by Penny Junor
Prince Charles leaves his private secretaries to keep in touch with the chairmen and chief executives of his charities – except for the few key ones. He has five private secretaries in all: Michael Peat; his deputy, Elizabeth Buchanan; and three assistants, Paul Kefford, James Kidner and Mark Leishman, and they each have responsibility for different aspects of the Prince’s life. Princess Anne has one Private Secretary, a jolly ex-naval officer called Nick Wright who, on the day I met him, wore a tie with elephants on it and paperclip cuff links. I mentioned Starbucks and he said he’d never been into one. ‘What are people doing in there?’ he said. ‘Why aren’t they at their desks?’ ‘You can see who he works for,’ said Ailsa Anderson, laughing. She is the one in the Buckingham Palace Press Office who handles the Princess Royal.
The Press Office at Buckingham Palace has changed a lot since I first met Michael Shea there in 1981. Penny Russell-Smith is the Queen’s Press Secretary and she has ten people plus a PA in the department, with different titles and grades and all but four of them assigned to a particular member of the family; the other four run the website or deal with ceremonial and court circular type of things. Penny Russell-Smith is rather like a kindly schoolmistress: constantly preparing for Speech Day, slightly harassed and anxious, a little earnest, always immaculately dressed and made up. She is not the promptest at answering emails, however – in common with some of her colleagues both in the Press Office and in other departments in Buckingham Palace – and entirely failed to show up at one of our first meetings. She was due to be my guest for lunch in a restaurant; after waiting for forty minutes I rang to discover from her colleague that a meeting had overrun. She wouldn’t be coming. If I hadn’t rung I might still be waiting there now – she never rang, never apologized, never mentioned it. But she has been very helpful – as has her team – and there is no longer the feeling that their sole job is to keep the press at bay. The regular royal photographers and cameramen all love the girls in the office – who currently seem to be in the middle of a baby epidemic but they are good fun and totally unaffected and matter of fact about the people they work for. They share a smart hat that lives in the office for formal engagements and go out of their way to get the press the shots they want.
Robin Janvrin (also bad at responding to emails), to whom they all ultimately report, is well aware that the monarchy stands or falls on its media coverage. The day the phones are silent and no emails arrive – the day when no one wants to read about the Queen or look at pictures of the Royal Family – is the day the monarchy dies. As one of the Prince of Wales’s former private secretaries says, ‘I think even adultery may be a better thing than boredom.’
Mark Bolland’s brief as Deputy Private Secretary to the Prince of Wales was to make his relationship with Mrs Parker Bowles acceptable to the British public. Sir Michael Peat’s has been to get adultery off the front page and promote the Prince’s work which had been largely obscured by the media frenzy over his private life. Peat felt that the Bolland approach – pandering to people’s craving for celebrity news – was dangerous, an effective way of boosting the Prince’s image in the short term but not wise in the long term, which is what the Royal Family is here for, because celebrities have a limited shelf life. He doesn’t deny that people are much more interested in sex and money than good works, and accepts that a certain amount of the Prince’s private life – and that of his sons – will filter out, but feels it has to go hand in hand with some knowledge about what they do in the course of their jobs.
‘We were having Beckham without the football,’ says a former colleague.
I think Michael was also dubious about Bolland’s methods, of spinning and trading stories with favoured newspapers, which, although effective, did not earn the institution respect – and caused huge divisions between St James’s Palace and Buckingham Palace, which was extremely damaging. It worked in the short term but in the longer term it was helping to undermine people’s respect for the institution; it put the Prince of Wales and Mrs Parker Bowles into the celebrity category and it damaged people’s view of the honesty of the institution. The prime ingredient of any leader is trust, and the Queen and the Prince of Wales are in leadership roles. People must be able to trust them, and if they employ people who go about using techniques that don’t display trust then you’re in trouble because it’s very corrosive.
Michael Peat has worked with Robin Janvrin for more than fifteen years and if anyone can heal the rift between the two Palaces and repair some of the damage that has been done, not just during Bolland’s years at St James’s Palace, but ever since the Prince set up his own show, then it will be him. He came to the job with an overall view of monarchy. His predecessors were concerned – as most private secretaries are – with their principal, their boss. And that is the weakness of the current system. Robin Janvrin, or even Lord Luce, the Lord Chamberlain, has no jurisdiction over the Prince of Wales, and Penny Russell-Smith no influence in Clarence House. They are two separate organizations both theoretically working for a common cause – The Firm – but not always giving out vibrations of unity. Even within Buckingham Palace there are a series of separate fiefdoms, each member of the family having their own household and their own private office. Although there are regular meetings between private secretaries and regular communication within the Press Office, outsiders who have to deal with more than one member of the family find it intensely frustrating. ‘It’s interesting how compartmentalized the household is,’ says one chief executive. ‘If I tell a Private Secretary something there’s no guarantee it will reach the others. I have to tell each one. They do seem to look after their own person. If I want to be certain I will tell them both. What they need is a decent director of communications at the Palace – they need Alastair Campbell over there. The problem is no one has set up an office to look after the Royal Family; every office is private.’
FORTY-ONE
In the Genes
One evening last summer I had a call from Paddy Harverson, the Prince of Wales’s new Communications Secretary. He was in Gloucestershire. Knowing I lived nearby, he asked me to join him in the Hare and Hounds at Westonbirt for a drink at about 9.00 p.m. I had rung him earlier to say I was writing a piece about Prince William: could he help me with some background information? We had met a couple of times. On one occasion we had had lunch – and he was there bang on time. Every time I had emailed him or phoned him since he had come back to me within hours if not minutes. It gives a very good impression of the man he is working for. (Mark, dearly love him though I do, was completely hopeless in that respect.) ‘I hope Prince William is going to join us in the pub,’ said Harverson that night. The Hare and Hounds is less than a mile from Highgrove. When I arrived, the saloon bar was filled with journalists and photographers – about fifteen in all – some familiar to me, some not. They had all come down to Gloucestershire in preparation for the following morning’s informal photocall – the latest series in the St Andrews Agreement – when Prince William was going to perform in front of the cameras and answer a few questions about life at university. As a change, he had decided to do it on the Home Farm at Highgrove. Paddy was also there, dressed in jeans and a jumper, as was his deputy, Patrick Harrison. Both men looked distinctly off-duty. And as I talked to my media colleagues I realized that none of them knew who was about to walk through the door. Paddy had simply invited them to join him for a drink in a friendly kind of way.
At about 9.25 the door opened and in walked William with Mark Dyer, the ex-Welsh Guards officer who travelled with him on his gap year. He was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and, but for the familiar face, could have been any tall, slim, tousle-headed twenty-one-year-old walking into the pub. Paddy immediately sprang up to greet him and introduced him to the people standing round, even the most hardened of whom were looking flushed – and I don’t think it was the beer. Having shaken each and every hand and looked us all in the eye as he did so, the second in line to the throne of England said he would
like a pint of cider and sat down on a bench with his back against the wall. Those who could find chairs sat in a circle around him; others stood and for nearly an hour, while he drank his pint and we drank ours, we all chatted. Seldom have I seen such a self-possessed, confident yet self-deprecating, skilful, thoughtful and charming young man – nor such a group of seasoned hacks (myself included) leaning forward so intently to catch and savour every word. Questions he didn’t want to answer he simply bounced back or laughed knowingly at, as if to say he wasn’t going to fall into that trap, but it was done with such charm that there was no offence. He asked the News of the World journalist whether he came here often, did he know the area? ‘Oh, yes,’ he said, ‘I’ve been here quite a lot but I can’t say I’ve ever been invited.’
The photocall had been arranged on the farm quite simply because William was down from university for the summer holidays and the Prince’s staff who organized it thought it might provide some interesting shots – feeding pigs, driving a tractor, that sort of thing. Little did they know when they set it up six weeks earlier that that very week one of the tabloids would announce that, according to ‘senior courtiers’, William was planning to turn his back on the Army after university to pursue a career in farming. Suddenly an innocuously pastoral photocall looked like a major statement about the future intentions of the future king of England.
But as William made clear that night, and again in an interview he gave to the BBC and Press Association in November 2004, the first term of his final year at St Andrews, he is not planning a career in farming, any more than he is planning a future at the Lewa Game Reserve in Kenya, where he spent another part of his gap year. Nor is he planning to go into the City to work for Coutts, the royal bankers. All of which had been authoritatively put forward as plans for the future by unnamed sources.
Another common assumption frequently put forward by the media is that Prince William is a reluctant royal. If he is, all I can say is he is a remarkable actor. The impression I came away with that night was that he may not enjoy the attention and the lack of privacy that goes with the role, but that he has Ich Dien (I serve) stamped on his forehead just as indelibly as his father had before him – a product, I suspect, of nature as much as nurture. A senior courtier at Clarence House agrees. ‘I think it’s the hereditary system. You get bred for the job and you do what you’ve got to do. If you apply for a job, you can turn it down; if you don’t apply for it it’s a lot more difficult to hand it over or retire, because it’s not really a job: it’s a vocation, a duty, you’re called to do it and that’s the strength of it. William knows that, it’s his duty to do it and he will do it very well.’
William certainly does seem to have an indefinable quality – a presence – that sets him apart. He kids around but deep down has maturity beyond his years – not surprising given his childhood experiences – and a beguiling mixture of confidence and humility that suggests he has never once questioned the certainty of the job that awaits and the significance of the family motto. Because, although the Princess of Wales introduced him to baseball caps, hamburgers and big dippers, and taught him how to have fun – and thank God she did – she also made absolutely certain that William understood what lay ahead and the importance and seriousness of his position. Since her death he has been particularly close to his grandparents, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. Speaking about the relationships in his December interview William said of the Queen, ‘She’s been brilliant. She’s a real role model. She’s just very helpful on any sort of difficulties or problems I might be having’, adding, ‘but I’m quite a private person as well so I don’t really talk that much about what I sort of feel or think.’ As for the Duke of Edinburgh, he admired his bluntness. ‘I’m very close to my grandfather. He makes me laugh. He’s very funny. He’s also someone who will tell me something that maybe I don’t want to hear and he won’t care if I get upset about it. He knows it’s the right thing to say and I’m glad he tells me that because the last thing I want is lots of people telling me what I want to hear.’
He is a most enchanting young man, with very definite star quality, who could easily become an icon just as his mother did. The difficulty for her, though, was that stardom was thrust upon her at the age of nineteen, having had a life before that of virtual anonymity. William was born to it. As he says, ‘Being in the centre of the spotlight is kind of awkward but it’s something I’ve got to do and something I can adapt to. I’ve spent twenty-two years being in the spotlight. You don’t really know much different but I value the normality I can get, doing simple things, doing normal things, more than anything, rather than getting things done for me which I’m not a big fan of.’ He seems to have inherited the best attributes of both of his parents and none of the worst. He has his mother’s gift for talking to people and putting them at their ease – something his great-grandmother also had – and his mother’s relaxed, easy style; also her sense of humour. He has her steely determination too, but, as far as one can see, none of her insecurity. He has his father’s charm and sensitivity and his way of looking people in the eye while he speaks to them, with, it seems, none of Charles’s tendency to whinge and feel sorry for himself. He also has his father’s love of the countryside and interest in people as well as wildlife. But he seems to be less grand than his father, having inherited more from his grandparents, perhaps, and less spoilt.
When the Duke of Edinburgh goes to an Award conference in Barbados he takes a police protection officer – because he’s not allowed to go further than the lavatory without a police protection officer. When the Prince of Wales went to Chatsworth one weekend in the days when the Duke of Devonshire was still alive, as well as his police protection officer he took two valets, one helicopter and enough luggage to fill a medium-sized living room. He was staying for two days – and Chatsworth is one of the last remaining grand houses in England to have enough valets for twenty guests. He needed to take nothing.
The Prince enjoys his luxuries and lives far more grandly than his siblings or his mother ever has. The Queen is comparatively modest. ‘There wasn’t a clear distinction between the Queen’s personal staff and the staff of Buckingham Palace who are there to receive diplomats or to serve at state banquets or assist at garden parties,’ says a former Private Secretary to the Queen.
My impression is if you made that separation, the number of staff there to look after the Queen and Duke personally is quite tiny, and that a large part of the manpower is to do with official activities. But the same group of people is used for both and therefore looks quite large.
Is there an argument for separating the two? There may be, but then you would lose the economies of scale. You’d have people who had a bit of spare time on their hands. The Queen’s dresser, for example; a lot of her work is getting the Queen’s clothes ready for official occasions. The staff she needs for a country weekend in Windsor or Sandringham is pretty tiny but once you do have personal staff you have to have people to replace them when they have weekends off and that sort of thing, so inevitably you have to have a certain number around. All the Queen has is someone to be there if needed, not to do absolutely everything for her. At Christmas, when she and Duke are at Sandringham, they stay in Wood Farm, which is really quite a modest farmhouse, which has a bit built on for the security staff to stay in – the inevitable appendage, which I am quite sure they would rather not have to have – but the actual living area is very modest, and there is certainly not a maid living in the room next door waiting on them hand and foot. There will be somebody within call but not someone there to be summoned every moment of the day.
The Prince of Wales is much more like his grandmother in this respect: she also lived in style – and at vast expense. There is no reason why the Prince shouldn’t – he can afford it. As Prince of Wales he has income from the Duchy of Cornwall of £11.9 million, which amply funds both his official and his private life. He has no money from the Civil List and, since Peat’s reforms of 1993, pays tax at 40
per cent on all his income, just like anybody else. But a lifestyle that involves valets, chefs, house managers and housekeepers, butlers, chauffeurs, secretaries, high performance cars, a string of horses and three large houses – Highgrove, Clarence House (refurbished at a cost of £4.5 million) and Birkhall – doesn’t sit entirely comfortably alongside a man who spends so much of his life worrying about the environment, inner-city deprivation, poverty and giving a leg-up to those at the bottom of the pile.
Lynda Chalker doesn’t entirely agree.
In his thinking he’s so advanced but in his lifestyle he’s from a different age. When we’ve been flying places he’s said, ‘I’m bored with my own company, come and sit and talk to me’, and I’ve sat whilst he’s had dinner, and he’s eaten the food he has brought with him from Highgrove – goodness knows how many thousands of feet above sea level and across two continents. I said to him once, ‘You know, British Airways food isn’t all that bad’, and he said ‘It might upset me’. It’s being a system apart. Okay if you’ve got to have separate food for safety reasons, but actually not to be seen to eat what other people eat it gives entirely the wrong impression. I think it was coping with circumstances like that that Diana found totally and utterly impossible.
And, yes, Prince Philip is frugal but there are a huge number of jobs in the household. Who keeps that going? It’s down to the Comptroller of the Household and to Janvrin and Luce. But the Queen is now seventy-eight; it’s very hard for her to change her ways, but one ought to be able to give her the same service without this unbelievable number of people. Okay, she pays for it so you could argue she has every right to have it that way. Highgrove is much smaller, it’s very simple by comparison, probably two house staff certainly in the public rooms, couple of extra maids, most people are on the farm, but even so, preparing Charles’s food … he’s very precise and it has an element of the four moves of the marmalade [A. A. Milne again] about it.
