The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor

by Penny Junor

  But what was good for St James’s Palace was not necessarily viewed in such a favourable light from across the Mall. Stories in the press that the Queen was still hostile to Camilla did nothing to amuse. For the Prince’s own fiftieth birthday the Queen gave a party at Buckingham Palace to which Camilla was not invited. Since the guests were people from his public life that was not surprising. What did seem surprising was that the Queen refused an invitation to a private birthday party that Camilla gave for Charles at Highgrove. In retrospect the Prince realized he should have spoken to his mother about the party first and not just allowed her to find out when an invitation arrived out of the blue. More likely was that she found herself between the devil and the deep blue sea. There would be a media story whatever she did: if she went she would be seen to be condoning the relationship, which she was not prepared to do at that stage; if she didn’t, she was snubbing Camilla. Damned if she did; damned if she didn’t.

  SIXTEEN

  Master of Spin

  One of the most damning charges levelled against Mark Bolland during his time with the Prince was the accusation that he briefed against other members of the family in his quest to portray his boss in a good light. The Wessexes felt particularly aggrieved, as did the Duke of Edinburgh. It started with Prince Edward’s television company, Ardent. When Prince William went to university at St Andrews in October 2001, St James’s Palace drew up a kind of Faustian pact with the press, generally known as the St Andrews Agreement. William’s side of the bargain was that once a term he would give the press access in the form of a photocall and an informal chat. In return, the press would leave him alone thereafter and allow him to enjoy his university career unmolested. In the first week of his first term, no sooner had the press dutifully left the Scottish seaside town than Prince William spotted a television crew filming. It turned out to be a crew from Ardent.

  In no time at all the newspapers were full of the story, with reports in the Daily Mail that the Prince was ‘incandescent’ with rage that the one company that should have flagrantly ignored the agreement should have been his brother’s. He was so angry that he had refused to take telephone calls from Edward. The story blew up into a major attack on Prince Edward and his competence as a film maker, and ran for some days. Then a further report claimed that Prince Philip, in support of his youngest son, thought William was being ‘overprotected’ by his father and that he had ‘overreacted’ to the Ardent film crew.

  The stories had Bolland’s fingerprints all over them, and once again Buckingham Palace was not amused. In a rare reaction, Prince Philip issued a strongly worded public statement saying that the views attributed to him by the Daily Mail were ‘totally without foundation’.

  His peers, however, had nothing but admiration for his endeavours. Shortly afterwards Mark Bolland won a public relations industry award for his campaign to improve the image of the Prince of Wales. In honouring him as PR Professional of the Year, he was commended for overseeing ‘a massive sea change in the relationship between Charles and the press … and moving the subject of any potential marriage to Camilla Parker Bowles on to less negative ground’.

  In January 2002 another extraordinary story came out of St James’s Palace. The Prince of Wales had taken his younger son to visit a drugs rehabilitation centre after he confessed to smoking cannabis. The story was a News of the World exclusive and had come directly from the Prince’s office. Prince Harry had been drinking under age and after hours in a pub called the Rattlebone Inn in Sherston, near Highgrove, as well as smoking cannabis. Prince Charles had discovered the previous November what had been going on while he had left Harry home alone during the school holidays, and had handled the incident well, so the story went. He had taken him for a short sharp shock to Featherstone Lodge in south London to talk to recovering drug addicts. What could have been a wholly negative story had a positive spin. Charles had handled the nightmare scenario – one that every parent with a teenager dreads – and reacted well. The story was so well sourced that there were suggestions in some sections of the media that maybe Bolland’s friendship with Rebekah Wade was just a bit too cosy.

  Not many people knew at the time that this was a masterful piece of damage limitation. The News of the World had published a photograph of a very spaced-out Harry in a nightclub in Spain during the summer. They had kept a watch on him ever since, spoken to associates, and had compiled damning evidence of far more serious behaviour than that which appeared in January 2002. Rebekah Wade rang Bolland to alert him to what they had and he brokered a deal which saved the young Prince’s bacon and left his father smelling of roses. The Prime Minister headed the list of people queuing up to praise Prince Charles. ‘The way Prince Charles and the Royal Family have handled it is absolutely right and they have done it in a very responsible and, as you would expect, a very sensitive way for their child,’ said Tony Blair on Breakfast With Frost. Peter Martin, chief executive of Addaction, Britain’s largest drug and alcohol treatment agency, said, ‘The Prince of Wales has acted with deep sensitivity and very quickly, which is exactly what is needed.’ To which the Department of Education added, ‘Parents play a very important role, as demonstrated by Prince Charles, who has set an extremely good example.’

  None of them pointed out that leaving a seventeen-year-old – particularly one as mixed-up and vulnerable as Harry – home alone for long periods of time with no parental guidance is bordering on the negligent, and is certainly a recipe for disaster. Of course Prince Harry is not home alone in the sense that he’s a latch-key kid. The house is fully staffed and he always has a police protection officer with him, but these figures are not in loco parentis – and suggestions that a certain sort of behaviour might be inadvisable (such as wearing a Nazi outfit to a fancy dress party) are usually unwelcome.

  By now Bolland was finding that the fun was wearing off. He had too many powerful enemies, not just those who worked for the Queen across the Mall but some of the Prince’s friends with whom Bolland had clashed over the years and who had the Prince’s ear and thought him a bad influence. He had been at St James’s Palace for almost six years; he had had enough of the infighting and backstabbing and being on call for the Prince of Wales morning, noon and night. Stephen Lamport had already announced he was leaving in the summer and his replacement was to be Sir Michael Peat, architect of the modernization programme at Buckingham Palace, Keeper of the Privy Purse and a direct import from the enemy camp. Bolland knew it was time to go.

  And so in February 2002 he announced his resignation and left to set up his own company, MBA, a public relations consultancy; but such was the Prince’s dependency on this charismatic character (to whom Prince William referred as Lord Blackadder, after Rowan Atkinson’s creation) that, following his departure, he paid Bolland £130,000 a year to act as an adviser to both him and Camilla in a private capacity.

  ‘Mark has been a senior and much valued member of my staff for nearly six years,’ said the Prince in tribute, ‘and is now ready to move on to develop his career in new areas, but I’m delighted that he will continue to provide help and advice to my office.’

  It suggested a calmness he didn’t feel. For the next year Mark Bolland continued to spend hours on the phone to both Charles and Camilla, to hold their hands, handle their crises, all the while discovering that his other clients offered much less trouble for far more money. He began to tire of this, too. He wanted out; he didn’t get on with Michael Peat but he wanted Charles and Camilla to drop him rather than vice versa. In February 2003 the perfect opportunity presented itself. Rebekah Wade claimed to have some stolen strands of Prince Harry’s hair, taken so as to have them DNA tested to ascertain whose son he was – the Prince of Wales’s or James Hewitt’s. (This, by the way, is a physical impossibility since Diana did not know Hewitt until after Harry was conceived.) Peat handled it in what Bolland considered to be a ham-fisted way, and said so. A row ensued, it became obvious to everyone that the relationship wasn’t working and Bolland ha
d his out. He had been colourful and controversial, he had put up backs and sent shock waves through the immaculately carpeted corridors of Buckingham Palace, but he had done what had been asked of him. He had made Camilla Parker Bowles a legitimate part of the Prince’s life. And the fact that in 2005 Charles was able to marry Camilla without the sky falling down is a major credit to Mark Bolland. He prepared the ground.

  And yet he is the only member of the Prince’s staff of that seniority who remained in his employ for that length of time who was not offered a gong.

  SEVENTEEN

  Planes, Trains and Automobiles

  I was standing on the platform of a station in the small town of Mistley in Essex. It was ten o’clock in the morning and the royal train was expected. A shaven-headed policeman in fluorescent jacket arrived with a bouncy black Labrador. Half his tail was missing. What happened to his tail, I asked. He wagged it so much he kept hitting things with it and splitting it open, explained the handler. The dog raced the length of the platform, sniffing along the railings that bordered the station; his rear end wagging furiously, he leapt on to the small stone wall, investigated under the single railway bench where nobody sat and bounded briefly into the undergrowth at the far end. His handler called him back. The two of them then jumped down on to the rails, crossed the track and climbed up on to the southbound platform to do the same there. The dog was a delightful hooligan; the handler might have gone that way too, but the police force caught him in time. They made a good team.

  There was a small reception committee waiting on the platform – several men in suits and the Lord-Lieutenant of the county in full fig with sword and spurs, gold braid and red stripes up his trouser legs. The men stiffened briefly as a train approached but passed straight through. Everyone relaxed and the forced laughter and chatter continued. People checked their watches. In the station forecourt a group of excited schoolchildren had gathered, clutching a motley collection of flags and banners. They had been waiting a long time. And across the road, a beautifully restored nineteenth-century maltings, the object of the day’s visit, was filled with nervous people in best bib and tucker, all of whom had some connection with the project. They too had been waiting a long time.

  Suddenly we had action. At 10.07, two minutes late, the royal train came into sight and slowly and deliberately pulled up alongside the platform. Did the driver see the reception committee and calculate how far forward he had to go to make sure his passenger stepped from his carriage at precisely the right point, or had it all been recced and worked out in advance? I don’t know. But I do know that there is no chance that the Prince of Wales walked along the inside of the train until he found the door that best suited his hosts. He is not in the habit of making adjustments; he expects everything to be perfect and invariably it is.

  The train is not what you might expect a royal train to be; although, given how clean and shiny the paintwork and windows are, you know it can’t be a regular passenger train. The engine that pulls it looks very ordinary – it is one of two, and does in fact pull other coaches when it’s not wanted by the Royal Family, without anyone being the wiser – and the rest looks quaintly old-fashioned, rather like a train Miss Marple might meet. It is maroon with red and black livery and a grey roof and resides in Wolverton, just outside Milton Keynes, where aged retainers lovingly polish every nut and bolt. The Prince had spent the night on board, having had an engagement in Scotland the previous evening. Sometimes it travels through the night, sometimes it pulls into a siding, depending upon timing. Either way, the Prince and his entourage would have had a good night’s sleep and been able to work as well. It is not quite the Orient Express, given that most of the coaches are thirty to thirty-five years old and could do with refurbishment, but the train is extremely comfortable by any standards, with armchairs and sofas, a dining room, office and communications equipment, decent-sized bathrooms, showers, soft down duvets and full-sized beds, and, in the Prince’s coach, pictures of Highgrove on the walls. It is a home from home, and one of the most secure ways of accommodating the Royal Family overnight – as well as being one of their favourite – and of maximizing their time. Both the Prince of Wales’s and the Queen’s coaches are heavily reinforced; they are ten times heavier than the other coaches.

  The man who organized that trip to Mistley was Group Captain Tim Hewlett, a pilot with the RAF for thirty years. He is now in his mid-fifties, has been at the Palace since 2001 and as director of Royal Travel runs the equivalent of a small travel agency from a narrow little office on the ground floor. He’s informal, relaxed and friendly, and clearly enjoys his job, as everyone I have met inside Buckingham Palace seems to.

  Hewlett is also the Queen’s Senior Air Equerry (actually, post-Peat and his 188 recommendations, he is her only Air Equerry) and as such flies everywhere with the Queen. One of the requirements for the job was that he should have military fixed-wing experience, and although he doesn’t fly the aircraft, if anything went wrong he could, and he is certainly in a good position to advise a course of action if an engine fails, for example, a not unknown occurrence. He travels in uniform, acts as a go-between with crew and passengers and stands at the foot of the steps when the Queen disembarks. Wearing his other hat he handles the travel arrangements for the entire Royal Family and is an expert on trains, planes and helicopters and how to get the best and cheapest deals. The private secretaries say where their principals need to travel to, when and why, and he and his team calculate the best and most economical way of getting there. It is often a combination of transport, and very often the answer can be for the entire journey or part of it to be on normal scheduled services.

  On a recent visit to Cambodia and Vietnam, for example, the Princess Royal flew commercially to Bangkok, but once there used a BAe 146 which Hewlett’s team had flown out separately because there was no other means of getting about, and she returned with British Airways.

  Since 9/11, the Queen and the Prince of Wales no longer travel on scheduled airlines because of the security risk. Nor do they ever fly together in the same aircraft – they never have – and the Prince of Wales does not as a rule fly with his sons. He needs the Queen’s permission to do so and there have been occasions in the past when she has refused it. The only exception was when the Queen Mother died, and Charles, William and Harry all flew home from Klosters together. But the Queen and Prince of Wales, like every other member of the family, can and do use normal scheduled passenger trains from time to time. For most of them no special arrangements are made. They travel first class and simply reserve a seat and travel with a royal protection officer. Princess Anne frequently travels on the train between Kemble and Paddington. She is met by a car on the platform in London and whisked away, but at Kemble, a small country stop near her home in Gloucestershire, she walks to the car park like any ordinary commuter. The Queen, of course, doesn’t. She usually has a carriage to herself and always travels with a lady-in-waiting, a Private Secretary, an equerry and police protection officers and considerably more fuss is made – but not as much as you might imagine. The Lord-Lieutenant of Wiltshire was due to meet the Queen off a regular passenger train at Swindon one day. ‘I was told what time she would arrive and there was no sign of her. I thought “Damn it, she’s missed the train”, then spotted a little lady walking down the platform swinging her handbag.’ As Hewlett says, ‘In PR terms it looks like a nice cheap option, and we can stand proudly in front of the accountants and say it cost £35 for a first class rail ticket for the Queen, but the security costs are quite considerable and those are not part of our budget. [The police pay for security.] It’s not really so cheap. But the royal train is expensive …’

  The train is owned by Network Rail and operated by EWS and is the most expensive means of transport they use. The cost of the Prince of Wales’s journey from Edinburgh to Essex that day would have been getting on for £20,000; the audited figure for 2003–04 is £48 per mile by rail, compared with £14 per mile for air travel. (Curiously,
there is no similar breakdown for travel by road.) He had to get to four separate locations around the county and home in time for a reception, followed by a dinner at Buckingham Palace. It was a very tight schedule; and after that first engagement in Mistley he transferred to a car – an insignificant-looking black Ford Sierra – and he and his staff were driven in convoy with a police escort at high speed from one place to the next. His schedules are invariably tight and it is always difficult to keep to the timetable; when a couple at the converted maltings, whose apartment the Prince was looking over, wanted to show him their collection of model boats, his timing went for six. The minute he hit the back seat of his car the convoy was off, five vehicles in all, with a marked Metropolitan Police car at the front and an unmarked one bringing up the rear that belonged to the local force. I was trying to follow in my own car and was warned if I couldn’t keep up they wouldn’t wait, and if I followed them through a red light, which they can do themselves if necessary, I would be on my own. As we approached a junction the lights duly turned red and I was forced to stop. I lost them but we were just about to turn on to a dual carriageway with scarcely any traffic on it; I had a fast car, I could easily catch up. Some hope. I was nudging 100 mph for the next twenty miles or more and didn’t even catch sight of them. They had been doing 120 mph.