The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor (30 page)

Prue Leith, who happens to be my sister-in-law as well as a former chairman of the RSA, finds him perplexing. ‘He’s an enigma: really hard-working, well-briefed, intelligent, controversial and good company,’ she says.

He is the most challenging and terrific RSA president, reading everything and commenting forcefully on anything he doesn’t like. When we were changing the RSA governance, I remember us sending out the new proposals to all forty-odd council members. He was the ONLY one to return it, annotated with suggestions and corrections handwritten in the margins.

But … and there is always a but, ‘Sometimes he is extremely rude and a real bully.’

One day he came to an RSA event in honour of Dame Judi Dench, in a thoroughly bad mood, and was cross that there were two photographers present, loudly demanding an explanation from me in front of the half-dozen VIPs waiting to be presented. Since I had no idea why we had two photographers and anyway was unaware that we should not have, I joked, ‘No idea, sir, maybe it’s because one of them is useless and the other is back-up.’ ‘What utter rot,’ he says and turns on his heel and stamps away, leaving me looking like a prat, unable to present anyone to him, and everyone embarrassed. I hissed at the barman to get him a drink pretty damn quick, and left him to his own devices. Of course, being the pro he is, he got on and talked to everyone else, and by dinner time he was completely delightful and great company. By then I’d found out that the unwanted extra photographer was in fact a Palace photographer, and we’d been asked by his staff to accommodate him. I told him this, but didn’t get an apology – just a flat denial. ‘Nonsense, I don’t have a photographer.’

But he can be unexpectedly un-grand and relaxed. Once, in a discussion on world population, he was banging on a bit about how too many people had too many children and I found myself saying, ‘That’s a bit rich coming from someone with four children’ – the sort of crack you are not meant to make at royals. He just laughed and said, ‘Touché’ or something similar.

And I remember remarking to one of his equerries that I’d just had a pleasant conversation with Prince Philip and that for once he wasn’t determined to put me down, and he said, ‘That’s because you stand up to him. He likes that.’

Princess Anne, who is made entirely in her father’s image, was due to open the Millennium Footpath in Bradford-on-Avon
one day. At 10.30, driving her own car, she arrived, and Sir Maurice Johnston opened the door and said, ‘Good morning, Your Royal Highness, welcome to Wiltshire’, and she said, ‘It is not a good morning’, and strode swiftly on towards the chain gang he was presenting to her. When he caught up with her and asked what that was all about, she said, ‘For the last twenty-five minutes I’ve been watching you from the multi-storey car park there with a copy of
The Times
over my head hoping no one would see who I was, because my policeman got me out of bed half an hour early.’ No one she met during the course of her visit would have known how cross she was, but her policeman is certain to have had better days.

The chain gangs are an inevitable part of royal visits, but something the Royal Family would prefer to see less of. When they are tying to cram so much into a day, and time is therefore limited, they want to meet the people they have come to see – the people who actually teach in the school, who take care of patients in the hospital and the people making widgets on the floor of the factory – not the local dignitaries. The Lord-Lieutenant is there every time a member of the Royal Family comes into his county on official business, his wife or husband is always there, the High Sheriff, the local Mayor or the Chairman of the District or County Council, the Chief Constable and the local MP and sometimes their spouses as well. ‘One tries to limit them,’ says Sir Maurice, ‘but they are dying to be there because it’s a great day in their lives.’

A new way of patting people on the head, as Sir Maurice puts it, is themed receptions at Buckingham Palace. The first one last year was for Women of Achievement. Perhaps there were some who had stayed away. Perhaps an invitation to lunch with the Queen at Buckingham Palace was not something for which they would have cleared their diaries; but I
doubt it. And so on one cold March day, gathered 180 of Britain’s highest achieving women – artists, athletes, academics, actresses, writers, models, politicians, scientists, doctors, businesswomen. Famous names, famous faces – J. K. Rowling, Janet Street-Porter, Kate Moss, Twiggy, Baroness Thatcher, Jennifer Saunders – and many you would never have heard of, but all of whom have done something remarkable – like an Indian woman who started off making curry in her kitchen and now has a business that supplies millions of pounds’ worth of ready meals to one of the leading supermarket chains.

Before they went in to lunch there were drinks and much chattering. Whatever they may have thought of the monarchy, the women invited to the Palace that day were enjoying themselves. Some said their mothers were pleased they were there, others admitted it was for themselves, several had met the Queen before; two were wearing the same outfit but all seemed to be on a high. Many of them already knew one another, others were meeting for the first time, but seemed excited to be meeting heroes. It felt like a particularly good party and with 180 women talking at nine to the dozen the decibel levels were probably higher than I would guess the state rooms have heard in a century or two. And chatting with just as much enthusiasm were the Queen, the Princess Royal and the Countess of Wessex – the female members of The Firm – who had shaken everyone’s hand formally as they arrived, and then mingled with the guests, walking informally up to groups and joining the conversation as any hostess would at any normal drinks party.

It is not often that members of The Firm work together. Indeed it used to be the first thing that new recruits to the private offices were told – to avoid putting members of the family together on the same platform, apart from the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, because they were all used to
being stars in their own firmaments and happier that way. Even at events like the Chelsea Flower Show they arrive in quick succession in a fleet of separate cars but immediately split up and make their own way around the exhibits.

The guests congregated in three interconnecting state rooms on the first floor overlooking the garden, one of them the Blue Drawing Room – so-called because of the blue flock wallpaper hung by Queen Mary in the early twentieth century. It is huge – George IV intended it to be a ballroom but died before the building work was finished. Queen Victoria built her own ballroom – where lunch was served that day – and the Blue Drawing Room became a reception room. It is one of the grandest rooms in the Palace, designed by John Nash, as all the state rooms on the first floor were, sumptuously decorated, particularly the ceiling, with moulded plaster reliefs, Corinthian columns and vast chandeliers. Big windows look out over the garden, and, were it not for the full-length net curtains, would offer a wonderful view across the lawn and down to the lake. Why the curtains are there I have yet to fathom. It isn’t as if buses trundle past and passengers on the number 25 are going to see in. That side of the Palace is not overlooked; and the garden was deserted, except for a flock of greylag geese grazing greedily on the lawn.

From this height you could see that the lawn was still showing signs of strain from the two Golden Jubilee concerts. They may have lasted no more than two days but the effect on the lawn, where the colossal stage had been erected many months in advance, was every bit as great as that on the country. First there was a classical concert with great names from the world of opera at which the Queen, the Prince of Wales and Camilla Parker Bowles were all seen for the first time together; then there was the Party in the Palace, the biggest Golden Jubilee party of all – an evening of rock and pop with a spectacular
pyrotechnic finale. Nothing like it had ever been seen at the Palace before. Twelve thousand people lazed on the lawn of the most famous building in Britain and listened to music spanning the fifty years of the Queen’s reign. The
Telegraph
’s music critic was disappointed, however.

Queen Elizabeth II came to the throne in the same year Britain got its first singles charts. Her reign has coincided with the explosive birth and ongoing evolution of a vibrant pop culture. Although it may have had little impact on Her Majesty’s dress sense, she has presided over rock and roll, the beat boom, psychedelia, heavy rock, prog rock, reggae, punk, ska, indie, new romance, electro pop, acid house, hip hop, trip hop, Britpop, jungle and garage. Yet precious little of this astonishing diversity was reflected in a Jubilee line-up almost exclusively divided between veterans of the sixties and the latest crop of all-singing-and-dancing, twenty-first-century stage-school graduates. It was a Royal Variety Show in everything but name, emphasizing the light-entertainment aspect of pop that has changed little over the decades.

The content was immaterial. The event was ground-breaking. Never before had the Palace gardens been opened up to the general public. These were not people who had done good works in the community or served the country in two world wars; they were not diplomats or civil servants. They were ordinary people of every age and background, in work, out of work, pro-monarchy, anti-monarchy – all they had in common was that they had been successful in the ballot for tickets. The tickets were free, and each person was given a hamper with a picnic and a small bottle of champagne in it. They were the lucky ones; outside in the Mall and Green Park a million people watched the action on a series of giant screens while
the noise of the music boomed across the Palace walls into the night; and a further two hundred million watched it on television worldwide. And not only did they get to see such global superstars as Paul McCartney, Rod Stewart, Eric Clapton, Tom Jones, Phil Collins, Cliff Richard, Shirley Bassey and Annie Lennox – with Brian May of Queen standing on the roof blasting out the National Anthem to signal the start of the concert – they also got to see the real Queen – and Charles, Camilla, William and Harry all together for the first time in public. The Queen (wearing ear plugs) and the Duke of Edinburgh – neither known for their love of rock music – joined twenty-five younger members of the Royal Family in the royal box for what they thought was the last half-hour, but the concert so overran that they had to listen for an hour before taking to the stage to thank performers and to hear the Prince of Wales pay tribute to both the Queen and the Duke.

He also thanked the stars for their performance, which he said had made him ‘feel extraordinarily proud of this country’. He then turned to his mother and, to deafening cheers, said:

Your Majesty … Mummy. We are here tonight because, above all, we feel proud of you. Proud and grateful for everything you have done for your country and for the Commonwealth over fifty extraordinary years, supported unfailingly throughout by my father. You have embodied something vital in our lives – continuity. You have been a beacon of tradition and stability in the midst of profound, sometimes perilous, change. Fifty years ago, I would probably have been playing in the sandpit in the garden just behind this stage. But now you have generously invited everyone in here for a thoroughly memorable concert. So, Your Majesty, we are all deeply grateful to you and, in the
words of the National Anthem, you have certainly given us cause to shout with heart and voice, ‘God Save the Queen’.

And to a rousing three cheers from the audience, the Prince then kissed his mother. It was the climax to a day of street parties, fêtes and festivals, and at the end of it the Queen lit a fuse to ignite a rocket which sped along a wire suspended over the Mall that in turn lit the National Beacon on the Queen Victoria Memorial, the last in a chain of 1985 beacons across Britain and the world, and triggered the fireworks spectacular. It was all the work of Major Sir Michael Parker, who has been doing this sort of thing for a while. He has produced, to name but a few, twenty-seven Royal Tournaments, the Queen Mother’s 80th, 90th and 100th birthday celebrations, the Silver Jubilee chain of beacons, and VE and VJ Day anniversary tributes. But that weekend’s festivities in London – with 25,000 participants and no opportunity for rehearsal – was his most ambitious project yet.

From all his past glories there was one moment that he would not want to relive. It was when the Queen stood, torch in hand, ready to light the huge beacon he had organized to celebrate her 1977 Silver Jubilee. The only problem was it was already alight, prematurely ignited by an overeager squaddie.

The Queen turned to him and exclaimed: ‘Look, look. It’s lit already.’

‘And it was lit,’ Sir Michael said. ‘But not only that, the main BBC generator had just blown up so we had to lend them one of ours, which meant half the site was in darkness.

‘I had to say to the Queen, “Your Majesty, I am very sorry but I have to tell you that absolutely everything that can go wrong, is going wrong”, and she turned to me and smiled and said, “Oh good. What fun.”’

Walter Bagehot, who famously warned against letting daylight in on the monarchy for fear of losing the magic, would have spun in his grave the day that the phoney footman began his tale of life inside Buckingham Palace. Photographs of royal bedrooms, bathrooms, sitting rooms and the Queen’s breakfast table, laid with marmalades and Tupperware boxes at the ready, finally expelled the last traces of magic. Bagehot was writing in the 1860s when Queen Victoria was on the throne. Parry’s exposé was monarchy in the twenty-first century and a proof positive of just how intolerable life has become for her descendants.

Some people believe that the beginning of the end was in 1969 when the Queen, with encouragement from the Duke of Edinburgh, agreed to the making of a documentary called
The Royal Family.
It was an idea William Heseltine, who was then Press Secretary, hatched with Lord Brabourne, Earl Mount-batten’s film director son-in-law, who then sold the idea to Prince Philip. There was a feeling that the Royal Family was almost too dull and that pulling back the curtain to give a glimpse of the domestic side of their lives, to reveal them as ordinary human beings, might add interest. According to the late Lord Charteris, ‘There was a view that the Queen needed
to sell herself a bit.’ Sir Edward Ford, who worked alongside Charteris as Assistant Private Secretary to the Queen for the first fifteen years of her reign (and for six years to King George VI), had left by the time the film was made but thought letting the cameras in on their private lives was a mistake. Like Charteris, he had been at the Palace in the days when Richard Colville, the Press Secretary, had called in the two court correspondents (formally dressed) each morning to brief them about the day’s public engagements and give them details of what clothes and hat the Queen would be wearing.

Our remit – and that of Richard Colville, the much abused Press Secretary – was there should be maximum coverage of anything they did in the public sector, at any publicly announced engagements, tours, visits to provinces, audiences – provided that it was done in their roles as Queen and Consort – then we would give the fullest liberty to the press. But they very much resented their private lives being invaded in any way and particularly when it began to be by the paparazzi. But that meant they were remote figures. People didn’t know about them unless they happened to work as an official or be involved in some sort of official contact. They didn’t see them – the press were kept at bay.

The film certainly made the Royal Family less remote. It followed them for a year and showed the formal and the informal sides of the Queen’s life; and caught the family off duty and at play in a way that had never been shown before. In one of the most memorable scenes it showed them on holiday at Balmoral, barbecuing their supper by the loch. A rather gauche teenage Princess Anne lit the fire, the Duke of Edinburgh was chief cook, Prince Charles mixed the salad dressing, while one of their younger brothers played around on the roof of the
Land Rover; and the Queen, wearing rubber gloves, washed the plates at the end of the meal. It was fascinating – partly to see how very ordinary they were. They looked and behaved like any other family, ill at ease with the camera, self-consciously making banal remarks and silly jokes, but riveting television in the same way that reality television is sometimes riveting. These characters normally associated with red carpets, golden coaches and grand palaces were disarmingly human – a fact that they had always jealously guarded. Marion Crawford, whose book,
The Little Princesses
, was a harmless and affectionate memoir about her years as governess to Elizabeth and Margaret, was cast into outer darkness for her revealing anecdotes and never forgiven to the day she died, almost forty years later.

This film was far more revealing than anything Crawfie wrote; the difference was that this time the Palace wanted those titbits put into the public arena – and they had full editorial control of them.
The Royal Family
was arguably the first example of royal ‘spin’ nearly twenty years before the term became common currency. ‘I think it’s quite wrong that there should be a sense of remoteness or majesty,’ said Prince Philip, when asked his views about the film. ‘If people see, whoever it happens to be, whatever head of state, as individuals, as people, I think it makes it much easier for them to accept the system or to feel part of the system.’

What it actually did was make people hungry for more – thus in a sense the Queen and her advisers were the architects of their own misfortune. They were the ones who first let the daylight in – although society was changing so rapidly and respect for institutions disappearing so quickly that it was only a matter of time before the media tore down the curtain that
The Royal Family
had so discreetly and fleetingly lifted; if they hadn’t jumped they would surely have been pushed. And in
choosing the BBC to make the film – and choosing the BBC again to interview Prince Charles before his investiture as Prince of Wales the same year – they bred resentment among its rivals who felt all the more inclined to do a bit of pushing. As Ben Pimlott wrote, ‘Was it right for a Fourth Estate worth its salt, to accept such a calculated piece of media manipulation as a given? If royal “privacy” was no longer sacrosanct, why should its exposure be strictly on royalty’s own terms?’ Kenneth Rose observed, ‘The sight of Prince Philip cooking sausages meant that after that people would want to see the dining room, the sitting room, then everything except the loo.’ As it happens, they had to wait for Ryan Parry thirty-four years later to see all the rooms, but they saw an awful lot of other things in the meantime.

‘Heseltine was acutely aware that the Queen did so much more than public engagements,’ explains Sir Edward Ford, ‘and people were just beginning to say “Do we need to pay quite so much money for so little return?”’

Heseltine thought people ought to know how hard the Queen works, that her day was so full, also that she was a human being and not just a remote figure out of the fairytale books; and so he had the idea of having a film showing her at work at her desk, seeing her private secretaries, and other heads of departments, approving programmes for visits and speeches. Her day was very fully taken up but I don’t think people were worried about how hard she worked. There was a little bit of criticism starting up about her ‘long holidays’ at Balmoral; no one realized that every day the Aberdeen train brought up a red box or two for her to go through which she did regularly through the holiday. She didn’t go to the Mediterranean or Caribbean, as most of us do. It was the relentlessness of her life, the relentlessness of
the job. Even when she was having children, she never gave up doing her daily work; she used to ring within two days of the birth. She was tied to the job. She had very enjoyable holidays at Balmoral in the summer and Sandringham at Christmas time, but she never used them as excuses for not doing the job. She has never really taken a proper holiday. It was a great pity, I always thought, that the government did away with the royal yacht because that was the one place to which she could get away, because it was sometimes quite difficult to get the papers from Whitehall to the yacht, say, when it was off the west coast of Scotland. They could come by helicopter and be dropped. Urgent things could always be got to her. Even in Australia twice a week papers were flown out that required her signature on decisions.

The film certainly opened the door and once that door is open it’s very difficult to shut it. You can open it wider but it’s difficult to shut it. It was a mistake, but this is with a bit of hindsight. I’m not sure at the time I didn’t think, ‘Oh bully, they’re going to discover the Queen that only we knew.’

The Royal Family
reinforced the image of the Windsors as a model family, which with four children still to grow up was a dangerous card to play. ‘If I had to point to one thing in that film, which was a hostage to fortune, it was the image of one big happy family,’ says Guy Black, former director of the Press Complaints Commission, ‘because we all know families don’t work like that.’ And as the family started to fall apart the media took the greatest delight in reporting it. ‘But I guess
It’s A Royal Knockout
was an absolute low point in their relationship with the media because they became a laughing stock and it takes years and years to rebuild your reputation after being a laughing stock.’

That programme in 1987 did immense damage to the Royal Family; not only because it turned them into a laughing stock but because it put them on a par with the sort of celebrities they had been competing with and against. As one of the Queen’s former press secretaries says, ‘It was a climacteric in terms of equating the young monarchy with showbiz because that’s what they were doing, they were dressing up and making fools of themselves. Okay, it was for charity but so what? If you equate yourself in that direction you’re going to be written about in that direction and it was a serious turning point.’

In today’s celebrity culture it is a fine balancing act to keep the Royal Family in the news but to prevent them becoming embroiled in the razzmatazz that goes with modern celebrity. Celebrity today means nothing more than being famous. Fame can mean being a brilliant sportsman and winning a gold medal at the Olympics or being last out of the
Big Brother
house, being a talented, award-winning actress, a disgraced politician, or being an It Girl. It’s vapid, rapid and comes with no sense of responsibility. Their private lives and their sex lives, past and present, are greedily devoured by the tabloid media in exchange for exposure and publicity and sometimes cash, and most of them thrive on it. They go to the places they know they will be seen, where they know the paparazzi will be waiting, and if they put their hand up to the lens or attempt to hide their faces it is nothing more than a con. There are plenty of places where rich and famous people, who truly don’t want to be seen, can go; plenty of places where even princes can go. But if they mix with celebrities they get treated like celebrities – as Prince Harry discovered when he was provoked by a photographer outside a fashionable Mayfair nightclub in 2004. And that is dangerous. Even if we know that the Royal Family is made up of men and women with feet of clay, we still need to believe there is something special about them.
Reduce them to the status of two-bit celebrities and the illusion is gone for ever.

On the other hand, the monarchy cannot afford to become dull. Nor can it afford to be invisible; and in today’s world the only way of being visible is through the media. They have no other form of direct communication. As Guy Black says, apart from the Queen’s two broadcasts – to the Commonwealth and at Christmas – ‘they don’t make set-piece speeches, they don’t have recourse to party political broadcasts, they don’t go out campaigning and they don’t put literature through people’s doors. They have to rely on the media to get their message across, so when that relationship goes wrong it is very bad for them.’

A number of incidents in the sixties and seventies showed that the relationship was strained. Princess Anne’s loathing of the press dates back to her competing days when she famously told photographers to ‘Naff off’ at horse trials, but the real problems started in the eighties with the arrival of Diana, who was such a gift for the media. Young, beautiful, glamorous, photogenic and, on top of everything else, a princess. And this princess didn’t scowl and swear at photographers, she smiled at them, called them by name and charmed the socks off them. The public was charmed too and a photograph of Diana on the front page of a newspaper or magazine sold copies, whatever the story that went with it, which was often little more than a caption. And when the marriage started to fall apart, the stories became more and more salacious, people’s natural appetite for gossip was well fed and circulations started to soar. Then the Princess began a direct dialogue with the media – and reaped the whirlwind from that in the end.

Her misfortune was that at much the same time the fundamental nature of newspapers started to change. For the first two decades of the Queen’s reign proprietors of the main
groups were members of the Establishment, monarchists to a man, who valued their relationship with the Royal Family. Lord Beaverbrook and Lord Rothermere owned the
Express
and the
Mail
respectively; two branches of the Astor family owned
The Times
and the
Observer
; the Berry brothers, Lord Camrose and Lord Kemsley, owned the
Daily Telegraph
and the
Sunday Times.
They were wealthy men who owned their newspapers more to fulfil their political ambitions or for reasons of vanity than to increase the family fortune. And had they wanted to make real money out of their newspapers, the print unions in Fleet Street were so greedy and so powerful they hadn’t a hope.

Rupert Murdoch changed all that in the mid-eighties. He challenged the unions. He secretly moved his operation from Fleet Street to Wapping in east London and printed newspapers using new technology, without union manpower. A long and bloody battle ensued, known as the Siege of Wapping, but the unions were defeated and a new era dawned. No longer in the stranglehold of militants, all the newspapers invested in new technology and at last began to make real money. The advertising and marketing departments suddenly became as important, and in some cases more so, as the editors who in the past had been gods. The result was that the industry, already having to compete with television, became fiercely competitive and desperate to attract readers. Stories of royal discord were everything they could have hoped for.

And there were no more patricians to protect them, no one for whom sentiment was more compelling than the bottom line. Today’s proprietors have different priorities. Rupert Murdoch whose News International owns
The Times
, the
Sun
, the
News of the World
and BSkyB, not to mention an entire book publishing empire, is an Australian living in America with no sentimental attachment to the monarchy or any other
British institution. He is a republican by inclination, but first and foremost he is a businessman and while royal stories continue to make money he won’t kill the golden goose, but he doesn’t lose sleep if he causes it distress. As Anthony Sampson says, ‘Murdoch probably did more than any single individual to undermine the old British tribal Establishment. He promoted cheeky Australian journalists and crusading anti-Establishment editors who thrived on debunking toffs and stuffy institutions, and used class warfare to boost circulation … He avoided paying British taxes, and remained uncontrollable and unaccountable, like an eagle swooping down on his prey and soaring back into the sky.’ The Express Group, once owned by Lord Beaverbrook, is now owned by Richard Desmond, a man who made his millions publishing soft porn. The Hartwell family, which founded the
Telegraph
titles, are long gone, replaced by businessmen. Only the Harmsworth name survives. Jonathan, the fourth Viscount Rothermere, is chairman of Daily Mail and General Trust which owns Associated Newspapers, but he is answerable to shareholders and his are therefore as aggressively competitive as every other title. And as newspapers became more competitive, particularly the red tops, they became less scrupulous in their story gathering – paying criminals, entrapping public figures, fabricating stories and creating a lucrative market for kiss-and-tell tales: the perfect climate for disaffected royal servants to make a bob or two.