The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor (29 page)

In November 2003 Benjamin Zephaniah, the Rastafarian poet, broke with convention and announced publicly that he had rejected the offer of an OBE because he claimed it stood
for colonial brutality and slavery. Would-be recipients are always sounded out by letter to see whether they will accept an honour before the list is passed to the Queen – 98 per cent accept. In rejecting the honour, Zephaniah did not pull his punches: ‘It reminds me of thousands of years of brutality – it reminds me of how my foremothers were raped and my forefathers brutalized.’ He added, ‘Stick it, Mr Blair and Mrs Queen – stop going on about the empire.’

The next month documents leaked from Whitehall, hitherto secretive about the whole matter, revealed just how many prominent figures from the world of literature, stage, screen and sport had also turned down honours; and also how confidently a committee of civil servants, chaired by Sir Hayden Phillips GCB of the Lord Chancellor’s department, decided who was to be honoured and who left out – revelations which once again brought the whole legitimacy of the honours system into question. The result was two reports, both published in July 2004. One, written by Sir Hayden Phillips, came up with thirty-one recommendations to ensure that the system would be seen to be fair and more accessible to the population at large. ‘Some people believe the whole system should be swept away,’ he wrote. ‘Others would abolish traditional titles and historic orders. Some of those who hold these views hold them with a passionate intensity. But I do not believe that there is a broad public opinion that is seriously opposed to having a national system through which the Queen, as Head of State, confers recognition on the contribution of individuals to our society. Put more simply the honours system is our way, within our cultural history, of saying thank you publicly.’ The other, a House of Commons Select Committee, attracted rather more attention, however. Under its recommendations, top civil servants and diplomats would also lose their entitlement to more ‘exclusive’ honours – the Order of the Bath and the Order
of St Michael and St George; Knighthoods and Damehoods would be abolished and the Order of the British Empire renamed the Order of British Excellence. Knighthoods, so they said, were ‘redolent of past preoccupations with rank and class, just as “Empire” is redolent of an imperial history’. It was roundly condemned by traditionalists and constitutional experts as ‘damaging political correctness that could undermine the monarchy’.

Nearly forty years ago, however, the Queen tried to change the name of the OBE herself. In 1966, according to the author Anthony Sampson, she handed the Prime Minister Harold Wilson a four-page memo written by Prince Philip proposing the name be changed as the empire had been ‘virtually eliminated’. He suggested alternatives like the Order of St James’s or the Order of the Lion and the Unicorn. ‘But senior civil servants were horrified,’ Sampson wrote in
Who Runs This Place
?, ‘and revealed all their conservatism in opposition to the Palace, the supposed “fount of honour”.’

The head of protocol Sir Lees Mayall mockingly suggested that St James might recall a Tudor nunnery which was home to ‘fourteen leprous maidens’. The head of the diplomatic service Sir Saville Garner complained that any change would arouse ‘a good deal of unnecessary controversy’. The head of the Treasury Sir Laurence Helsby argued that it would be too expensive, and ‘the less relation the name of an order has to reality, the better, and the further the empire disappears into the sands of time, the less difficulty there is in retaining the name’.

The mandarins won the day.

Garden parties are another great Palace institution. Three times every summer nine thousand people, most of them
mystified as to why they have been invited, make their way from all over the country to Buckingham Palace – and once each summer to the Palace of Holyroodhouse. The men are mostly in morning dress or uniform (although increasingly it is lounge suits or national dress), women in their best summer suits, hats and handbags – all clutching their prized and exceedingly stiff and embossed invitations from the Lord Chamberlain who ‘is commanded by Her Majesty to invite’ them. As with every invitation issued by the super-efficient Malcolm Ross, who also organizes the garden parties, there are detailed instructions about where to find the Palace and which entrance to use, what clothes to wear, what time to arrive (4.00 – gates open at 3.15) and what time to leave (6.00), accompanied by car park stickers for their windscreens and instructions about where to park should they elect to come by car. The guest list is a hotchpotch of people from every walk of life, pulled together by a variety of list makers – the government, the civil service, the Armed Forces, professional bodies and the Lord-Lieutenants – and they are another means by which the Queen acknowledges and rewards good works and community service.

As with everything the Queen does, the pattern is the same party after party, year after year. She and the Duke of Edinburgh and members of the Royal Family walk out on to the terrace outside the Bow Room at four o’clock, at which point one of the two bands that play a selection of music throughout the afternoon stops and plays the National Anthem. Everyone stands to attention, including the royal party; a handful of people are then presented formally to the Queen – new Lord-Lieutenants, chaplains to the Queen or tenants of the Duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster. After that members of the Royal Family disperse themselves among the crowd mingling on the lawn, each one taking a different route, weaving their way
between groups, talking at random to people who catch their eye. There is no formality and it is largely a matter of luck as to whether a guest will meet one, several or none of the family, but unless they are off exploring on the other side of the lake they are certain to come close. Besides, just to be inside the secret garden, behind the high brick wall with the black iron spikes on the top that seals off royalty from the rest of London, has a certain magic in itself. There are almost forty acres of garden at the back of the Palace, to the west, with a tennis court, wonderful rose beds, shrubberies, a huge herbaceous border, and more than two hundred mature trees, many of them specimens, gifts from different Commonwealth countries. The lake covers four acres and is a haven for wildlife. Tea and cakes are served in huge open-sided tents and for those guests who are rather more special than others – ambassadors, high commissioners, government ministers and the like – there’s a royal tea tent. On the dot of 6.00, the band launches into a second rendition of ‘God Save the Queen’, she and the rest of the family disappear into the Palace and everyone else flocks out into the Mall, their day of excitement done, and heads home.

Lord-Lieutenants are the Queen’s representatives in the country; there is one in every county, appointed by the Queen on the advice of the Prime Minister. They are usually retired, can be men or, nowadays, women, aristocrats or commoners but are recognized as figures of distinction and good standing in the community. Glory comes with the job but not hard cash. The position is voluntary and although they get mileage, telephone and postage reimbursed, and have part-time use of a secretary, they have to provide their own car and meet all other expenses, which can during their tenure run into many thousands of pounds, out of their own pocket. As one of them said to me:

Everywhere you go as Lord-Lieutenant, you go to church, you sit in the front pew and the collection plate comes to you first, you can’t just put a couple of coins into it, you have to put at least £5; you go to a charity do and you can’t buy a single 10p raffle ticket, you buy a £5 strip – and I am patron or president of fifty organizations. Heaven knows what I spend but I don’t begrudge it. It’s a huge privilege to be Lord-Lieutenant. You represent the sovereign which is a great honour, everywhere you go you’re in the front row
of the stalls, you’re greeted properly, your wife is hugely esteemed and you meet wonderful people we would never have met before – little people, big people, good people doing nice things, just beaming all over when someone says ‘What a wonderful job you’re doing’. One of best parts of the job is finding people to pat on the head and say well done to.

Lord-Lieutenants may be out of pocket but they are the top dog in the county, and except when the Queen or another member of the Royal Family comes to visit – which they organize with military precision right down to the last millisecond – they reign supreme.

They were originally appointed in Henry VIII’s reign as part of the reorganization of local government, to control the military forces of the Crown in each county, and for a couple of hundred years had full control of the militia; but under the Forces Act of 1871 control reverted back to the Crown. The military flavour remains, however. The men wear military-style navy blue uniform with scarlet stripes down the trousers. On formal occasions they dress it up with overalls, swords, sashes, spurs, medals and peaked hat with a scarlet band – the full fig. Less formally, they leave off the sword and spurs and on other occasions can wear ordinary suits or blazers. The women – helpfully also called Lord-Lieutenants – are positively drab by comparison. All they have to show for themselves is a diamond brooch in the shape of the Queen’s crown and emblem of the nation which hangs on a red and white striped ribbon that they wear with normal clothes.

Lord-Lieutenants are in demand, in much the same way as members of the Royal Family, to be presidents or patrons of charities, to open schools, factories and new buildings, to attend local functions and present awards and prizes including
the public service Long Service and Good Conduct medal, the Queen’s Awards for Export and Technology and the Queen’s Scout and Queen’s Guides Awards. It is a pretty full-time job and involves most evenings, too. They are automatically senior magistrates, they chair the Lord Chancellor’s advisory committee, which appoints and sacks local Justices of the Peace, they are Keeper of the Rolls – the county archives – they are head of the county’s Reserve Forces and Cadets Association, president of the St John Ambulance in the district and by tradition they are made Knights of St John. And at midnight on their 75th birthday they are sacked.

‘Once appointed, we used to do it for life,’ says Lieutenant General Sir Maurice Johnston, former Lord-Lieutenant of Wiltshire since reaching the magic age last October, ‘but allegedly the Queen went up to the furthest reaches of Scotland and a nonagenarian drooled over her hand and she came back and said, “Up with this, I will no longer put. Sack them at seventy-five!”’

It is very often out in the country, at the grass roots away from the city cynics and chattering classes, that you get a more accurate sense of how the monarchy is viewed and valued. And the Lord-Lieutenants are useful in feeding the mood of the nation back into the system.

Occasionally you get nobbled: ‘Would you tell the Queen that …’ People sometimes assume you see the Queen after breakfast every day, which of course you don’t, but the relationship with the Private Secretaries of all members of the family is very close and we talk a lot. We are one of the avenues for advice and temperature gauging which goes to Sir Robin Janvrin. He used us a lot during the Golden Jubilee to sound out attitudes and opinions. Wiltshire is a conservative county with small and large C – except for Swindon
which has two Labour MPs. The attitudes of people are pretty conservative, they don’t like change, they like order and authority, they don’t like disorder and disharmony, and, as I discovered when I started, and during Jubilee Year, the Royal Family is held in huge esteem in the county. If, for instance, I have laid on a programme for a visit, there is massive disappointment if the visit has to be cancelled. And there is huge excitement when I bring a minor member of the family – the Duchess of Gloucester, for example – people go wild with excitement; or the Duke of Kent – he’s a very valuable member of the family, does a good job and people are thrilled to see him. When Prince Philip came to open the new Great Western Hospital everyone knew where he was by the gales of laughter.

The Queen and Prince Philip spent a whole day in Wiltshire in December before the Jubilee Year. They went to Chippenham, Calne and Malmesbury; it was wonderfully successful, the programme encompassed big things, small things, walkabouts. I didn’t announce that they would be travelling from Chippenham to Calne at such and such a time and the car would go past houses on the A4, but every single house had Union Jacks hanging from the window and every single house had someone standing on the pavement waving and taking off hats. People don’t do that if they are longing to become a republic.

At the other end of the country, parts of which are considerably less Conservative, Sir John Riddell, the Prince of Wales’s former Private Secretary and now Lord-Lieutenant of Northumberland, had the same experience.

I can tell you in the county of Northumberland when the Queen and Duke came on a pre-Jubilee visit I took them to
Ashington, which is a very melancholy and very large ex-pit village; it used to be the biggest pit village in the world. When I said the Queen was going to walk down Station Road there was a slightly bored response and I was expecting that no one would turn out and no one would make much effort. And they didn’t make much effort, but it happened to be a sunny day and you’d have been in floods of tears if you’d been a monarchist because Station Road was absolutely full of people waving Union Jacks; you may say it doesn’t take very many people to fill Station Road, Ashington, but by God they were all there, and that’s a very important thing.

Sir Maurice regards Princess Anne as one of the hardest working members of the family and quite the most professional in terms of doing her homework and knowing what she’s looking at. He once took her to a very high-tech cutting-edge firm:

It invented and manufactured a prism which basically split fibre optics and instead of ten thousand conversations going through a fibre optic, with the prism, there were eight times the number going through the same fibre optic. She knew all about that; could talk to the people in white coats about refraction and technical terms. From there she went to a hospice and she sat beside a dying lady’s bed and knew exactly what to say, also to a nurse with a problem. It’s because they’ve done it so many times before.

The Queen is less interested in the technical.

When she came to open a multimillion-pound extension of Motorola in Swindon, I briefed them that the purpose of the visit was for her to talk to the people, the work people,
not to get involved in technicalities of what went on inside. Halfway down the line a white-coated expert said, ‘Ma’am, this is our latest toy and if you look inside here …’, and asked her to pop her head inside something the size of a deep freeze and was explaining that the wires connected to this and that; the Queen turned round and gave me a great wink. They’re not interested in seeing computers – they’ve seen hundreds – nor looking at the layout of a factory. They’re there so people can meet them and talk to them and have that wonderful satisfaction of saying ‘I met the Queen today’.

One of the factories in Wiltshire that several members of the Royal Family have visited over the years is Dyson Appliances in Malmesbury, which found fame with the revolutionary bagless vacuum cleaner. James Dyson is its equally revolutionary inventor and chairman, and is as unconventional as his vacuum cleaners. ‘I spent a lot of my life thinking the Royal Family didn’t have much to offer,’ he says.

Recently, since I’ve got to know them because they’ve come to see me at the Design Museum [of which he has been chairman for the last five years, and trustee for eight], here at the factory and at the Chelsea Flower Show [where he had an award-winning garden design in 2003] it’s rewarding and important to have someone who comes round and encourages, and congratulates people without having a political or any other motive. There’s a place for that. It’s like being at school and the headmaster or his wife comes round and says ‘Well done’. It’s very nice to know that someone has noticed and cares – as much for me as for my workforce. There is a role for someone saying what you are doing is good and good for the country. If the Prime Minister had
done that, it would have been nice but it’s different. We’ve had Gordon Brown here and I’ve been on a trip to Japan with Tony Blair. It’s nice but there could be another motive, a political agenda. With the Royal Family there may be a social agenda but not a political one. When they came here and when Prince Philip went to the Design Museum, they said, ‘What are you doing here? What are your problems?’ They asked intelligent questions – I’ve never heard a member of the family ask a stupid question.

The Queen came eighteen months ago with the Duke. They weren’t invited. They decided they wanted to come and see us. There was a lot of arranging to do – sniffer dogs and all that. There’s a protocol; the Lord-Lieutenant of Wiltshire, Lieutenant General Sir Maurice Johnston, writes to you and comes to see you to discuss it. You don’t hear from Buckingham Palace at all until afterwards, when you get a thank-you letter. It all goes through the local royal man. It was the same with Prince Charles two years before. The Lord-Lieutenant says they’d like to come and works out what they will do when they are here. He says they’d like to meet as many people as possible. There was no time to do the offices and the production line, so we got everyone into the factory, and at one end of the line was the whole of the finance department, and at the other end all our engineers from the office floor. When you go on to the production line you have to wear yellow safety jackets and safety boots and the Duke of Edinburgh kept going up to people and saying ‘Which forklift do you drive?’ and they would be one of our top scientists. The Queen happened to talk to a lot of people in the finance department and she turned to me and said, ‘Why do you have so many people in your finance department?’ I said, ‘You just happen to have met them all bunched up.’ When I brought her up on
to the office floor to use the loo – you have to have a designated lavatory – she was supposed to be brought up by the lady-in-waiting but there wasn’t one around so I brought her up. In a way that was the most interesting part of the whole trip because she talked much more freely when there weren’t lots of people around and was much more interesting and relaxed and chatty. I have a feeling she’s quite shy and finds it difficult.

The Queen is very easy-going. Other members of the family can be more difficult and Sir Maurice would not be the first person, when awaiting the arrival of the Duke of Edinburgh, to be quietly praying that his royal visitor was going to arrive in a good mood. A former director of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufacture and Commerce (RSA) says that his views changed a lot over his seventeen years of working with Prince Philip, but he never lost his admiration for him.

He was pretty fantastic, he was pretty daunting and could be pretty awful. He would turn up here in a foul mood and make life very difficult. He could be quite rude to people and unkindly rude, but by the end of the time, two or three hours, he was invariably in a good mood again; the bad moods weren’t very often. Generally he was fantastically supportive and pro and I thought as far as the environment was concerned he was brilliant, and he was a complete master of his brief. That was what amazed me. He did his own homework, wrote his own speeches. He asked for ideas, rough drafts, and he would never use anything verbatim but you could tell he was taking an interest in what you’d say and out came his own stuff. In environment committee meetings with lots of real experts, the Attenboroughs
of this world and others, he was the master of the total brief, no doubt. He had a very small staff, a very efficient office in complete contrast to the Prince of Wales’s office. Going back twenty-five years, his was the little tight, well-run group of ex-servicemen mostly, pretty classy sorts. First woman equerry one before last was very nice, but they have become much more relaxed. A lot of the formality has fallen away; when I first encountered Prince Philip it was a very formal occasion. One gets very blasé about contact with the Palace. I have a letter from the Palace every week or a phone call. I joke that I see him more than my sister sometimes because he does do an awful lot for us. And he has a capacity to get into the detail of things. We sent him a governance review about six years ago and he asked to see the by-laws and he discovered four or five drafting errors that the lawyers had completely missed and he obviously enjoyed going through it.