The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor

by Penny Junor

  The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh have no interest in tracking opinion polls themselves. It’s a form of self-protection they have developed over the years. They read newspapers and the Queen watches the early evening news on ITV so they are well aware of what is being said and written about them, and they pick up the sarky comments in comedy programmes, but they don’t pore over the minutiae, as Diana did, looking to see if they had a good report today.

  It’s the Private Secretary’s job to talk these kinds of issues through with the Queen, to discuss the way the monarchy is currently being perceived in the country and to work through the implications, and when and if necessary, recommend change. And it is probably one of the toughest and most crucial parts of the job.

  You trod carefully as you would with a minister or Prime Minister, and probably more carefully because it is an intensely personal role. Generally if you are in public life you can console yourself that if you’re being criticized, it’s your official persona that’s being criticized. But it’s very difficult for the Royal Family because that boundary line between being a private and public individual is blurred for them. One of the things I took away from my time at the Palace was a feeling that there needed to be a clearer distinction between the two. I think they’ve learnt to protect themselves from taking the criticism personally to some extent, but only to some extent.

  Criticism was at its fiercest, of course, in the days after Diana’s death, and that was the second major impetus for change. By the end of the week, when the family had finally come back to London and the Queen’s broadcast had showed the country that its sovereign was back in the driving seat, no one at Buckingham Palace was in any doubt that the future had been on a knife edge. The Queen pulled it off; catastrophe was averted but it could easily have gone the other way. No one had any illusions about that, and they realized that change in the way the Queen’s programme was organized was now a priority.

  First they mapped out how the Queen currently spent her time on official visits; how many organizations in the private sector she went to compared to those in the public sector, what parts of the country she visited; when she went to schools, how many of them were private, how many state; within the private sector, how often did she go to manufacturing companies compared with service companies. And they mapped it against the current structure of society in the economy and discovered, for example, that she was doing a disproportionate amount in the public sector for the number of people employed in it. When she did pay visits to the private sector she tended to visit manufacturers rather than companies in the service industry because it was easier to devise a visit for her when there was something specific being made that she could look at. So even though the service industry accounts for 80 per cent of the private sector she didn’t go there. But the reason she tended to go to more public schools than state schools, they found, was simply because she received more invitations from public schools.

  ‘What we tried to do was get the maps a bit more aligned, which wasn’t difficult once you tried, and I think she found she was visiting rather fresher places, that were fun.’ She started going to popular, touristy kinds of places, like a Center-Parcs, and an aquarium in Liverpool, an example of new investment in that part of the country. In London, where she had only ever done ceremonial events in the past, the Queen spent a whole day visiting the City of London; she had lunch at the Financial Times, visited an investment bank, a venture capital company, sat in on a Monetary Policy Committee at the Bank of England, bought a copy of the Evening Standard from a vendor outside Holborn underground station and met messengers biking documents all round the City; everyday experiences for most people, all new for the Queen. She spent another day in theatre-land, a huge source of tourist income, and among other things watched a rehearsal of the musical Oklahoma!, and visited the Almeida Theatre in Islington. They became known as ‘theme days’ and were as relaxed and informal as possible. On other days, the Queen has toured television studios and seen something of the world of broadcasting; she dipped into publishing when she visited Bloomsbury and met the Harry Potter author, J. K. Rowling; and last year the entire Firm (this was a first) spent the day visiting tourist attractions all over the country, each member of the family in a different region, culminating in a big reception at Buckingham Palace in the evening for leading lights in the tourist industry.

  I was with the Queen on that day and I never cease to be amazed by how very informal she is when she is out and about meeting people. Security is tight but it’s low-key and unobtrusive and in no way puts up a barrier between the sovereign and her people. She doesn’t put on any great show, doesn’t keep a grin on her face in the way that showbiz personalities do when they meet their public. She smiles when something amuses her or if someone hands her something particularly pleasing but her face is often in repose – and therefore quite glum, even when the cameras are on her.

  Tourism is Britain’s sixth most important industry. Visit-Britain (formerly the British Tourist Board), which markets the country abroad, estimates that there are 2.1 million jobs in the industry – 7 per cent of all people in employment – and the monarchy, with its palaces, history and pageantry, is one of the principal draws. The top five royal attractions in the country – the Tower of London, Windsor Castle, Hampton Court Palace, Buckingham Palace and the Palace of Holyroodhouse – account for more than four million visits each year. But they also go in their hundreds of thousands to the decommissioned Royal Yacht Britannia berthed at Leith in Edinburgh, to Sandringham, KP, Balmoral, and, more recently, Clarence House; and to watch the annual Trooping the Colour ceremony. The biggest free visitor attraction in London is the Changing of the Guard which happens every morning on the forecourt of Buckingham Palace at 11.00 a.m. and lasts for half an hour. The Guard is mounted by the two regiments of the Household Cavalry – the Life Guards and the Blues and Royals – each of which provides one squadron for a special ceremonial unit in London, which is housed in Hyde Park Barracks with more than one hundred horses, and men who do a two- or three-year stint before returning to their operational units. The man in charge is Major General Sebastian Roberts who sits at the Duke of Wellington’s old desk in the aptly named Wellington Barracks with history all around and the awesome task of ensuring that the military aspect of state ceremonials goes according to plan.

  Buckingham Palace is not just a magnet for tourists. It is a rallying point where people instinctively go when there’s a problem or a cause for celebration – either personal or national. When in 1982 a schizophrenic named Michael Fagan had family problems, it was the Queen he wanted to talk to. ‘I was under a lot of stress,’ he said, ‘and just wanted to talk to Her Majesty about what I was going through.’ So he broke into the Palace, found his way to her bedroom and she awoke to discover him sitting on her bed with a broken ashtray in one hand and blood pouring from the other – and, incidentally, needed to make two calls to the police switchboard within the Palace before anyone came to her rescue. When in 2004 a divorced man wanted visiting rights with his children, he dressed up as Batman and scaled the front of Buckingham Palace to stage a protest on a ledge and refused to come down for five hours. He caused a major security alert and the Metropolitan Police commissioner warned that the next time anyone tried a similar stunt they might very well be shot. (The mother of the interloper’s third set of children, meanwhile, walked out on him, saying that he spent twice as much time demonstrating as he ever spent with their children and she’d had it; but that’s not the point. The point is that he made his protest at Buckingham Palace.)

  Those of her subjects who don’t drop in personally – and the Queen prefers it if they don’t – tend to write to her. She gets about three hundred letters a day: some of them to do with political matters, some wanting help in solving a local problem such as housing or hospitals – or the difficulty for divorced fathers in seeing their children – and some are straightforward fan letters (and a few abusive), but others are also highly personal, ju
st as Michael Fagan’s conversation was personal.

  And that is one of the functions of monarchy: providing a focus for people’s emotions. Two women spend an entire morning each day opening and sorting letters. The Queen doesn’t answer them personally but she sees them and gets a very good feel as a result for the issues that are worrying people. Her other great feeler for the mood of the nation is the conversations she has when she is on away days. People may only have a few seconds with her when she shakes their hand, and some are so overcome with nerves that they utter nothing intelligible, but some come straight out with whatever is on their mind, from Britain’s engagement with Europe to the contentious issue of foxhunting.

  The Queen’s other opportunity to meet people outside her own social circle is at receptions and lunches at the Palace. A recent innovation has been themed receptions. There was one for pioneers, for example, to which people like James Dyson, of vacuum cleaner fame, were invited; another for people who had changed the life of the nation, for which the television cook Delia Smith was chosen; and another for women of achievement, which included all sorts from Lady Thatcher to Kate Moss.

  The research for all of these activities is done by the CRU. They plan the Queen’s programme and research not only who the women of achievement, for example, are for the receptions, but also which parts of the country are due for a royal visit. They have the latest in IT – researched, you guessed it, by the CRU – and with this they can produce geographical analysis tables of royal visits, and can work out where each member of the family should go in the coming six months.

  On one of the days I followed the Queen she was in Surrey, where amongst other things she opened a new orthopaedic wing at Epsom hospital and met a familiar face – Mr Roger Vickers, the surgeon who operated on her knees and the Queen Mother’s hips so successfully. It was no random choice: she had not been to the county for five years. They also do research on patronages; if a charity approaches a member of the family asking them to become patron or president, they check it out. They research new thinking from the private sector, look at policy procedures, work with the Press Office on opinion polls, scrutinize travel plans; the list is endless, and, according to Havill, the unit is constantly changing, constantly modernizing, constantly evolving.

  A longer-established tradition are small, informal lunches at Buckingham Palace for assorted members of the great and the good. It was an idea suggested by the Duke of Edinburgh, who has had many good ideas during the course of the Queen’s reign. These lunches were held so that the Queen could meet interesting people and opinion formers who she didn’t normally come across; and, just as importantly, so that they could meet her. The first lunch took place in 1956 and she has been holding them ever since. People who go are generally enchanted, my own father among them. There were ten guests the day he went, a typical number. At the time he was editor and columnist of the Sunday Express; his fellow diners were a Tory MP, Sue MacGregor, then the presenter of Woman’s Hour, a High Court judge, an interior designer, the coxswain of the Humber lifeboat and Anne Beckwith Smith, lady-in-waiting to the Princess of Wales. They gathered promptly at 12.50 in the 1844 Room where they were given a drink before lining up to meet the Queen and Prince Philip who came in and shook hands with each of them and engaged in small talk. There were corgis roaming around and my father jokingly asked the Prince whether they were dangerous. ‘You mean are they in danger from you?’ he retorted. He had clearly done his homework and had a journalist in his midst under sufferance.

  At lunch my father found himself on the Queen’s left-hand side, the judge was on her right, and throughout the first two courses – salmon, followed by braised ham – she addressed not one single word to him. He was beginning to feel more than a little miffed. At the other end of the table he noticed that the Tory MP was in exactly the same situation. He was on the Duke’s left and for two courses had been completely ignored while Philip lavished attention on Sue MacGregor, seated on his right. The two of them looked at each other and shrugged their shoulders.

  But as soon as the pudding arrived the entire table was transformed. The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh both turned to the guest on their left and my father basked in the Queen’s full attention for the rest of the lunch. They chatted, he said, like old friends and he was always certain that the key had been horses. On the way to the Palace his office driver, a very keen punter, had told him to ask the Queen whether her horse Height of Fashion was going to win the Oaks. This is precisely what he did and the Queen immediately lit up and explained that the horse’s legs were possibly too long for the Epsom course but that its chances would be decided by whether the horse ran well at Goodwood. Bingo.

  SEVEN

  Diana

  Someone should have taken them to one side and said, ‘Make this work. Go out on to that balcony, hold hands, smile and when you come back down, one of you turn to the right, one to the left. Take a mistress, take a lover if you want, but for the sake of the boys, the family and the country, stay together.’ No one seemed to have the long view; Diana was a huge asset. She’d have been in her forties by now; and one of the most interesting women in the world, the best ambassador for this country ever. She could have been UNESCO’s child ambassador … Wherever we went people’s eyes widened – her mannerisms, her dress sense. What else did he want? In that position you’ve got to work together. Someone should have said to the Queen, ‘This is the next generation coming through.’ They should never have let her go.

  These are not the words of an outsider who didn’t understand the situation. This is someone who worked for the Prince of Wales before his marriage and for both the Prince and Princess for several years after the marriage. He was a member of the royal household for ten years in all and was loyal, devoted and dedicated. He is now in his early seventies and might still have been there in some capacity or other had he not been caught in the crossfire of the warring Waleses. He was enormously fond of both the Prince and the Princess and would have wished the greatest personal happiness to them both, but this was not about personal happiness. It couldn’t be. They were not just any couple; they were royal, they had obligations; and his principal concern is for the monarchy.

  There is no doubt that he is right. The monarchy was very seriously damaged by the breakdown of that marriage; it destroyed the respect that a great many people instinctively felt for the Royal Family and it paved the way for much of the intolerable media intrusion that has now become a part of their lives. Charles and Diana would not have been the first couple to have lived separate lives under the same roof; they didn’t even have to be under the same roof – they already had a roof each – Charles at Highgrove in the country, Diana at Kensington Palace in London. Aristocratic families have been doing precisely this for generations: staying married for the sake of their children and their estates, and discreetly taking lovers on the side. It should have been possible for the Prince and Princess, but this was such a mismatch, the relationship so volatile, Diana so unpredictable and the handling of it all so inept that in the final analysis bringing the marriage to an end was the lesser of two evils.

  Michael Colborne first met the Prince of Wales in the Navy in the early seventies when, fresh out of Dartmouth, Charles had joined his first ship, HMS Norfolk, as a sub-lieutenant. Colborne was a non-commissioned officer, fourteen years his senior, unfazed by the HRH tag and quite unafraid to speak his mind. He was a grammar-school boy, with a wife and young son, who had joined the Navy at sixteen and been there all his working life. The two became friends and they would sit up at night, talking over a few drinks; Colborne would often pull his leg and when they were on shore leave he would show him the sights. This was the first time the Prince had mixed with people from a different social class and he was fascinated by every aspect of Michael’s life; when the Prince left the Navy in 1977 and became a fully-fledged member of the Family Firm he invited Colborne to help set up his office. Officially he was in charge of his financial affairs, but in pract
ice he became the Prince’s right-hand man, and the only member of his staff prepared to tell Charles the truth, however unpalatable it sometimes was. The Prince welcomed his honesty and made him promise that he would never change. ‘If you don’t agree with something, you say so,’ he had told him, but, of course, on those occasions when Colborne had disagreed and said so, there was all hell to pay.

  Like his father and grandfather, George VI, the Prince has a terrifying temper that has reduced strong men to tears; it was that which finally drove Michael Colborne away. Lord Mountbatten, the Prince’s great-uncle and mentor, had once said when he was on the point of leaving in the very early days, ‘Bear with him, Michael, please. He doesn’t mean to get at you personally. It’s just that he wants to let off steam and you’re the only person he can lose his temper with. It’s a back-handed compliment really, you know. He needs you.’

  The Prince did need him, not least in helping him cope with Diana. The story of Charles and Diana and their marriage has been analysed and written about ad nauseam – I have done a fair share of it myself – but I am now about to do it again. This is partly because no book about the monarchy can ignore the significance that that marriage and all the consequences of its failure has had on the institution; and partly because, in my view, despite all the books, articles and documentaries, there is still a profound misconception about the whole sorry tale.

  Colborne was one of the first people the Prince told about his proposal to Diana. He was the one who organized flowers to greet her on her return from Australia where she had gone while making up her mind about marriage. The Prince had asked him to send her the biggest, most fragrant bunch of flowers he could find and had handwritten a welcome home note to go with them. They had been delivered by the Prince’s police protection officer, yet years later, when the Princess was talking about her rotten marriage, she threw it out as a sign of his callousness: ‘I came back from Australia,’ she told Andrew Morton. ‘Someone knocks at the door – someone from his office with a bunch of flowers and I knew that they hadn’t come from Charles because there was no note. It was just somebody being very tactful in the office.’ Nothing could have been further from the truth.