexplicably been leaked.
Robert Fellowes, treading difficult ground, not for the first or last time, as both Diana’s brother-in-law and the Queen’s Private Secretary, asked Diana if she had had anything to do with the book. Diana swore she hadn’t and Fellowes believed her. The Duke of Edinburgh also challenged her and again she denied it; lying, as it turned out in both cases. The chairman of the Press Complaints Commission therefore duly issued a statement condemning the serialization, and was left feeling very foolish and exceedingly angry when Diana went straight round to Carolyn Bartholomew’s house (having telephoned the newspapers to ensure photographers would be waiting) and in a public show of approval embraced her on the doorstep.
During Ascot Week, very shortly afterwards, while Morton’s book started vanishing from the shelves, the Queen, the Duke, Charles and Diana all sat down together at Windsor to discuss the situation and to see what could be salvaged from the marriage. This was the first time there had ever been a discussion of this kind. Parents of any couple having difficulties in their marriage would be naturally reticent about intervening, uncertain as to whether help would be welcome. But this wasn’t any couple. The breakdown of this marriage had huge implications for the monarchy and yet both the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh had held back and chosen not to get involved. Andrew Morton was the first person to discover that the Princess had been suffering from bulimia, and the detail in his book was obviously unparalleled, but plenty had already been written about the state of the marriage; it was no secret that Charles and Diana were leading separate lives, seeing separate friends and that the marriage was in trouble. Calling a conference now was too late. Diana had gone public, and, intoxicated with the power she had over the husband who had cheated on her, she announced that she wanted a trial separation.
The Queen and Duke were sympathetic but were firmly against the idea of separation, and urged them both for the sake of the boys as well as Crown and country to try and find a way of making the marriage work. They all agreed to meet again the next day to talk further, but Diana didn’t show up.
Two months later the Sun published a transcript of an amorous late-night telephone conversation allegedly between Diana and James Gilbey. Dubbed ‘Squidgygate’ because of the way Gilbey repeatedly referred to her as Squidgy or Squidge, it reinforced Morton’s message. Between endearments, she railed against the Prince and his ‘fucking family’ and said, ‘I’m going to do something dramatic because I can’t stand the confines of this marriage.’
By Christmas her wish had come true. It had taken one final disastrous tour to Korea, and a botched weekend Charles had planned to have with the children at Sandringham, for the Prince finally to snap and agree there was no purpose in carrying on; the marriage was over and all hope that he and Diana might still be friends was also over. On 9 December 1992 the Prime Minister, John Major, announced their separation in the House of Commons. Julia Cleverdon, chief executive of Business in the Community, was with the Prince of Wales that day. She had worked closely with him for nearly ten years and in all that time, despite innumerable crises, she had never seen him so utterly miserable.
Diana took the moral high ground. She seemed oblivious of the fact that she too had been unfaithful during their marriage. In fact, she had been the first to do so, and had had not just one lover but a succession. Charles had been unfaithful with one woman. The problem was that it was Camilla Parker Bowles, the same woman he had admitted to having been in love with before he and Diana ever met. In yet another example of the Prince’s unfortunate compulsion to tell the absolute truth he had gone out of his way to explain this to Diana, to reassure her that now that he was engaged to be married there was, and would be, no other woman in his life. And when Diana asked him point-blank if he still loved Camilla, he didn’t say, as anyone with an ounce of common sense would have said, ‘No. You’re the one I love. She and every other woman I’ve ever known is history.’ He said ‘Yes’ and went on to explain that Camilla was very special to him, but then so were a number of other women.
For a man who is so sensitive and really quite clever at times, it was utterly crass. Diana was insanely jealous of her and it had nothing whatever to do with having a wobbly background and insecure childhood. Find me a young girl who is not jealous of her boyfriend or husband’s ex-lovers. Even if they have never met their predecessors they are jealous – jealous of the idea, jealous of the memories they have of each other; irrational, stupid, deeply destructive, I don’t deny, but true.
An old family friend, who had also married a man much older than herself, tried to calm Diana. Yes, he’d had girlfriends and some quite serious, but he was thirty-two, that was to be expected. The thing to hang on to, she said, was the fact that it was none of them that he had married – the one he wanted to marry was her.
There was just one glaring difference here between Diana’s situation and that of any other girl on the eve of her wedding; and Diana was no fool, she knew. Charles was Prince of Wales, he couldn’t marry them; he certainly couldn’t marry Mrs Parker Bowles – she was already married. As she said to Andrew Morton, ‘He’d found the virgin, the sacrificial lamb.’
And so she became obsessed. A suspicious, insecure girl by nature she imagined an affair where none existed, she imagined him on the telephone to Camilla all the time, discussing his marriage, discussing her. The suspicion and the jealousy ate away at her. She had found a bracelet on Michael Colborne’s desk, with GF engraved on it, that Charles had given to Camilla over lunch two days before the wedding. The GF stood for Girl Friday, his nickname for Camilla. It was with a collection of similar presents for other women who had been kind to him during his days as a bachelor. Diana simply saw it as a token of love and went berserk. Camilla gave Charles a pair of cufflinks and those were the ones he chose to wear on his honeymoon. Proof seemed to be everywhere. He might have stopped seeing her, she reasoned, but that didn’t mean he had stopped loving her. She told Morton that Charles and Camilla had slept together at Buckingham Palace two nights before the wedding. It was fantasy. The Queen had hosted a dinner and ball that night and Charles was up until the early hours with guests; Camilla was long gone; and on the following night he spent most of it talking to his mother’s lady-in waiting, Lady Susan Hussey, who he had known since the age of twelve. All sorts of wild ideas thrashed around inside Diana’s head and no amount of reassurance from her husband helped. She couldn’t exorcize the conviction that her husband loved someone else.
The Prince of Wales was utterly humiliated by Diana: Her True Story. It painted the blackest portrait; it not only called him a cold and faithless husband and a bad father, but it also questioned his fitness to be king. So much of it was demonstrably untrue and so many stories were a distortion of the truth. People who were witnesses to the events remembered them in essence, but they had a twist to them which always put the Prince in a bad light. He was adamant, nevertheless, that there should be no retaliation and instructed his friends to say nothing.
Charles has never publicly criticized Diana. Whenever I have pointed this out to people they say, ‘Ah, but he got his friends to do it for him.’ This is untrue. Some of his friends did feel that the injustice meted out to him by Morton’s book was intolerable and I, for one, was encouraged by several of them to try to redress the balance, but they were not thanked for their trouble and neither was I. I had been planning to make the television documentary that Jonathan Dimbleby finally made, to mark the Prince’s twenty-five years as Prince of Wales. I had had discussions with Christopher Martin, the producer of the Prince’s previous films – one on his views about architecture, the other about conservation called The Earth in Balance. Christopher and I had been to a private lunch at Highgrove to discuss it with him. Suddenly I was dropped from the project and discovered very much later the reason why. I had defended him too vigorously in the media.
What Morton’s book had done, as none other had done before it, was point the finger at Camilla Parker Bowles as the principal cause of Diana’s unhappiness. Diana had seriously considered calling off the wedding two days before she walked down the aisle, he said, because of Prince Charles’s ‘continuing friendship with Camilla Parker Bowles, the wife of a member of the Queen’s household’. Today the name Camilla Parker Bowles is almost as well known as that of the Prince of Wales, but until 1992 she was scarcely known outside her own circle of friends – and neither was her relationship with the Prince.
Morton’s book changed all that. It didn’t convince everyone that Charles and Camilla were having an affair. Some thought there was a chance that he had got it wrong, that it was just more tabloid tittle-tattle; but a substantial number of people did believe that what was written in Diana: Her True Story was true, and overnight Camilla’s peaceful existence in the heart of the countryside was shattered. The press set up camp outside her house and followed her wherever she went. She wasn’t safe even in her own garden; photographers were waiting with their long lenses. Hate mail began to arrive accusing her of breaking up the royal marriage. For someone with no experience of being the object of such hatred it was extremely unnerving. It also put her husband in a difficult situation, and wasn’t easy for her two children, Tom and Laura (then both in their teens), or for her elderly parents. But Morton was as nothing compared with what followed in relatively quick succession: the Camillagate tapes, the Dimbleby documentary and Panorama. The first two put an end to Camilla’s twenty-one-year marriage; the third brought the Prince’s marriage to an end.
ELEVEN (#ulink_cfe33a6d-097c-5fd3-848a-6c76119f84a8)
From Bad to Worse (#ulink_cfe33a6d-097c-5fd3-848a-6c76119f84a8)
Having watched the Royal Family from the sidelines all these years, I never cease to be amazed by their resilience. Crises have come and gone, crises that would have crippled most individuals, families, even institutions, but they simply keep going, keep on doing what they have always done, nine times out of ten not even acknowledging whatever has happened, and miraculously the crisis fades. It is a brilliant strategy for survival and probably the only one that could work for a family so remorselessly in the limelight from cradle to coffin. They have no alternative but to take the long view, and recognize that, long term, very little really matters. But after an intimate late-night telephone conversation between Charles and Camilla was taped, published in the British press and devoured by millions over their breakfast cornflakes, I did wonder how the Prince of Wales would recover from this one. The man wanted to be a Tampax. How do you hold up your head in public after everyone you meet knows that? He wanted to be a Tampax to be as close as he could to Camilla. It was a playful conversation any two people very much in love and missing one another might have had and, read in its entirety, the eleven-minute conversation was rather touching; but you would rather slit your throat than contemplate one solitary soul overhearing you, let alone millions of people all over the world.
The tape was a compilation of several different conversations held over several months in 1989, but that was irrelevant. No one could deny that the voices were authentic; the Prince’s humiliation and embarrassment were total. He knows that it will come back to haunt him – it will be dredged up at his coronation and at other serious moments in his life – and serve to humiliate his parents, his sons and Camilla’s family, too. And yet the day the tapes were published he had an engagement in Liverpool and, instead of finding some excuse to cancel, as any ordinary person would, he stepped out of his car that morning to face the waiting crowds as though absolutely nothing had happened. The courage it took was immeasurable; he had no idea what kind of reception awaited him, but to the intense relief of everyone with him there were no sniggers, no shouts, no catcalls and no absence of people. Yet for all his cool, it was one of the worst days of his life, made worse by the damage he knew he had inflicted yet again on the monarchy.
There were lurid headlines and cartoons in the press, wide condemnation of Charles, questions about his fitness to be king, and, in the mounting fever of puritanical indignation, demands from Cabinet ministers that the Prince give up Mrs Parker Bowles.
The contents of her mailbag, meanwhile, took on an even more unpleasant tone and the press presence and pressure at her house became even worse. She became the butt of jokes up and down the country, her children at boarding school were teased and tormented and her husband stood publicly cuckolded.
It was at this point, with the documentary underway, that Jonathan Dimbleby and the Prince’s adviser, Richard Aylard, discussed the question of the Prince’s adultery. With the Morton book published, two sets of tapes in the public arena and screeds written in the press, it was an issue that no film about the last twenty-five years could duck. Dimbleby would have to ask the question; what Aylard and the Prince had to decide was how best to reply? There were three options. The truth, a lie, or evasion. Aylard advised the first, which accorded with the Prince’s inclination. If he lied then sooner or later he would be caught out, argued the Private Secretary. The News of the World, he knew, already had both the Prince and Camilla watched and followed round the clock; it was only a matter of time before they were seen together or a disaffected servant sold his story. If he refused to answer the question on the grounds that it was a personal matter the surveillance would continue and the story would never go away until the media had evidence of an affair. After the ‘Camillagate’ tape, most people believed they were lovers, so why not be honest with the British public and admit the truth? The Prince wanted to tell the truth and Aylard encouraged him.
What they should both have foreseen was that the great British public was more interested in Diana’s truth. She had got hers in first and it had a far juicier ring to it. They heard the ‘Yes’, and completely ignored the rest of his sentence which came after an anguished pause, ‘the marriage having irretrievably broken down, us both having tried’, and concluded that Charles had been an adulterer from day one. When Aylard confirmed at a press conference the next day that the adultery to which the Prince had confessed had indeed been with Mrs Parker Bowles, her goose was finally cooked. Andrew Parker Bowles filed for divorce and, less than a year later, married his long-term girlfriend, Rosie Pitman. The public blamed Camilla for breaking up the royal family home, and the reputation of the monarchy was once again dragged through the mire.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/penny-junor/the-firm-the-troubled-life-of-the-house-of-windsor/) на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
Penny Junor
It would be hard to invent a group of personalities more extraordinary than the British Royal Family – known as 'The Firm' by Prince Philip. With an eye on the past, present and future, this book takes a look at how the family really operates and reveals how they behave behind closed doors.This ebook is made from the 2009 edition.With showbiz stars and sporting celebrities now attracting the adulation once afforded to royalty, The Firm questions what monarchy is for.Is it a hangover from the past, an expensive anachronism, a relic of a bygone age of deference and hierarchy, or is it an important and relevant part of Britain in the 21st century – something that gives stability and continuity to the country, and richness and glamour to our national life in ways that a republic never could? If so, do the media mock, hound and criticize the Royal Family at their peril? Has Prince Charles sacrificed the throne for love? Could Prince William decide that the long lenses and the scrutiny of his private life is too high a price to pay?Penny will also look at how the dynamics of the royal household have changed over the last year and what repercussions these changes will have. Whilst in the hardback edition Penny Junor was able to discuss the implications of Charles and Camilla's marriage only two months after it was announced, the paperback promises to offer a host of new surprises and implication for the future of the House of Windsor, as well as an inside view of how The Firm have taken in their newest member.Whatever happens over the next year, we can be sure that Penny will update this paperback edition to make it an essential buy for anyone who has even a passing interest in Britain's most dysfunctional and fascinating family.
PENNY JUNOR
The Firm
The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor
For Lupus
Contents
Cover (#u64fb74cc-7a0e-572e-9545-74f7808f3964)
Title Page (#u2aaa33eb-fbe0-5f5d-8644-a4fde48b454a)
Dedication (#uafa43ee2-9c46-5e43-9afd-d28965de61d2)
List of Illustrations (#u4ca041cd-d3ed-5387-84cf-bdb6bbdae2c8)
Introduction (#u9d247835-75ff-5f1c-b646-d774a87b19a4)
1 An Extraordinary Way to Live (#u402639dc-5912-56c5-a2bf-deb0351987b6)
2 Keeping House (#u6228bb4d-72ca-5230-bc2e-77de3911ba03)
3 Winds of Change (#ue930f7eb-ddec-5b94-9533-765f9f7bced3)
4 188 Recommendations (#ud6267628-9800-5c8f-a90d-0174a4ffdd71)
5 Communication (#u69d052a4-39e6-56da-a820-62bd4e5b746f)
6 Lessons Learnt (#ua971c270-7522-5f5f-80fd-c2da8e09064d)
7 Diana (#u6fbd409f-c9e4-551a-b45f-23adc2e8fd49)
8 The Duty of an Heir (#u8cc04b07-bff3-50b2-aea9-58adf7b56bf7)
9 Not Waving: Drowning (#uc90ea8e6-81b3-5a55-bbf3-7f31d560874b)
10 Camilla and the Future (#ua4b24f15-ec26-5019-af8d-33cbed2b61a1)
11 From Bad to Worse (#u499bb2e4-1498-5b0f-b41d-5462bc12e64a)
12 What If? (#litres_trial_promo)
13 Mrs PB (#litres_trial_promo)
14 Lord Blackadder (#litres_trial_promo)
15 Battle of the Palaces (#litres_trial_promo)
16 Master of Spin (#litres_trial_promo)
17 Planes, Trains and Automobiles (#litres_trial_promo)
18 Beyond the Dreams of Avarice (#litres_trial_promo)
19 All the King’s Horses – The Private Queen (#litres_trial_promo)
20 The Sport of Kings (#litres_trial_promo)
21 Representing the Nation to Itself (#litres_trial_promo)
22 Coming to Grief (#litres_trial_promo)
23 Pomp and Ceremony (#litres_trial_promo)
24 Charity Begins at Home (#litres_trial_promo)
25 The Rough with the Smooth (#litres_trial_promo)
26 A Moment of Madness (#litres_trial_promo)
27 The Key to the Door (#litres_trial_promo)
28 Community Spirit (#litres_trial_promo)
29 A Thankless Task (#litres_trial_promo)
30 Changing the World (#litres_trial_promo)
31 Maundy Thursday and Fixtures in the Calendar (#litres_trial_promo)
32 Pressing the Flesh (#litres_trial_promo)
33 Crossing Continents (#litres_trial_promo)
34 Gongs and Garden Parties (#litres_trial_promo)
35 Voluntary Service (#litres_trial_promo)
36 Media Menace (#litres_trial_promo)
37 Temporary Stand-off (#litres_trial_promo)
38 Burrell (#litres_trial_promo)
39 Allegations and Denials (#litres_trial_promo)
40 Bear Traps (#litres_trial_promo)
41 In the Genes (#litres_trial_promo)
42 Conclusions (#litres_trial_promo)
43 The Way Ahead (#litres_trial_promo)
44 The Camilla Factor (#litres_trial_promo)
Plates (#litres_trial_promo)
Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
List of Illustrations (#ulink_817d458c-806c-5474-afb1-a589aec2ace2)
The King, Queen and Princess on the balcony (Rex) (#litres_trial_promo)
Lady Diana Spencer in see-through skirt (Rex) (#litres_trial_promo)
The Royal Family on the balcony with Diana and young Princes at Trooping the Colour (Tim Graham) (#litres_trial_promo)
The Family on the balcony during the Golden Jubilee (Tim Graham) (#litres_trial_promo)
The Party at the Palace (Tim Graham) (#litres_trial_promo)
The Prince of Wales shooting with Michael Fawcett (Eddie Boldizsar/Rex) (#litres_trial_promo)
Paul Burrell carrying a corgi (Tim Graham) (#litres_trial_promo)
The Queen arriving in Saudi Arabia on Concorde (Tim Graham) (#litres_trial_promo)
The Queen and Prince Philip in the Gold State Coach (Tim Graham) (#litres_trial_promo)
Prince Philip in bearskin (Les Wilson/Rex) (#litres_trial_promo)
Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother with Irish Guards and wolfhound (Tim Graham) (#litres_trial_promo)
The Queen at the Windsor Horse Show (Les Wilson/Rex) (#litres_trial_promo)
The Kiss on the balcony (Tim Graham) (#litres_trial_promo)
Charles and Diana in Korea (Tim Graham) (#litres_trial_promo)
The Princess of Wales with children in her arms (Tim Graham) (#litres_trial_promo)
Princess Anne standing by a cot (Tim Graham) (#litres_trial_promo)
Diana crouching to talk to hospice patient (Tim Graham) (#litres_trial_promo)
Diana in surgical mask (Rex) (#litres_trial_promo)
Prince William with hand to mouth for 18
birthday (Rex) (#litres_trial_promo)
Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation (Rex) (#litres_trial_promo)
Queen Mother’s funeral (Tim Graham) (#litres_trial_promo)
Prince William over a hot stove (Rex) (#litres_trial_promo)
Prince William in school uniform with Union Jack waistcoat (Rex) (#litres_trial_promo)
Prince Edward with Sir Cliff Richard at It’s a Royal Knockout (Rex) (#litres_trial_promo)
Princes William and Harry playing polo on bicycles (Les Wilson/Rex) (#litres_trial_promo)
The Queen wrapped up against the weather with a labrador and spaniel (Greaves/Rex) (#litres_trial_promo)
The Queen with Princess Anne and Zara Philips, all on horseback (Tim Graham) (#litres_trial_promo)
A tearful Queen leaving the 9/11 memorial service (Tim Graham) (#litres_trial_promo)
The Prince of Wales and Camilla Parker Bowles on the evening their engagement was announced (Rex) (#litres_trial_promo)
Prince Charles with Lady Diana Spencer after their engagement (Tim Graham) (#litres_trial_promo)
Prince Charles and Prince William on the 50th anniversary of VJ Day (Tim Graham) (#litres_trial_promo)
Prince Charles and Prince William with cows on the Home Farm (Les Wilson/Rex) (#litres_trial_promo)
Prince Harry being restrained outside a London nightclub (David Abiaw/Rex) (#litres_trial_promo)
The Princess of Wales during the Panorama interview (Rex) (#litres_trial_promo)
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.
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:
We went stalking together, we got hot, we got tired, she fell into a bog, she got covered in mud, laughed her head off, got puce in the face, hair glued to her forehead because it was pouring with rain … she was a sort of wonderful English schoolgirl who was game for anything, naturally young but sweet and clearly determined and enthusiastic about him, very much wanted him.
Imagine his surprise, therefore, when after their engagement she seemed suddenly to hate everything he had thought she loved. He was quite at a loss to understand the change in Diana and thought it must be his fault in some way; that the prospect of marrying him was all too ghastly. And yet he spoke to no one about his anxieties; and when concerned friends tried to talk to him, he refused to listen. Pulling out would have been unimaginable: the humiliation, the hurt, the headlines, the castigation; but in retrospect, it would have been infinitely less painful and less damaging to everyone involved, including the monarchy, than going through with a wedding that he knew was a mistake. At the very least he should have discussed it. As one relation says, ‘In his position he bloody well should have spoken to people because he had to think of the constitutional side as well as the private side. He had chosen Diana with both sides in mind, but equally he needed to think of the consequences for both if it was going to go wrong.’
The trouble is that the Prince of Wales is fundamentally a weak man, and that is what has so incensed the Duke of Edinburgh over the years. He wanted a son in his own image – a tough, abrasive, plain-talking, unemotional man’s man – but those qualities bypassed his first son and settled instead on his daughter. Charles has a generous heart, he cares hugely about the underdog, because, for all his palatial living, he is one, he identifies. He wants passionately to make the world a better place, to stop people feeling hopeless and helpless, to stop modernizers from destroying our heritage, chemicals from destroying our environment, ignorance and greed from destroying our planet, red tape from destroying our lives. He is admirable in so many ways, but he has never been a strong character and has never been able to cope with confrontation. Blisteringly angry at times, certainly, demanding, yes, and on the sporting field no one could question his courage, but he has never been brave when it comes to taking tough decisions. He gets others to do it for him. Perhaps it is because he has always been surrounded by strong women: his grandmother, his mother, his sister – even his nanny. Helen Lightbody was such a terrifying woman that the Queen kept out of the nursery while she was in charge. By the time the Queen had the two younger children Helen Lightbody had gone and Mabel Anderson, her deputy and a much easier character, was in charge, and she and the Queen were good friends and brought the children up together. As a result the Queen had much more contact with Andrew and Edward than she ever had with Charles and Anne, and is still infinitely closer to them today.
In marrying Diana, for all her emotional turmoil and frailty Charles had found himself with another strong, determined woman. He didn’t understand her rages – one day during their honeymoon, when they were staying at Craigowan Lodge, a small house on the Balmoral estate, she lost her temper and went for him with a knife which she then used to cut herself, leaving blood everywhere. That night as he knelt down to say his prayers – as he regularly does – Diana hit him over the head with the family bible. He has never been to the house since. He just couldn’t fathom the emotional rollercoaster, the demands, the insecurities; he couldn’t cope, needed others to help, which of course infuriated her more. Michael Colborne was the first of a long string of members of the Prince’s staff who had to mediate with Diana while Charles backed away. Even during the honeymoon he was summoned to Balmoral to talk to Diana because she was so bitterly unhappy. She was already caught in the grips of an eating disorder, bored by the countryside, made miserable by the rain and baffled by the Prince’s desire to spend his days shooting and fishing. And what was he doing while Colborne spent more than seven hours with Diana while she raged, cried, brooded in silence, ranted and kicked the furniture by turns? He was out stalking with his friends.
That night both men were taking the train back to London; the Prince had an engagement in the south, Diana was staying at Balmoral. As Colborne waited in the dark by the car, a brand-new Range Rover, he could hear a fearsome row going on inside. Suddenly the door flew open and Charles shouted ‘Michael’ and hurled something at him, which by the grace of God he caught before it was lost in the gravel. It was Diana’s wedding ring; she had lost so much weight it needed to be made smaller. The Prince was in a black rage all the way to the train; the new car wasn’t quite as he had specified and so he took it out on Colborne, calling him every name under the sun. Exhausted and defeated by his day with Diana, Colborne simply stared out of the window and let the abuse wash over him. Once on the train, the Prince summoned him. Colborne had just ordered himself a triple gin and was in no hurry to respond. The Prince offered him another. ‘Tonight, Michael,’ he said, ‘you displayed the best traditions of the silent service. You didn’t say a word.’
And for the next five hours or more they sat together and talked about the Prince’s marriage; not yet two months old it was already a disaster. He was mystified by Diana’s behaviour, simply couldn’t fathom what was going on or what he could do to make her well and happy.
NINE (#ulink_106771d7-2880-552b-aead-c8389f613ed3)
Not Waving: Drowning (#ulink_106771d7-2880-552b-aead-c8389f613ed3)
It was never the case that Charles didn’t care. Couldn’t cope, yes; and as the months and then the years went by with no let-up from the unpredictability of Diana’s behaviour, he became hardened and at times downright callous in his attitude towards her. He had found her a top psychiatrist; he had done what he could to appease her. He had cut out of his life the friends she disliked or of whom she was suspicious; good, loyal friends, some of them friends since childhood – and, in typical style, he took the easy way out and did it without telling them. They were left to wonder what had happened when phone calls, letters and invitations to Highgrove and Balmoral simply stopped. He even gave away his faithful old Labrador Harvey because Diana thought he was smelly. None of this seemed to make any difference; and when she burst into tears or launched into a tantrum, nothing he could say seemed to calm her. So he gave up. When she made dramatic gestures he walked away, when she self-harmed he walked away. Not because he didn’t care but because he couldn’t help; he felt desperate, hopeless and guilty and to this day he feels a terrible sense of failure for not having been able to make his marriage work.
That is not to say that there was no happiness. There were moments of intense pleasure, the children brought huge joy and there was laughter and jokes and fun, but not enough to counter the difficulties, and as time went by the gulf between them became no longer bridgeable.
Diana had needs that Charles couldn’t begin to address. Anyone who has lived with someone suffering from an eating disorder (which was very probably in Diana’s case a symptom of a personality disorder and therefore even more complex) knows all too well what an impossible situation he was in. Anorexia and bulimia test and sometimes destroy even the most stable relationships and balanced homes. And all that we know of her behaviour – from her staff, her friends and even her family – fits every description that has ever been written about the disorders. The Prince didn’t stand a chance. And yet to outsiders Diana looked like the happiest, most equable girl you could hope to find. She seduced everyone with her charm and coquettishness, men fell like ninepins, she was playful and funny and oh so beautiful, so young, so glamorous. Just what the Royal Family needed to invigorate it and make it seem relevant to swathes of young people who didn’t see the point of it. She captured the hearts and minds of the nation. No wonder no one wanted to believe that behind closed doors Diana was deceitful, demanding and manipulative, and that the laughter was replaced by tears and tantrums. Much easier to believe that it was all a story put about by the Prince’s friends to discredit Diana. And when Diana accused him of doing as much herself, because the woman he really loved was Camilla Parker Bowles, there was nothing more to be said. Nothing would convince the majority of the British people that Charles was anything other than a villain who used Diana as a brood mare to produce the heir and spare he needed; that their marriage was a sham from the start and the woman he really loved, and continued to bed throughout, was Camilla.
Camilla Parker Bowles has seen a turnaround in her fortunes since Diana died. Having been arch-villain and probably the most hated woman in Britain for a good chunk of the 1990s, people now rather admire her. They have bought into a touching love story. Charles was a bastard for what he did to Diana, so the script goes, but this is a woman he has loved since he was twenty-three. They missed their opportunity to marry then, but the flame still burned bright and now, in middle age, they have finally found happiness together. It doesn’t alter their view of what Charles did to Diana, but Diana has now been dead for nearly eight years, Camilla has behaved with dignity and discretion throughout, he has been true to her (if not to Diana), he’s a pretty decent chap in every other respect: they deserve some happiness.
It’s neat but it’s not the truth, and it is important to state this if only for the sake of William and Harry, who must infer from this version of events that the father they love used, abused and destroyed the mother they also loved. He did not and the impression of their marriage that Diana left on the world, via Andrew Morton and Panorama, and repeatedly rehearsed in documentaries, is grievously unfair.
The Prince of Wales has plenty of shortcomings but he is not a liar; his great misfortune is that he has never been able to be even faintly economical with the truth. There are so many occasions when the smallest, whitest lie would have saved him a great deal of trouble – starting with that fateful answer on the day of his engagement to Diana about whether he was in love. It has come back to haunt him regularly, as for many years did his admission that he talked to plants. And when I interviewed him in 1986 and asked him whether having a wife to talk to who had done ordinary, everyday things before her marriage was an advantage in helping him know how the other half lives, he said he didn’t really talk to Diana about that sort of thing, but conversations with Laurens van der Post were very stimulating from that point of view. His Private Secretary, Sir John Riddell, almost visibly clutched his head in his hands. But the most disastrous example was during his television interview with Jonathan Dimbleby when he was asked about his infidelity. The question didn’t come out of the blue, and his reply was very well thought out.
‘Were you,’ asked Dimbleby, ‘… did you try to be faithful and honourable to your wife when you took the vow of marriage?’
‘Yes,’ said the Prince, and after a brief and rather anguished pause said, ‘until it became irretrievably broken down, us both having tried.’
On that occasion his Private Secretary, Richard Aylard, had reinforced the Prince’s determination to tell the truth, and it was the rest of the world that held their heads in their hands and gasped with incredulity. The Duke of Edinburgh was incensed, the rest of the family flabbergasted, the Queen’s advisers and courtiers stunned, the Prince’s friends appalled, and the blame fell squarely on Richard Aylard for having allowed Charles to make what many regarded as the worst mistake of his life. At the time many people thought it might cost him the throne.
‘It wasn’t being honest to Jonathan that was the problem,’ protested Aylard in his defence. ‘If you want to start placing blame, the fault was getting into the relationship in the first place.’
There is no doubt that Camilla has been an important figure in the Prince’s life since he first fell in love with her at the age of twenty-three. They are the greatest of friends, they have all sorts of interests and enthusiasms in common and they love one another very dearly; it is clearly a warm, comfortable relationship and hugely beneficial to them both, but it hasn’t been an exclusive, obsessive relationship since Charles was twenty-three. He has fallen in and out of love many times since then – probably never more deeply than with Camilla – but he has fallen in love none the less. She was certainly one of the women he was seeing when he started going out with Diana but it was never going anywhere. Camilla was married; even if she had been divorced he could never have married her, not in 1981; a divorcee with two children becoming Princess of Wales? It was unthinkable. Besides, what woman in her right mind would want to?
When Charles first started looking upon Diana as a possible candidate for marriage he talked to Camilla about her; he asked all his close friends what they thought of Diana, and Camilla was one of those who tried to befriend her and welcome her to the group. She invited Charles and Diana to spend weekends at her house. There was nothing sinister in any of this. The fact that Camilla knew Charles was going to propose and hence wrote a friendly note to Diana to await her arrival at Clarence House on the day it was announced wasn’t sinister either. Look at almost any episode of the American TV sitcom Friends: soliciting friends’ approval of the latest girl/boyfriend is par for the course. But the Princess took it as proof that something was still going on between them, and read into Camilla’s friendly invitation to lunch the latter’s desire to find out whether she was going to hunt when she moved to Highgrove, and therefore whether she would be in the way of their plans to meet.
There were no meetings, and virtually no contact until several years into the marriage, and certainly no sex, as the Prince so painfully and honestly explained, until the marriage had irretrievably broken down. And by that time he was close to irretrievably breaking down, too. Towards the end of 1986 he started making contact with friends once again, those he had shut out of his life at Diana’s request some years before. As he wrote to one of them:
Frequently I feel nowadays that I’m in a kind of cage, pacing up and down in it and longing to be free. How awful incompatibility is, and how dreadfully destructive it can be for the players in this extraordinary drama. It has all the ingredients of a Greek tragedy … I fear I’m going to need a bit of help every now and then for which I feel rather ashamed.
He was in such a chronic state of depression by then that they feared for his sanity, and it was Patty Palmer-Tomkinson who engineered a reunion with Camilla, knowing how much she had meant to him in the past. Camilla herself was not particularly happy; she and Andrew Parker Bowles were the best of friends but their marriage was an empty shell with Andrew in London escorting pretty girls all week and Camilla minding the home, dogs, horses and children in the country. At first she and Charles started to talk on the telephone, he pouring out his heart to her, she listening sympathetically, warm, understanding and supportive; then they met at Patty’s house in Hampshire and started seeing each other again, and gradually the relationship developed and they took up where they had left off more than six years before. Camilla was a lifeline for Charles; she brought light and laughter into his life which for a long time had been so very dark.
This was not the outcome Charles had either wanted or anticipated. For years he had longed to be married, to have for himself the family atmosphere that he experienced in his friends’ houses, to have children running around and a companion with whom to share his life. He was lonely; he was surrounded by valets, footmen, butlers, private secretaries and police protection officers. He was never on his own, but ‘he was one of the loneliest men you’ll ever meet. They all are,’ says Michael Colborne. ‘They go out to banquets and dinners and great dos, but when they get home at night they go up to their rooms and they are on their own. There’s no one to have a drink with. They are very independent people; even their friends are mostly acquaintances.’ Charles wanted a soulmate. In a thank-you letter to a friend written on Boxing Day in 1981, when Diana was first pregnant, he wrote, ‘We’ve had such a lovely Christmas – the two of us. It has been extraordinarily happy and cosy being able to share it together … Next year will, I feel sure, be even nicer with a small one to join in as well.’
It had either been a rare moment of calm or wishful thinking. Not long afterwards she was throwing herself down the stairs in a desperate cry for help. The whole situation was a vicious circle. Diana’s chronic need for love and reassurance meant she wanted Charles to be with her 100 per cent of the time – more than that; she wanted his full attention 100 per cent of the time. It was an impossible demand. If she didn’t get it, she raged, and the more she raged the further she pushed him away. Even the most slavishly devoted partner would have found her demands unreasonable; he found them impossible. He was Prince of Wales, he had letters to write, papers to read, speeches to deliver and a diary full of engagements and ceremonial duties stretching ahead for ever. He could have given up all his sporting activities if he had wanted to, but he would never have been able to abandon his work; he simply couldn’t be the husband Diana wanted.
The interesting question is whether he could have been a satisfactory husband for any woman. Charles wanted a wife, he wanted a companion to share his life with, and he needed a wife because he was heir to the throne and had a duty to procreate; but he had no need of a wife in the sense that most other men need wives. Everything was already done for him: his meals were cooked; his clothes bought, laundered and laid out for him; his bath run, his toothbrush pasted; his shopping done; his house furnished, cleaned and polished; and if he wanted four boiled eggs for breakfast and his car brought round to the front door a minute ago, it happened.
Michael Colborne had warned Diana that in four or five years with this sort of lifestyle she would change; she would become an absolute bitch. The Prince of Wales had known no other lifestyle and was perforce supremely selfish. It may be that he would have taken out of a marriage rather more than he put into it. Very few people have ever disagreed with him, still less said ‘No’ to him, or told him anything he didn’t want to hear. He has never had to consider anyone else’s plans or preferences – and still doesn’t. His staff work all hours and are expected to jump when they are called whatever the time of day with little apparent thought for their families.
Materially he was spoilt but emotionally he was needy. And though he longed for a home, a family and security, as she did, like Diana he had never known a normal one and therefore had no model to work from. His parents loved him – there is no doubt about that – and friends remember the Queen sitting him on her knee at teatime when Charles was a small boy and playing games with him but she didn’t spend the hours in the nursery that she did with the two younger boys because she was intimidated by Helen Lightbody, and any sort of overt affection stopped as he grew older. The Duke was and is a bully, and was equally sparing in his affection. He was rough with Charles, and, according to witnesses, frequently reduced the boy to tears. As a result Charles was frightened of his father and always desperate to please him, without ever apparently succeeding. Even now in his fifties, Charles is still eager to please his parents and earn their approval, and much of the time still feels he’s failing. Hard to feel anything else when your father repeatedly makes sarcastic and cutting comments either to you or about you.
The Queen and the Duke were appalled by The Prince of Wales, the book Jonathan Dimbleby wrote about the Prince in 1995 following the disastrous film, and hurt by the picture he drew of his childhood. The Prince had given Dimbleby unprecedented access – which turned out to be decidedly foolish – allowed him free rein with private letters, diaries and even official papers and had given him many hours of his time. One former courtier was utterly bemused that his advisers had ever let it happen:
They released Jonathan Dimbleby and the Prince of Wales on to the Scottish moor together at 9.30 and they came back breathless and excited at 4.30; and when you go for a very exhausting walk with anybody – if you went with Goebbels – after a time the blood circulates, the joints ease up, the breath gets short – you’d pour out your heart to anyone, even Goebbels. Dimbleby has huge maieutic charm. Alan Bennett uses that word in his book Telling Tales; it means mid-wifely. Jonathan Dimbleby’s charms are huge so the Prince of Wales gave him all that stuff about how unhappy when he was a boy – the Queen never spoke to him, the Duke of Edinburgh was beastly to him – and it very much upsets them.
Everyone was told this book would finally show what a marvellous person he was; and people were bored out of their wits by Business in the Community and the Prince’s Trust; they wanted to know about their private life. We’re interested in who they’re going to bed with, except we got rather bored by that because we couldn’t keep up with it.
Superficially the Prince of Wales is a carbon copy of his father; it is as though he has modelled himself on the older man. They walk and talk the same way, hold their hands behind their backs in the same way, they enjoy the same sports, share the same interests, and are both involved in charities with much the same agendas. But according to the Duke of Edinburgh there is a fundamental difference. ‘He is a romantic – and I’m a pragmatist. That means we do see things differently. And because I don’t see things as a romantic would, I’m unfeeling.’
If Charles and his parents had only been able to talk, the history of the last two decades might have been very different and thus also the future security of the monarchy. Prince Philip might have spoken to Charles about the need to make up his mind about Diana rather than sending him a letter which was open to misinterpretation. Charles may have discussed his fears that this marriage was going to be a mistake during the five months of his engagement, so that they could have devised a dignified way of calling the whole thing to a halt. And if all else had failed and they had gone down the aisle and given the public the fabulous fairy-tale wedding that so lit up the world, he might have asked his parents for help when things started to unravel at such terrifying speed. Instead, he said nothing and they said nothing. And, sure as hell, no one else was going to say anything, even though everyone in Kensington Palace and St James’s Palace could see the disaster unfolding before their very eyes.
Sadly, the marriage was never going to have been bliss for either of them, that was clear from the start. There were too many differences, too many unrequited needs, too much loneliness; but they could have kept up a façade for the sake of their sons and the monarchy and the millions of people who had wished them well on their wedding day, identified, empathized and invested such hope in their union. By the time any talking happened it was too late. The Princess had gone public, she was out of control – and scaring even herself – and on course for destruction.
As a former courtier says, ‘You might have thought the Prince could have found a way of dealing with Diana. Have said, “Let’s have a high-level conference over tea to see how we’re going to manage this.” But it’s part of his psychology that he can’t do that, it’s all part of not giving a PR answer, not telling the smallest of white lies, when he should.’
TEN (#ulink_2b67c279-a5ca-5f34-8967-ccfac791866f)
Camilla and the Future (#ulink_2b67c279-a5ca-5f34-8967-ccfac791866f)
The Queen has long held the wish that the earth would open up and swallow her newest daughter-in-law. It is nothing personal – they scarcely met during all the years of controversy – and when they did know one another, in the days when Camilla was a regular guest at Balmoral, Sandringham and Windsor, she was very fond of her. Everyone was very fond of Camilla, particularly the Queen Mother. She was there in those days as the wife of Andrew Parker Bowles, who boasted the unlikely title of the Queen’s Silver-Stick-in-Waiting. It is a title from Tudor times – the incumbent kept close to the sovereign to protect him or her from danger and carried a staff of office, topped in silver. Camilla was easy, friendly, earthy and game for anything; she also loved horses and dogs – the perfect combination to endear anyone to the House of Windsor. But the Queen, like her former Private Secretary Robert Fellowes, believes that with few exceptions everything that has gone wrong for the monarchy in the last twenty years has been attributable to Mrs Parker Bowles. It is hard to disagree.
Whichever story you buy about the relationship – the Princess’s version, that there were three of them in the marriage, so it never stood a chance; or the Prince’s version, that he gave up Camilla before his engagement and there was no physical contact until more than six years later – Mrs Parker Bowles plays a central role. She was certainly the Prince’s lover before Diana appeared on the scene, and she was definitely in place again after 1987. He told us so. Whether activity in the intervening years was all in Diana’s imagination or not is largely immaterial. By 1992 the Princess of Wales was passionately jealous of her rival and wanted the world to know how unhappy she was about it. Her chosen method was through Andrew Morton, a charming, roguish former Daily Star journalist. He wrote a riveting book the like of which has never been seen before or since.
He once told me that he was able to write his book Diana: Her True Story in 1992 because of one I had written the previous year which had incensed Diana. That book was Charles and Diana: Portrait of a Marriage and in it I had said that the marriage was not a happy one for a multitude of reasons – something I had first mentioned in a biography of Charles four years earlier – and they were leading largely separate lives with separate friends, which was sad, but that it was a successful working partnership none the less. They both worked hard, both made a real difference in their charitable activities, were a terrific double act for the House of Windsor and were both excellent parents. Jonathan Dimbleby mentioned my book as a footnote in his own book three years later. He called it ‘a sensitive account of a working partnership which judged that the marriage was, in those terms, “actually very healthy” – a conclusion which, pre-Morton, did not seem so far from the truth as it would do with the benefit of hindsight’. What incensed Diana was the suggestion that, ten years into her marriage, she was happy with this situation; and she set out to tell the world what her life was really like.
Morton used to play squash with a doctor friend of Diana’s, James Colthurst, and he acted as a go-between. The full truth of Diana’s participation only came out after her death. She had spoken into a tape recorder at Kensington Palace during the summer and autumn of 1991 and Colthurst had delivered the tapes to Morton. The result was explosive: eighteen thousand words on tape and a publishing phenomenon. Diana: Her True Story, which ultimately led to the break-up of the marriage, rocked the monarchy to its foundations. It talked about Diana’s troubled childhood, her feelings of abandonment when her mother left, her bulimia, her husband’s indifference towards her, his obsession with his mistress. The authority of the text was bolstered by on-the-record quotes from some of Diana’s closest friends like James Gilbey (of Squidgygate fame) and old flatmate Carolyn Bartholomew. It talked about the Prince’s shortcomings as a father and the loneliness and isolation Diana had felt for so many years, trapped in a loveless marriage within a hostile court, made worse by a cold and disapproving Royal Family. The book was serialized in the Sunday Times. ‘Diana Driven To Five Suicide Bids By “Uncaring” Charles’ screamed the banner headline, while the Palace went into meltdown. So many incidents revealed in the serialization, such as those occasions on which the Princess had self-harmed, happened at Sandringham; plans over who took the children where were discussed in the privacy of their office. Morton’s sources were good; suspiciously good. And it wasn’t the first time that stories had inexplicably been leaked.
Robert Fellowes, treading difficult ground, not for the first or last time, as both Diana’s brother-in-law and the Queen’s Private Secretary, asked Diana if she had had anything to do with the book. Diana swore she hadn’t and Fellowes believed her. The Duke of Edinburgh also challenged her and again she denied it; lying, as it turned out in both cases. The chairman of the Press Complaints Commission therefore duly issued a statement condemning the serialization, and was left feeling very foolish and exceedingly angry when Diana went straight round to Carolyn Bartholomew’s house (having telephoned the newspapers to ensure photographers would be waiting) and in a public show of approval embraced her on the doorstep.
During Ascot Week, very shortly afterwards, while Morton’s book started vanishing from the shelves, the Queen, the Duke, Charles and Diana all sat down together at Windsor to discuss the situation and to see what could be salvaged from the marriage. This was the first time there had ever been a discussion of this kind. Parents of any couple having difficulties in their marriage would be naturally reticent about intervening, uncertain as to whether help would be welcome. But this wasn’t any couple. The breakdown of this marriage had huge implications for the monarchy and yet both the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh had held back and chosen not to get involved. Andrew Morton was the first person to discover that the Princess had been suffering from bulimia, and the detail in his book was obviously unparalleled, but plenty had already been written about the state of the marriage; it was no secret that Charles and Diana were leading separate lives, seeing separate friends and that the marriage was in trouble. Calling a conference now was too late. Diana had gone public, and, intoxicated with the power she had over the husband who had cheated on her, she announced that she wanted a trial separation.
The Queen and Duke were sympathetic but were firmly against the idea of separation, and urged them both for the sake of the boys as well as Crown and country to try and find a way of making the marriage work. They all agreed to meet again the next day to talk further, but Diana didn’t show up.
Two months later the Sun published a transcript of an amorous late-night telephone conversation allegedly between Diana and James Gilbey. Dubbed ‘Squidgygate’ because of the way Gilbey repeatedly referred to her as Squidgy or Squidge, it reinforced Morton’s message. Between endearments, she railed against the Prince and his ‘fucking family’ and said, ‘I’m going to do something dramatic because I can’t stand the confines of this marriage.’
By Christmas her wish had come true. It had taken one final disastrous tour to Korea, and a botched weekend Charles had planned to have with the children at Sandringham, for the Prince finally to snap and agree there was no purpose in carrying on; the marriage was over and all hope that he and Diana might still be friends was also over. On 9 December 1992 the Prime Minister, John Major, announced their separation in the House of Commons. Julia Cleverdon, chief executive of Business in the Community, was with the Prince of Wales that day. She had worked closely with him for nearly ten years and in all that time, despite innumerable crises, she had never seen him so utterly miserable.
Diana took the moral high ground. She seemed oblivious of the fact that she too had been unfaithful during their marriage. In fact, she had been the first to do so, and had had not just one lover but a succession. Charles had been unfaithful with one woman. The problem was that it was Camilla Parker Bowles, the same woman he had admitted to having been in love with before he and Diana ever met. In yet another example of the Prince’s unfortunate compulsion to tell the absolute truth he had gone out of his way to explain this to Diana, to reassure her that now that he was engaged to be married there was, and would be, no other woman in his life. And when Diana asked him point-blank if he still loved Camilla, he didn’t say, as anyone with an ounce of common sense would have said, ‘No. You’re the one I love. She and every other woman I’ve ever known is history.’ He said ‘Yes’ and went on to explain that Camilla was very special to him, but then so were a number of other women.
For a man who is so sensitive and really quite clever at times, it was utterly crass. Diana was insanely jealous of her and it had nothing whatever to do with having a wobbly background and insecure childhood. Find me a young girl who is not jealous of her boyfriend or husband’s ex-lovers. Even if they have never met their predecessors they are jealous – jealous of the idea, jealous of the memories they have of each other; irrational, stupid, deeply destructive, I don’t deny, but true.
An old family friend, who had also married a man much older than herself, tried to calm Diana. Yes, he’d had girlfriends and some quite serious, but he was thirty-two, that was to be expected. The thing to hang on to, she said, was the fact that it was none of them that he had married – the one he wanted to marry was her.
There was just one glaring difference here between Diana’s situation and that of any other girl on the eve of her wedding; and Diana was no fool, she knew. Charles was Prince of Wales, he couldn’t marry them; he certainly couldn’t marry Mrs Parker Bowles – she was already married. As she said to Andrew Morton, ‘He’d found the virgin, the sacrificial lamb.’
And so she became obsessed. A suspicious, insecure girl by nature she imagined an affair where none existed, she imagined him on the telephone to Camilla all the time, discussing his marriage, discussing her. The suspicion and the jealousy ate away at her. She had found a bracelet on Michael Colborne’s desk, with GF engraved on it, that Charles had given to Camilla over lunch two days before the wedding. The GF stood for Girl Friday, his nickname for Camilla. It was with a collection of similar presents for other women who had been kind to him during his days as a bachelor. Diana simply saw it as a token of love and went berserk. Camilla gave Charles a pair of cufflinks and those were the ones he chose to wear on his honeymoon. Proof seemed to be everywhere. He might have stopped seeing her, she reasoned, but that didn’t mean he had stopped loving her. She told Morton that Charles and Camilla had slept together at Buckingham Palace two nights before the wedding. It was fantasy. The Queen had hosted a dinner and ball that night and Charles was up until the early hours with guests; Camilla was long gone; and on the following night he spent most of it talking to his mother’s lady-in waiting, Lady Susan Hussey, who he had known since the age of twelve. All sorts of wild ideas thrashed around inside Diana’s head and no amount of reassurance from her husband helped. She couldn’t exorcize the conviction that her husband loved someone else.
The Prince of Wales was utterly humiliated by Diana: Her True Story. It painted the blackest portrait; it not only called him a cold and faithless husband and a bad father, but it also questioned his fitness to be king. So much of it was demonstrably untrue and so many stories were a distortion of the truth. People who were witnesses to the events remembered them in essence, but they had a twist to them which always put the Prince in a bad light. He was adamant, nevertheless, that there should be no retaliation and instructed his friends to say nothing.
Charles has never publicly criticized Diana. Whenever I have pointed this out to people they say, ‘Ah, but he got his friends to do it for him.’ This is untrue. Some of his friends did feel that the injustice meted out to him by Morton’s book was intolerable and I, for one, was encouraged by several of them to try to redress the balance, but they were not thanked for their trouble and neither was I. I had been planning to make the television documentary that Jonathan Dimbleby finally made, to mark the Prince’s twenty-five years as Prince of Wales. I had had discussions with Christopher Martin, the producer of the Prince’s previous films – one on his views about architecture, the other about conservation called The Earth in Balance. Christopher and I had been to a private lunch at Highgrove to discuss it with him. Suddenly I was dropped from the project and discovered very much later the reason why. I had defended him too vigorously in the media.
What Morton’s book had done, as none other had done before it, was point the finger at Camilla Parker Bowles as the principal cause of Diana’s unhappiness. Diana had seriously considered calling off the wedding two days before she walked down the aisle, he said, because of Prince Charles’s ‘continuing friendship with Camilla Parker Bowles, the wife of a member of the Queen’s household’. Today the name Camilla Parker Bowles is almost as well known as that of the Prince of Wales, but until 1992 she was scarcely known outside her own circle of friends – and neither was her relationship with the Prince.
Morton’s book changed all that. It didn’t convince everyone that Charles and Camilla were having an affair. Some thought there was a chance that he had got it wrong, that it was just more tabloid tittle-tattle; but a substantial number of people did believe that what was written in Diana: Her True Story was true, and overnight Camilla’s peaceful existence in the heart of the countryside was shattered. The press set up camp outside her house and followed her wherever she went. She wasn’t safe even in her own garden; photographers were waiting with their long lenses. Hate mail began to arrive accusing her of breaking up the royal marriage. For someone with no experience of being the object of such hatred it was extremely unnerving. It also put her husband in a difficult situation, and wasn’t easy for her two children, Tom and Laura (then both in their teens), or for her elderly parents. But Morton was as nothing compared with what followed in relatively quick succession: the Camillagate tapes, the Dimbleby documentary and Panorama. The first two put an end to Camilla’s twenty-one-year marriage; the third brought the Prince’s marriage to an end.
ELEVEN (#ulink_cfe33a6d-097c-5fd3-848a-6c76119f84a8)
From Bad to Worse (#ulink_cfe33a6d-097c-5fd3-848a-6c76119f84a8)
Having watched the Royal Family from the sidelines all these years, I never cease to be amazed by their resilience. Crises have come and gone, crises that would have crippled most individuals, families, even institutions, but they simply keep going, keep on doing what they have always done, nine times out of ten not even acknowledging whatever has happened, and miraculously the crisis fades. It is a brilliant strategy for survival and probably the only one that could work for a family so remorselessly in the limelight from cradle to coffin. They have no alternative but to take the long view, and recognize that, long term, very little really matters. But after an intimate late-night telephone conversation between Charles and Camilla was taped, published in the British press and devoured by millions over their breakfast cornflakes, I did wonder how the Prince of Wales would recover from this one. The man wanted to be a Tampax. How do you hold up your head in public after everyone you meet knows that? He wanted to be a Tampax to be as close as he could to Camilla. It was a playful conversation any two people very much in love and missing one another might have had and, read in its entirety, the eleven-minute conversation was rather touching; but you would rather slit your throat than contemplate one solitary soul overhearing you, let alone millions of people all over the world.
The tape was a compilation of several different conversations held over several months in 1989, but that was irrelevant. No one could deny that the voices were authentic; the Prince’s humiliation and embarrassment were total. He knows that it will come back to haunt him – it will be dredged up at his coronation and at other serious moments in his life – and serve to humiliate his parents, his sons and Camilla’s family, too. And yet the day the tapes were published he had an engagement in Liverpool and, instead of finding some excuse to cancel, as any ordinary person would, he stepped out of his car that morning to face the waiting crowds as though absolutely nothing had happened. The courage it took was immeasurable; he had no idea what kind of reception awaited him, but to the intense relief of everyone with him there were no sniggers, no shouts, no catcalls and no absence of people. Yet for all his cool, it was one of the worst days of his life, made worse by the damage he knew he had inflicted yet again on the monarchy.
There were lurid headlines and cartoons in the press, wide condemnation of Charles, questions about his fitness to be king, and, in the mounting fever of puritanical indignation, demands from Cabinet ministers that the Prince give up Mrs Parker Bowles.
The contents of her mailbag, meanwhile, took on an even more unpleasant tone and the press presence and pressure at her house became even worse. She became the butt of jokes up and down the country, her children at boarding school were teased and tormented and her husband stood publicly cuckolded.
It was at this point, with the documentary underway, that Jonathan Dimbleby and the Prince’s adviser, Richard Aylard, discussed the question of the Prince’s adultery. With the Morton book published, two sets of tapes in the public arena and screeds written in the press, it was an issue that no film about the last twenty-five years could duck. Dimbleby would have to ask the question; what Aylard and the Prince had to decide was how best to reply? There were three options. The truth, a lie, or evasion. Aylard advised the first, which accorded with the Prince’s inclination. If he lied then sooner or later he would be caught out, argued the Private Secretary. The News of the World, he knew, already had both the Prince and Camilla watched and followed round the clock; it was only a matter of time before they were seen together or a disaffected servant sold his story. If he refused to answer the question on the grounds that it was a personal matter the surveillance would continue and the story would never go away until the media had evidence of an affair. After the ‘Camillagate’ tape, most people believed they were lovers, so why not be honest with the British public and admit the truth? The Prince wanted to tell the truth and Aylard encouraged him.
What they should both have foreseen was that the great British public was more interested in Diana’s truth. She had got hers in first and it had a far juicier ring to it. They heard the ‘Yes’, and completely ignored the rest of his sentence which came after an anguished pause, ‘the marriage having irretrievably broken down, us both having tried’, and concluded that Charles had been an adulterer from day one. When Aylard confirmed at a press conference the next day that the adultery to which the Prince had confessed had indeed been with Mrs Parker Bowles, her goose was finally cooked. Andrew Parker Bowles filed for divorce and, less than a year later, married his long-term girlfriend, Rosie Pitman. The public blamed Camilla for breaking up the royal family home, and the reputation of the monarchy was once again dragged through the mire.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/penny-junor/the-firm-the-troubled-life-of-the-house-of-windsor/) на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
Penny Junor
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Биографии и мемуары
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 17.04.2024
Отзывы: Пока нет Добавить отзыв
О книге: It would be hard to invent a group of personalities more extraordinary than the British Royal Family – known as ′The Firm′ by Prince Philip. With an eye on the past, present and future, this book takes a look at how the family really operates and reveals how they behave behind closed doors.This ebook is made from the 2009 edition.With showbiz stars and sporting celebrities now attracting the adulation once afforded to royalty, The Firm questions what monarchy is for.Is it a hangover from the past, an expensive anachronism, a relic of a bygone age of deference and hierarchy, or is it an important and relevant part of Britain in the 21st century – something that gives stability and continuity to the country, and richness and glamour to our national life in ways that a republic never could? If so, do the media mock, hound and criticize the Royal Family at their peril? Has Prince Charles sacrificed the throne for love? Could Prince William decide that the long lenses and the scrutiny of his private life is too high a price to pay?Penny will also look at how the dynamics of the royal household have changed over the last year and what repercussions these changes will have. Whilst in the hardback edition Penny Junor was able to discuss the implications of Charles and Camilla′s marriage only two months after it was announced, the paperback promises to offer a host of new surprises and implication for the future of the House of Windsor, as well as an inside view of how The Firm have taken in their newest member.Whatever happens over the next year, we can be sure that Penny will update this paperback edition to make it an essential buy for anyone who has even a passing interest in Britain′s most dysfunctional and fascinating family.