The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor

by Penny Junor

  The question was what would happen once they left school. Prince William was left unmolested during most of his four years at St Andrews. The deal the Palace made with the media worked. There was the Ardent episode, which got things off to a bad start, and there were photographs of him walking down the street with a Tesco carrier bag, also a couple of stories about girlfriends, but overall it was successful. And in the filmed interview he gave in November 2004 – which he would never have given had the media not behaved well – he made it clear that he was grateful to them for having allowed him to live life as a relatively normal student: doing his shopping, renting videos, going to the cinema and to pubs and generally enjoying himself. He said the agreement had been ‘invaluable’ and hoped it would continue once he left university.

  The chances are it might. William has a kind of natural authority – and so far no labels attach. He is very much his own man – a much stronger character than his father – he knows what he wants and will do what he wants. He grew up with a profound dislike of the media and a hatred of cameras, having been subjected to so much of it with his mother and seen what havoc and unhappiness it caused to all their lives. But since his mother’s death he has been well served by a series of good, kind and sympathetic individuals in his father’s Press Office who have broken him in gently, carefully hand picking journalists to interview him and photographers to take pictures, gradually building up his trust, teaching him that not all media people are out to hurt or take advantage of him, that not all publicity is damaging. He knows that, like it or not, the media is going to be an essential part of his life – essential for the monarchy and the role he will have to play in The Firm. He will need the media as much as the media will need him – and, like his mother, he is playing the charm card, but where Diana spent most of her life out of control, William is in command and my guess is that he will command respect.

  Sandy Henney was the first Press Secretary to take William under her wing. A former civil servant, she was warm, genuine and devoted to both boys. She had flown up to Balmoral after Diana’s death at the Prince’s request to talk to William and Harry and to try to prepare them in some way for what they would find when they came to London for their mother’s funeral. Being there, helping them during that emotionally difficult time, made the relationship slightly special, and when Sandy fell on her sword after arrangements for William’s eighteenth birthday photographs went wrong, they were sorry to see her go. Colleen Harris, her deputy, took over. She was another former civil servant and another caring, solicitous mother figure who also built up a good relationship with William and Harry and loved them dearly. Both women were ideal when the boys were vulnerable teenagers without a mother; but the new press supremo at Clarence House is perfect for them now that they are young men. Paddy Harverson, who came from Manchester United, arrived in October 2003. He’s an imposing figure, a former journalist – he was sports correspondent on the Financial Times and still loves football – stands six foot four and is bright, straightforward, fair, forty and unflappable. And having spent his time at Manchester United, the world’s biggest and most successful football club, dealing with giant egos, millionaires and megastars like David Beckham and perpetually managing intense tabloid interest, he was neither overawed by Clarence House nor the challenges of his new surroundings.

  Sir Michael Peat had taken up his position a year earlier as an antidote to Mark Bolland, with the express intention of getting the Prince of Wales’s private life out of the newspapers and his good works into them. Paddy Harverson’s arrival cemented the plan. He doesn’t spin, doesn’t have favourites and is straight as a die. He also made it plain early on that Clarence House was under new management. When the Daily Express columnist Carol Sarler viciously attacked Prince Harry in February 2004 he immediately fired off a furious letter to the editor for publication. Harry had just arrived in Lesotho on his gap year, having previously been working on a cattle farm in Australia, and there had been stories of him visiting London nightclubs. Sarler had written:

  That Prince Harry is a national disgrace is scarcely news. His exploits have been making headlines for years: the drinking, the drugging, the yobbing, the waste of the costliest education in the land, the explicit disdain for the lower orders, the increasingly sexual public romps. But now there’s a new note creeping into the royal revelations that turns my already queasy stomach: all of a sudden there’s a nudge-nudge, wink-wink in the air, along the lines of good old Harry, eh? Just like any other lad his age, just a regular kinda guy … No, he’s not. And I swear, if I really thought all nineteen-year-olds, in whose hands our future lies, were anything like him then I’d emigrate. He has never once done anything because it was the right thing to do and has rarely lifted a finger unless it’s to feel up a cheap tart in a nightclub. Harry has opted for eight lavish weeks in interesting parts of Africa, where he has reluctantly agreed to spend a bit of the trip staring at poor people.

  Her words, said Harverson, exercising commendable restraint, ‘made it entirely clear that Ms Sarler has little or no understanding of Harry as a person and no knowledge of how he has so far spent his gap year. Like any other nineteen-year-old fortunate enough to be able to spend time travelling and working abroad, Harry should be allowed to enjoy and benefit from his experiences without being subject to the kind of ill-informed and insensitive criticism made in your paper by Ms Sarler.’

  It was the first time either of the two Palaces had responded to an opinion piece in a newspaper; two months later, he made it clear that this was not a one-off. When the Sun published paparazzi photographs of Prince William on the slopes at Klosters with his girlfriend Kate Middleton – just days after he had performed for the cameras in a set photocall – Harverson punished the paper by banning Harry Arnold, the veteran Sun photographer, from future photocalls with William. It wasn’t Harverson’s doing but before he arrived Clarence House also went after the Mail on Sunday, an action which came to fruition in June. The paper had published a story that Prince William had speared and killed a dik-dik, a dwarf antelope, during his time in Kenya. Clarence House claimed the story was wrong; the Mail on Sunday had a good source and refused to back down and so Clarence House lodged a complaint with the PCC and the newspaper finally gave in. Speaking on the BBC Radio 4’s Today, Harverson said, ‘Now, hopefully, they will understand that we do take things seriously and will hold them to account where we feel that they are wrong and have evidence to prove that they are wrong.’

  ‘The one thing the Royal Family can never ever succeed in is litigation against the papers,’ says Guy Black.

  It should never even attempt it. The example of the Mail on Sunday and the dik-diks in Kenya is an interesting example of where things are stacked in the media’s favour. At one point the Royal Family started involving lawyers and threatening legal action. I talked to the newspaper a bit about it and we both reached the same conclusion, that the idea of taking legal action was laughable. How do you put Prince William, with his well-known views on hunting, in the witness box on a trial about killing animals? ‘So what is your view about hunting? Do you approve of foxes being clubbed to death, in which case what’s your problem with dik-diks? Tell us about your hunting exploits.’ They would have a field day. The newspapers would love to get one of them in court; it would be worth having to pay hundreds of thousands of pounds in libel expenses just for all the information that would come out during a libel trial. So the media has got them where it wants them on this. They could never sue over libel or privacy. The courts have already fashioned some jurisprudence on privacy under the Human Rights Act, but a lot of it relates to the issue of ‘If you court the media a bit, if you put aspects of your private life into the media, then you must expect the media to pay attention in return, and if you are a public figure you must expect the public to be interested in you’. That is a doctrine of the courts now laid down and Prince William is a public figure. Again, anyone who goes into the witness box to defend their privacy ends up wi
th their reputation shredded. Naomi Campbell, Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta Jones; okay, they may come out of it with a bit of money – but that’s not important to the Royal Family – but their reputation is in tatters. So I’ve never seen the case for a privacy law to protect the rich and famous because they wouldn’t benefit from it and the people who would least benefit from it are the royals because they couldn’t use it.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Burrell

  The Royal Family, however, did come close to appearing in court in the notorious Burrell trial in 2002 – not initiated by them but by the Crown Prosecution Service, driven by the Spencer family, Diana’s executors. It was a trial that should never have come to court and, but for the behaviour of one of the arresting officers, probably never would have done. The damage and the subsequent fallout were inestimable. Paul Burrell, who began life as the Queen’s footman and moved on to become Diana’s ‘rock’ (and thence to fame as a celebrity), was accused of stealing more than three hundred items belonging to the Princess of Wales’s estate. His house was a veritable Aladdin’s Cave of items that he had either been given by the Princess or taken for safekeeping, and when police arrived on his doorstep early one morning in January 2001 looking for Diana’s mahogany box – the box that supposedly contained letters from Prince Philip, James Hewitt’s signet ring and tape recordings that came to be known as the ‘rape tapes’ – which they never found, they arrested him for theft. Their pretext for the dawn raid was the theft of an eighteen-inch-long jewel-encrusted model of an Arab dhow worth £500,000 which had been a wedding present to the royal couple from the Emir of Bahrain. It had been offered for sale in a London antiques shop, and the man accused of stealing it was Harold Brown, another of Diana’s butlers. He claimed that Burrell had authorized its disposal. In October 2002 Burrell was brought to trial for the theft of the items found in his house and a month later the trial was abandoned after the Queen apparently ‘remembered’ a conversation with him in which he had told her that he had taken a number of items from Kensington Palace for safekeeping. Harold Brown’s trial for the theft of the dhow collapsed a few weeks later, also before he took the witness stand and supposedly because of this evidence from the Queen.

  The Queen had not suddenly ‘remembered’ anything. After Diana’s death in 1997, the Queen had been encouraged by the domestic staff at Buckingham Palace to see Burrell, who was utterly distraught. Because she was fond of him and felt sorry for him she agreed. And so they met but because it was not a formal meeting – Burrell had come in from the staff side – Robin Janvrin knew nothing about it. During the course of the conversation Burrell mentioned that he had taken a few papers from Kensington Palace for safekeeping, about which the Queen took little notice. Four years later she read about Burrell’s arrest in the newspapers, still thought nothing of their conversation but was saddened that such a nice man should have been up to no good. The Prince of Wales had similar sentiments, as had William and Harry, who had grown up with Burrell, knew his wife and as children had played with his two sons. The Prince of Wales would have liked to help but was warned by his lawyer, Fiona Shackleton, to stay out of it. He was told it was a legal process; he must not try to protect Burrell or get involved in any way. His private secretaries at the same time were telling him that Burrell in court would be a disaster and should be averted at all costs. And so Mark Bolland set up a meeting between the Prince of Wales and Burrell – who at that point had not been charged – for 3 August. The hope was that if Burrell apologized, confirmed that he had intended only to retain the property for safekeeping, agreed to return it all and not reveal information personal to the Princess of Wales, then they would tell him that it might not be necessary for the police to press charges.

  The meeting never took place because that same morning the police met the Prince of Wales and others at Highgrove and indicated to him that they were ‘in a position to show that Mr Burrell’s lifestyle and finances altered drastically after the death of the Princess of Wales’. Also that ‘police are in a position to produce evidence that large quantities of items have been sold abroad to several dealers. In addition an independent source has shown police photographs of several staff members dressing up in clothing belonging to the Princess of Wales at a party before packaging them up and sending them abroad.’ With what seemed like incontrovertible evidence that Burrell had been profiting from Diana’s belongings, all thought of reasoning with Burrell vanished. The meeting was cancelled and Burrell was charged on 18 August and came to trial that October. When the Queen heard about the police evidence, all sympathy she may have had for Burrell also vanished.

  The trial went ahead with some uncomfortable revelations filling the newspapers for several weeks. During the course of it Maxine de Brunner, one of the arresting officers, who had been at the 3 August meeting at Highgrove and had told the Prince of Wales that Burrell had been profiting from Diana’s belongings, was interrogated by Burrell’s leading counsel, Lord Carlisle QC. Had she, he wanted to know, been to Highgrove to tell the Prince of Wales that his client was believed to have been selling items abroad? She agreed she had, and agreed that there had been no evidence to back it up. Had she ever corrected the false impression she gave to the Prince, he wanted to know? No.

  The Queen read all of this in the newspaper reports of the trial and began to wonder whether Burrell might not have been rather harshly treated. She had never thought that her conversation with him in 1997, which referred to a few papers, could have been in any way relevant to the trial, since the three hundred-plus items he had squirrelled away were furniture, pictures, ornaments and clothes. Nevertheless, having heard that what the police told Charles wasn’t true, perhaps, she reasoned, Burrell wasn’t guilty after all. She mentioned it to Prince Philip and the Prince of Wales while the three of them were together at Buckingham Palace before setting off for St Paul’s Cathedral for a memorial service after the Bali bombing. The journey took them past the Old Bailey where the trial was underway. After the service the Prince of Wales rang Sir Michael Peat, newly installed as his Private Secretary, and asked him if the Queen had ever mentioned to him that she had seen Burrell after Diana’s death. He hadn’t and asked whether the Prince was sure she had. Yes, he said, she had told both him and the Duke of Edinburgh. Peat then said they should mention it to the police. Yes, said the Prince, but thought that Peat had better speak to the Queen first to make sure he had the story absolutely right. Having ascertained that the story was right, Peat then rang Fiona Shackleton who rang the police and, to everyone’s surprise, the trial that had cost £1.5 million was suddenly brought to a shuddering halt. Why evidence that Burrell had told the Queen that he had a few papers should have undermined a trial for theft of more than three hundred items found in his house and under his floorboards remains a mystery to everyone in both Palaces.

  Paul Burrell had had a devastating experience. He was a sad character, obsessed by the memory of Diana, but his life had been shattered, he had felt abandoned, he had contemplated suicide, he was out of a job, he had no money. And waiting in the wings was the Mirror, the persuasive Piers Morgan and its reporter Steve Dennis who had become a friend. No fewer than four hundred media organizations approached Burrell, offering up to a million pounds for his story, but he decided to tell all to the Mirror, who gave him editorial control, for £300,000. ‘He will protect the memory of Princess Diana,’ said Morgan the day the deal was done, ‘and will honour his pledge to always protect the Queen. But I think there will be many others in the Royal Family and close to the Royal Family who will be quaking in their boots tonight.’

  It must have been one of the best deals that Piers Morgan ever made. Not only did he have riveting stories day after day pushing up his circulation, but a year later, despite promises that he would never betray the Princess or the Royal Family, Paul Burrell came out with a book, A Royal Duty, which was sensationally serialized in the Mirror. ‘This particular phase of my life,’ wrote Diana in a letter supposedly w
ritten ten months before her death, published in the first instalment, appearing to support conspiracy theories about her accident, ‘is the most dangerous – * * * * * * * is planning “an accident” in my car, brake failure and serious head injuries, in order to make the path clear for Charles to remarry.’ It wasn’t long before they overcame the ‘legal reasons’ and named the Prince of Wales as the person she feared was trying to kill her – although serious doubt has since been cast on the date of the letter. It appeared to have been genuine in as much as it was written by Diana but written years, not months, before her accident. In another letter written shortly before her death she said, ‘I have been battered, bruised and abused mentally by a system for fifteen years now … Thank you, Charles, for putting me through such hell and for giving me the opportunity to learn from the cruel things you have done to me.’