The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor (34 page)

Shortly afterwards, Edward became the NYMT’s president. ‘He has been everything we could have wished for,’ says James Taylor.

We were doing
The Beggar’s Opera
at the Lyric Hammersmith in September 1997; Edward was coming on the Tuesday to the opening night and on the Sunday Diana died. All royal engagements were off. I got instructions on the Tuesday to have the whole cast on stage at 6.45, and Edward came along, wished everyone good luck, said, ‘I’m sorry I can’t stay but have a wonderful evening, I’ll be thinking of you.’ It was a wonderful gesture; he was worried that with all the hype of a royal opening the kids would be upset if he didn’t turn up.

Prince Harry is in grave danger of being branded as Edward was, and as the second son – the ‘spare’ as his mother called him – he has no clear vision of his own future. Prince William does. He has inherited a sense of responsibility, a sense of destiny and gravitas, that are entirely lacking in his younger brother, and also a sense of humility that seems to run in the blood. Harry is not likely to feel out of place in the Army –
he is a much more rugged type than his uncle and, if he can cope with the discipline, it will probably be the making of him – but he is seen as the wild child, the irresponsible one, the volatile one, the rogue, the womanizer, the good-time boy who will always find trouble. He is utterly charming and far more sensitive than he is ever given credit for but he has not been disciplined and the chances are he will find trouble. Princess Margaret, the Queen’s younger sister, was also rebellious and her behaviour was quite shocking when seen alongside the Queen’s. She was vivacious, colourful – in language as well as personality – she fell in love with the wrong people, had affairs, had a divorce and managed, despite all of that, to bring up two very level-headed, charming children. Her friends speak very warmly of her; she had compassion and she was deeply religious. But she never lost the ‘spoilt and difficult’ label from her youth.

Princess Anne is the one member of the family who has managed to turn around her publicity. She was once the most unpopular member of The Firm; she was rude and ungracious, uncooperative and surly. And I would say, from my experience of her and that of several people I know, still is today. But that’s not how she is regarded. She is seen as hardworking and thoroughly admirable. And there’s no doubt that she is. And like her father and her older brother she has made a real difference to the world. Through the Princess Royal Trust for Carers which she founded in 1991 (having thought of the idea while sitting round a kitchen table with friends in Scotland) she was the first person to recognize and address the isolation and needs of that army of unpaid people in this country – more than 6 million and some of them as young as four – who care for friends and relatives with long-term illness. ‘One in ten of us are carers and the figure’s going up because
of the ageing population,’ says Alison Ryan who is the charity’s chief executive. ‘Two out of three of us will be carers within the next ten years and some of them are very young, children looking after disabled parents, and if there are mental health or drug or alcohol problems they tend to go underground. The person who identified that these people needed support was the Princess Royal. She saw it as an absolute consequence of community care. If you’re a princess you tend to open things, so she was opening day centres and replacement facilities when they closed the long-term hospitals and she was the one who asked the question, “What happens at the weekends, in the evenings, what happens in the summer when you’re closed?” And on the whole there was a lot of shuffling feet and no very good answers. So she thought there might be a gap there.’ The first Carer Centre opened in Banbury in 1992 and there are now 143 nationwide.

‘It’s a huge issue, the amount of money saved by carers doing the work they do has been evaluated by the Institute of Actuaries and it is £57 billion, exactly the same cost as it takes to run the NHS, so there’s a parallel unpaid-for NHS. It’s a huge issue all over the world, even in the undeveloped world, and the first country to have a thorough-going comprehensive support system for carers is the UK and that organization is the Princess Royal Trust for Carers. We are in demand now all over the world to tell people how to do it and it was her idea, she identified it.’

Anne went through a divorce and married again and, a few years ago, there were rumours that her second marriage was in trouble. Adam Helliker reported in his diary column in the
Mail on Sunday
that she was leaning heavily on Andrew Parker Bowles at this difficult time. Andrew, who is Camilla’s ex-husband (now married to Rosie Pitman) was a boyfriend from Anne’s youth, and is Zara’s godfather. There were a couple of
follow-up stories elsewhere at the time but nothing since. Friends say the rumours are nonsense, that she and Tim Lawrence are happily married and that is the end of it, and I don’t doubt it. Anything similar about her brothers, however, whether true or not, would never have passed with such little coverage; but just a look from Anne is enough to wither the boldest reporter. She went hunting in December 2004, just after the ban was announced, something she hasn’t done for years, and was out again in 2005 just weeks before the ban came into force to make a point presumably. The publicity was negligible. Who would cross someone who looked as terrifyingly humourless as Anne – particularly on a horse?

A High Court judge of my acquaintance was seated on Anne’s left at dinner one evening. For the first two courses she ignored him and spoke to the person on her right. As the pudding was served she turned to my acquaintance. ‘And what do you do?’ she asked. ‘I’m a judge,’ he replied. ‘Oh really? Dogs or horses?’

Anne has a very good sense of humour and can be good fun – and when she smiles she can be very pretty, too. Her friends adore her and say she is deeply loyal and not remotely grand; there are no butlers or footmen at Gatcombe Park, her house in Gloucestershire, simply a housekeeper; it feels like a family home and Anne sometimes does her own cooking. However, the teenage daughter of a friend of mine was once invited there by Peter Phillips, her son, and Anne was so rude to the girl she rang her father and asked to be taken home. And I confess to having been faintly appalled one day at the Savoy Hotel in London when the Princess Royal was presenting awards to Women of Achievement to mark the 75th anniversary of her old school, Benenden. She gave the most perfect speech from the podium, turned to put her speaking notes on the chair behind her, picked up a pair of gloves and put them on before
shaking hands with some of the most remarkable and able women in the country.

Anne doesn’t go out of her way to be friendly or even polite. I was at Benenden with her. I was a year older but it was not a vast school, and, although we were not friends because we were in different boarding houses, we knew one another, had friends in common and overlapped for four years of our teenage lives incarcerated in the depths of Kent. When I saw her in Uzbekistan thirty-odd years later I expected there to be some acknowledgement – as there is with every other Senior (as old Benenden girls are called) I meet. During the course of two or three full days Anne, known as PA at school, didn’t even catch my eye. Though we stood, at times, no more than four feet from each other looking at archaeological marvels, she studiously avoided eye contact. I had joined an unusually small group of journalists and photographers – five in all, if I remember correctly – on the last leg of her trip. Most of the rat pack had followed the Princess of Wales to Africa and Princess Anne, on her first foreign tour with her new husband, was a secondary attraction, but I had been asked to write about it and, having made arrangements through her Press Secretary at Buckingham Palace, arrived to join the party in Tashkent. My fellow journalists had been with the royal pair for over a week and yet, in all that time, in all the bizarre and uncomfortable situations they had experienced – the desert storm, the sheep’s eyes – she had not addressed one word to any of them and had not once smiled in the direction of their cameras. Having only ever previously been anywhere with the Prince and Princess of Wales, both of whom invariably said good morning to the press, I was stunned.

When I followed Anne on a day out in Kent a couple of weeks later, visiting some of her charities, where I was the only journalist, she was exactly the same. A hatred of journalists,
I thought to myself, until we happened to arrive at our local railway station one evening and found our cars parked so closely together that I had to hold my door closed to enable her to open hers. This time I thought she was bound to say something – if only ‘thank you’, as one would to any stranger who did the same. But no. It was a hatred of me, I decided. I wondered whether I had written something rude about her in the past but had no memory of it, and the piece about her visit to Uzbekistan – including the cerebral palsy hospital (which she might have found rude) – had not been published. Maybe she was still smarting from what I have just discovered my father had written about her in the
Sunday Express
in November 1978 …

It must have been tough for Princess Anne to find herself publicly pilloried because she failed to show warmth to a small boy in hospital who was demanding to be cuddled and to have, as a result, angry Norwegians demanding that she go back to Britain.

I saw the incident on TV and I do not believe for one minute that the Princess acted with deliberate coldness. All she showed was her natural shyness and reserve.

Even so, and to prevent international incidents in future, might it not be wise when she goes on goodwill tours abroad if instead of visiting sick children in hospitals she contents herself with administering sugar lumps in stables?

No one is ever likely then to mistake the look of genuine love and compassion in her eyes.

Baroness Chalker, the former Tory minister, has known Anne for years and is very fond of her. She admits she can be tricky but is impressed by how effective she is.

We share a number of charities together and she is clearly far more on the ball than I realized. I was at a function the other night and her husband Tim Lawrence was there. I’ve known Tim since before he started courting her and he came over to see me and he asked about one of our charities and I said, ‘Bit of sticky weather at the moment’, and he said, ‘Yes, I think you and my wife are of the same opinion.’ I said, ‘What could that be, Tim?’ And what he came out with was a hundred per cent right. I hadn’t told her; how she’s picked it up I don’t know but she’s picked up the thing I’m having a battle about. It’s nothing drastic; it’s a management thing, which is why it’s all the more interesting that she knows what’s going on. She has her finger much more closely on the pulse of her NGOs than others have and that’s partly because she will not employ somebody to do it. She sees me as president and chairman of the board herself, and she sees the chief executive every few months.

Prince Charles leaves his private secretaries to keep in touch with the chairmen and chief executives of his charities – except for the few key ones. He has five private secretaries in all: Michael Peat; his deputy, Elizabeth Buchanan; and three assistants, Paul Kefford, James Kidner and Mark Leishman, and they each have responsibility for different aspects of the Prince’s life. Princess Anne has one Private Secretary, a jolly ex-naval officer called Nick Wright who, on the day I met him, wore a tie with elephants on it and paperclip cuff links. I mentioned Starbucks and he said he’d never been into one. ‘What are people doing in there?’ he said. ‘Why aren’t they at their desks?’ ‘You can see who he works for,’ said Ailsa Anderson, laughing. She is the one in the Buckingham Palace Press Office who handles the Princess Royal.

The Press Office at Buckingham Palace has changed a lot since I first met Michael Shea there in 1981. Penny Russell-Smith is the Queen’s Press Secretary and she has ten people plus a PA in the department, with different titles and grades and all but four of them assigned to a particular member of the family; the other four run the website or deal with ceremonial and court circular type of things. Penny Russell-Smith is rather like a kindly schoolmistress: constantly preparing for Speech Day, slightly harassed and anxious, a little earnest, always immaculately dressed and made up. She is not the promptest at answering emails, however – in common with some of her colleagues both in the Press Office and in other departments in Buckingham Palace – and entirely failed to show up at one of our first meetings. She was due to be my guest for lunch in a restaurant; after waiting for forty minutes I rang to discover from her colleague that a meeting had overrun. She wouldn’t be coming. If I hadn’t rung I might still be waiting there now – she never rang, never apologized, never mentioned it. But she has been very helpful – as has her team – and there is no longer the feeling that their sole job is to keep the press at bay. The regular royal photographers and cameramen all love the girls in the office – who currently seem to be in the middle of a baby epidemic but they are good fun and totally unaffected and matter of fact about the people they work for. They share a smart hat that lives in the office for formal engagements and go out of their way to get the press the shots they want.

Robin Janvrin (also bad at responding to emails), to whom they all ultimately report, is well aware that the monarchy stands or falls on its media coverage. The day the phones are silent and no emails arrive – the day when no one wants to read about the Queen or look at pictures of the Royal Family – is the day the monarchy dies. As one of the Prince of Wales’s
former private secretaries says, ‘I think even adultery may be a better thing than boredom.’

Mark Bolland’s brief as Deputy Private Secretary to the Prince of Wales was to make his relationship with Mrs Parker Bowles acceptable to the British public. Sir Michael Peat’s has been to get adultery off the front page and promote the Prince’s work which had been largely obscured by the media frenzy over his private life. Peat felt that the Bolland approach – pandering to people’s craving for celebrity news – was dangerous, an effective way of boosting the Prince’s image in the short term but not wise in the long term, which is what the Royal Family is here for, because celebrities have a limited shelf life. He doesn’t deny that people are much more interested in sex and money than good works, and accepts that a certain amount of the Prince’s private life – and that of his sons – will filter out, but feels it has to go hand in hand with some knowledge about what they do in the course of their jobs.