The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor (27 page)

Ceremonial is something the British do to perfection and it is at state visits that the splendours of our national heritage and the pomp and pageantry really come into their own. Visiting heads of state are treated as genuine guests of the Queen and want for nothing. She oversees all the plans, chooses all the menus, checks the suites that her visitors will stay in at Buckingham Palace or Windsor – or occasionally Holyroodhouse – to make sure that the flowers, the books and everything that has been laid out for them are right for the occasion; she decides on the presents that will be given to her guests and even checks the dining arrangements once the table has been laid for the state banquet on the first evening. From the moment a decision is made about who is to be invited, the organization falls to the Comptroller of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, Lieutenant Colonel Sir Malcolm Ross, who has been in charge of all things ceremonial since 1991. In his early sixties, with an Eton and Sandhurst pedigree, followed by twenty-three years in the Scots Guards and now nearly twenty years at Buckingham Palace, he can do state visits, weddings, jubilees, investitures and state funerals standing on his head. And in between times he is in charge of a whole host of things including the Crown Jewels, the Queen’s chapels, chaplains and choirs, styles, titles, protocol, royal warrants, swans and the fifteenth-century ceremony of swan upping.

It is a popular misconception, a hangover from the Middle Ages, that all swans in Britain belong to the Crown. They don’t. It was only ever swans on the Thames that belonged to the sovereign, and in 1473 a royal charter was granted to the Worshipful Company of Vintners allowing them to own swans
on the river too, and a few years later the Dyers were also given permission. From then on it became necessary to mark the swans so they could tell who owned which. Unmarked birds belong to the sovereign, those with a mark to the right of their beaks to the Dyers and those to the left to the Vintners. And every year since then, on the Monday of the third week in July, the royal swan keeper, accompanied by a representative from the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, the Queen’s swan uppers and the swan marker of the Vintners’ Company and the swan master of the Dyers’ Company and their men – all dressed in special uniforms – set off upstream from Blackfriars in London to Pangbourne in Berkshire, in six rowing boats known as Thames skiffs. The journey takes five days and the task is to find the broods of cygnets and their parents, identify the adult birds and mark the young in the same way. The first man to sight a brood shouts ‘All up!’, warning everyone to get into position to catch the swans.

State visits follow a formula. The visiting heads of state arrive before lunch on a Tuesday at Gatwick Airport, where they are met by a junior member of the Royal Family and taken on the royal train to Victoria Station. Until ten or twelve years ago, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, possibly other members of the family and various dignitaries, including the Prime Minister, would meet their guests – head of state, spouse and cast of fourteen – at the station in carriages. A long procession, escorted by the Household Cavalry, would then make the journey to Buckingham Palace along Victoria Street to Parliament Square, up Whitehall, through Horse Guards Arch and into the Mall, thus knocking out seventeen bus routes for the day that run from the north of London to the south. In response to public criticism the procession was scrapped and the Queen now meets her guests at Horse Guards Parade. An informal lunch for sixty follows – six round tables
for ten with a member of the Royal Family heading each, which the Queen describes as an ‘ice-breaker’ – then an exchange of gifts and occasionally decorations.

That evening the state banquet takes place, at which 165 people sit down to dinner in the Ballroom round a horseshoe-shaped table that will have taken up to seven hours to prepare. There are no tablecloths: the tables are highly polished, lavishly decorated with floral arrangements and gold candelabra, laid out – using a ruler to measure the space between each setting – with gleaming George III or George IV silver and gilt cutlery and porcelain from one of the many priceless services in the Royal Collection. Some of it is kept in the vaults; the rest of it, when not in use, lives in one of the display cases in the Queen’s Gallery and it is only handled by people who have been specially trained to work in the china and silver pantries. If the banquet is at Windsor Castle, in St George’s Hall – as it was for President Putin in 2003 – the tableware is transported from London, as are the staff to prepare for the evening, to cook and wait at table. The glassware is cut-crystal made for the coronation in 1953 and hand-engraved with EIIR, the Queen’s royal cipher; the wine that is served in it, the finest from the royal cellars, is looked after by the Yeoman of the Cellars. The family are not wine enthusiasts but others in the Palace are; there is a tasting committee which includes Masters of Wine from among the Royal Warrant Holders, and wines are bought
en primeur
through the Clerk of the Cellars and laid down until such time as he advises they are ready for drinking. According to the accounts for 2003–04, there is currently £365,000 worth of wine in store.

The Royal Family turns out en masse for state banquets – the women in long dresses and tiaras, the men in uniform with full decorations – and is on hand throughout the three days to entertain the visitors and show them parts of the country that
may be of particular interest. Other guests are members of the government and other political leaders, high commissioners and ambassadors, members of the royal household and prominent people who have trade or other associations with the visiting country.

One of the most important tasks before a state banquet, or any dinner that the Queen hosts, is to establish what the guests can and cannot eat. And when the Queen travels it is equally important that her host knows what she likes and dislikes. She has a travelling yeoman who goes ahead to make sure that everything about her visit is acceptable. The only diet the Palace kitchens can’t cope with is kosher because they don’t have the facilities; in such cases they use an outside caterer. Everything else can be accommodated, and once the Master of the Household knows a particular guest’s preference it will be logged, thus, if ever they come to the Palace again, the drink they particularly liked before lunch will miraculously appear or the herbal tea they drank in preference to coffee.

Day two of the visit is largely political: there is a reception at St James’s Palace with the high commissioners and ambassadors in London, followed by talks with the Prime Minister and lunch at 10 Downing Street, after which there is often a press conference; and meetings with the leaders of the main opposition parties. That evening there is another banquet in the guest’s honour in the Great Hall at Guildhall as guest of the Lord Mayor of London, and a guard of honour to inspect beforehand. And on day three, having spent the day seeing something of Britain – either by royal plane, train or auto-mobile, the visiting head of state hosts a return banquet for the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, to which members of the Royal Family are once again invited.

Vladimir Putin’s visit in 2003 was a return of hospitality. The Queen had been to Russia in 1994, three years after the
end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. It was her first visit and the fact that Boris Yeltsin was the first Russian leader ever to have been chosen by democratic election was no coincidence. While the successors of the Bolshevik regime that had murdered the Romanovs were in power she had refused to go as a matter of principle, but Russia had entered a new era. The visit was a great success and the Queen chose to include film clips from it in her Christmas broadcast that year. She had never met Yeltsin before but, thanks to some bright spark at the Foreign Office, the relationship got off to a good start. They had discovered that the President’s wife Naina loved gardening and so the Queen’s gift to her hosts had been a delicate set of crystal drawers containing seeds specially harvested from the gardens at Buckingham Palace. They were thrilled. By the time President Putin landed on British soil nine years later, relations between the two countries were secure, British companies had been investing heavily in the new democracy – and her eldest son’s International Business Leaders’ Forum was about to celebrate ten years of work in St Petersburg.

Prince Charles was already acquainted with Vladimir Putin. He had met him first in 1994 when he too visited Russia. The year before he had been approached by Anatoly Sobchak, then Mayor of St Petersburg. He wanted money to save the city’s crumbling art and cultural heritage, its health institutions and civil society organizations. ‘We don’t do money,’ said the Prince, ‘this is not Venice in Peril. But we do advice.’ And so a small task force organized by the IBLF went to St Petersburg in 1993 to see what could be done. The next year the Prince of Wales went to see for himself, taking with him a group of European experts and business leaders; the man escorting them round the city was the then First Deputy Mayor, Vladimir Putin. One of the typical sights on their tour was the
Marinskaya Hospital, where they saw rusty surgical instruments, skilled eye surgeons who were paid less than UK shop assistants and a desperate shortage of drugs. They also saw the city’s newly opened Littlewoods department store. Long-term practical projects to help the city were developed as a result of that visit, working in partnership, as always, with Russian organizations and individuals. Ten years on they have made a significant impact.

‘In the early days in Russia,’ says Robert Davies, the IBLF’s CEO, ‘it was remarkable to work with someone who had such a very strong sense of history and destiny for Russia in a way that no one who is a politician ever could have.’

He was invited by the then Mayor of St Petersburg, the late Anatoly Sobchak, to the burial of the Tsar’s bones in St Petersburg and I remember asking should he not go? For me it was a matter-of-fact thing; an issue to be judged here and now in relation to the politics and circumstances of the day. He took a four-hundred-year view of this, saw the historical context; and it is this sense of where we have all come from and where we are all going that helps pin my organization into thinking about the world in longer time scales and contexts.

Tsar Nicholas II, the last Russian Emperor, was buried in St Petersburg in July 1998, eighty years after his death. He and his family and several close servants had been murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1918 and their bodies thrown down an abandoned mine in Yekaterinburg; their remains were finally laid to rest alongside their ancestors in Peter and Paul Cathedral, where all Russian tsars from Peter the Great to Alexander III are buried.

The Prince of Wales didn’t go to the burial; neither did the
Queen nor any senior member of the British Royal Family. They all work on a different historical time scale from the rest of us.

‘Those of my generation in Britain have special cause to remember the unimaginable sacrifice the Russian people made to defeat fascism in the Second World War,’ said the Queen in welcoming President Putin and his wife at the start of the state banquet.

Nothing – not even the fact that our countries became estranged in the war’s aftermath – has ever dimmed our memory of the scale of your loss. That experience should continue to inspire us as we seek to build a more peaceful and secure world.

When I visited your country in 1994, I recall saying to President Yeltsin that he and I had spent most of our lives believing such a visit could never happen, and that I hoped he was as delighted as I was to be proved wrong. I am just as delighted now, nine years later, to be able to welcome you here and to learn about the great changes which have occurred in your country since I was there. Russia has established itself as our partner and our friend: we work together bilaterally and on the international stage, and we are developing new links all the time, in fields of commerce, culture, and counter-terrorism, of energy, education, the environment.

State visits in both directions do a great deal to strengthen links and friendships between nations. Sir Richard Needham, who was Minister for Trade between 1992 and 1995, says that he relied a lot on the support of the Royal Family in promoting Britain’s commercial interests overseas and they were extremely good at it. The Prince of Wales and Princess Anne have been travelling the world for years, combining charity work with commercial flag waving, but more recently their brother, the Duke of York, has joined the fray and now plays a significant and much more specific role. When he left the Navy in 2001 after twenty-two years, he became a Special Representative for UK Trade and Investment. He has travelled all over the world since then opening up markets abroad for small to medium-sized companies and encouraging overseas traders to invest in the UK; and in that capacity he has been involved in inward state visits. He spent time with both President Putin and President Bush during their stay – 49 per cent of inward investment in the UK now comes from the United States.

Richard Needham has been heavily involved in business since he retired from the House of Commons in 1997 and is deputy
chairman of Dyson, which, because of planning restrictions in the UK, has moved its manufacturing operation to Malaysia. He has encountered the Duke of York in a variety of settings.

On a good day, there’s no one more charming, affable, amusing and capable of getting hold of the brief you’ve given him then getting it across in a non-partisan manner promoting Britain’s interests, whether it’s investment or gaining orders for power stations. He manages to get into places, to see people and get through doors which even with an ambassador you couldn’t do. Part of it is that monarchy can attract a much higher level of participation – both in the countries he visits and the people he takes with him. On a bad day some people felt the Duke hadn’t read the brief very carefully and seemed more interested in playing golf than doing what was wanted of him. He’s much better now. He came along to a British Export Association reception at the House of Lords recently and gave an extremely good speech. I think he’s got himself together. He does a very, very good job.

A former courtier at Buckingham Palace once got into a lot of trouble for suggesting that Prince Andrew would make a better king than the Prince of Wales. It was a long time ago, but his view then, which has not essentially changed, is that Andrew was more dutiful, would do what he was told, wouldn’t agonize so much about things as the Prince of Wales does, and would be easily manipulated and therefore ‘reliable’ in governmental/civil service-type context. ‘Here is your speech, you read it, don’t start rewriting it; and this is where you are going next.’ He would do it magnificently, he would be smartly turned out, very soldierly and look the part. ‘He has a huge sense of duty,’ says the ex-courtier. ‘I’m not saying Charles
doesn’t but he wouldn’t argue, he would just do the job. He’s not stupid by any means; he’s very astute, very loyal.’

One of Andrew’s commanders at sea in the early 1990s agrees.

Prince Andrew is a lovely chap, less bright than Edward. He was flight commander, senior aviator in a frigate, seconded to my staff for about six months. I enjoyed his company, he’s fun, he enjoys a laugh and a rumbustious laugh sometimes, too. He is fanatical about his golf; he was just learning it then and whenever he could he was away with his golf clubs to the nearest course. What I admired about him particularly was this: when we parked alongside anywhere, he was on duty as a royal and his Private Secretary would arrive and say here’s your itinerary, and he would go off and do official business and I was occasional dog’s body tagging along at the back – complete role reversal. And he would do all that stuff and do it well; he would also play his golf every spare moment and get quite cross if there wasn’t room for golf. Then we’d come back on board and do the military stuff and he was so keen to show that he wasn’t just a royal playing at having a job so he could deflect criticism for being a playboy. He was very serious about his job on board. It was clear he was not in the forefront of tactical thinking about use of naval airpower, that wasn’t his forte, he wasn’t a questioning sort of person. But in producing schedules of flying, producing a safe plan, he was bloody good and he took it very seriously indeed and I admired that hugely. He was a typical aviator, they are great in their aeroplanes and they love it, but anything beyond that … You cannot put incompetents into aeroplanes, they kill themselves and people around them. He was a good aviator.

On shore he was Your Royal Highness and on board he was Andrew to the other officers, and sailors would call him sir, as they did every officer. He looked and behaved like a bog-standard officer. I think he enjoyed it enormously; he gave every impression he loved what he was doing and the environment in which he was doing it. It’s a lad’s environment and he was a lad, thoroughly uncouth.

Prince Andrew’s great misfortune was in not being able to marry Koo Stark, the American he fell in love with in the early eighties. She was a model-turned-actress-turned-photographer, very pretty, very sweet and very much in love with Andrew but in her youth had appeared naked in the lesbian shower scene of a soft-porn movie. Throughout the relationship with Andrew she behaved admirably – also afterwards, and has remained a good friend – and the Queen was very fond of her, but the photographs ruled Koo Stark out as a potential royal bride and, much to Andrew’s distress, they parted company. ‘He was in love with Koo Stark,’ says a former courtier, ‘and she behaved immaculately and she was very honourable. He was deeply upset about Koo and the Queen liked Koo enormously.’

It was no secret that Fergie, Sarah Ferguson, the girl Andrew subsequently married, had a colourful past. Daughter of Prince Charles’s polo manager, Major Ronald Ferguson, she had lived with playboy racing driver Paddy McNally and was clearly something of a good-time girl, but no damaging photographs were ever published and Fergie ran the course. The public warmed to her, she was the girl next door – not wafer-thin like Diana – she was fun, sexy, cheerful and informal and in 1986 she became part of the Family Firm. But the marriage fell apart and when the nation was not riveted by the Charles
and Diana show, they could switch channels and see the embarrassing highlights of the Yorks’ home life. By 1992 Fergie was having her toes sucked by her scantily-clad American financial adviser and enjoying herself with his Texan oil millionaire friend. They separated that year and by 1994 they were divorced. She was, in the words of Lord Charteris, the Queen’s former Private Secretary, ‘vulgar, vulgar, vulgar’.

Fergie was indeed vulgar, but she had a very kind heart and an indomitable spirit, and I can’t help admiring her. She was wildly extravagant, she exploited her position and had amassed colossal debts by the time of her divorce, but she set to work to pay back the money she owed. She went to America, where they simply adored her; she became involved with Weight Watchers; she wrote children’s books; she went on chat shows; she used her Duchess name-tag shamelessly to open doors and did everything she could think of to make money. But she never even came close to selling her story or betraying the Queen. She and Andrew remained good friends and for the sake of the children, and to save money, she moved back into the house they had once shared. They lived in opposite wings, and at Christmas and Easter he would take the little Princesses to their grandparents for a family get-together and Fergie would be left alone, excluded from family events.

On 11 September 2001 Prince Andrew was thirty thousand feet over the Atlantic on his way to an Outward Bound visit in America when the news came through that four American passenger airliners had been hijacked by terrorists. His plane immediately turned back but he felt in some way closer to the tragedy as a result. He was very keen to join the United States Ambassador in London at Buckingham Palace on the day that ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ was played during the Changing
of the Guard, by way of tribute to those who died at the World Trade Center. He was also at the memorial service at St Paul’s with the rest of the family. And on a trip to New York not long afterwards he changed his schedule in order to visit Ground Zero. He was also prominent during President Bush’s state visit in 2003.

‘The first US President to stay in Buckingham Palace was Woodrow Wilson, in December 1918,’ said the Queen in her banquet speech.

America had then been fighting alongside us in the First World War and was to do so again in our hour of need during the Second World War. And at the very core of the new international and multilateral order which emerged after the shared sacrifices of that last, terrible World War was a vital, dynamic transatlantic partnership, working with other allies to create effective international institutions. The Marshall Plan led to the beginnings of the European Union, and the establishment of NATO became the bedrock for European security.

Sixty years ago, Winston Churchill coined the term ‘Special Relationship’ to describe the close collaboration between the United Kingdom and United States forces that was instrumental in freeing Europe from tyranny. Despite occasional criticism of the term, I believe it admirably describes our friendship. Like all special friends, we can talk frankly and we can disagree from time to time – even sometimes fall out over a particular issue. But the depth and breadth of our partnership means that there is always so much we are doing together, at all levels, that disputes can be quickly overcome and forgiven.

I in my turn have had the pleasure of paying three state
visits to your country. The last was in 1991 – the end of the Cold War. Your father, Mr President, was instrumental in leading the way through those heady but uncertain months from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to the break-up of the Soviet Union two years later.

In this twenty-first century we face together many unforeseen and formidable challenges. The leadership you showed in the aftermath of the terrible events of 11 September 2001 won the admiration of everyone in the United Kingdom. You led the response to an unprovoked terrorist attack which was on a scale never seen before. Your friends in this country were amongst the very first to sense the grief and horror that struck your nation that day – and to share the slow and often painful process of recovery. And our troops have served side by side in Afghanistan and Iraq to lead the fight to restore freedom and democracy. Our two countries stand firm in their determination to defeat terrorism.

The Queen’s speeches at state banquets are never entirely her own, either in this country or abroad. She acts and speaks, officially, only on ministerial advice. So although she might write them, in conjunction with her Private Secretary, and express her own sentiments, these speeches are always checked and approved by the Foreign Secretary. Any speech on any matter, however trivial, is always checked and approved by the minister responsible for that particular portfolio. There are just two speeches each year that have no governmental input: her message to the Commonwealth on Commonwealth Day each March, which is sound only; and her traditional Christmas broadcast on television. Conversely, the only speech she delivers that is pure government with not a nuance of her own, is the Speech from the Throne at the State Opening of Parliament.
The same is true when she is in any of her realms. Speeches in, say, Australia, New Zealand or Canada have to be acceptable to ministers in that country and sometimes to state or provincial ministers, too. And if ever a speech causes controversy, it is the minister and not the Queen who shoulders the blame.

According to Robert Lacey, the Queen’s biographer:

The Commonwealth has provided Elizabeth II with more sustained pleasure than any other aspect of her work – and an area in which her power and prestige have actually increased. In 1952, Britain’s Commonwealth seemed a poor apology for a lost empire. In the course of her reign it has developed, in a quietly persistent and low-key style that rather echoes her own, into a pragmatic international organization from which its members have generally profited. It helps its less developed members get aid, and has played its part in such events as the ending of apartheid and the coming of majority rule in South Africa.

The Commonwealth is unlike any other international organization such as the United Nations, NATO or the European Union. It didn’t come about through contract or treaty but through history; it grew organically as Britain lost her empire. During the first half of the twentieth century, almost all of the territories that had been subjugated during the reign of Queen Victoria – which made the British Empire the largest the world had ever seen – formed themselves into a voluntary association of free and independent states which today comprises 30 per cent of the world’s population. ‘In all history,’ declared the Queen to the City of London during the Silver Jubilee celebrations in 1977, ‘this has no precedent.’ Following the re-entry of
South Africa to the Commonwealth in 1994, it now comprises nearly one-third of the world’s independent states, fifty-three in all. Its total population is estimated at 1.8 billion people. Sixteen of the fifty-three members are monarchies ruled by the Queen, six are separate indigenous monarchies and twenty-nine are republics. ‘To ask,’ as Vernon Bogdanor says, ‘“What does the Commonwealth do, what is its purpose?” is perhaps to ask the wrong question. The Commonwealth is an association which exists, not for any particular
purpose
, but for what it is, a group of countries connected by a common heritage and historical experience, and also by the English language. “The Commonwealth,” Professor David Dilks has said, “is the only international organization which has no need of interpreters.”’ It is ‘a kind of international Rotary Club’.