On Duty With the Queen: My Time as a Buckingham Palace Press Secretary

by Dickie Arbiter

  The year was shaping up to be a nightmare in terms of royal press, and not just because of the various marital disharmonies. There were not one but two significant breeches of Buckingham Palace’s security. Just ten years after Michael Fagan had managed to get into Her Majesty’s bedroom (while she was in it), another intruder successfully made his way into the Palace gardens, while a short time later a second trespasser found his way through an open set of French doors and into the Palace itself.

  While security breaches were a serious concern, it was still the human stories for which the public had an insatiable appetite. As the year drew to a close, it became increasingly obvious that the Waleses 11-year marriage was coming to an end.

  I had always had my doubts that Prince Andrew’s marriage was going to last, but the breakdown of the Waleses union saddened me. For all of the media’s cynicism on the subject, I knew with certainty that at one point there had not only been a strong connection between the two, but genuine love and adoration.

  Age difference aside, in the end I believe that Charles and Diana simply inhabited two different worlds.

  CHAPTER 12

  Trouble and Strife – Annus Horribilis Part Two

  November 1992

  From the media’s point of view, Charles and Diana’s trip to South Korea in November of 1992 signalled the end of their marriage. I had travelled to Seoul ahead of the couple to carry out my usual pre-visit recce, and was on hand at the airport the day of their arrival. As the door to the aircraft opened I turned to the protection officer and said, ‘we’ve lost this one.’

  The Prince and the Princess were the epitome of Mr and Mrs Glum – her expression pinched and pale, his rigid and morose. Their body language was so hostile, it was as if they could have killed each other with a single glance, and the dark cloud hanging over them would remain throughout the tour.

  Unless they were to her advantage, Diana had no interest in conducting joint tours anymore. She was much more concerned with undertaking solo visits, which were still few and far between. For the South Koreans, however, this was a valuable and significant visit. Regardless, the media’s sole interest was of a more personal nature – how the royal couple was getting on…or, more to the point, not getting on. It was a tour in which the pictures alone told the story.

  But one Household member’s poor choice of words definitely didn’t help matters.

  ‘How are the Prince and Princess coping with all this?’ asked The Daily Mirror’s James Whitaker of the tour’s private secretary. ‘Is the marriage okay?’

  ‘All marriages have their problems,’ replied the private secretary, testily.

  It was an attempt to deflect the question, but he pretty much gave credence to all the rumours that we had spent months trying to quash. If we hadn’t lost the tour upon arrival, we had undoubtedly lost it now.

  Indeed, less than a month after Their Royal Highnesses return to England, the then Prime Minister, John Major, announced to the House of Commons that the Prince and Princess of Wales had agreed to separate.

  After years of speculation, the relief was palpable, but as one fire in the House of Windsor was extinguished, another, which would prove equally damaging, was about to ignite.

  There has been a castle in Windsor for almost a thousand years. The longest occupied castle in Europe, it was built by William the Conqueror in the 11th century, following the Norman Conquest of 1066. Constructed as part of a defensive ring of motte and bailey castles around London (each a day’s march from the other), it wasn’t used as a royal residence until Henry I made it his home at the turn of the 12th century. Since then, it has been continuously occupied by royalty, sometimes as a main residence, such as when Queen Victoria lived there following the death of Prince Albert in 1861. At other times it served as a hunting lodge and party venue – as was the case with James I – or as a collection of grace-and-favour apartments for prominent widows and friends of the crown, as during the reign of George II.

  Today, Windsor Castle is where the Queen spends the majority of her weekends throughout the year. Though she cherishes the peace and solitude of Balmoral, Windsor has always held fond family memories. The Queen and her sister, Princess Margaret, spent a large part of their childhood there during World War II. It had been suggested that the young princesses should be evacuated to Canada, but their mother refused, proclaiming, ‘the children could not go without me, and I could not possibly leave the King…and the King will never leave.’ For their safe keeping, the girls were sent to Windsor. There, they staged pantomimes at Christmas to raise money for The Queen’s Wool Fund, which purchased yarn to knit military garments. Along with their nanny and governess, Elizabeth and Margaret sheltered in the castle dungeons during air raids. They also joined a local Girl Guide group, with whom they spent time alongside other evacuees.

  Windsor continues to be a profoundly personal site for the Queen. Her parents are entombed in St George’s Chapel, within the castle walls, along with the ashes of her sister Margaret.

  Friday, 20th November, 1992 marked the Queen and Prince Philip’s 45th wedding anniversary. There would be no celebrations, as the Prince was abroad on business. Instead the Queen would be heading to Windsor alone for the weekend.

  I was in my office at Buckingham Palace when the phone rang. It was BBC Radio Berkshire.

  ‘Can you confirm there’s a fire at Windsor Castle?’ asked the girl at the other end of the line.

  This was news to me. Surely if it was true, someone would have phoned to inform the press office. I told her I couldn’t confirm it, and that I would get back to her. I immediately called the Castle switchboard.

  ‘Is there a fire there?’

  ‘Erm, I can’t tell you anything,’ replied the operator.

  ‘In that case, can you ask Major Eastwood to call me as soon as possible?’ Major Jim Eastwood was the Superintendent of Windsor Castle at the time. If anyone was on the case, it would be he.

  ‘I can’t, I’m afraid. He’s not here. He’s a bit busy.’

  Not surprising, given the news I’d just heard. I asked if she could get a message to him to call me, and then went to find Charles Anson.

  I was standing in Anson’s office and about to declare, ‘There’s a fire at Windsor Castle…’ when the phone on his desk rattled to life with the news.

  There was indeed a blaze raging through the Brunswick Tower, with 50-foot flames leaping into the sky. With the fire confirmed and a fervent media racing to the scene, Charles and I agreed that I should get to Windsor as quickly as possible. I sprinted out of the Palace and jumped into my car, switching on my hazard warning lights before tearing through the gates and making it to the Castle an impressive 28 minutes later.

  Word of my imminent arrival had clearly preceded me, because when I swept in towards the advance gates I was ushered straight through. I followed the road up to the Quadrangle. The sight that greeted me was shocking. Flames ripped through the tower as police held back the swarms of correspondents.

  My first task was to find a place where they would be able to report on the events as they unfolded without hampering the efforts of both the fire brigade and the military. After weighing the options, I relocated them to the Moat Path. It was an ideal location as it provided an unimpeded view of the fire and the accompanying activity in the Quadrangle, while also keeping them out of harm’s way.

  Fire engines descended in droves. Members of the armed forces had been drafted in from the two local barracks, Victoria and Cumbermere, to assist in moving to safety the many precious items from the Royal Collection.

  In that respect, we had been very lucky. Longstanding work to replace the out-of-date wiring had been going on in that particular section of the Castle for some time. As a result, many of the treasures housed within its walls had already been cleared out. When the fire had finally been doused, we realised just how fortunate we had been. Only two major items in the Royal Collection were destroyed – an 18-foot Morel & Seddon sideboard, and
a painting of George III by Sir William Beechey. Both works were of such vast dimensions that it was impossible to get them through the doorway.

  The Queen arrived around 3pm. She was immediately met by Major Eastwood in the Quadrangle. He informed her that a halogen lamp had ignited a curtain in the Queen’s Private Chapel at 11:33 that morning, and that the fire had proceeded to spread quickly to neighboring rooms. By 12:20pm, it had spread to St George’s Hall, the largest of the State Apartments.

  Prince Andrew, who’d been researching a project in the Castle’s Royal Library, had immediately taken charge, assembling all able-bodied people to help evacuate works of art from the building. As Prince Charles rushed from Sandringham to aid in the rescue efforts, the Queen remained on site all day and into the evening. She would spend that night in her private apartment at the Castle, and return to assess the damage the following morning. In a largely unprecedented move, I had Andrew step before the cameras on two occasions to provide updates on the emergency personnel’s progress. He was very good indeed.

  The main fire continued to burn until 11 o’clock that night, and the secondary fires weren’t completely extinguished until early Saturday morning.

  The Windsor fire was the second conflagration in a royal residence in a short space of time. There had already been one at Hampton Court Palace in 1986, which had caused major damage to the King’s Apartments, the restoration of which was only completed in 1990.

  Being such a dramatic feature on the Windsor skyline, any destruction to the Castle would have had catastrophic implications. The fire was always going to be a major news story, and the scale of media interest was immense. What we couldn’t have anticipated, however, was that an unguarded remark by a politician would lead to an even greater story.

  The cost of the damage was estimated to be in the region of £40m. The following morning, as fire crews worked to dampen the remaining embers, the media posed a perfectly legitimate question: ‘Who pays for the restoration’?

  Secretary of State, Peter Brooke, an elected politician and member of the cabinet, went before the cameras, and in the heat of the moment announced, ‘the government will pay.’

  The outcry was vociferous and immediate, and the press enthusiastically fanned the flames of outrage and disgust.

  I had been at the Castle managing the media throughout the crisis, as 225 firemen and emergency personnel struggled to contain the blaze, using over a million gallons of water from the River Thames. I had wrongly assumed that that would be my sole responsibility as press secretary, but a much more perilous job was to come. Within seconds, Peter Brooke, a government minister whose job it was to be absolutely non-committal, had handed the press a completely erroneous story on a platter.

  Politicians are not very good at ‘saying nothing’… unless it is they who are directly in the line of fire. With the statement now declared before a global audience, I was left to deal with a barrage of questions from what was becoming a very hostile press pack. The story gained momentum by the hour. It ran and ran. As head of the establishment, it was the Queen who was yet again left to carry the burden of responsibility. Nothing we said or did seemed to alter the public’s perception or repair the damage. The media had struck at the weak underbelly of the Monarchy, and the press was going to run with it for as long as possible.

  I have often wondered since what it must have felt like for the Queen at the time. A global royal news story with an ugly political twist must have been deeply traumatic for her. All that quite aside from the horror of watching her beloved home, which contained centuries of history, go up in smoke.

  Four days later, on 24th November, Her Majesty gave a speech at the City of London’s Guildhall. Already battling a heavy cold and laryngitis, she spoke sadly and eloquently of a year that she would, ‘…not look back on with undiluted pleasure. In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents,’ she told the nation, ‘it has turned out to be an Annus Horribilis.’

  The question of who would pay for the Windsor Castle restoration wasn’t just an opportunity to score party political points. It also highlighted just how much is misunderstood with regard to our Sovereign’s wealth. Her Majesty’s fortune has always been a matter of speculation. When The Sunday Times produced its first Rich List on 2nd April, 1989, it was clear that, as with most things royal-related, they were completely misguided. Predictably, they listed the Queen at number one. Why? They simply made an uninformed assumption.

  What is now correctly understood is that Her Majesty does not have quite the property portfolio that the Rich List would have had us believe. She does not own all of the royal palaces and castles in the UK. In fact, she owns just two royal residences – the Sandringham Estate in Norfolk and Balmoral Castle in Scotland. The others are all owned by the State. When making the initial calculations, those charged with compiling the Rich List had thrown into the pot the Royal Navy’s Royal Yacht Britannia, the RAF’s Queen’s Flight, the Royal Train, the Royal Collection (which the Queen merely holds in trust for her successors and the nation), and – erroneously – the Crown Jewels, which are also part of the Royal Collection. In short, her financial portfolio had been fabricated, and it took almost two years to convince The Sunday Times of the reality, which would prove to drop her down to a more realistic number 59 on the list.

  By 2014 her place had fallen to 285, well behind Virgin Group founder, Sir Richard Branson (23), former Beatle Sir Paul McCartney (142), British composer and musical impresario Andrew Lloyd Webber (162) and Harry Potter creator JK Rowling (180).

  Which begs the question: Why is the Queen dropping down the rankings year after year? The answer is actually very simple. Those above her are invariably involved in commercial, profit-making enterprises, with vast resources at their fingertips. Her Majesty solely has her investments. What these are, no one really knows, but they’re certainly not as lucrative as some would have us think.

  Meanwhile, I was about to see a big change in my own modest profit-making enterprise – my job. Unlikely as it may seem, the fire at Windsor Castle was about to play both a pivotal and ultimately positive role in my future.

  CHAPTER 13

  Receiving Visitors

  August 1993

  We hoped that the year following Her Majesty’s Annus Horribilis would be significantly less dramatic. It proved to be a landmark year with a major and unexpected royal first.

  While more than 50,000 people are invited to Buckingham Palace each year to attend state banquets, lunches, dinners, garden parties, investitures and receptions, the grounds had never been open to paying visitors. Aside from the necessary maintenance work that usually occurs during the summer months, there was no particular reason why it shouldn’t have been opened to the public, especially given that the Queen and Prince Philip holiday at Balmoral in August and September each year.

  Inspired by Her Majesty and endorsed by Prince Philip, the idea of a summer opening hoped to capitalize on those two available months in order to provide funding for the restoration of Windsor Castle.

  The period following the Castle fire had been a bruising one for the Royal Family, as indicated by the Queen’s Christmas Day message that year, in which she stated: ‘My heart goes out to those whose lives have been blighted by war, terrorism, famine, natural disaster or economic hardship. Like many other families, we have lived through some difficult days this year. The prayers, understanding and sympathy given to us by so many of you, in good times and bad, have lent us great support and encouragement. It has touched me deeply that much of this has come from those of you who have troubles of your own.’

  Although some of the initial public fury died down in the wake of Her Majesty’s speech, there were still public rumbles of dissatisfaction with a Monarchy continually perceived to be living the high life, while expecting taxpayers to fund the £40m restoration bill. A number of venomous letters detailing such frustrations made their way into print.

  It would be an understatement to say that we in t
he press office felt aggrieved by what Peter Brooke had said on camera. Not only had he failed to consider the consequences of his actions, but he had also stood in defiance of his permanent secretary, Hayden Phillips, who had told Peter in no uncertain terms to withhold any information about how the rebuild was to be funded until details had been properly worked out.

  With their backs against the wall, the Royals inevitably stuck to their guns and the public summer opening was put into place. The Palace called a media briefing on 29th April, 1993, at which it was announced that the State Rooms would be opened to the public for a five-year experimental period. Entrance to the grounds of Windsor Castle – previously cost-free to visitors – would now be included as part of a new one-price ticket, replacing the previous ticket to tour the Castle itself. Minus startup costs, all revenues raised through admissions and souvenir sales would go directly into the restoration fund. The hope was that these measures would solicit 70 percent of the estimated £40m needed to repair the damaged areas of Windsor Castle.

  The media was quick to praise the Monarch for such a revolutionary idea – a welcome turnaround from the previous weeks – but it wasn’t long before praise turned to ridicule. Certain papers went on to lampoon the entire exercise, going so far as to make irreverent suggestions for the souvenirs that should be sold in the gift shops – Kitsch at the Palace, as one rag described it. Stuffed corgis, Prince Charles boxer shorts, royal loo roll covers and the like were loosely bandied about for consideration.