The Queen has remained steadfastly loyal to the wider cousinhood, meeting many of their costs and including them in all the major royal events. She still invites them all on to the Palace balcony after her Birthday Parade. A plan to reduce the numbers there was drawn up by the Private Secretary’s Office and discussed at one of the family’s Way Ahead Group meetings in the mid-nineties. ‘One of our joint recommendations was that when there were balcony appearances, there shouldn’t be hordes and hordes of people standing there,’ says one of those involved. ‘But the Queen wasn’t prepared to accept that. So it didn’t happen.’ Even officials at Westminster Abbey, the most loyal and royal church in the land, have suggested to the Palace that royal protocol verges on the excessive when nearly twenty people styled ‘HRH’ turn up and the clergy are expected to genuflect to all of them. The Queen, however, is not in the business of downgrading her relations. Nor does she encourage one-upmanship between them when it comes to official duties. Palace staff insist they keep no list of who does what, arguing that they want to avoid a ‘league table’ of royal activity in the papers. It’s a charming pretence, of course. A few seconds on a Palace computer could produce the results.
George V was obsessive in keeping a table of all family activity and would read out the results each Christmas. These days, however, the task is left to Tim O’Donovan, a retired insurance broker from Datchet, Berkshire, who methodically goes through the Court Circular every day of the year, tots up all the results and publishes them in a letter to The Times. What everyone in the family acknowledges, however, is that, in future, the ‘active’ royal unit will be much smaller – the Monarch and the Consort plus children and spouses.
For now, though, the Queen is grateful for the work which her cousins do on her behalf But her reign has seen a complete transformation of life on the royal fringe. The Gloucesters are a good example. Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, was the younger brother of Edward VIII and George VI. He was looking forward to a military career until the Abdication crisis of 1936 promoted him to third in line. Should anything have happened to George VI, the Duke would have been Regent to Princess Elizabeth until she came of age. Within a year, he had been withdrawn from his unit, accelerated from major to major general and was destined to spend the rest of his days unveiling plaques. His no-nonsense military small talk is still the stuff of Palace legend. Opening a flower show, he remarked: ‘What a bloody big marrow. Glad I don’t have to eat it.’ And when a state visit involved an excursion to Tosca at the Royal Opera House, the Duke of Gloucester was heartily relieved as Maria Callas finally tumbled over the battlements. ‘Well, if she really is dead,’ he informed the occupants of the Royal Box, ‘we can all go home.’
Although he remarked that his memoirs should be called ‘Forty Years of Boredom’, he never complained. His elder son, Prince William of Gloucester, sought to break the royal mould during the sixties and pursued a career in the City and then the Foreign Office. ‘I am just a rather junior appendage to this extraordinary institution called the monarchy,’ he once explained. But duty duly called for this eligible bachelor. Having returned home to help his elderly parents with the running of the family’s Northamptonshire estate, he admitted: ‘It looks as though I shall spend the rest of my life shooting small birds and sleeping with larger ones.’ William’s tragic early death in a plane crash in 1972 propelled his younger brother, Prince Richard, from life as a professional architect to that of a trainee ‘royal’. Following his father’s death in 1974, the new Duke of Gloucester took on most of his father’s old patronages. But the nature of the job was changing. With the Duke of Edinburgh leading the charge, many members of the Royal Family were switching from a titular role to a semi-executive position in some of their organisations. Today, they still unveil plaques but they might also attend the board meetings. It’s a change which has suited today’s Eton and Cambridge-educated Duke of Gloucester well. In addition to some of the more traditional military and agricultural patronages, he is an active, hands-on supporter of organisations involved in architecture, disaster prevention, health and building technology. He also takes a mischievous pride in his patronage of the Richard III Society, a body dedicated to the rehabilitation of the most notorious Duke of Gloucester in history. The latest model has flirted with controversy himself, using his maiden speech in the House of Lords, in 1984, to attack the tobacco industry and to argue that the government should do more to tackle it. His Danish-born wife, meanwhile, is patron of more than sixty organisations and a particularly active figure in the field of musical education. None of their children, however, will lead a ‘royal’ life.
The Duke’s heir, the Earl of Ulster, a soldier married to a doctor, has no royal style, no royal home and will not take on royal duties when he succeeds to the title. But for now, the present Duke, a grandfather and proud bearer of a Senior Railcard, continues to maintain an active royal schedule shaped not by tradition but largely by himself. He performs around three hundred royal engagements around the world each year. These events will never attract much interest from the national media but they are much appreciated by the school children, diplomats, nurses, veterans, scientists and whoever else happens to be on the receiving end of royal and national recognition in the shape of the Duke. It is much the same across the royal spectrum. The family call it ‘supporting the Queen’. It has long been the core business of royalty, accounting for thousands of events involving hundreds of thousands of ordinary people every year. But it counted for little as recession and post-Cold War uncertainties hung over the start of the nineties.
In February 1991, as British forces prepared for war in the Gulf following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the Sunday Times devoted its leader column to one of the most withering attacks on the Royal Family for many years. The article contrasted two sides of British youth – those in uniform going into battle versus fringe members of the House of Windsor going on holiday. Beneath the headline ‘Royal Family At War’, the column declared: ‘It is the exploits and public demeanour of the minor royals and nearly royals which causes most offence.’ The examples listed were flimsy. Evidence for the prosecution included some party snaps of the Queen’s nephew, Viscount Linley, and recent Parisian trysts involving the Princess of Wales’s brother, Viscount Althorp. Both were private citizens and neither was any sort of burden on the state. The impression created, however, was of a privileged, debauched elite being propped up by the taxpayer.
There were heated scenes on phone-ins and chat-show sofas as royal defenders voiced their support for the monarchy. The Palace press office produced an extensive list of royal engagements involving troops in the Gulf and their families. Even so, for a monarch so bound up with the Armed Forces, this was wounding stuff. Complacency had set in after the sunny years of weddings, babies and the Silver Jubilee. Suddenly, parts of the media had diagnosed a royal ‘problem’. And it was all wrapped up with that even more damaging non sequitur: ‘Why is the Queen exempt from tax?’
In broadsheets and tabloids alike, the tax issue quickly gathered momentum. The Queen’s exemption was not some clever accounting wheeze. Nor was it an ancient privilege. It had only been established for half a century, having been agreed with her father by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in the wake of Edward VIII’s abdication. George VI had incurred huge expenses paying off his brother but it was decided that a tax break was far tidier than agreeing a new Civil List arrangement. The Civil List option would have involved pushing the deal – very publicly and painfully – through Parliament. A tax deal, it was concluded, would produce the same result but could be done quietly. And, in due course, the Queen inherited the same system. Now, decades later, it had suddenly become a live issue after the details were revealed in a television documentary. Similarly, there was a new media vogue for ‘rich lists’ in which the Queen was routinely portrayed as the multi-billionaire owner of the Crown Jewels, Windsor Castle and the Royal Yacht. She could no more sell these than the Prime Minister could flog Big Ben bu
t the impression had taken root. In the absence of any official figure for the Monarch’s private wealth, the guesswork could be spectacular. Charles Anson, her Press Secretary at the time, remembers the mood only too well: ‘Day after day, every other story would be followed up with “What’s more, the Queen doesn’t pay tax.”’
What the media did not know was that the Queen had already been pondering the same issue herself. Behind the veneer of calm, the Palace was in turmoil. ‘It was a difficult subject,’ says Lord Airlie. ‘There was media pressure. But on very important things like this, the Queen, rightly, doesn’t wish to be rushed. I always say: if you’re being pressed by the media, count to ten.’ Lord Airlie and the Palace reformers were not only thinking about ways of paying tax but had a further plan: if the Queen took the rest of the Royal Family off the public balance sheet and paid for them herself, a lot of heat would go out of the arguments about ‘minor royals’. The Queen had already been doing this for her cousins, the Kents and Gloucesters, for fifteen years. The cost for the rest of the Royal Family was running at £ 1.8 million. ‘We were thinking the whole thing through very carefully,’ says Lord Airlie. ‘We had to make sure she could afford it.’
The Queen receives most of her Privy Purse (private) income from the annual surplus of the Duchy of Lancaster, an ancient estate covering 46,000 acres of countryside and a few urban sites including some prime land around London’s Savoy Hotel. In 1992, it was producing £3.6 million a year. The Queen would have no trouble paying tax on those revenues, of course, but what if she was also supposed to pay for everyone else out of the same pot? The whole point of the Privy Purse was to give the monarchy some independence from government. How long before the entire royal machine became entirely dependent on public funds, a sort of pageantry sub-division of the Civil Service? These were the sort of worst-case scenarios which had to be examined as Michael Peat and his team did their sums. In the media, some royal supporters offered the lame argument that the Queen, as the living embodiment of the Crown, could no more tax herself than prosecute herself. But the fact was that previous monarchs had been taxed. What’s more, the Queen was minded to go ahead. There was one stumbling block, though – the Prime Minister. He was not convinced. ‘The fact of the matter is we would not have required the Queen to pay tax. I did not require the Queen to pay tax,’ says Sir John Major firmly. So here was a faintly hilarious situation: a non-taxpayer trying to give money to the Inland Revenue against the wishes of the government.
Charles Anson remembers the strange contrast between media heat and Cabinet cool: ‘John Major didn’t want to do it. Even the Treasury were reluctant. But the media, not just the tabloids, were absolutely on a roll about tax.’
‘I don’t think any Prime Minister knows what it’s like to be pushed in that way,’ says one of those involved. ‘I mean, consistent tabloid pushing at the monarchy’s privileges was becoming pretty wearing. The Queen was clever enough to see the advantages that if she did pay tax, a lot of heat would go out of the financial pressure on her.’
John Major was not the only one advising caution. Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother was continuing her guerrilla war against the modernisers from within her Clarence House redoubt. Her stern opposition to the creation of lady members of the Order of the Garter had only just subsided following the installation of Lady Thatcher, a firm favourite. Now she had caught wind of the tax discussions. Once again, the Clarence House guns were primed. The Queen Mother was not merely opposed to tax reforms for the sake of it, she was also fearful that any change might reflect badly on her late husband who had secured the original tax exemption from the government. The Queen dispatched her Private Secretary, Sir Robert Fellowes, to outline the details to her mother. ‘When I finished,’ he told William Shawcross, ‘there was a long pause and then she said, “I think we’ll have a drink.” In other words, she thought it was completely wrong but she didn’t want to hear about it.’
The Queen none the less followed her instincts. Her advisers had done their sums and had shown her that it was viable. In the end, Sir John Major came round to the idea, too. ‘There were cases for her to do it,’ he says. ‘Those cases were advanced by the Palace. We discussed it. I agreed with it.’ He would have loyally supported the status quo. But it was the Palace which was driving the changes. ‘We worked hard on this,’ Lord Airlie recalls, ‘and, in February 1992, we entered into a discussion with the Inland Revenue.’ There would need to be exhaustive and secretive investigations to establish what was taxable and what was not. But the process was under way. Nine months later, it would turn out to be a godsend.
It was exactly forty years earlier, in February 1952, that the Queen had acceded to the throne as she sat in a concealed treehouse, watching the wildlife stir beneath a Kenyan dawn. Now, in February 1992, she did not want any sort of Ruby Jubilee celebrations. She had even vetoed a fountain in her honour in Parliament Square. She had, however, agreed to another epic royal documentary, Elizabeth R. Unlike the ground-breaking 1969 film, Royal Family, this equally dazzling 107-minute film was more focused on the Queen herself. The portrait of a dutiful mother, grandmother and head of state proved to be an award-winning hit. But any hopes that it might calm the rattling of media pitchforks at the Palace gates were to be dashed within weeks. The year had started with awkward newspaper revelations of photographs confirming a friendship between the Duchess of York and a Texan businessman. Of greater concern was the rift between the Prince and Princess of Wales. It was becoming an open secret. During a tour of India the same month, the Princess’s solo (and wistful) appearance at that peerless symbol of love, the Taj Mahal, had been calculated to send out a message to the world. She could not have been louder or clearer had she used a loud hailer.
The following month, Britain was embroiled in a particularly tight general election campaign. Having replaced Margaret Thatcher as Conservative leader less than two years earlier, John Major was seeking a mandate from the people. After thirteen years in opposition, Labour, under Neil Kinnock, was running him close. During any campaign the monarchy is expected to carry on quietly without upstaging the democratic process. Throughout this election, however, the royal story continued to take centre stage. The death of the Princess’s father, the 8th Earl Spencer in March 1992, was followed by stories of further rows between the Prince and the grieving Princess. In the same month, it was announced that lawyers had drawn up separation plans for the Duke and Duchess of York. The decision was not entirely surprising given the recent reports about the Duchess’s private life but the election was duly consigned to the inside pages again. The story continued to grow following official confirmation of the separation and an unimpeachable BBC report that ‘the knives are out for Fergie’. The Queen, for whom all this must have been profoundly distressing anyway, felt honour-bound to apologise to the Prime Minister for all these distractions. ‘I remember a call to Number Ten at the Queen’s request being made very rapidly,’ says one of those in the crossfire.
John Major won the election and politics duly returned to a more familiar, steady pace. Not so the monarchy. The procession of extraordinary royal revelations was merely gathering momentum. In April, it was announced that the Princess Royal had commenced divorce proceedings, the first of the Monarch’s children to do so. In June, the remaining veneer surrounding the Waleses’ marriage was eroded by the publication of Diana: Her True Story, Andrew Morton’s account of the Princess’s unhappiness. At first, the Princess assured Robert Fellowes – her own brother-in-law – that she had never spoken to Morton. When it transpired that she had communicated with him via an intermediary, Fellowes offered the Queen his resignation. It was refused.
The Highlands offered the Queen no respite during her annual spell at Balmoral. First, came the Daily Mirror’s publication of intimate photographs of the Duchess of York and her financial adviser beside a French swimming pool. In the same month, the Sun reproduced transcripts of a three-year-old conversation between the Princess of Wales and her
friend James Gilbey in which she spoke candidly about her unhappiness within the royal fold. Within five months, a similar conversation between the Prince of Wales and Camilla Parker Bowles, the future Duchess of Cornwall, would be laid bare in similar fashion. Come the autumn of 1992, an important tour of South Korea by the Prince and Princess would place the couple under the international spotlight. The visit proved to be a commercial and diplomatic success but a public relations nightmare. The media scrutinised every handshake and greeting line like marriage guidance counsellors.
Even when the couple were photographed looking solemn at a war cemetery, it was reported as another case of domestic unhappiness. ‘It’s a cemetery,’ groaned one despairing press officer, attempting to put a wreath-laying in perspective. ‘What did you expect? Cartwheels?’ But there was no changing the narrative. And nor was it entirely wrong. This would be the last tour the Prince and Princess would undertake together. Soon after their return, the Queen was dealt another blow, one which would become emblematic of this abysmal run of events. On 20 November, a team of builders working on the north-east corner of Windsor Castle went for their mid-morning break, leaving a curtain draped over a scorchingly hot work lamp.
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