Within minutes, the greatest of all the royal residences was ablaze. The building work had at least emptied that particular part of the castle of both people and contents. But the blaze could not be contained. The only member of the Royal Family in residence, the Duke of York, helped coordinate a brisk and efficient evacuation of all the treasures in the path of the flames as they crept upwards and outwards through the 1,500-room castle. Priceless works were passed hand to hand down human chains to rest beneath open skies. Mercifully (for the works of art, at least), Windsor was spared a downpour that afternoon. Having rushed down from London, the Queen joined in herself. ‘It was just awful for her,’ says Lord Airlie. ‘Awful, awful, awful. It was a dark, miserable drizzly November day and here was this fire roaring across this fantastic building.’ He shivers at the recollection of the Queen watching the flames tear through her childhood home. ‘Needless to say she was incredibly stoical about it all.’ But what sort of impact would all this have on her? Her staff were worried. ‘For a woman to lose her house, her nest, is very traumatic. A lot of her heart is at Windsor,’ says Charles Anson. ‘And the Duke of Edinburgh was on an official visit overseas when it happened. Obviously, the Queen had to come back to Buckingham Palace on the evening of the fire and about six of us went to her private entrance thinking: “Prince Philip isn’t back yet and it will be quite a lonely thing for her coming back by herself on a day like this.” And I remember feeling distinctly nervous about it, because what do you say? So, she came in and we all murmured: “We’re so sorry, Ma’am.” And she was brilliant. She looked very calm and said: “The maddening thing is I’ve lost my voice. I have a cold and the smoke has made it so much worse.” We all said how sorry we were again and she said: “It was ghastly but we managed to save the pictures.” This wasn’t put on. She was just going to weather it.’
Her true thoughts will not be known until a future biographer is granted access to her papers in another reign. But we get a glimpse of the torment of those weeks from the words she wrote to the Queen Mother after spending the next few days with her at Royal Lodge: ‘It made all the difference to my sanity after that terrible day.’
Those who thought the fire might mark some sort of closure to a sorry royal chapter were wide of the mark. ‘That fire started other fires,’ says Lord Airlie. With the remains of the great medieval chamber of St George’s Hall still smouldering, the government set about reassuring the nation that all would be well. The National Heritage Secretary, Peter Brooke, inspected the Windsor damage and promised that all would be restored to its former glory by the state. But he had misjudged the mood of the nation. Such had been the corrosive effect of all the stories about marital strife and royal finances that a substantial part of the country did not share Brooke’s avuncular spirit of generosity. ‘I am not easily shocked,’ says a former Private Secretary, ‘but I was more shocked by the reaction to the Windsor fire than anything else. And I think most people who worked with me would have subscribed to that. Peter Brooke said exactly the right thing but was pilloried for it.’
A grudge was afoot and it had clearly spread beyond the traditional confines of left-wing orthodoxy. Much was made of the fact that Windsor was uninsured. The fact that its contents are priceless was irrelevant. Why, asked the commentators, should the rest of the country be expected to buy household insurance when the Queen evidently had not?
‘Peter Brooke was a very nice man and I always felt very sorry for him,’ says Lord Airlie. ‘He made this speech to the effect of “Don’t worry, Ma’am. We will put this right.” And this lit another flame. The weekend was pretty miserable in the media.’
Papers which were traditionally supportive of the Queen now turned. The Daily Mail wrapped the fire, the tax issue and the catalogue of scandals into a national crisis beneath the headline: ‘WHY THE QUEEN MUST LISTEN’. Condemning Brooke’s announcement, the paper went on: ‘The impression given is of an out-of-touch Government pandering to the wealthy insensitivity of an out-of-favour Royal Family’ Writing in The Times, Janet Daley summed up this new sentiment with a muchquoted sentence: ‘While the castle stands, it is theirs, but when it burns down, it is ours.’
‘I thought the media reaction to the Windsor fire was mean in the extreme, and I was quite shocked,’ says Sir John Major. ‘Windsor Castle is a national asset. To claim that it isn’t seems to be mealy-mouthed in the extreme.’
The fact that the vast majority of Windsor Castle, the largest inhabited castle in the world, was not a royal residence was a fact which was deliberately overlooked. Around two hundred people – clergy, conservators, housekeepers, conference organisers, retired army officers and their families – live beneath its thirteen-acre roof in a close-knit community centred around the castle and its great chapel. The section of the castle destroyed by the fire was actually the collection of state and semi-state apartments which had been open to the public since the mid-nineteenth century. To this day, these rooms draw in up to a million tourists a year. None the less, minds were made up. Those spoiled royals had lost their luxury bolthole so they could damned well pay for the repairs themselves.
Four days later, at a City of London lunch to mark her fortieth year on the throne, and planned long before any of all this, the Queen made one of the most telling speeches of her reign. It is most widely remembered for her reference to an annus horribilis, her delivery all the more dramatic thanks to the state of her voice. Indeed, it nearly didn’t happen. Laid low both by her cold and by smoke inhalation, the Queen had contemplated calling it off and told Sir Robert Fellowes: ‘I can’t make a speech today. I haven’t got a voice. Prince Philip will have to do it.’ Fellowes was clear that if anyone was going to deliver these words, they had to come from the Queen herself. A compromise was reached: she would deliver the speech before and not after the Guildhall luncheon (setting a precedent which is observed at lunches and banquets to this day, thus allowing the Queen to enjoy her food rather more). The most significant section of the speech was her acknowledgement that ‘no institution … should expect to be free from the scrutiny of those who give it their loyalty and support, not to mention those who don’t’. Its significance stunned the audience. ‘I sat up pretty sharpish in my seat,’ Lord Hurd recalls. ‘It was portrayed as a cry for help,’ says a former Private Secretary, ‘but she was trying to say, “You’re not just dealing with me and my family. You’re dealing with an institution and you really are knocking it about a bit.” I think she felt her children were getting a very hard time at the hands of the press and she would almost sooner it was all directed at her. She wanted a little bit of common sense and less hysteria.’
In the prevailing climate, there was no guarantee that anyone would listen. Back at the Palace, the Queen’s advisers decided that it was time to pre-empt further attacks. The original plan had been to finalise all the new tax details with the Treasury and the Inland Revenue and announce the Queen’s new financial arrangements the following March. ‘The Revenue only had two or three people working on it in total confidence. And we were practically there,’ says Lord Airlie. But over the weekend, between the fire and the annus horribilis speech, the decision was taken to get it all out in the open as quickly as possible. Some would later crow that the monarchy was caving in to the tabloids when, in fact, the decision to pay tax had been taken nearly a year before. But, in the circumstances, it seemed better to clear the decks.
‘The timing couldn’t have been worse because we hadn’t tied up all the strings. We had to move very fast,’ says Lord Airlie. ‘The work had been done. It would have been nice to spend some time going through it quietly but the Queen had the annus horribilis speech the following day and a really terrible cold. So we had to take her through it very quickly. She was absolutely marvellous about it, she was very practical, she understood it. It was a very good example of how practical she can be.’
Just two days later, John Major stood before the Commons to announce that the Queen had voluntarily agreed to pay tax li
ke anyone else. She would also reimburse the government for the Civil List costs of all the Royal Family except the ‘old guard’, the Duke of Edinburgh and the Queen Mother. It was a substantial reform announced in dramatic circumstances. In Parliament, there was cross-party agreement that the Queen had done the right thing.
Three months on, the details were announced in full, along with what would be one of the most important creations of this reign – the Royal Collection Trust. A registered charity, it was established to maintain and conserve this world-class assembly of paintings, sculpture, furniture, guns, clocks, jewels, porcelain, books, armour, Fabergé eggs and much, much more. Then, as now, it also had a mandate to ‘enhance the public’s appreciation and understanding’ of the collection. There could no longer be any suggestion that any of it somehow ‘belonged’ to the Queen herself. It was now very clear that successive monarchs only owned it on behalf of the nation. John Major unveiled the plans to the Commons while Lord Airlie and Michael Peat took the unprecedented step of holding a press conference at St James’s Palace.
There was a vast amount for the press to absorb, not least the shock of being invited into the Picture Gallery of St James’s to hear the Lord Chamberlain give a frank assessment of the Queen’s private wealth. The spirit of glasnost sweeping across Eastern Europe had arrived in the Mall. Dismissing wild media estimates of between £100 million and billions, Lord Airlie announced: ‘Her Majesty has authorised me to say that even the lowest of these estimates is grossly overstated.’ The sum, it emerged, was somewhere around £60 million.
The new arrangements were far from straightforward. The Queen was going to pay tax of her own volition but the law could not actually force her or her successors to do so. The most controversial issue was the fact that sovereign-to-sovereign transfers would be exempt from inheritance tax. This, the Prime Minister had stipulated, was to ensure ‘a degree of financial independence from the government of the day’. There were practical reasons. Monarchs cannot make conventional inheritance plans, they can’t retire and they can’t hand over the business or the family home to their successor at an appropriate point. What’s more, assets like Sandringham and Balmoral are both official and private residences. In the Commons, Major warned that they might fall victim to ‘salami slicing’ without the exemption. The Labour leader, John Smith, was not entirely convinced by the exemption but the plans were generally accepted amid some lively tumbril talk from the left.
The press response was, predictably, mixed. In most cases, there was a sense that a line had been drawn under the mayhem of recent years. The Sunday Times, cheerleader for reform, sensed history in the making. ‘Never, since the English civil war,’ it declared, ‘has there been such a determined royal campaign to woo public opinion.’ If that was a little over the top, so, too, was the Mirror’s vindictive personal attack centred on the inheritance tax issue, ‘HM THE TAX DODGER’ ran the headline. ‘The Queen is set to become Britain’s biggest tax “dodger” – paying as little as £2 million on her vast fortune,’ wrote the paper’s political editor, Alastair Campbell. Within five years, he would be turning up for meetings at the Palace, reincarnated as the Prime Minister’s Press Secretary. On this occasion, he managed to reduce some of its residents to tears. Even after the hammering of the preceding year, members of the Royal Family and their staff were shocked to see the Queen depicted as Fagin on the front of a national paper. Finally, at the end of April 1993, Lord Airlie had one further innovation to announce. For the next five years, Buckingham Palace would open to the public during the summer to finance the rebuilding of Windsor. The taxpayer would not be footing the bill. As the editorial column of The Times concluded the following day: ‘The opening of Buckingham Palace is an imaginative step in the renovation of the House of Windsor.’
In these uncertain and ill-tempered days, it was too soon to realise the extent of what had been achieved. Through a sustained series of reforms which, at times, must have grated with her innately conservative nature, the Queen had none the less persisted with the most fundamental financial overhaul of the monarchy in two centuries. It had taken nine years to move from the framework of an Edwardian house party to an organisation ready for the twenty-first century. And it would take at least another ten years for a new culture of professionalism to bed in. But money was now off the mainstream agenda. Sex, on the other hand, was not.
Within days of the inferno at Windsor, the Queen’s annus horribilis speech and the announcement about tax, the Prime Minister had another bombshell to deliver to the Commons. While it was greeted with studied solemnity in Parliament, it was to become an enduring topic of conversation at the saloon bar, the watercooler and the playground gates for the rest of the millennium. ‘It is announced from Buckingham Palace that, with regret, the Prince and Princess of Wales have decided to separate,’ John Major said. ‘Their Royal Highnesses have no plans to divorce and their constitutional positions are unaffected. This decision has been reached amicably, and they will both continue to participate fully in the upbringing of their children.’ To this day, the former Prime Minister refuses to elaborate beyond his original statement. ‘These things were not in my memoirs. They will not be in the papers I leave when I die. I’m not talking about them now. I won’t talk about them in the future.’
The following weekend, there was actually some cause for celebration as the Princess Royal remarried in an almost obsessively low-key ceremony at Crathie Church, near Balmoral. Her new husband was the Royal Navy officer and former equerry Commander Timothy Laurence. Even the harshest royal critics were unable to find fault with the most inexpensive royal wedding in history. Instead of opening up Balmoral Castle for a proper wedding party, the bride and groom held a two-hour reception of soup and sandwiches in a castle function room and enjoyed a thirty-six-hour honeymoon in an estate lodge before returning to work. The contrast with the ‘fairy-tale’ wedding spectaculars of the seventies and eighties could scarcely have been more pronounced.
Just as the public had devoured every detail of the Prince Charles and Lady Diana romance, so they would be treated to every sorry step in its demise. The so-called ‘War of the Waleses’ would be the dominant royal theme throughout the nineties. Real history was also taking place in these years. The Queen was leading historic missions to countries which, in many cases, had never seen a British sovereign before. Only the Pope had managed to draw greater crowds to central Warsaw than those which came out for the Queen in 1996. Despite kinship with the tsars, no British monarch had ever set foot in Red Square until the Queen arrived one grey autumn day in 1994 (sadly, it was empty, nervous Russian security chiefs having evicted the public). In the same year, as democracy took root in post-Soviet Estonia, the new Estonian coalition government included a royalist party. Its leader believed that the best guarantee for the country’s long-term democratic freedoms was a constitutional monarchy. A letter was dispatched to Buckingham Palace asking if Prince Edward – still single and establishing a role for himself – might consider becoming King of Estonia (in much the same way that Prince Philip’s Danish grandfather had been invited to become King of Greece). The Queen and her youngest son were both touched by the offer; here was a pleasant morale-booster, a reminder that some parts of the world regarded the monarchy as more than just a glamorous soap opera. But the offer was politely declined.
No one can recall a happier start to a state visit than the moment the Queen stepped off the Royal Yacht on to a Cape Town quayside to be greeted by Nelson Mandela on a March morning in 1995. And one of the first acts of Nelson Mandela’s presidency had been to return South Africa to the Commonwealth. It would prove an enduring friendship. The fiftieth anniversaries of D-Day, VE Day and VJ Day were powerful and evocative moments when the Queen and her family were the perfect focal point for a complex range of national and international emotions. ‘We are just war relics,’ the Queen Mother joked to the Queen after their VE Day anniversary appearance, along with Princess Margaret, on the Palace balcony.
As Churchill might have said: some war, some relics. These were huge occasions involving millions of people all over the country. Whatever the private domestic problems of the House of Windsor, it was still a phenomenal force for national unity.
But always in the background – and very often in the foreground there were the tensions between the Prince and the Princess of Wales. Equally sensitive was the relationship between the Princess and the institution from which she was obviously detached and yet to which she was also inextricably attached through her sons. ‘The Princess was a political hot potato and several papers were championing her,’ says a former senior official. ‘The Queen needed to be careful, constitutionally, because there was a lot of support for this hot potato.’
Added to that were the tensions between the Queen’s staff at Buckingham Palace and the Prince of Wales’s officials who had set up a fiercely independent operation at St James’s Palace. The Prince’s new team were determined to rebrand their man their way and resented what they regarded as old-school interference from ‘over the road’ at the Queen’s office. As the Prince’s environmental messages became more forceful, his mother’s advisers became more uneasy. Says one: ‘We got a lot of: “If the Prince wants to talk about the environment he will do so and he’ll clear it with the Department of the Environment. So get off our backs. We’re grown-ups. We can deal with the government.” It was that sort of tone.’
It did not take much to resurrect the chilling spectre of the annus horribilis. ‘You might have wonderful D-Day or VE Day anniversaries but then along came Panorama in 1995,’ says Charles Anson. ‘Suddenly we were right back in there and it raised all those worries again. It took a long time to get rid of that sense of neurosis, a sense that round every corner there’s a problem.’ The Princess of Wales’s interview for BBCI’s Panorama in November 1995 was a turning point for the Monarch. Its genesis, the Princess would claim, was an interview granted by the Prince of Wales the year before. In 1994, the Prince had allowed broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby to produce a film and a book about his life. Both provided a colourful and compelling account of the unique nature of the Prince’s job. Neither viewer nor reader could be left in any doubt about the depth of his feeling for the people who would, one day, be his subjects, nor for the broad range of causes he had chosen to champion. The entire multimedia exercise was overshadowed, though, by a few seconds in nearly two hours of candid and engaging close-quarters filming. The Prince’s admission that he had remained faithful to the Princess until his marriage had ‘irretrievably broken down’ would be the enduring memory in the public consciousness. Some of his advisers had believed that the admission would help to ‘clear the air’ after years of speculation about his relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles. Instead, it merely moved the speculation to a new, more frantic level, begging the fundamental question: what next? The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh were dismayed, not just because of the Prince’s candour on screen. More wounding was the accompanying book which gave the impression that the Prince had endured an unhappy childhood. As the book was serialised in the Sunday Times over several weeks, the drip-feed of revelations managed to eclipse everything else the monarchy was attempting to do at the same time, including that long-awaited historic state visit to Russia. At Windsor Castle, the sense of frustration boiled over in public. ‘I’ve never discussed private matters and I don’t think the Queen has either. Very few members of the family have,’ the Duke of Edinburgh said crisply on the eve of the royal departure for Moscow. The Queen Mother harboured similar reservations. As she would tell Sir Eric Anderson (former Provost of Eton and royal confidant) years later: ‘It’s always a mistake to talk about your marriage.’
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