Her Majesty

by Robert Hardman

  Just like the royalty whom they represent, the Lord-Lieutenants must confront their own version of the royal paradox. We want them to be ‘ordinary’ and to do more and more. But we don’t want to fund them. The pool of ‘ordinary’ people with the private means to support an unpaid, semi-professional, quasi-royal existence for a decade is somewhat limited. It’s much more time-consuming than it used to be. ‘The working Lieutenancy is a fairly new concept which has come about in the last twenty years,’ says Lord Shuttleworth. ‘My predecessor would say that he would very rarely expect his Deputy Lieutenants to do anything whereas I expect mine to do a great deal. If you go to some counties, they’re run like a squadron of community volunteers. They’re very hot in Kent.’

  Most Lord-Lieutenants have a part-time clerk and some secretarial support from a local council. But it can be tricky when the government suddenly has a bright idea and turns to the Queen’s team for help. A classic example was the recent decision to honour the wartime service of the women’s Land Army. The Queen and the Prime Minister would host a big event in London but that could only absorb a fraction of the old girls who wanted to take part. So the Ministry of Defence asked the Lord-Lieutenants to look after everyone else at county level. They were delighted to do so, but a little perplexed when the government had no budget. Eventually, Ministers discovered £50,000 to cover the entire country. ‘It worked out at £1.10 per Land Army girl,’ Lord Shuttleworth recalls. ‘By the time you’ve booked a cathedral, got a choir, and done the flowers that’s gone before you’ve arranged tea. So, in my county, I spoke to some people and we got a couple of sponsors to pay for the teas and a local college did the flower arranging. It was all fine but it’s not really sustainable. There’s this contrast between the expectation that we do something yet no one has the faintest idea of how we pay for it.’

  Lord Shuttleworth is not complaining. A genial chartered surveyor and custodian of a small agricultural estate north of Lancaster, he polishes his own boots, adores his job and says that it has changed dramatically in the recent past. ‘I’m rather a throwback, a hereditary peer. But the significance today is we are getting people who are in or have been in work whereas, historically, Lord-Lieutenants were people who were military or landowners. I’m not saying they didn’t work but people who are “in work” is now the thing and I fit my duties around my own efforts to earn a living. You want people with a very good ability to get on with other people and good contacts in business, charities and the services. And it may be that some remote titled person is not the best person to do that.’ On the other hand, some of the most diligent modern Lord-Lieutenants still happen to be peers and landowners. And, unlike the late Marquess of Aberdeen, they are sufficiently switched on that they are unlikely to ask the Queen: ‘What are you up to these days?’ (according to Miles Jebb, she replied: ‘Still Queen.’)

  The royal awayday is part of the bedrock of modern monarchy. It seldom makes national headlines but is always hugely appreciated at local level. As the Queen has said simply: ‘A lot of people don’t come to London so we travel to them instead.’ That is why a furtive posse of smartly dressed men and women are wandering amid the manure and shavings of a Cheshire equestrian centre on a chilly spring morning. Ten weeks from now, the Queen will be in the county to visit Reaseheath College, a 7,000-strong centre of agricultural and countryside studies near Nantwich. It has received several royal visits over the years, starting with the previous Prince of Wales in 1926. He arrived on a cold day and in a bad mood. Official records show that his temper worsened when there was cream but not milk for the royal tea (Miss Wallis, the matron, kept his cup unwashed for years).

  The present Prince of Wales spent an afternoon learning the art of cheese-making here in 2005 and enjoyed it so much that the Duchess of Cornwall visited a year later. The college has attracted £35 million of investment and its hyperactive, OBE-winning principal, Meredydd David, has long been determined that the Queen should come and see some of the new facilities, not least a shiny new equestrian centre and a dairy unit. It was finally arranged after some patient but persuasive advocacy by the Lord-Lieutenant of Cheshire, Sir Bill Bromley-Davenport. He would be welcoming the Queen here except for the fact that he has reached the mandatory Lord-Lieutenant’s retirement age of seventy-five so the honour will fall to his successor. That’s just the way it goes.

  The new Lord-Lieutenant of Cheshire, David Briggs, is the first not to be drawn from the landed gentry or, indeed, from Cheshire’s most famous family, the Grosvenors, Dukes of Westminster. Nor is he retired. He runs a family confectionery business and a business selling musical instruments. But Cheshire is a county of many parts. As well as a large rural rump, it has its old industrial sectors and some famously expensive celebrity/footballer enclaves on Manchester’s southern fringe. Briggs’s talents as a bridge-builder between these various walks of life were spotted during his year as High Sheriff of Cheshire when he made great efforts to get the emergency services and local charities working together on youth projects.*

  Now, in his first months as Lord-Lieutenant, Briggs has the honour of welcoming the Queen. A Buckingham Palace team have come to Cheshire to check all the arrangements. They start at Crewe railway station where the Royal Train will drop the Queen after a slow overnight trundle from London. It’s not just a matter of deciding at which platform the Queen will stop. They must decide where the royal door will open, where the local cadets will be standing to greet the Queen, how many of them will be on parade, where the royal car will be parked and so on. At Reaseheath College, Meredydd David, his trustees and the police are the only ones aware of what is going on. The seven thousand pupils haven’t a clue. Security means that this visit is classified until a few days beforehand. There is palpable nervousness among those in the know. The hosts are waiting for the head of the Palace delegation, the Queen’s Assistant Private Secretary, Doug King, to tell them what to do. He keeps reminding them that it is up to them to decide what they want to gain from the visit. The occasion is for their benefit, not the Queen’s. His priority is to ensure that the Queen and the Duke have a clear idea of what is expected of them.

  As ever, protocol is an anxiety, almost a millstone. People always assume that the Royal Family need protocol much as the rest of us need oxygen, that the Queen or the Duke of Edinburgh will be mortally offended if someone leaves the room before them or a mayor is in the wrong greeting line. In fact, protocol exists to ensure that everyone else knows exactly what he or she is supposed to be doing and therefore feels comfortable. Jonathan Spencer, Deputy Comptroller and the Palace’s man in charge of protocol, is regarded as an almost biblical authority on the matter. As he points out, it’s largely common sense: ‘We don’t even have a book on it because no two situations are the same. We just give practical guidance if we’re asked for it.’ He is often being grilled by his own colleagues. ‘Last week I had a call from Clarence House. The Prince of Wales was going to Cornwall as Duke of Cornwall to the Royal Cornwall Show. Should he fly the Duke of Cornwall’s flag? I just told them: “If they want to and you want to and the flagpole’s high enough, why not? He’s the Duke of Cornwall and it’s the Royal Cornwall Show.” In other words, common sense.’

  In the earlier years of the reign, the Queen was always confronted by long lines of civic worthies. The Palace position is that it is a matter for the hosts to decide these things. But the hosts always want to do what the Queen prefers and, these days, the Queen prefers less formality. So, lines have shrunk. It’s the same at her own events. Except for the annual white-tie Palace reception for the protocol-obsessed Diplomatic Corps, the Queen discourages long lines at home. Like the Prince of Wales, she asks her staff to arrange guests into small horseshoe-shaped clusters.

  The students at the Reaseheath equestrian centre are too polite to ask why all these strange men in suits are pacing the distance from an imaginary Bentley to an imaginary handshake. The Palace team are delighted to learn that a former groom from the Royal Mews
is now working here on the staff. They need to work out a cunning way for him to be introduced to the Queen. He can’t be in the greeting line because it will upset the civic worthies. Instead, Philip Warren, twenty-four, will be strategically positioned holding open a gate through which the Queen will pass. There’s always a solution if you think hard enough.

  For much of the reign, these awaydays simply happened on a loop. A big county or city might expect to see the Queen every three or four years. A tiny, remote one might see her every eight or ten years. Someone would keep a list and say: ‘Right, it’s been a while. We’d better go to Liverpool again.’ Wherever the Queen went, the visits would be pretty similar – a series of ribbon-cuttings interrupted by a civic lunch. That all changed during the process of internal Palace reforms during the nineties with the creation of the Co-Ordination and Research Unit (CRU). The idea was to focus on what sort of contemporary issues the Queen and the Royal Family should be highlighting and to find places that were being overlooked. Central London, for example, was always getting royal engagements, for obvious reasons. But outer London was more neglected than the Outer Hebrides. More recently, the CRU has gone, to be replaced by the Secretariat, a team of young, sharp-eyed, lateral thinkers whose basic job is to see what the Royal Family should be doing – and how it should be interacting with the rest of us.

  An important part of the job is scrutinising new legislation for royal implications. It’s not a question of one law for them, one law for us. Rather it’s about safeguards. If a new Bill gives gas inspectors automatic rights of access to any house in Britain, then, in theory, they might turn up at a royal residence, flash a pass and snoop around because they can. So a royal exemption may be required.

  Freedom of Information requests – whereby anyone can ask for information held by a public authority – now occupy a good deal of the Secretariat’s time. The Royal Household is not classed as a public authority and the Royal Archives are not public records. The Queen and her family have certain exemptions from the Freedom of Information Act because they work to a different timescale from ministers and civil servants. Many (if not most) of the politicians the Queen has encountered during her reign are either retired or dead. But she is still doing the same job. A controversial issue involving, say, a state visit in the sixties may no longer embarrass the deceased Foreign Secretary of the day but it could still be awkward for the Queen.

  Royal exemptions only go so far. They do not cover all royal information sitting somewhere in a government office. Ask the Department of Transport something about trains and the resulting information may involve the Royal Train. It is then down to the Secretariat, led by Doug Precey, to establish whether that information should be kept confidential. If he thinks it should remain so, he will have to argue his case. Precey insists that he is not trying to conceal the truth. ‘The spirit of the Act is one of transparency,’ he says. ‘If we can’t justify to a civil servant, in the course of a robust conversation, why something is sensitive, then we can’t expect them to justify to anyone else why it’s sensitive.’

  The monarchy’s exemptions chiefly concern royal communications. Until recently, any correspondence between public bodies and the Royal Family or their staff- however confidential – could still be revealed, subject to a public interest test. Shortly before the 2010 election, the Labour Justice Secretary, Jack Straw, decided to tighten things up to protect the unique constitutional position of the Queen and all future monarchs. As a result, all communications involving the Sovereign, the heir to the throne and the second-in-line are now automatically exempt from the Act. As Mr Straw points out, the new rules were at his own behest, not the Palace’s.

  ‘I managed to get all-party agreement on much better protection for the Royal Family,’ he says. ‘I felt that they’re in a completely different position because they’re in it for life. And the whole relationship between the constitutional monarchy, including the heirs to the throne, and the government and Opposition would break down if records of private conversations were disclosed. It would just wreck the process. So I made sure they got an absolute exemption.’

  Some newspapers and pressure groups are unhappy with the new rules. They point out that these new exemptions would have prevented the 2009 disclosure that eight government departments had been in discussions with the Prince of Wales’s office regarding a property development which the Prince opposed. On the other hand, it would have set a sorry precedent if future Kings could not speak to their future Ministers in complete confidence.

  The Secretariat is also a research unit, writing briefing papers for the Press Office or digging up precedents for the private secretaries. Today, for example, Precey and his team are trying to find out what happened the last time one of the Monarch’s prime ministers was ousted by a colleague (it has just happened in Australia) and what the Monarch should do if Britain’s Andy Murray wins the men’s tennis at Wimbledon (it’s a case of dusting off the Virginia Wade file from 1977). The Secretariat will cast a watchful eye over all the Queen’s patronages. Is a lesser-known charity for ancient mariners still going? Does it still need a royal patron? They must monitor upcoming anniversaries and suggest ideas. What should the monarchy be doing for the thirtieth anniversary of the Falklands conflict, the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens, Apprentice Week …?

  But a major part of the Secretariat’s work is just that ordinary day-to-day interaction between the monarchy and us – days like this in Cheshire. ‘The Private Secretary’s Office might say: “The Queen is going to x or y. Now come up with a plan!”’ says Precey. ‘So we produce a number of ideas and the day might take shape around that. It’s good fun.’

  But all good plans need an alternative. Sometimes, things just don’t follow the script. And David Briggs, Lord-Lieutenant of Cheshire, has to think fast with just hours before the Queen is due at Crewe railway station. Disaster has struck. The Duke of Edinburgh has had to have a minor operation on his hand and will not be coming. There is now a huge hole in the schedule as the Duke was supposed to be opening the new dairy unit – and it’s his birthday to boot (urgent memo to chef: remove candles from cake). When the staff in the dairy unit hear the news, they are so disappointed that they stop hosing down the floor and adjourn for a cup of tea. The Lord-Lieutenant needs an emergency Duke. He cannot perform the role himself as he will be accompanying the Queen all morning. He discusses the matter with the Reaseheath College governors. They all think that the Vice-Lieutenant, Viscount Ashbrook, would be an excellent choice. A self-effacing Manchester solicitor and popular local landowner, Lord Ashbrook could certainly do the job but he wonders if there might not be a better solution. So the honour goes to Steven Broomhead, the chief executive of the Northwest Regional Development Agency. It’s a sensible move since the college receives millions of pounds in grants via the agency. It will do no harm to treat its boss, quite literally, like royalty. But as everyone admits: ‘It’s not quite the same.’ And the royal plaque will have to replaced with an unroyal one. The dairy staff are not the only unhappy ones. The managers at the Rolls-Royce factory in Crewe were planning to send a new Bentley prototype to transport the Duke for the day. Now they will not.

  Having arrived a day ahead of the Queen, Colette Saunders from the Palace Press Office is checking the entire route all over again. For the first time in its history, the equestrian centre smells of flowers rather than horses. Reaseheath teaches floristry – one pupil apparently came fifth at the world flower-arranging Olympics in Japan – and the faculty of flowers has been busy. Saunders checks that all is ready for the Queen’s grand unveiling of a chainsaw-carved statue of two horses. She talks to Philip Warren, the staff member who once worked at the Royal Mews. He is thrilled to be meeting his former employer. He doubts that the Queen will recognise him – ‘I did meet her at Christmas drinks but there were a lot of people there’ – yet he will always be grateful for his years at the Palace and always likes to tell his students about the 5.55 a. m. starts in the Royal Mews
. ‘I learned about pride in your work and perfection. Mind you, I don’t miss those postilion jackets with a hundred buttons on them.’

  The clouds are darkening overhead but Peter Wilkinson, the Queen’s official television cameraman, who will provide footage for all the networks, is not worried. During fourteen years of filming the Queen, he has only seen her rained on eleven times. ‘She has pretty good contacts,’ he explains. There is a sudden flap in another part of the college. Colette Saunders is summoned to advise. It turns out that some of the governors are worried about a flower arrangement which may be obscuring the plaque which the Queen will unveil. It is a footling, hilarious panic but Saunders takes it in her stride. As the royal advance party, her main job is simply to calm everybody down and remind them that they are supposed to enjoy the day. The Queen will not give two hoots about the position of a flower arrangement.

  Another problem presents itself. A local radio reporter is at the royal arrival point and broadcasting live, with breathless excitement’… The Queen will be seeing the best of Cheshire. Everyone is so excited …’ That’s all good. But, for some reason, the lady reporter is wearing a T-shirt several sizes too small, jeans and flip-flops. The Queen has seen it all before but some of the locals are unhappy. The reporter is dressed for the beach, not the Queen. They sense a lack of respect. As the media minder for the day, Saunders has a quiet word. ‘We don’t see a lot of flip-flops at royal engagements,’ she says gently. ‘Have you got any other shoes?’ The girl shakes her head. She seems genuinely surprised that anyone is bothered. ‘I’m sure she would dress properly if someone important was coming,’ comes a sarcastic stage whisper from one of the crowd. By now, the Queen has arrived at Crewe. Regular trains can do the journey in ninety minutes. The Royal Train has taken a leisurely overnight stroll up the back routes, avoiding all the main lines, and has taken eleven hours and ten minutes. But it arrives at 10.10 a.m., bang on time to the nearest second. David Briggs, the Lord-Lieutenant, does the introductions but keeps the line short. There are royal handshakes for his wife, Lord Ashbrook, the High Sheriff, a trio from the local council, the local MP and the Chief Constable. Cheshire’s de facto monarch, the Duke of Westminster – a Knight of the Garter and a friend of the Queen – will not be seen at all. Once he would have been at her side all day. These days, everything has changed.