Her Majesty

by Robert Hardman

  While ‘Pied Piper’ ideas were being quietly smothered, there were more practical decisions to be taken. The Princess’s coffin, it was agreed, would be carried on a gun carriage, despite the military/royal overtones. ‘I wanted people to be able to see the coffin,’ says Sir Malcolm Ross. ‘If we were going to have this mass of people in London, a hearse and a low vehicle with glass between the public and the coffin was not the spectacle we were trying to achieve.’ Ever since the horses bolted at the funeral of Queen Victoria, coffins on gun carriages have traditionally been pulled by humans from the Royal Navy. Ross, however, decided to give the horses the chance to redeem themselves after nearly a century and called in the King’s Troop, Royal Horse Artillery. ‘You can whistle up the King’s Troop in ten minutes but you try and get two hundred sailors. Not a chance.’

  The smallest details could require mini-summits. The authorities at Westminster Abbey were happy to have Sir Elton John singing his lament for the Princess and yet they had reservations about the inclusion of Verdi’s Requiem on the grounds that it was a secular piece of music (the Abbey relented). ‘I had Plácido Domingo on the line from San Francisco asking if he could take part,’ says Ross. ‘I said: “So sorry, the job’s gone.”’

  By now, the two main concerns for the organisers were the reaction to the Queen’s impending return to the capital and the size of the crowds at the funeral. The Palace team had come up with three suggestions which, according to police sources, avoided a serious crowd control issue or even loss of life. The first had been the extension of the funeral route by starting from Kensington Palace, the Princess’s old home, rather than St James’s Palace. The second was the erection of giant television screens in London parks to ease congestion around Westminster Abbey. The third was the decision to publicise a processional route for the hearse all the way through London and up to the Princess’s ancestral home at Althorp, Northamptonshire.

  All eyes were now on the Queen’s arrival from Balmoral to meet the crowds and address the nation. Much of the midweek anger had vanished as quickly as it had appeared following the sudden – and astonishingly composed – appearance of Prince William and Prince Harry with their father amid the mourners and flowers outside Kensington Palace. Newly released details of the funeral arrangements also gave the rolling news channels plenty to chew on.

  Even so, some of the most experienced members of the Royal Household still look back on that moment as the most pivotal of the Queen’s entire reign. As one retired aide puts it: ‘The stakes were at their highest when the Queen made that broadcast after she came down from Balmoral. She did it live which was a crucial decision by her. It was a high-risk thing but she did it brilliantly. Then she made another very important decision. It was her initiative – what she wanted to do and felt she should do. And that was to walk outside the Palace and bow to the coffin as it went past. A very big moment, that, actually.’

  Any lingering doubts about the core strength of the monarchy were dispelled as much of the world watched the Queen deliver her tribute to her late ex-daughter-in-law. ‘What I say to you now as your Queen and as a grandmother, I say from my heart,’ she said (the ‘as a grandmother’ phrase was a genuine Alastair Campbell contribution). The following day, as she led her family out of the Palace gates to lower their heads as the coffin passed by, few could doubt the significance or sincerity of the gesture. The Sovereign, who traditionally bows to no one, had not merely shown leadership and humility. She had also displayed genuine majesty.

  ‘The important thing is that at the end of the day on that Saturday, it went all right,’ says Lord Airlie. Drawing on a metaphor from his days in the City, he adds: ‘You may well find in years ahead, that that crisis, that awful situation, was the very nadir of our stock market. Look back and it’s probably true. But the monarchy has come through.’

  Two years later, the Royal Family assembled for another royal wedding. The marriage of Prince Edward to public relations executive Sophie Rhys-Jones did not bring the capital to a euphoric weekday standstill but took place on a Saturday afternoon in the family church, St George’s Chapel, Windsor. There was none of the bunting and street-party mayhem which accompanied the weddings of the Prince’s brothers back in the eighties. This was not supposed to be another ‘fairy-tale wedding’. The world could watch and yet it was not expected to get involved. Even so, Windsor Castle, now restored to greater grandeur than before, rose to the occasion beautifully. The two main television networks cleared their schedules to pack it all in and stations around the world carried the event live. The choice of Windsor made it emphatically a family affair, not a state occasion. The scale matched the mood perfectly. Similar thoughts led the Prince of Wales and Camilla Parker Bowles to choose St George’s Chapel for the blessing of their wedding in 2005. The whole occasion was marked by sensitivity, given the divorces on both sides, the Prince’s future position as Supreme Governor of the Church of England and the death of Diana. There were problems with the location of the civil marriage ceremony* and even the date. Come the day, though, there was a carnival atmosphere around Windsor. Here was a stylish and inescapably modern occasion in an impeccably ancient setting with a buzz and a warmth epitomised by the obvious happiness of Prince William and Prince Harry. A line had been drawn. The world wished the Prince of Wales and the new Duchess of Cornwall well. It was time to move on.

  For the Queen herself, the Golden Jubilee of 2002, with its sad start and its stupendous crowds, surpassed all expectations. As she was cheered through the packed streets of Windsor three years later on her eightieth birthday, the Queen’s position as the new Mother of the Nation was beyond doubt.

  Henceforth, the Royal Family would be looking forwards. True, the Duchess of York would continue to cause the occasional bout of royal apoplexy, most notably when caught trying to sell royal access to an undercover reporter. There are some who believe that she should now relinquish her title, not least because it was the Queen Mother’s during the Queen’s formative years. But the general feeling is that the harm she inflicts is on herself – and that it might even fulfil a necessary role. Sir Antony Jay, observer of royal fortunes across four decades, shares a favourite theory of the late Lord Charteris – the importance of royal lightning conductors. ‘Every royal family needs a wicked fairy, someone to pick on,’ he points out. ‘It’s a displacement activity. It was Princess Margaret then Princess Anne then Princess Michael of Kent. The press tried it on with Prince Harry and nightclubs for a bit but it didn’t work. Now it’s Prince Andrew. You always need someone to be picked on.’

  But as well as wicked fairies, every royal family needs a few happy endings, too. The sense of euphoria which accompanied the wedding of Prince William to Catherine Middleton in April 2011 surprised even the most optimistic royalists. Following the announcement of the couple’s engagement the previous November, there was a palpable sense of restraint, of not wanting to tempt fate, among the press and the British public alike. A recurring media theme was that the people had been hoodwinked by a fairy-tale wedding thirty years earlier and they did not want to be duped again. The rest of the world, however, took a less cautious view. Here was a great new chapter in the one-thousand-year story of the world’s most famous family. Why not just enjoy every moment?

  Come the day, a 10,000-strong media contingent from all over the world watched a million people in central London enjoy a day of uncomplicated exuberance. Across Britain, all that doubt and caution simply evaporated. People suddenly found themselves much more excited than they had expected to be. The sight of Prince William and Prince Harry travelling to the Abbey together evoked powerful memories of the two boys making that heartbreaking walk behind their mother’s coffin in 1997. Here they both were fourteen years on – two dashing young blades waving and smiling at near-hysterical crowds in their immaculate army uniforms; a credit to Diana, to the monarchy and the country.*

  Catherine Middleton’s radiant happiness on the arm of her father, Michael – a man display
ing his own Olympian powers of composure – struck an instant chord with the public. Some commentators had previously tried to project the union as a clash of class and culture, the girl from the happy, entrepreneurial Home Counties family being tossed into an unbending, snobbish world obsessed with pedigree. All of a sudden, those Jane Austen conspiracy theories simply collapsed. Everything about the occasion bespoke a genuine, solid love match, an impression reinforced by the armies of lip-readers employed by Fleet Street to translate every inaudible aside. ‘I am so proud you’re my wife,’ the new Duke of Cambridge whispered as he helped the new Duchess into the State Landau outside the Abbey. Since boyhood, Prince William has carried a colossal – at times overwhelming – burden of expectation. That burden, at least, could now be shared.

  And despite the inevitable comparisons with the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer thirty years earlier, the backdrop was reminiscent of a different event. The 1981 royal wedding took place in an era of cloudless skies. During the build-up to this wedding, though, there had been a miasma of negativity. There were grumbles about the expense of it all (even though the cost to the public purse amounted to 0.2 per cent of the bill for the 2012 London Olympics). There were complaints from the modish left that another burst of Charles-and-Di-style razzmatazz was projecting an outdated image of Britain. Just days before the wedding, the Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, announced that he was planning to end male primogeniture in the Royal Family and allow the eldest child to succeed to the throne, female or male. It’s a recurring cross-party idea, always good for a headline yet forever thwarted by almost insuperable constitutional complexities. On this occasion, it merely succeeded in kickstarting a debate about the entire monarchy on the eve of a wedding.

  There were rows about the guest list too, notably the absence of invitations to the two former Labour prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. The omission carried uncomfortable, subliminal political messages – even if none was intended. To many, it smacked of a snub. The problem was that the two surviving Conservative ex-premiers, Lady Thatcher and Sir John Major, had been included. The Clarence House team charged with drawing up the guest list had decided to include all members of the Order of the Garter, on the grounds that Prince William was a Knight of the Garter himself. Lady Thatcher and Sir John were members of the Order. Blair and Brown were not. This was no ‘snub’. It was just an oversight – ‘a cock-up’, as a senior Buckingham Palace aide acknowledged. Blair had met Prince William many times and had gone out of his way to defend the monarchy at its lowest ebb. Brown had not only been scrupulous in his dealings with the Palace but, as Chancellor, had chaired the committee which created a permanent public memorial to Diana, Princess of Wales. With the monarchy, perceptions of neutrality are as vital as the exercise of neutrality. If the guest list could include every Lord-Lieutenant and the footballer David Beckham, it could surely have included two former prime ministers. But the overarching concern was one of tone. The marriage was taking place against a backdrop of economic hardship and substantial cuts in public spending. The situation was certainly not as bleak as the conditions of post-war austerity which prevailed in 1947 when Princess Elizabeth married Prince Philip. But now, as then, it was vital for the monarchy to strike a happy balance between spectacular pageantry and common sense.

  And yet, all these worries simply melted away by mid-morning on 29 April 2011. The moment the bride arrived at the altar in her masterpiece of lace and ivory satin by Sarah Burton at Alexander McQueen the occasion was already a monumental triumph. It had the bonus of making Britain feel a great deal better about itself at a time of economic malaise. And in that regard, the closest comparison was not the ballyhoo of the royal weddings of the eighties. This one, rather, echoed that unexpected revivalist hit of the previous decade – the Silver Jubilee of 1977.

  Overall, inter-generational royal relations have seldom been better. Once at loggerheads, the Prince of Wales’s staff and the Queen’s officials now liaise, dine and even work out together on a daily basis. Michael Peat, the architect of all those royal reforms on behalf of the Queen, was knighted and went on to become the Prince’s Private Secretary, a move which helped to harmonise the two operations. In 2011, after more than twenty years of royal service, he finally announced that he would return to the private sector, to be replaced by William Nye, a senior civil servant. The Prince has rearranged his household at Clarence House to replicate the structure of Buckingham Palace, complete with a Master of the Household. But the Queen is well aware of the need for each generation to exercise a sensible independence from the one in front.

  So while Prince William and Prince Harry had previously depended on their father’s staff at Clarence House, they have now set up their own office next door in a corner of St James’s Palace. The Queen also pays for Prince William to have his own independent constitutional adviser in the form of Sir David Manning, former British ambassador to Washington.

  Long before their wedding, the Prince and his bride-to-be had been renting a farmhouse together in Anglesey following his posting there with the RAF. As man and wife, however, they also needed a new London base. The new Duke and Duchess of Cambridge could hardly be expected to share the Clarence House bachelor flat with Prince Harry.* A modest apartment in the private wing of Kensington Palace – where the Duke spent much of his childhood – was allocated to them.

  However, there was no question of Prince Harry moving out of the shared office. The two Princes remain extremely close and several guests at the evening party after the wedding were reduced to tears during Prince Harry’s irreverent but poignant tribute to the big brother who had helped him through the turmoil of their mother’s death. Today, the Duke, the Duchess and the younger Prince plus nine office staff all work out of a small terraced house which had previously been earmarked as accommodation for the Lord Chamberlain. Guests are greeted by a bust of the Queen and a portrait of Edward VII next to a very ordinary kitchen where the royal residents and the staff share a coffee machine, a kettle and a table covered in newspapers. Brynnie, a friendly working cocker spaniel belonging to senior aide Helen Asprey, is part of the furniture.

  The single stairwell (there are no backstairs for staff) is dominated by a Franz Winterhalter portrait of Queen Victoria and lined with smaller military prints and a view of Windsor from Eton. It is smart but not grand. There is an easy informality and a bustling sense of purpose as young assistants trot between floors bearing correspondence or dress samples. If the Duke of Cambridge is between official engagements, visitors are as likely to bump into him wearing chinos, open-neck shirt and tank top as to find him in a suit.

  Space is tight, though. This may be the headquarters of the most famous young couple on earth but they don’t just share the same first-floor study with each other. They share it with Prince Harry, too. And because there is only room for two desks, the trio are reduced to what, in modern officespeak, is known as ‘hot-desking’. ‘It’s not a problem as they’re hardly ever all there at the same time,’ explains a member of staff. While the Private Secretary works in the room next door, the other officials and assistants occupy the floor above. Here, the atmosphere is even more informal, the walls lined not with works from the Royal Collection but delightful sketches of the Princes as very young children. It’s a small, close-knit operation without the trappings of larger royal households – equerries, ladies-in-waiting, orderlies and so on. And at this stage in his life, that is precisely how the next monarch but one likes to keep it.

  With the domestic situation happy and settled, it is money which has crept back up the agenda again. Today, it is a matter for Sir Alan Reid, Keeper of the Privy Purse since the Golden Jubilee. An international management consultant from the same KPMG stable as Sir Michael Peat, Reid has quietly introduced an entirely new financial structure for the monarchy. In 2010, exactly 250 years after the creation of the Civil List – an anniversary studiously ignored by everyone at the Palace – the old system was torn up. The
ten-year Civil List deal had come to an end and Reid and the Coalition Government both agreed it was time for a simpler plan. Instead of receiving a fixed head of state allowance from the state plus complicated grants for maintenance and travel, the monarchy would receive one lump sum every year – a percentage of the Crown Estate’s annual profits. Announcing the plans in June 2011, the Chancellor, George Osborne, said that the initial share would be 15 per cent – to meet a projected royal bill of £35 million. But the figure, he added, could be adjusted up or down. What’s more, it would have a new name. The term ‘Civil List’ would be consigned to the history books. The new deal would be called the Sovereign Grant.

  Once upon a time, the Sovereign had taken the entire Crown Estate pot. In 1760, George III swapped it all for the Civil List. Now, 250 years later, the monarchy would live on a slice of that original pie. It seemed like a good deal all round. The Royal Household had finally achieved Lord Airlie’s dream of being ‘masters of their own destiny’. Parliament would have scrutiny of the whole royal budget via the National Audit Office. But, looking to the future, there are risks, too. The Crown Estate is a dynamic property developer in a tough market. Any unpopular decisions – and it has made many – may now rebound directly on the Queen. What’s more, the new deal was announced in the teeth of a dire economic crisis. And, unlike most of the public sector, the monarchy had already spent the previous twenty years cutting costs. Thus, there was less flab to lose. Yet Reid has already identified new cuts, not least by securing a place on the Royal Visits Advisory Committee. Previously, royal visits were decided by the Foreign Office and the royal visitor, while the bill was then sent to the Treasury for payment. Now that the cost must, instead, come out of the monarchy’s central budget, Reid will in future be in a position to clip royal wings. It is unlikely that a state visit will ever be called off because of the transport costs. But if the choice is between sending a junior member of the family to the Pacific or hiring a new footman, it may help to focus the mind.