The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor (3 page)

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.

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.