Allison’s arrival also coincided with a more important change at the Palace, the retirement of the Queen’s Private Secretary, Sir Michael Adeane, to be succeeded by the charismatic Martin Charteris. Like Colville, Adeane had been a trusted member of George VI’s inner sanctum. And, like Colville, he was replaced by a natural innovator. Taken in the context of the whole reign, this brief period, bridging the end of the sixties and the early seventies, was unquestionably a watershed. The royal biographer Sarah Bradford has described it as a deliberate ‘relaunch’ on the part of the Queen. Sir William Heseltine insists that there was nothing on quite such a grand, strategic scale: ‘I don’t think there was any idea of relaunching – but a lot of things came together.’ The newly invested Prince of Wales and his sister were becoming part of the mainstream royal team. The outside world was undergoing social and technological revolution – from the Beatles to the American civil rights movement. Man could land on the moon and mankind could watch it all in the comfort of a living room.
The Queen and Prince Philip had now been around long enough to have lost their novelty value, as illustrated by the poor turnout during their ‘second time around’ tours of the world. It was time, very gently, to break the George VI mould of monarchy and create a new one. It is, therefore, unfair to attribute the monarchy’s outdated media image entirely to Richard Colville. The monarchy was not stuck in a fifties mindset just because Richard Colville was. He was a symptom rather than a cause. But the media’s relationship with the monarchy is the most obvious litmus test of the monarchy’s relationship with the public, and that relationship continued to develop and improve through the seventies until it reached a plateau which would stretch from the bunting-festooned renaissance of the 1977 Silver Jubilee until ten years later when the cloud of It’s a Royal Knockout gradually darkened into the gathering storm of the nineties.
During those happy years of royal engagements, weddings and births, the only serious hiatus between the Palace and the press was in 1986 when the Sunday Times published those stories of a royal rift with Downing Street. According to supposedly impeccable sources, the Queen regarded Margaret Thatcher’s policies as ‘uncaring, confrontational and socially divisive’. The story was hugely embarrassing for the monarchy – since it appeared to break every rule on constitutional neutrality – and equally awkward for the Prime Minister. The Sunday Times refused to name its ‘sources’ who later turned out to be one source. After several days of denials and confusion, it emerged that the Queen’s Press Secretary, Michael Shea – who had succeeded Allison in 1978 – had indeed spoken to the Sunday Times. But Shea was adamant that his remarks had been completely misinterpreted. The debate over who said what continues to this day and will never be fully resolved since Shea died in 2009. But what is beyond doubt is that Shea was not speaking with the authority of anyone, let alone the Queen. Furthermore, not a single member of the Royal Household of the period can recall – or even imagine – the Queen saying anything so indiscreet to a member of staff. Charles Anson, who would take up the post of Press Secretary soon afterwards, is emphatic: ‘Never in a month of Sundays would the Queen show to anybody, not even to her Private Secretary, that she thought anything bad of Mrs Thatcher or, indeed, any of her prime ministers.’
Shea’s former colleagues recall an outgoing figure who liked the company of journalists (they, in turn, liked him). One senior courtier conjectures that Shea was probably ‘trespassing over-confidently on political ground’ and being pressed into making some anodyne remark about the Queen being ‘in the middle’ on any given political issue. As the courtier puts it: ‘They managed to write it up in a way that suggested she’d probably be voting Liberal if she had a chance.’ ‘The poor chap’s dead,’ says another Household colleague, ‘but I know that after he’d had the conversation with this journalist, over the telephone, Michael came to a meeting and said to me: “I’ve just had a rather good chat to so and so and I think there might be quite a good story in the Sunday Times.” So he was under no feeling that the axe was coming down.’
The axe did not come down immediately. Some months later, Shea left for a senior position in commercial public relations, always insisting that his departure had nothing to do with the Thatcher row. Once again, this was not entirely accurate. ‘In the end, we had to encourage him to move on,’ says Sir William Heseltine, Shea’s boss at the time. ‘It was hubris on Michael’s part. He just went further than he should have done in attributing attitudes and notions to the Queen and then realised he’d gone too far and denied having done so.’
By now, the glamorous younger members of the family, especially the Princess of Wales, were dominating the media schedules. Most news organisations had appointed designated ‘royal’ teams to cope with the rising demand for royal stories. And the ever-expanding ranks of the ‘royal rat pack’ were not particularly interested in what the Queen and Prince Philip were doing. This was of no great concern to the Queen who is not, by nature, competitive about such matters, nor in any doubt about her position in the royal scheme of things. But, ahead of her fortieth anniversary as sovereign in 1992, it was decided that another Royal Family-type project would be a useful reminder of what the monarchy was all about.
‘At the Palace, I think there was a sense of: “How do we justify all this royal expenditure if the Queen is out of sight?”’ says Edward Mirzoeff, the director charged with doing what Richard Cawston had done twenty-three years earlier. ‘She was doing tours and visits and yet no one was reporting it. The younger royals were all over the papers. It was partly a question of: “How do we pull this back?”‘ adds Mirzoeff.
On this occasion, there would be no joint BBC/ITV production. The BBC wanted to keep the project very much to itself, although ITV would be given the finished product to transmit at a time of its own choosing. The BBC’s relationship with the Palace had shifted significantly in the intervening years. The Palace might still control the access but there would be no committee chaired by the Duke of Edinburgh this time (indeed, the Duke had little to do with the project). ‘The Palace could have no editorial control but they could have negative rights over any material gained through special access – and considering that most of the programme was special access, that was quite a lot of material,’ Mirzoeff recalls. There were plenty of teething problems early on. ‘There was a constant refrain of “The Queen won’t like it.” Even if I said, “Did you ask her?” it was still the same response.’
He deliberately hired a few veterans from the 1969 documentary crew. ‘I assembled a team who I thought would be familiar, including Peter Edwards who had done the sound on the original. All the royals are far more worried about sound than pictures and Peter was totally trusted. So, we got these amazing conversations.’ One of them takes place at the Palace banquet during the 1991 G7 Summit. Sir Edward Heath chides US Secretary of State James Baker for not following his example and meeting Saddam Hussein in person before the outbreak of the first Gulf War. ‘He couldn’t go to Baghdad like you could,’ says the Queen. ‘Why not, Ma’am?’ says Heath briskly. ‘I went to Baghdad.’ ‘I know you did,’ says the Queen with an impish grin, ‘but you’re expendable now!’ It has been suggested that the Queen may later have regretted the remark. Mirzoeff still regards it as a very endearing moment and recalls that Heath got off lightly in the film. ‘I remember him at that banquet at the Palace. He kicked up the most awful fuss about where he was seated, grumbling that as a former Prime Minister he should be in a much more senior position. I think in the end they actually reseated him!’ Before long, Mirzoeff and the crew had realised that different parts of the Royal Household could work in very different ways.
‘I always found that the Court divided into two parts – the male private secretaries who worried all the time and the ladies-in-waiting who were much warmer. I went for months thinking: “This film can’t be made.” But the mood changed when the ladies-in-waiting warmed to us.’ Mirzoeff developed a new filming strategy to get round over-cautio
us Palace officials. ‘A press officer would always say, “Two minutes only!” or “Three minutes left!” and it was incredibly annoying because these things always get better as you go on. So I brought along attractive young women – a researcher, an assistant producer – and their job was to ask questions all the time and create a diversion. All the men seemed to like these pretty girls – with the one exception of Prince Philip who did not seem to respond to any of this.’
The Royal Household’s nervousness was understandable. Charles Anson, a new arrival as Press Secretary, had just inherited the project. He was hardly going to let Edward Mirzoeff and the BBC roam the Palace at will. ‘Once cameras have rolled and there’s some ghastly incident, you’re badly stuck if it’s on film,’ he explains. ‘It was hard for Eddie to get what he wanted but he was right to press for it. We became friends but it was blood, sweat and tears for the first six months.’ As with Royal Family, the Queen seemed to take the view that if she was going to do this television programme then she was going to do it properly. ‘There is nothing she doesn’t notice,’ says Mirzoeff, as if reminiscing about a Hollywood great. ‘There were times when she could see that we were not getting the right angle because we were being kept in a corner by officials. So she would gradually slide around and get in shot. She was totally aware of what was needed and what we needed and you’d be thinking, “You’re wonderful! You’re wonderful!” On Britannia, she once came over and said: “Why weren’t you filming? That was an interesting conversation.” I had to explain that we weren’t allowed.’
The result was a beautifully observed, award-winning film. It covers an eventful twelve-month spell spanning the first Gulf War, a G7 summit and the Queen’s first meeting with Nelson Mandela plus intimate footage of all the Monarch’s regular fixtures, from the Derby to a Dine and Sleep dinner at Windsor Castle. But it also contains what remains to this day the nearest the Queen has ever come to granting an interview. ‘We filmed from mid-1990 to late 1991 but when we got to the cutting room, we were still trying to find a shape to the programme,’ says Mirzoeff. ‘So I said to Charles Anson: “You don’t know how much this would be improved by a personal voice.” Charles, to his credit, went away and thought about it and then the Queen agreed to do it. And the conditions were wonderful. It was getting dark. There were just me, the sound recordist and Charles. I said to the Queen: “I just want to elaborate on a few things that we have been filming.” And she was just terrific. There was no camera there, just her talking. We went away thinking: “Magic!”’ Anson felt much the same. ‘The final chat was so relaxed and full of insights into how the Queen sees her role,’ he says. ‘It was the closest ever to an interview – in fact, it was better than an interview because the Queen was so relaxed.’ Her remarks are fond, reflective, modest, self-aware, homely. On Balmoral: ‘It’s rather nice to hibernate.’ On Red Boxes: ‘Most people have a job and then they go home. In this existence the job and the life go on together. The boxes and the communications just keep on coming. Luckily I am a quick reader … though I do rather begrudge some of the hours I have to do instead of being outdoors.’ On the honours system: ‘I think people need pats on backs sometimes. It’s a very dingy world otherwise.’
It is surprising to hear these remarks yet they do not surprise us. They reinforce rather than readjust our perception. Of her meetings with her prime ministers, the Queen says: ‘They unburden themselves … I think it’s rather nice to feel that one’s a sort of sponge and everybody can come and tell one things. Occasionally, one is able to put one’s point of view. They may not have seen it from that angle …’
Mirzoeff says that he was spared any clumsy attempts at censorship and happily acquiesced to just two personal requests from the royal camp – one to edit out an unflattering shot of the Queen Mother’s hair and one to lose an ambiguous aside about an animal charity. Harder editing issues presented themselves elsewhere, not least the question of what to do with the Princess of Wales. The Princess was still very much part of the family during the filming but, unwittingly, had a tendency to draw the attention away from the leading lady. ‘We took quite a difficult decision,’ Mirzoeff admits. ‘We had loads of wonderful dialogue with her [Diana] but we cut it out. The film editor just found that when she appeared, she drew the eye away and we didn’t want that. At the Diplomatic Reception, she tells the ambassador of Myanmar how she likes to drive round the city at night. It’s wonderful stuff. But, in the end, we just cut it.’
As the film was being completed, the Queen decided that she would like a preview. Even for a fearless, veteran filmmaker, it was a nervous prospect as the Monarch, the Duke and the uppermost tiers of the Royal Household and the BBC trooped into a tiny BAFTA screening room. Before the viewing started, Mirzoeff had asked the Queen’s Private Secretary, Sir Robert Fellowes, how to decipher the Queen’s reaction. Back came the reply: ‘You’ll just know.’ ‘She didn’t react at all but, early on, there was this great roar of laughter from the Duke of Edinburgh,’ Mirzoeff remembers. ‘And from that moment, they all started laughing. Then, at the end, I said: “We’ve got some tea. Would you like some?” And the Queen said: “Yes, that would be very nice.” Just as Robert Fellowes had said, that was the moment we knew.’
The documentary attracted a vast British audience of almost thirty million – half the population – across both networks.
Whereas Royal Family had been a genuine eye-opener, Elizabeth R had been more of a refresher. Yet it marked the high-water mark of the Queen’s engagement with the media. It did so with the timing of a Greek tragedy. At the very moment of this landmark in royal communications, lawyers acting for the Duke and Duchess of York were arranging a separation which would mark the start of the infamous annus horribilis.
Never again would the Monarch allow the cameras and microphones so close. For the next five years, as we have seen, the Palace and the media would retreat to entrenched positions. Royal correspondents such as Richard Kay of the Daily Mail and James Whitaker of the Daily Mirror became celebrated mainstays of their respective publications. Their television equivalents, Jennie Bond of the BBC and Nick Owen of ITN, acquired their own celebrity status. Both the Prince and Princess of Wales would use television to present their respective positions to the wider world. At the Palace, Charles Anson and his team simply had to get on with the job. There were all the usual fixtures in the royal schedule -including some historic state visits and anniversaries – and there was nothing officials could do about the private lives of the Queen’s children. ‘It was like being a sailor in a massive storm where you had to batten down everything and then come up, finally, when the sun appeared to see what needed repairing,’ Anson recalls. ‘But the Queen was steady, never short; never irritable. Completely steady. That must have been down to experience, going right back to Suez and so on. But it must also be down to temperament.’
Having maintained a dignified silence through the most lurid tales in the media, the Queen and her staff finally ran out of patience. It followed Diana, Princess of Wales’s interview with the BBC’s Panorama in which she cast doubts on her husband’s fitness to reign. Not only did the Queen decide that the time had come to urge the Prince and Princess to divorce but the BBC was promptly relieved of its automatic right to produce the Queen’s Christmas broadcast. In future, the honour would rotate with ITV (and, latterly, with Sky, too). It might have seemed a small gesture, but in the executive echelons of the BBC and the broadcasting industry it was a very significant moment. The decision was not wholly unwelcome in parts of the BBC. The Corporation’s relationship with the monarchy was no longer ‘special’. And, for many inside the BBC and beyond, that was to be regarded as a good thing.
In the furore surrounding Panorama, the media had overlooked the Queen Mother’s own plucky attempt at media management.
She had been due to have a hip operation at some point but, on hearing about the forthcoming Panorama programme, she took some spirited pre-emptive action. Knowing that there was a risk
attached to invasive surgery on a lady of ninety-five, Queen Elizabeth brought forward her operation to the same week as the broadcast. On that basis, if the operation was not a success, then at least she would have the (posthumous) satisfaction of kicking Panorama off the front pages. After a lively lunch at the Ritz with her ladies-in-waiting, she departed for hospital in high spirits – and re-emerged in equally robust form eighteen days later.
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