The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor (7 page)

The public loved Diana for all sorts of reasons but not least because people felt she was in tune with them; she went down to the Embankment in London and met the homeless, she went to drug rehabilitation centres and she visited AIDS victims and held their hands. She connected with the public in a way that they liked. It wasn’t the royal way. Princess Anne once tetchily remarked, ‘The very idea that all children want to be cuddled by a complete stranger I find utterly amazing.’ She has a point; but Diana’s informality and the raw, controversial causes she adopted, symbolized a humanity that compared badly with the unemotional hands-behind-the-back approach of everyone else.

According to one of the private secretaries involved in the process of finding a new way forward:

That interview showed what a very different model Diana was and would continue to be, and it certainly gave impetus to the work that was going on in the Palace for change. What was their attitude to her style? Less hostility than I would have expected. There was an acceptance she was very popular and I never heard the Queen criticize Diana, but there was almost a sense of bafflement and a feeling that
this wasn’t the style of the rest of the family. The Queen had a very strong, admirable sense herself of the need to be herself and not be something different. The Duke of Edinburgh will say, ‘We are not here to electioneer, to tout for short-term popularity’, and there was an understanding that they couldn’t adopt Diana’s style and pretend to be the kind of people they weren’t. But working out how they could be themselves and yet do somewhat different things, and show interest in somewhat different things, was something they needed a lot of help with.

The CRU began trying to steer the Queen and other members of the family towards official engagements that were more closely aligned to what was going on in society. They used MORI and other opinion surveys to track key issues and establish people’s views on a variety of issues. They looked at current polls which showed how many people in the population held republican sentiments, how many didn’t care and how many were staunch monarchists, and discovered that the ratio varied very little. The number of republicans was always between 8 and 12 or 13 per cent; a large majority was neutral and a small number of people were raving monarchists.

The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh have no interest in tracking opinion polls themselves. It’s a form of self-protection they have developed over the years. They read newspapers and the Queen watches the early evening news on ITV so they are well aware of what is being said and written about them, and they pick up the sarky comments in comedy programmes, but they don’t pore over the minutiae, as Diana did, looking to see if they had a good report today.

It’s the Private Secretary’s job to talk these kinds of issues through with the Queen, to discuss the way the monarchy is currently being perceived in the country and to work through
the implications, and when and if necessary, recommend change. And it is probably one of the toughest and most crucial parts of the job.

You trod carefully as you would with a minister or Prime Minister, and probably more carefully because it is an intensely personal role. Generally if you are in public life you can console yourself that if you’re being criticized, it’s your official persona that’s being criticized. But it’s very difficult for the Royal Family because that boundary line between being a private and public individual is blurred for them. One of the things I took away from my time at the Palace was a feeling that there needed to be a clearer distinction between the two. I think they’ve learnt to protect themselves from taking the criticism personally to some extent, but only to some extent.

Criticism was at its fiercest, of course, in the days after Diana’s death, and that was the second major impetus for change. By the end of the week, when the family had finally come back to London and the Queen’s broadcast had showed the country that its sovereign was back in the driving seat, no one at Buckingham Palace was in any doubt that the future had been on a knife edge. The Queen pulled it off; catastrophe was averted but it could easily have gone the other way. No one had any illusions about that, and they realized that change in the way the Queen’s programme was organized was now a priority.

First they mapped out how the Queen currently spent her time on official visits; how many organizations in the private sector she went to compared to those in the public sector, what parts of the country she visited; when she went to schools, how many of them were private, how many state; within the private
sector, how often did she go to manufacturing companies compared with service companies. And they mapped it against the current structure of society in the economy and discovered, for example, that she was doing a disproportionate amount in the public sector for the number of people employed in it. When she did pay visits to the private sector she tended to visit manufacturers rather than companies in the service industry because it was easier to devise a visit for her when there was something specific being made that she could look at. So even though the service industry accounts for 80 per cent of the private sector she didn’t go there. But the reason she tended to go to more public schools than state schools, they found, was simply because she received more invitations from public schools.

‘What we tried to do was get the maps a bit more aligned, which wasn’t difficult once you tried, and I think she found she was visiting rather fresher places, that were fun.’ She started going to popular, touristy kinds of places, like a Center-Parcs, and an aquarium in Liverpool, an example of new investment in that part of the country. In London, where she had only ever done ceremonial events in the past, the Queen spent a whole day visiting the City of London; she had lunch at the
Financial Times
, visited an investment bank, a venture capital company, sat in on a Monetary Policy Committee at the Bank of England, bought a copy of the
Evening Standard
from a vendor outside Holborn underground station and met messengers biking documents all round the City; everyday experiences for most people, all new for the Queen. She spent another day in theatre-land, a huge source of tourist income, and among other things watched a rehearsal of the musical
Oklahoma!
, and visited the Almeida Theatre in Islington. They became known as ‘theme days’ and were as relaxed and informal as possible. On other days, the Queen has toured television
studios and seen something of the world of broadcasting; she dipped into publishing when she visited Bloomsbury and met the Harry Potter author, J. K. Rowling; and last year the entire Firm (this was a first) spent the day visiting tourist attractions all over the country, each member of the family in a different region, culminating in a big reception at Buckingham Palace in the evening for leading lights in the tourist industry.

I was with the Queen on that day and I never cease to be amazed by how very informal she is when she is out and about meeting people. Security is tight but it’s low-key and unobtrusive and in no way puts up a barrier between the sovereign and her people. She doesn’t put on any great show, doesn’t keep a grin on her face in the way that showbiz personalities do when they meet their public. She smiles when something amuses her or if someone hands her something particularly pleasing but her face is often in repose – and therefore quite glum, even when the cameras are on her.

Tourism is Britain’s sixth most important industry. Visit-Britain (formerly the British Tourist Board), which markets the country abroad, estimates that there are 2.1 million jobs in the industry – 7 per cent of all people in employment – and the monarchy, with its palaces, history and pageantry, is one of the principal draws. The top five royal attractions in the country – the Tower of London, Windsor Castle, Hampton Court Palace, Buckingham Palace and the Palace of Holyroodhouse – account for more than four million visits each year. But they also go in their hundreds of thousands to the decommissioned Royal Yacht
Britannia
berthed at Leith in Edinburgh, to Sandringham, KP, Balmoral, and, more recently, Clarence House; and to watch the annual Trooping the Colour ceremony. The biggest free visitor attraction in London is the Changing of the Guard which happens every morning on the
forecourt of Buckingham Palace at 11.00 a.m. and lasts for half an hour. The Guard is mounted by the two regiments of the Household Cavalry – the Life Guards and the Blues and Royals – each of which provides one squadron for a special ceremonial unit in London, which is housed in Hyde Park Barracks with more than one hundred horses, and men who do a two- or three-year stint before returning to their operational units. The man in charge is Major General Sebastian Roberts who sits at the Duke of Wellington’s old desk in the aptly named Wellington Barracks with history all around and the awesome task of ensuring that the military aspect of state ceremonials goes according to plan.

Buckingham Palace is not just a magnet for tourists. It is a rallying point where people instinctively go when there’s a problem or a cause for celebration – either personal or national. When in 1982 a schizophrenic named Michael Fagan had family problems, it was the Queen he wanted to talk to. ‘I was under a lot of stress,’ he said, ‘and just wanted to talk to Her Majesty about what I was going through.’ So he broke into the Palace, found his way to her bedroom and she awoke to discover him sitting on her bed with a broken ashtray in one hand and blood pouring from the other – and, incidentally, needed to make two calls to the police switchboard within the Palace before anyone came to her rescue. When in 2004 a divorced man wanted visiting rights with his children, he dressed up as Batman and scaled the front of Buckingham Palace to stage a protest on a ledge and refused to come down for five hours. He caused a major security alert and the Metropolitan Police commissioner warned that the next time anyone tried a similar stunt they might very well be shot. (The mother of the interloper’s third set of children, meanwhile, walked out on him, saying that he spent twice as much time demonstrating as he ever spent with their children and she’d had it; but
that’s not the point. The point is that he made his protest at Buckingham Palace.)

Those of her subjects who don’t drop in personally – and the Queen prefers it if they don’t – tend to write to her. She gets about three hundred letters a day: some of them to do with political matters, some wanting help in solving a local problem such as housing or hospitals – or the difficulty for divorced fathers in seeing their children – and some are straightforward fan letters (and a few abusive), but others are also highly personal, just as Michael Fagan’s conversation was personal.

And that is one of the functions of monarchy: providing a focus for people’s emotions. Two women spend an entire morning each day opening and sorting letters. The Queen doesn’t answer them personally but she sees them and gets a very good feel as a result for the issues that are worrying people. Her other great feeler for the mood of the nation is the conversations she has when she is on away days. People may only have a few seconds with her when she shakes their hand, and some are so overcome with nerves that they utter nothing intelligible, but some come straight out with whatever is on their mind, from Britain’s engagement with Europe to the contentious issue of foxhunting.

The Queen’s other opportunity to meet people outside her own social circle is at receptions and lunches at the Palace. A recent innovation has been themed receptions. There was one for pioneers, for example, to which people like James Dyson, of vacuum cleaner fame, were invited; another for people who had changed the life of the nation, for which the television cook Delia Smith was chosen; and another for women of achievement, which included all sorts from Lady Thatcher to Kate Moss.

The research for all of these activities is done by the CRU.
They plan the Queen’s programme and research not only who the women of achievement, for example, are for the receptions, but also which parts of the country are due for a royal visit. They have the latest in IT – researched, you guessed it, by the CRU – and with this they can produce geographical analysis tables of royal visits, and can work out where each member of the family should go in the coming six months.

On one of the days I followed the Queen she was in Surrey, where amongst other things she opened a new orthopaedic wing at Epsom hospital and met a familiar face – Mr Roger Vickers, the surgeon who operated on her knees and the Queen Mother’s hips so successfully. It was no random choice: she had not been to the county for five years. They also do research on patronages; if a charity approaches a member of the family asking them to become patron or president, they check it out. They research new thinking from the private sector, look at policy procedures, work with the Press Office on opinion polls, scrutinize travel plans; the list is endless, and, according to Havill, the unit is constantly changing, constantly modernizing, constantly evolving.

A longer-established tradition are small, informal lunches at Buckingham Palace for assorted members of the great and the good. It was an idea suggested by the Duke of Edinburgh, who has had many good ideas during the course of the Queen’s reign. These lunches were held so that the Queen could meet interesting people and opinion formers who she didn’t normally come across; and, just as importantly, so that they could meet her. The first lunch took place in 1956 and she has been holding them ever since. People who go are generally enchanted, my own father among them. There were ten guests the day he went, a typical number. At the time he was editor and columnist of the
Sunday Express
; his fellow diners were a Tory MP, Sue MacGregor, then the presenter of
Woman’s
Hour
, a High Court judge, an interior designer, the coxswain of the Humber lifeboat and Anne Beckwith Smith, lady-in-waiting to the Princess of Wales. They gathered promptly at 12.50 in the 1844 Room where they were given a drink before lining up to meet the Queen and Prince Philip who came in and shook hands with each of them and engaged in small talk. There were corgis roaming around and my father jokingly asked the Prince whether they were dangerous. ‘You mean are they in danger from you?’ he retorted. He had clearly done his homework and had a journalist in his midst under sufferance.