In a society where the reality show and phone-in have made a virtue of being noisy and opinionated, the Queen is a rare advertisement for the power of silence. ‘Where she’s been brilliant is in her quietness,’ observes Charles Anson, her former Press Secretary. ‘In a very noisy world where people constantly want to express themselves or overreact, what the Queen has done has been the opposite. She is not a celebrity. She’s not at all shouty. You get back, perhaps, to that part of the brain where a child wants reassurance from a mother or father. They might call their parents “old squares” but, deep down, they want the quiet reassurance from the parental figure.’
Propping it all up is a faith which dates from childhood but was substantially reinforced soon after her father’s death. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, believes that one of his predecessors, Geoffrey Fisher, played his part. ‘Before the Coronation, Geoffrey Fisher prepared a little book of meditations and prayers for her to use daily,’ says Dr Williams. ‘I think she really treasured that. She showed it to me once at Windsor – it’s in the library there. I just have a hunch that the period before the Coronation was very, very formative for her and for the way she’s approached everything since. It was a time when seriousness kept breaking in.’
But the Queen’s staff also know that nothing helps a bold idea along like a spot of levity. She has a keen sense of the ridiculous. After meeting a Scottish ice-cream manufacturer in 2007, she was fascinated to hear that he had developed a robotic milking operation for his cows. The Queen asked the Keeper of the Privy Purse, Sir Alan Reid, to investigate. Might it be feasible to build an automated milking shed at Windsor? Keepers of the Privy Purse have had many strange duties to perform through the centuries but none has ever had to become an expert on remote-controlled manure sweepers and bovine waterbeds. The Queen was not only fascinated by it all but close to hysterics when Reid explained how the cows would congregate in a ‘loafing area’ prior to milking. ‘The way it was described, it was as if the cow would sit and read a magazine or wander around chatting,’ says one of those involved. ‘She loved it.’ The plans sailed through, the £900,000 milking shed is now up and running and anyone invited to stay at Windsor for the weekend will be given a very animated guided tour – from the proud owner.
After more than thirty years in the Royal Air Force, Air Vice-Marshal Sir David Walker understands chains of command better than most. He was previously in charge of 14,000 men and women as head of RAF training. Yet he regards the Queen as the best boss he has encountered. ‘She is far more accessible than most senior officers I’ve worked for. She’s got a good mind for detail and if you want to see her, you’ll get to see her.’ As the man in charge of all royal hospitality, he knows that the Queen wants to be consulted on all new ideas. ‘She’d tell you if it was a stinker.’ A state banquet might look like a time-honoured set piece but every aspect of it will be revisited every time. It’s hard to rearrange the furniture much at a place like Windsor where the St George’s Hall table is said to be the longest in Britain. But the Queen always likes to fine-tune the arrangements. A few years ago, she decided that state banquets were, simply, going on too long. She discussed it with the Master and a solution was found: lose the soup. ‘It saves twenty minutes,’ says Walker.
The Secretary of the Master’s Department, Michael Jephson, is used to suggestions from the very top when he is compiling guest lists for a reception. Sometimes the Queen will ask him to invite an interesting person she has just heard on the radio. She has a similar eye for detail as an employer. ‘She is very beady. She has an uncanny way of knowing exactly what is going on,’ says the current Lord Chamberlain, Lord Peel. ‘I wasn’t prepared for the level of in-depth knowledge.’ The loyalty of long-serving staff to the Monarch is reciprocated. ‘She really does feel as if she is part of a team and sometimes it shows,’ says a former senior official. In particular, she will not tolerate rudeness towards her own people.
Many of her staff – and those who come up against her staff – talk about her pragmatism. She can display what former Prime Minister Tony Blair has described as ‘a certain hauteur’ (it would be surprising if a monarch could not) but she is not stuffy.
Some have found that the best way of dealing with over-protective, second-guessing royal officials is to bypass them altogether and go straight to the top. It’s a high-risk strategy but sometimes it’s the only way, as the television producer Edward Mirzoeff discovered when he was filming the great 1992 royal documentary, Elizabeth R. The final scene was to be the Ghillies’ Ball at Balmoral – the social highlight of the Queen’s stay in the Highlands. It had been a fraught day. The ballroom was so gloomy that Mirzoeff had been forced to scrounge a vanload of lighting from his local ITV rivals in Aberdeen. He had even enlisted the van driver as a ‘sparks’ to light the room before the Royal Family arrived. Finally, after his crew had only been filming for a few minutes, Palace staff intervened. Mirzoeff was informed that his time was up. The cameras had intruded for quite long enough. Mirzoeff admits that he ‘nearly lost it’ with the courtiers: ‘I thought: “This can’t happen.” So I dashed across the dance floor and went straight up to the Queen – and said: “Ma’am, we have to keep on filming.”’
He remembers the ‘Bateman looks’* as he committed the ultimate dance-floor faux pas. But it worked. ‘I simply cannot tell you how marvellous she is in a situation like that,’ says Mirzoeff. ‘She said to me: “Fine, well just carry on.” And we got our ending. In fact, I had problems with everybody at one time or another making that film – except her.’
As the royal biographer Kenneth Rose observes: ‘One of the most pertinent mottos of the Household is “Better Not”.’ The same is not true of the boss. After more than thirty years of sponsoring one of Ascot’s plum royal fixtures, the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes, the diamond giant De Beers decided to step down. Only one company was prepared to come forward with the requisite pot of money. And Betfair, an online betting company, was not what some of the Jockey Club grandees had in mind. But there was no objection when the suggestion was put to the overall boss of Ascot Racecourse. As one official explains: ‘The Queen accepted the reality. If no one else is willing to sponsor something, then there is no choice.’ What used to be called ‘Diamond Day’ became the ‘Betfair Weekend’.
In any tricky situation, officialdom’s immediate instinct is to follow precedent. The Queen, on the other hand, is more inclined to follow common sense. Sir John Major recalls a clash between the two mindsets in 1994, on the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day at Portsmouth Guildhall. ‘The Queen had been placed next to two European royals, and President Clinton and President Mitterrand had been placed well below the salt at the other end of the table,’ he remembers. Clearly, at an event marking the Allied liberation of France, it would look faintly ridiculous to have the two principal players at the wrong end of the table. But the protocol people were in no mood to budge. ‘The fairly frosty response from an official was that elected presidents were lower in protocol than monarchs!’ Major recalls. So his Private Secretary contacted the Queen’s Private Secretary who consulted the Queen. ‘The Queen’s reply, broadly, was: “Of course, people will expect President Clinton and President Mitterrand to sit beside me and, in any event, I see my cousins all the time.” So the two presidents did indeed end up flanking the Queen.’
The following year, she dispensed with protocol again when the leaders of the free world arrived in London to mark the fiftieth anniversary of VE Day. The capital was full enough already without dozens of extra motorcades. As a result, the crowned heads and presidents were herded on to a couple of hired passenger coaches. Some of the overseas protocol departments were appalled. But the world leaders didn’t seem to mind. As King Hussein of Jordan was heard to remark: ‘This is the first time I’ve ever been on a bus!’
The Queen presides over a total workforce of around 1,100 – ranging from farmhands to management consultants – putting the monarchy somew
here on a par with a small government department. It’s an operation which has gone through precisely the same changes in employment and health and safety law as every other employer. These days no one there refers to ‘the Court’, except when referring either to the daily notice of royal activities called the Court Circular or the Diplomatic Corps. All diplomats are still formally accredited to the old royal address, the Court of St James’s.
Internally, the royal domain is referred to as the Royal Household or simply as ‘the Palace’. The ‘tweedy courtiers’ derided by Lord Altrincham in his audacious 1957 salvo against the ancien régime have been replaced by a younger, meritocratic and entirely professional executive team. Gone, too, are the old job descriptions like ‘lady clerk’.
The Queen does not send or receive emails personally but she is well aware of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, having insisted on full demonstrations before the Palace went live on all three. When she was invited to visit the British offices of Google in 2008, her hosts cheekily asked if they might use the royal effigy on the website’s main page (the ‘Google doodle’ in e-speak). The Queen’s head is one of the most closely guarded pieces of intellectual property in the world, restricted to stamps, currency and Seals of Office. Her Private Secretary put the idea to her. ‘Why not?’ came the reply. For one day only, the second ‘g’ in Google was replaced with the Sovereign’s head.
Anyone who actually puts pen to paper and sends a letter can rest assured that, unless it is a busy period around a birthday or a major anniversary, their thoughts are likely to go all the way to the top. Bundles of ordinary letters are sent up every morning. They may be hostile, sympathetic, grateful or, simply, desperate. ‘The Queen loves her mail and does not like to be shielded,’ says senior correspondence officer Sonia Bonici as she prepares to send up the latest batch, some of which is not entirely complimentary about one member of the Royal Family. The Queen will see it all. As she said in 1992: ‘It gives one an idea what is worrying people and what, actually, they feel that I could do to help. There are occasions when I can help. I can pass things on to the right authorities or I can even write to various organisations who will look into it. But I have always had this feeling that letters are written to me.’
The Royal Collection, which, for much of the reign, was run by just a handful of staff (including Soviet spy Anthony Blunt) is now the largest department of the Royal Household. Its 320 staff keep its one million works of art in perfect condition and circulating round the world’s museums and galleries without a penny of subsidy. The Queen can’t sell any of it; she holds the collection ‘in trust for the nation’. Hence, it is she alone who approves the loan of every single object, be it an Old Master or a coal scuttle. The Queen is also the nominal boss of the Royal Collection’s twelve gift shops in London, Windsor and Edinburgh, all of which generate vital income to maintain the collection. They sell everything from guardsman pyjamas for children to organic dog biscuits and royal postcards. The bestselling postcard used to be one of Diana, Princess of Wales. Today, it is the Queen herself. It’s not the youthful film star Queen of the mid-fifties, either. It’s today’s Queen, dressed in her full state finery on the day of the State Opening of Parliament. It’s the image most people have – and like to have – of the Queen: constant, regal, benign, authoritative, feminine, true. It’s an image which underlines the two most important by-products of constitutional monarchy: stability and continuity.
Yet it’s also an image of a royal radical. It shows the Monarch who expelled the debutantes, invented the walkabout, opened up the Palace, tore up the rulebook on bowing or curtseying and hosted a pop concert at the age of seventy-six. This is the Monarch who has just opened a café in the Palace garden (albeit one where the cappuccinos come with a chocolate-powdered crown sprinkled on top). ‘She is actually more open to new ideas now than ten, twenty or thirty years ago,’ says one senior official. In 2010, the Keeper of the Privy Purse, Sir Alan Reid, received a request from Disney to take over the state apartments of Kensington Palace for the launch of the studio’s seventh ‘Princess’ movie, Rapunzel, later retitled Tangled. Disney also wanted to stage a global celebration of all its princesses, going right back to Snow White. Where else but a real palace? Ten years ago, say staff, the response would have been a definite ‘No’ – if indeed the suggestion had ever been put to the Queen. On this occasion, after all the pros and cons had been laid out, the Queen was rather intrigued. ‘Seems like a good idea,’ she replied, giving Reid the nod. So how does she juggle these twin personas? How has a self-assured but intrinsically shy person who likes familiarity and routine – and is less confrontational than all her modern predecessors – also been the House of Windsor’s very own royal revolutionary?
Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary of York was born on 21 April 1926, to be followed four years later by her sister, Margaret Rose. Her parents, the Duke and Duchess of York, had expected to lead a dutiful life on the periphery of the Royal Family and imagined that their daughters would do the same. Three events would change all that and shape the girl who would be Queen nearly twenty-six years later. The first was her father’s sudden promotion from dutiful second son to King following the Abdication of 1936. The second was the Second World War, during which a little girl locked in a castle emerged into a beautiful young Princess at the wheel of an army truck. The third was the arrival of a dashing young Royal Navy officer with impeccable royal connections but no home. And having succeeded to the throne in 1952, the Queen has not merely moved it along with the times but has transformed it. The courtier who nodded off at the tail end of Victoria’s reign and woke up in the early 1950s would have found few changes beyond some cars at the back of the Royal Mews and the advent of telephones. Had the same courtier nodded off and reawoken after a further half-century, he might have expired on discovering footmen in the Monarch’s pool and secretaries borrowing the Royal Box at the Royal Albert Hall. On the other hand, he might be relieved to discover a monarch who had actually changed very little over the same period, her sense of duty and her love of horses, dogs and Prince Philip completely undimmed.
‘The Queen realises that the world is changing, that the country is changing and that this must be reflected within the Household,’ says a close colleague of many years’ standing. ‘But it needn’t necessarily reflect her personal life. That’s where she would dig her well-known heel in.’
Royal truths, taught on a grandmother’s knee, certainly hold fast today. Queen Mary – along with George V – believed in settling upon a style and sticking with it. ‘Queen Mary remained frozen into the fashions of 1913 and that’s why she wore the toque and a stiff piece of buckram under the dress so that she could load herself with jewels,’ says the historian Kenneth Rose. ‘The King insisted on her having this rigid, old-fashioned appearance because he didn’t like change.’
The Queen is similarly wedded to a certain style. Once teased by some fashion commentators for her floral patterns and sensible shoes, she is now held aloft as a fashion icon. ‘She is, simply, one of the most elegant women in the world,’ declared Miuccia Prada when the Queen’s state visit to Italy in 2000 reached Milan. The sentiment was echoed by an entire room full of brand names including Missoni, Fendi, Ferré and Krizia (‘The Queen is above fashion,’ purred Mariuccia Krizia). Even the Guardian felt moved to salute the Queen on its front page the next day.
The Queen’s own interest in fashion and jewellery, as in so much else, might be described as practical. All her shoes, for example, have a large square heel because she has discovered that it spreads the pressure more evenly than a point and thus makes standing up all day more tolerable. The royal designer, Hardy Amies, was always in awe of the Queen’s ability to put on a tiara while walking downstairs. She has refreshingly uncomplicated views on clothes. According to Sarah Bradford, the Queen told a milliner: ‘I can’t wear beige because people won’t know who I am.’ A Private Secretary who misinformed her about a dress code with the result that she turned up in da
y clothes to find everyone else in ‘full fig’, was later admonished gently with the words: ‘I think we were a little underdressed.’
However, the Queen is well aware that her choice of clothes can be critical to the success of an engagement. The green ensemble she wore for her arrival in Ireland in May 2011 set the tone for one of the most successful state visits of modern times in an instant. She had not reached the foot of the aeroplane steps before Irish commentators were joyously saluting her ‘emerald’ hat, coat and dress (the official Palace designation of ‘jade’ was largely ignored). The following night, her evening dress for the state banquet was decorated with 2,091 embroidered shamrocks and an Irish harp in Swarovski crystals. By the end of the tour, her dresser, Angela Kelly (herself of Irish descent), had become something of a national celebrity in her own right.
On any visit, she must dress up. It’s not vanity on her part. It would simply offend her hosts if she did not. When the royal party got soaked at a military parade in Northern Ireland in 2010, there was no change of clothes available. As everyone thawed out indoors, the Queen declined a chair. ‘I’ll stand,’ she said, explaining that by drying out on her feet her clothes would not be creased for the official lunch. A rare but historic wardrobe blunder took place just after the Coronation in 1953 when the Queen travelled to Scotland to be presented with the Honours of Scotland wearing an ordinary day dress. Many Scots took great umbrage. She might be Queen Elizabeth II of England but she was Queen Elizabeth I of Scotland. If she was to receive its sacred honours, then they believed that she should look the part and wear evening dress, if not Scottish Coronation robes.
The oversight was blamed on her Private Secretary, Sir Alan ‘Tommy’ Lascelles. Nearly fifty years later, as the Queen was preparing to open the newly created Scottish Parliament in 1999, she took no chances. For the first time, she had a woman as one of her private secretaries, Mary Francis, and the former senior Downing Street aide was pleasantly surprised to be involved.
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