Were Mary Francis and her colleagues grateful for all this loyal support from papers like the Daily Telegraph? ‘No,’ she says with a laugh. ‘We did not want to be defended like that. The view was that a constitutional monarchy works without those bells and whistles and the vital thing was to make sure no one thought anything else.’
Tony Blair had the same concerns. ‘There were some people who said: “If you start tampering with the hereditary principles here, it’s only a short step,”’ he recalls. ‘Whereas my view was that it’s not a short step. It’s a completely different issue.’ But he took care to make his views clear to the Queen. ‘I used to have this conversation with her. My point was that I’m a classic representative of the modern view: I can’t honestly justify my laws being made by people on the basis of [birth]. I can’t do it. And, besides, it gives the Conservatives a perpetual majority in one of the Houses of Parliament. On the other hand, the monarchy is a completely different thing.’
The joint Palace/government strategy of ‘de-linking’ the monarchy from the ‘toffs’ actually worked rather well and the expulsion of the hereditary half of the Lords was achieved with no collateral damage to the monarchy.* What the Queen really thought, we do not know. Several senior ex-courtiers actually believe that the demise of the hereditaries from Parliament has been a great boon for the monarchy. Heredity is no longer an open political sore.
For Mary Francis and her colleagues, though, there was another equally precarious debate to avoid. Blair and his ministers were planning to create a new parliament for Scotland and an assembly for Wales. Whatever the end results, the Queen’s primary concern was to keep the monarchy out of any rows about national identity. ‘People spent a lot of time asking: how does it affect the Queen and her overall role in the country? I wouldn’t say they were worried but they certainly wanted to make sure they got it right,’ Francis recalls. As the Palace representative on the government working groups for all of this, Francis remained assiduously neutral. ‘There was no inclination to challenge any of it,’ she says.
While there was plenty of heated public debate over symbols and ceremonial for the new legislature. Who would be in the procession? Would that famous Scottish nationalist Sean Connery be turning up? Yet a thumping great piece of constitutional reform passed by with little public comment. The Queen was, in effect, to be demoted. She might have the constitutional right to hire and fire prime ministers of the United Kingdom but the new First Minister of Scotland would simply be handed to her on a plate by the Presiding Officer (or Speaker) of the Scottish Parliament.
Tony Blair will not go into detail but is clear that he had ‘a lot of discussions’ not only with the Queen but with her Private Secretary and the Prince of Wales. While the Palace was not challenging the government, this still had to be a consultative process. ‘They weren’t saying, “We don’t agree with you.” They were simply reflecting on it. I found that not only proper but also very helpful,’ says Blair. ‘There was a concern, which I shared, that devolution was one step on the path to independence. For the Queen, it wouldn’t be great to be the Queen presiding over the break-up of the United Kingdom. So, I would explain my thinking on this which was that unless you offered this halfway house within the United Kingdom, you really would at some point find a fullblown march to independence. As it turned out, it never really happened and actually I think the financial crisis has probably removed any serious possibility. But I said to people throughout that this is a perfectly legitimate worry.’ That worry would certainly become more legitimate, shortly after this discussion, when the Scottish National Party secured an overall majority in the 2011 elections to the Scottish Parliament. The Queen was reported to have sought a special briefing from Prime Minister David Cameron on the subject. Whether an independent Scotland retained the monarchy or not, any unravelling of the United Kingdom would be a seismic constitutional challenge for the Monarch.
Given the party’s mandate at the polls, some of Labour’s new young bloods felt that it was time to question and, possibly, do away with what they saw as outdated flummery. And the sentiment was not confined to the political elite. Within the Civil Service, there were plenty of radical young bucks who felt that a rare opportunity had come to shake out a lot of dusty tradition. So, when the parliamentary and royal authorities set about planning the State Opening of Parliament after Labour’s repeat success in the 2001 election, some of those involved suggested a new form of ceremony. ‘Why can’t she come in a car?’ asked one. Another wondered why the Queen had to deliver the Queen’s Speech from her throne in the unelected House of Lords. Could she not address both Houses of Parliament in Westminster Great Hall? Tony Blair is adamant that these suggestions were not coming from his advisers, despite their zeal for modernising so many other facets of national life. ‘The irony is it wasn’t us. It wasn’t the Alastair Campbells of this world at all. They couldn’t give two hoots about it. There were people in the Civil Service who were desperate. They suddenly thought: “We’ve got a Labour government. For God’s sake, if you’re not prepared to take on all this flummery of the monarchy …” My attitude to it, despite what the press kept writing, was absolutely clear. The Queen’s Speech is a great event. Why do you want her to turn up on a tandem? It’s ridiculous. She’s there in the carriage and it gets filmed around the world!’ Blair says that he repeatedly had to ward off the meddlers: ‘It would usually be some younger guy in the Civil Service talking about this and I would say: “No. I’ve got more important things to worry about and, in any case, I like it.”’
He admits, though, that his own officials went too far in politicising the text of the Queen’s Speech, putting incongruous technocratic jargon in the mouth of a monarch well into her seventies: ‘The poor Queen was reading out New Labour twaddle. I said: “I’ve had enough of that. I’m not having that again.” It was so embarrassing listening to that “New Labour, New Britain” stuff.’
Even so, the modernising mood rattled some of the Queen’s representatives. The Duke of Norfolk, hereditary Earl Marshal and the organiser of state occasions at Westminster, authorised various tweaks to the running order and a minor reduction in the length of the royal procession. Suddenly there was no longer room for a few ancient fixtures like Silver Stick-in-Waiting (a senior officer in the Household Cavalry).
Overall, though, the dynamic between the monarchy and the government during the New Labour years can be seen as cordial and correct with the occasional stumbling block rather than a prolonged period of tension. In that regard, it was no different from the relationship between the Palace and the previous radical reforming administration – that of Mrs Thatcher. And it was by no means all one-way traffic. On one summer’s evening in 2003, Tony Blair unveiled a Cabinet reshuffle which left politicians on all sides of both Houses of Parliament open-mouthed. He announced a shake-up of the entire judicial establishment, including the abolition of the post of Lord Chancellor, the head of the legal system. The Lord Chancellor was certainly a very powerful figure. Since he ran the judges, acted as the Speaker of the House of Lords and sat in the Cabinet, he had a foot in three camps – the judicial, the legislative and the executive arms of the state. It was a system which had worked pretty well since the Norman Conquest but New Labour’s modernising tendency wanted to tidy it up.
By now, however, the Queen’s officials were feeling more assertive. It was six years since the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, and royal confidence had been boosted by the Golden Jubilee of 2002. This was an occasion when the Palace felt entitled to square up to the government. After all, the Queen was entirely within her rights. Quite apart from running the entire judiciary, the Lord Chancellor is one of the five people entitled to decide if a monarch is sane enough to reign or if a regency is required. The Queen meets him (it’s never been a her) in many different capacities and he is expected to look the part, too. On just his second day in office as Lord Chancellor, Jack Straw was astonished to receive a visit from the royal robe makers, E
de & Ravenscroft, who wanted to measure him for his Court dress and shoes. He was even more astonished when they suddenly produced a half-finished outfit. ‘They had already been on to my tailor to get my measurements!’ he says. Crucially, on top of everything else, the Lord Chancellor also holds one of the most colourful titles in the land. He automatically becomes the Keeper of the Royal Conscience. As one of the Queen’s advisers puts it: ‘The government were going to abolish the Queen’s “Conscience”. It was a jaw-dropper. No one had consulted her. I just don’t think anyone had thought it through.’
Once, the Keeper of the Royal Conscience took on the King’s responsibility for ‘infants, idiots and lunatics … and all charitable uses in the kingdom’. Today, the job involves delicate issues with clergy. In retrospect, it was an extraordinary decision not to consult the Queen – one of her constitutional rights, after all – about the abolition of an ancient office with deep-rooted royal connections. We have yet to learn the precise chain of correspondence and events, but Palace sources are clear that the Queen put her foot down. Six years later, the departing Lord Chancellor of the day, Lord Irvine, gave some indication of what happened in a statement to a House of Lords Select Committee: ‘I asked him [Tony Blair] how a decision of this magnitude could be made without prior consultation with me, the judiciary… and the Palace. The Prime Minister appeared mystified and said that these changes always had to be carried into effect in a way that precluded such discussion because of the risk of leaks.’ Tony Blair remembers it slightly differently. ‘Maybe there was more blowback than I realised. Maybe there was that concern,’ he says. ‘But my point was very very simple. I just kept saying this to everyone. The fact is the Lord Chancellor is also running a department of 10,000 people. I needed him in the department.’ In the end, royal concerns prevailed. The shake-up of the judiciary went ahead but the Lord Chancellor was spared the chop. The Queen managed to keep the man who keeps her conscience.
In 2007, Tony Blair relinquished power to his next-door neighbour at Number Eleven. In years gone by, the arrival of Gordon Brown at Number Ten might have presaged some challenging dialogue between Downing Street and the Palace. On paper, Brown was easily the most left-wing Prime Minister of the Queen’s reign. His political heroes included Oliver Cromwell and James Maxton, the anti-Establishment cheerleader of ‘Red Clydeside’ during the inter-war years (Brown wrote his biography). Brown had always made clear his distaste for formal state occasions, avoiding, whenever possible, white-tie state banquets and any setting which might oblige him to wear a kilt. When attendance was unavoidable, he would arrive in a lounge suit, regardless of the dress code. Yet, once in power, his relations with the Palace were very easy. There was still the odd gesture which smacked of gratuitous modernisation and rattled some of those at the Palace, not least the decision to drop the Royal Arms as the symbol of Britain’s new Supreme Court. It opened in 2009 with a newly commissioned floral logo instead. By now, though, New Labour had largely sated its appetite for constitutional reform and Brown had a more pressing issue on his mind for most of his time in office – global economic turmoil. As Prime Minister, he dutifully turned out for all the appropriate events and was happy to wear full evening dress for the Queen (although he still managed to dodge the kilt). He had, in fact, forged an unlikely alliance with the Duke of Edinburgh as a young man. In 1972, the students of Edinburgh University elected Brown as their Rector (the chairman of the university court of management). Traditionally, this was a largely honorary post for a celebrity or eminent Scot. Brown was not only the first student to be elected to the post but also the youngest Rector in history. Senior staff were dismayed. Not so the Chancellor of Edinburgh University, the Duke of Edinburgh. ‘Of course, none of the academics or professional people who sat on the court wanted me to chair the university governing body,’ Brown recalled in 2008. ‘The one person who gave me enormous encouragement and support and recognised that the students wanted to have someone there to represent their interests was the Duke of Edinburgh himself.’
Brown had also got to know the Queen during his decade as Chancellor of the Exchequer and had come to appreciate his occasional audiences at the Palace. No Prime Minister has had the word ‘dour’ applied to him more often, yet Brown found plenty of levity in his chats with the Monarch. During his days as Chancellor, he remarked: ‘One of the things people don’t realise is she’s got a tremendous sense of humour – something that people who don’t know the Queen should appreciate. She’ll be talking about things that make both her and me laugh. And her questions are designed to get the best out of you.’
However, there was one issue about which the Queen was, apparently, too diplomatic to ask questions: those Civil List arrangements which were due to end in the summer of 2010. As with Britannia, it was too close to home. And Brown was in no hurry to provide any answers. But the bald truth was that if nothing happened soon, the monarchy would run out of money. The Palace accountants and Treasury officials had been in constructive talks for months about the idea of financing the entire institution using a percentage of Crown Estate profits. But, whatever the solution, it would have to be approved by Parliament in what would, inevitably, be a heated political and media debate. In the end, Brown decided that it could wait until after the 2010 election and shelved all discussion of the subject. As things turned out, it would become a decision for someone else.
David Cameron, the Queen’s twelfth Prime Minister, is the first to be related to her, albeit at a considerable distance. As the great-great-great-great-great-grandson of William IV via an extra-marital affair, he is the Queen’s fifth cousin twice removed, a fact he was not actually aware of until he became Conservative leader and the genealogists promptly went digging deep into the heraldic mines. He saw her now and then in his youth, not as a very distant relative but as a prep school contemporary of Prince Edward. The Queen might have thought she had said farewell to her last Old Etonian Prime Minister nearly half a century earlier when Sir Alec Douglas-Home was defeated in 1964. Like every new arrival, though, Cameron was impressed by her intuition and her grasp of events, from the global to the parochial. ‘She’s always in touch, extremely sharp,’ he says. ‘She’s always seen the latest ambassador who’s just arrived or one of ours who’s just left.’
However perplexing any political dilemma may seem to him, he is mindful of the wealth of experience sitting in the chair opposite him. ‘In the great scheme of things, you are conscious that you are her twelfth Prime Minister,’ he admits.
Within weeks of Cameron’s appointment, Brown’s unfinished business with the royal finances came to the surface. The ten-year deadline on the Civil List was due to expire just weeks after the election. Cameron and his Chancellor, George Osborne, were in no mood to duck the issue. They liked the plan to use a share of Crown Estate profits but were also about to announce the greatest public sector cuts in a generation. So they decided to maintain the existing Civil List funding arrangements until after the Diamond Jubilee while details of the new Sovereign Grant were thrashed out. Cameron regards it as an important long-term decision for the monarchy. ‘There’s a real opportunity to have a proper reform,’ he says. It will always remain a sensitive political issue. Royal finances, however they are structured, are destined to be one of life’s guaranteed headline-grabbers.
However, with a big royal wedding followed by a jubilee falling into his lap in his first couple of years in charge, Cameron’s early royal encounters have been much happier than those of John Major and Tony Blair. His Coalition partner, Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, made a brief foray into royal territory with his call for the laws of succession to be amended, just like Lord Williams of Mostyn thirteen years before. Clegg’s argument for a Swedish-style system whereby the eldest child of the Sovereign succeeds to the throne, regardless of gender, attracted widespread support as it always does in any opinion poll. The monarchy has thrived under its queens – notably Victoria and both Elizabeths – and male primogeniture has few
defenders. But any change to the rules of succession would not only involve the assent of every parliament in all sixteen of the Queen’s realms; it would also open up a separate debate about the Act of Settlement, the legislation which excludes Roman Catholics or anyone married to a Roman Catholic from the line of succession. While it is blatantly discriminatory and offensive to some Catholics, it is also bound up with several other laws fundamental to Britain’s constitutional settlement, including the very Acts of Union on which the United Kingdom is founded. To unravel one Act could expose all the others to adjustments by politicians less well disposed to the institution of monarchy. As yet, no politician, left or right, has had the time or the inclination to embark on a process which, in political terms, would be akin to prescribing open-heart surgery to cure a cold.
* * *
In all her dealings with all her prime ministers, the Queen has been advised by the most important figure in the Royal Household, her Private Secretary. He may be outranked by the Lord Chamberlain. He may not enjoy the intimacy of a Lady-in-Waiting. But his office is the Monarch’s link with the outside world. He is the gatekeeper, the filter, the timekeeper, the lookout and the first port of call for any advice. He must be both proactive and reactive. Far better to pre-empt a crisis than be landed with one. And he must think globally. He is the Private Secretary to the Queen of sixteen countries. If the Prime Minister of Belize or Australia needs an urgent chat with the head of state, then it all goes through the Private Secretary. Hence, he is actually one of three people at any given time – the Private Secretary, the Deputy Private Secretary and the Assistant Private Secretary. Whoever is in attendance at the time will be referred to as the Private Secretary. Royal titles were never designed to be straightforward. So he has sometimes been she, although no woman has ever held the top position in the Private Secretary’s Office. ‘The essence of the Private Secretary’s task,’ writes Professor Vernon Bogdanor, ‘is to ensure that the machinery of constitutional monarchy works effectively.’ David Cameron (who was taught by Bogdanor at Oxford) explains that his Permanent Secretary will have a chat with the Queen’s Private Secretary before the Prime Minister’s weekly audience. ‘They put together an agenda and say, “You ought to cover these things” and that’s what the Queen always has on a piece of paper next to her. But we’ll stray into other stuff as well,’ says Cameron. ‘Then I tend to go and talk to her Private Secretary afterwards and we have a glass of wine in his office. If there are things we’ve agreed, I give him a good read-out.’
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