The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor

by Penny Junor

Sir Maurice regards Princess Anne as one of the hardest working members of the family and quite the most professional in terms of doing her homework and knowing what she’s looking at. He once took her to a very high-tech cutting-edge firm:

  It invented and manufactured a prism which basically split fibre optics and instead of ten thousand conversations going through a fibre optic, with the prism, there were eight times the number going through the same fibre optic. She knew all about that; could talk to the people in white coats about refraction and technical terms. From there she went to a hospice and she sat beside a dying lady’s bed and knew exactly what to say, also to a nurse with a problem. It’s because they’ve done it so many times before.

  The Queen is less interested in the technical.

  When she came to open a multimillion-pound extension of Motorola in Swindon, I briefed them that the purpose of the visit was for her to talk to the people, the work people, not to get involved in technicalities of what went on inside. Halfway down the line a white-coated expert said, ‘Ma’am, this is our latest toy and if you look inside here …’, and asked her to pop her head inside something the size of a deep freeze and was explaining that the wires connected to this and that; the Queen turned round and gave me a great wink. They’re not interested in seeing computers – they’ve seen hundreds – nor looking at the layout of a factory. They’re there so people can meet them and talk to them and have that wonderful satisfaction of saying ‘I met the Queen today’.

  One of the factories in Wiltshire that several members of the Royal Family have visited over the years is Dyson Appliances in Malmesbury, which found fame with the revolutionary bagless vacuum cleaner. James Dyson is its equally revolutionary inventor and chairman, and is as unconventional as his vacuum cleaners. ‘I spent a lot of my life thinking the Royal Family didn’t have much to offer,’ he says.

  Recently, since I’ve got to know them because they’ve come to see me at the Design Museum [of which he has been chairman for the last five years, and trustee for eight], here at the factory and at the Chelsea Flower Show [where he had an award-winning garden design in 2003] it’s rewarding and important to have someone who comes round and encourages, and congratulates people without having a political or any other motive. There’s a place for that. It’s like being at school and the headmaster or his wife comes round and says ‘Well done’. It’s very nice to know that someone has noticed and cares – as much for me as for my workforce. There is a role for someone saying what you are doing is good and good for the country. If the Prime Minister had done that, it would have been nice but it’s different. We’ve had Gordon Brown here and I’ve been on a trip to Japan with Tony Blair. It’s nice but there could be another motive, a political agenda. With the Royal Family there may be a social agenda but not a political one. When they came here and when Prince Philip went to the Design Museum, they said, ‘What are you doing here? What are your problems?’ They asked intelligent questions – I’ve never heard a member of the family ask a stupid question.

  The Queen came eighteen months ago with the Duke. They weren’t invited. They decided they wanted to come and see us. There was a lot of arranging to do – sniffer dogs and all that. There’s a protocol; the Lord-Lieutenant of Wiltshire, Lieutenant General Sir Maurice Johnston, writes to you and comes to see you to discuss it. You don’t hear from Buckingham Palace at all until afterwards, when you get a thank-you letter. It all goes through the local royal man. It was the same with Prince Charles two years before. The Lord-Lieutenant says they’d like to come and works out what they will do when they are here. He says they’d like to meet as many people as possible. There was no time to do the offices and the production line, so we got everyone into the factory, and at one end of the line was the whole of the finance department, and at the other end all our engineers from the office floor. When you go on to the production line you have to wear yellow safety jackets and safety boots and the Duke of Edinburgh kept going up to people and saying ‘Which forklift do you drive?’ and they would be one of our top scientists. The Queen happened to talk to a lot of people in the finance department and she turned to me and said, ‘Why do you have so many people in your finance department?’ I said, ‘You just happen to have met them all bunched up.’ When I brought her up on to the office floor to use the loo – you have to have a designated lavatory – she was supposed to be brought up by the lady-in-waiting but there wasn’t one around so I brought her up. In a way that was the most interesting part of the whole trip because she talked much more freely when there weren’t lots of people around and was much more interesting and relaxed and chatty. I have a feeling she’s quite shy and finds it difficult.

  The Queen is very easy-going. Other members of the family can be more difficult and Sir Maurice would not be the first person, when awaiting the arrival of the Duke of Edinburgh, to be quietly praying that his royal visitor was going to arrive in a good mood. A former director of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufacture and Commerce (RSA) says that his views changed a lot over his seventeen years of working with Prince Philip, but he never lost his admiration for him.

  He was pretty fantastic, he was pretty daunting and could be pretty awful. He would turn up here in a foul mood and make life very difficult. He could be quite rude to people and unkindly rude, but by the end of the time, two or three hours, he was invariably in a good mood again; the bad moods weren’t very often. Generally he was fantastically supportive and pro and I thought as far as the environment was concerned he was brilliant, and he was a complete master of his brief. That was what amazed me. He did his own homework, wrote his own speeches. He asked for ideas, rough drafts, and he would never use anything verbatim but you could tell he was taking an interest in what you’d say and out came his own stuff. In environment committee meetings with lots of real experts, the Attenboroughs of this world and others, he was the master of the total brief, no doubt. He had a very small staff, a very efficient office in complete contrast to the Prince of Wales’s office. Going back twenty-five years, his was the little tight, well-run group of ex-servicemen mostly, pretty classy sorts. First woman equerry one before last was very nice, but they have become much more relaxed. A lot of the formality has fallen away; when I first encountered Prince Philip it was a very formal occasion. One gets very blasé about contact with the Palace. I have a letter from the Palace every week or a phone call. I joke that I see him more than my sister sometimes because he does do an awful lot for us. And he has a capacity to get into the detail of things. We sent him a governance review about six years ago and he asked to see the by-laws and he discovered four or five drafting errors that the lawyers had completely missed and he obviously enjoyed going through it.

  Prue Leith, who happens to be my sister-in-law as well as a former chairman of the RSA, finds him perplexing. ‘He’s an enigma: really hard-working, well-briefed, intelligent, controversial and good company,’ she says.

  He is the most challenging and terrific RSA president, reading everything and commenting forcefully on anything he doesn’t like. When we were changing the RSA governance, I remember us sending out the new proposals to all forty-odd council members. He was the ONLY one to return it, annotated with suggestions and corrections handwritten in the margins.

  But … and there is always a but, ‘Sometimes he is extremely rude and a real bully.’

  One day he came to an RSA event in honour of Dame Judi Dench, in a thoroughly bad mood, and was cross that there were two photographers present, loudly demanding an explanation from me in front of the half-dozen VIPs waiting to be presented. Since I had no idea why we had two photographers and anyway was unaware that we should not have, I joked, ‘No idea, sir, maybe it’s because one of them is useless and the other is back-up.’ ‘What utter rot,’ he says and turns on his heel and stamps away, leaving me looking like a prat, unable to present anyone to him, and everyone embarrassed. I hissed at the barman to get him a drink pretty damn quick, and left him to his own dev
ices. Of course, being the pro he is, he got on and talked to everyone else, and by dinner time he was completely delightful and great company. By then I’d found out that the unwanted extra photographer was in fact a Palace photographer, and we’d been asked by his staff to accommodate him. I told him this, but didn’t get an apology – just a flat denial. ‘Nonsense, I don’t have a photographer.’

  But he can be unexpectedly un-grand and relaxed. Once, in a discussion on world population, he was banging on a bit about how too many people had too many children and I found myself saying, ‘That’s a bit rich coming from someone with four children’ – the sort of crack you are not meant to make at royals. He just laughed and said, ‘Touché’ or something similar.

  And I remember remarking to one of his equerries that I’d just had a pleasant conversation with Prince Philip and that for once he wasn’t determined to put me down, and he said, ‘That’s because you stand up to him. He likes that.’

  Princess Anne, who is made entirely in her father’s image, was due to open the Millennium Footpath in Bradford-on-Avon one day. At 10.30, driving her own car, she arrived, and Sir Maurice Johnston opened the door and said, ‘Good morning, Your Royal Highness, welcome to Wiltshire’, and she said, ‘It is not a good morning’, and strode swiftly on towards the chain gang he was presenting to her. When he caught up with her and asked what that was all about, she said, ‘For the last twenty-five minutes I’ve been watching you from the multi-storey car park there with a copy of The Times over my head hoping no one would see who I was, because my policeman got me out of bed half an hour early.’ No one she met during the course of her visit would have known how cross she was, but her policeman is certain to have had better days.

  The chain gangs are an inevitable part of royal visits, but something the Royal Family would prefer to see less of. When they are tying to cram so much into a day, and time is therefore limited, they want to meet the people they have come to see – the people who actually teach in the school, who take care of patients in the hospital and the people making widgets on the floor of the factory – not the local dignitaries. The Lord-Lieutenant is there every time a member of the Royal Family comes into his county on official business, his wife or husband is always there, the High Sheriff, the local Mayor or the Chairman of the District or County Council, the Chief Constable and the local MP and sometimes their spouses as well. ‘One tries to limit them,’ says Sir Maurice, ‘but they are dying to be there because it’s a great day in their lives.’

  A new way of patting people on the head, as Sir Maurice puts it, is themed receptions at Buckingham Palace. The first one last year was for Women of Achievement. Perhaps there were some who had stayed away. Perhaps an invitation to lunch with the Queen at Buckingham Palace was not something for which they would have cleared their diaries; but I doubt it. And so on one cold March day, gathered 180 of Britain’s highest achieving women – artists, athletes, academics, actresses, writers, models, politicians, scientists, doctors, businesswomen. Famous names, famous faces – J. K. Rowling, Janet Street-Porter, Kate Moss, Twiggy, Baroness Thatcher, Jennifer Saunders – and many you would never have heard of, but all of whom have done something remarkable – like an Indian woman who started off making curry in her kitchen and now has a business that supplies millions of pounds’ worth of ready meals to one of the leading supermarket chains.

  Before they went in to lunch there were drinks and much chattering. Whatever they may have thought of the monarchy, the women invited to the Palace that day were enjoying themselves. Some said their mothers were pleased they were there, others admitted it was for themselves, several had met the Queen before; two were wearing the same outfit but all seemed to be on a high. Many of them already knew one another, others were meeting for the first time, but seemed excited to be meeting heroes. It felt like a particularly good party and with 180 women talking at nine to the dozen the decibel levels were probably higher than I would guess the state rooms have heard in a century or two. And chatting with just as much enthusiasm were the Queen, the Princess Royal and the Countess of Wessex – the female members of The Firm – who had shaken everyone’s hand formally as they arrived, and then mingled with the guests, walking informally up to groups and joining the conversation as any hostess would at any normal drinks party.

  It is not often that members of The Firm work together. Indeed it used to be the first thing that new recruits to the private offices were told – to avoid putting members of the family together on the same platform, apart from the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, because they were all used to being stars in their own firmaments and happier that way. Even at events like the Chelsea Flower Show they arrive in quick succession in a fleet of separate cars but immediately split up and make their own way around the exhibits.

  The guests congregated in three interconnecting state rooms on the first floor overlooking the garden, one of them the Blue Drawing Room – so-called because of the blue flock wallpaper hung by Queen Mary in the early twentieth century. It is huge – George IV intended it to be a ballroom but died before the building work was finished. Queen Victoria built her own ballroom – where lunch was served that day – and the Blue Drawing Room became a reception room. It is one of the grandest rooms in the Palace, designed by John Nash, as all the state rooms on the first floor were, sumptuously decorated, particularly the ceiling, with moulded plaster reliefs, Corinthian columns and vast chandeliers. Big windows look out over the garden, and, were it not for the full-length net curtains, would offer a wonderful view across the lawn and down to the lake. Why the curtains are there I have yet to fathom. It isn’t as if buses trundle past and passengers on the number 25 are going to see in. That side of the Palace is not overlooked; and the garden was deserted, except for a flock of greylag geese grazing greedily on the lawn.

  From this height you could see that the lawn was still showing signs of strain from the two Golden Jubilee concerts. They may have lasted no more than two days but the effect on the lawn, where the colossal stage had been erected many months in advance, was every bit as great as that on the country. First there was a classical concert with great names from the world of opera at which the Queen, the Prince of Wales and Camilla Parker Bowles were all seen for the first time together; then there was the Party in the Palace, the biggest Golden Jubilee party of all – an evening of rock and pop with a spectacular pyrotechnic finale. Nothing like it had ever been seen at the Palace before. Twelve thousand people lazed on the lawn of the most famous building in Britain and listened to music spanning the fifty years of the Queen’s reign. The Telegraph’s music critic was disappointed, however.

  Queen Elizabeth II came to the throne in the same year Britain got its first singles charts. Her reign has coincided with the explosive birth and ongoing evolution of a vibrant pop culture. Although it may have had little impact on Her Majesty’s dress sense, she has presided over rock and roll, the beat boom, psychedelia, heavy rock, prog rock, reggae, punk, ska, indie, new romance, electro pop, acid house, hip hop, trip hop, Britpop, jungle and garage. Yet precious little of this astonishing diversity was reflected in a Jubilee line-up almost exclusively divided between veterans of the sixties and the latest crop of all-singing-and-dancing, twenty-first-century stage-school graduates. It was a Royal Variety Show in everything but name, emphasizing the light-entertainment aspect of pop that has changed little over the decades.

  The content was immaterial. The event was ground-breaking. Never before had the Palace gardens been opened up to the general public. These were not people who had done good works in the community or served the country in two world wars; they were not diplomats or civil servants. They were ordinary people of every age and background, in work, out of work, pro-monarchy, anti-monarchy – all they had in common was that they had been successful in the ballot for tickets. The tickets were free, and each person was given a hamper with a picnic and a small bottle of champagne in it. They were the lucky ones; outside in the Mall and Green Park a milli
on people watched the action on a series of giant screens while the noise of the music boomed across the Palace walls into the night; and a further two hundred million watched it on television worldwide. And not only did they get to see such global superstars as Paul McCartney, Rod Stewart, Eric Clapton, Tom Jones, Phil Collins, Cliff Richard, Shirley Bassey and Annie Lennox – with Brian May of Queen standing on the roof blasting out the National Anthem to signal the start of the concert – they also got to see the real Queen – and Charles, Camilla, William and Harry all together for the first time in public. The Queen (wearing ear plugs) and the Duke of Edinburgh – neither known for their love of rock music – joined twenty-five younger members of the Royal Family in the royal box for what they thought was the last half-hour, but the concert so overran that they had to listen for an hour before taking to the stage to thank performers and to hear the Prince of Wales pay tribute to both the Queen and the Duke.

  He also thanked the stars for their performance, which he said had made him ‘feel extraordinarily proud of this country’. He then turned to his mother and, to deafening cheers, said:

  Your Majesty … Mummy. We are here tonight because, above all, we feel proud of you. Proud and grateful for everything you have done for your country and for the Commonwealth over fifty extraordinary years, supported unfailingly throughout by my father. You have embodied something vital in our lives – continuity. You have been a beacon of tradition and stability in the midst of profound, sometimes perilous, change. Fifty years ago, I would probably have been playing in the sandpit in the garden just behind this stage. But now you have generously invited everyone in here for a thoroughly memorable concert. So, Your Majesty, we are all deeply grateful to you and, in the words of the National Anthem, you have certainly given us cause to shout with heart and voice, ‘God Save the Queen’.