The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor

by Penny Junor

  The late Princess Margaret’s two children, Viscount Linley and Lady Sarah Chatto, don’t feature in public life. Their names come up occasionally in gossip and society columns but they live normal lives, have married normal people and are not held up to public scrutiny. Princess Anne’s two children, Peter and Zara Phillips, live normal lives. Not many people would even recognize Peter, he is so seldom seen. Zara is instantly recognizable but that’s her choice. She invited Hello! magazine into her living room – and bedroom; she wears daringly skimpy outfits to Ascot, parades her boyfriends at public venues and clearly enjoys her celebrity status. And nobody minds. Her antics may upset her family but they do not reflect badly on the monarchy because she is not part it; she doesn’t work for the Family Firm. But so long as Harry is expected to, he will attract attention and, because he has already got off on the wrong foot, the media is watching and waiting for the next incident which will come as surely as a London bus.

  I can see no purpose in making him knuckle down, forcing him into a mould that doesn’t fit. He is never likely to be king so why make him spend his life shadowed by security, visiting factories, opening hospitals, shaking hands and doing good works, knowing that the slightest indiscretion is going to embarrass his grandmother or his father or, in time, his brother? Why not let him step back from it all and do what he wants with his life? His father found it hard enough to carve out a role for himself and he is heir to the throne; the Army won’t keep him for ever; and the Wessexes have already demonstrated how difficult it is to combine royal life with a career. So let him go out and earn a living free from all encumbrances. If his heart is really set, as he said it was, on following in his mother’s footsteps and carrying on with her work, he could do it as a private citizen. He will always be a name that any charity would want on its notepaper. And if the time ever came when he was needed to take up royal duties, then he could be brought back into the fold.

  Which brings us neatly to the subject of the fold – or The Firm. Lord Airlie and Sir Michael Peat revolutionized life at Buckingham Palace in the eighties when they implemented so many of Peat’s recommendations but they didn’t alter the basic structure. Every member of the Royal Family who carries out public engagements has their own household with private secretaries and other staff, and although there are channels of communication in place they don’t always seem to work. According to Mark Goyder, who is director of Tomorrow’s Company, an independent think tank that promotes good governance in business, ‘the structure in management terms is three decades out of date. It’s not a firm, it’s more like a number of tribes, a federation of tribes, and although there is a titular head, corporately it’s quite inefficient.

  ‘If you were in General Motors in the 1950s or British Rail in the 1980s you saw exactly those things. Then modern management came along and said this is crazy, we must have a structure that reflects function, must have an organization that is effective with compartments, but united towards a common goal.’

  A former Press Officer to the Prince of Wales believes doing away with the households is imperative.

  It’s divisive. Why have we had this punch-up between St James’s Palace and Buckingham Palace? Because they were working for the individuals and not the institution. It creates tensions. The difficulty for ordinary human beings to understand – and I didn’t understand until I got closer – is you are not selling a product, or a service or a commodity, you’re supporting that individual’s psyche and what they are and do every day of their lives; and they can’t walk away from it, and we the public owe a sense of responsibility which I don’t think we’re acknowledging at the moment, in terms of what price they have to pay and what price we should insist that the media should pay to allow them more privacy than they are allowed at the moment.

  I am not suggesting a state department to look after the Royal Family but having people who have responsibility for the institution rather than the individuals and who have a code of practice and standards, not dissimilar to the civil service in terms of how they work, so they do the right thing for the institution. In the civil service we had a change of administration; the machinery kept going and was more important than the individual.

  One solution, proposed by Tristan Garel-Jones, would be for the Head of State to have a private office that mirrors the Prime Minister’s. At No. 10 a series of bright young stars from various government departments work in the Prime Minister’s outer office for two or three years as part of the career path. This means they go back to their department with some knowledge of how the Prime Minister’s office and No. 10 function. This could be reproduced at Buckingham Palace at the push of a button. It is already moving in that direction but he would institutionalize the practice. The advantage is it would feed back into Whitehall a whole raft of up-and-coming civil servants who, having been doing the briefing notes and writing the speeches, would have an understanding of the Head of State’s functions and an appreciation of how important and difficult it can be at times. He would also do away with the separate households – even the Prince of Wales’s, and would route everything through the Head of State’s office. ‘So if you’re a minor member of the Royal Family and you’re invited to go and open a hospital in Nottingham, you get on to the Head of State’s office and say “I’ve been invited, should I do it?” And they would say, “Yes, we’ll send you a briefing note and a speech.” Nothing can do more, in my view, to strengthen the institution than if we all got used to referring to the Queen as the Head of State and that she was provided with the sort of administrative back-up that the Head of State in a country like ours ought to have.’

  Another good idea, suggested by a former press secretary, would be to find ways of engaging the public, giving them a feeling of ownership and involvement in the business of monarchy, so that they too understand what the institution is for. She would like to get schoolchildren to do projects for Trooping the Colour, for instance, and let the best ones go into the programme and have the winners meet the Queen; she would like to see ordinary children at the State Opening of Parliament – have them carrying the Queen’s train perhaps; and she would like to see people from the Palace go out into the community to explain to people what monarchy is all about. She once asked why the media were not allowed into investitures, given that the Queen was presenting medals on behalf of the country, and was told it would destroy the mystery. ‘I was made to feel as though I’d grown two heads,’ she says. ‘You won’t ever get the mystique back but I’m not sure you need it. It’s partly the mystique that has produced this lack of relevance.’

  There is also a section of the community that the monarchy needs to reach out to. People at the top of the tree are rewarded with gongs and garden parties and people at the bottom of the heap are catered for by the charities with which the Royal Family are involved. Their problems are well understood. But there is very little contact and therefore little understanding of the people in the middle. ‘What they have no feel for,’ says an equerry to the Prince of Wales, ‘is the middle-manager of a building company, who has a £100,000 mortgage on his house and has been told his job is redundant. Monarchy has a lot of support from the working class and the upper class. It’s the ones in the middle who feel it’s not relevant to them. That’s where the issue is. You go to a housing estate on a Wednesday afternoon in November and you know who you’re going to meet. Somehow you need to include those others.’

  What monarchy needs, like any modern business or organization, is a regular health check; it needs to ask itself why it is there, what it is aiming to achieve, and whether it is being successful. According to Mark Goyder

  a well-led company is one where there’s a very clear sense of purpose, of who and what you are and where you come from, clear values and a very clear understanding of all the relationships that are critical to your future success. The other idea we talk about is the licence to operate, the implicit permission that any business has – not granted by a regulator but by reputation, by trust,
by the legitimacy in which you’re held. In the sense of clear purpose, I wonder if the question has ever been asked of the Queen, what are you here for? Or is that what it means to be the Establishment; that you’re so established you never have to ask that question? That might be the answer. In a world in which everyone else questions who they are and what they’re for, this is the one institution that doesn’t have to answer that question and maybe that is what defines them.

  ‘The Queen appeals to those things which are beyond controversy; the basic values, she enunciates them, she points to that realm where we are still united despite all the political shenanigans and argy-bargy. You may feel, sitting in London,’ says Richard Chartres, the Bishop of London, ‘that the appeal of these things ebbs, is ebbing, has ebbed.’

  I am wondering whether the monarchy still has the capacity to overcome the differences of education and community disintegration. I think the death of the Queen Mother was an astonishing revelation of the world outside the chattering classes of the Westminster village, where there is huge cynicism about all of this. Mind you, there’s huge cynicism about everything. It isn’t that the monarchy is regarded as decrepit; it is that we have, astonishingly, an Establishment that seems to want to liberate us from any sense of constraint or universal value and fundamental meaning. That’s obviously an enormous challenge for an institution like the monarchy whose whole raison d’être is social cohesion pointing beyond the argy-bargy of politics to some of the deep laws, the abiding themes of all human life, love and loss, values that we all basically share.

  ‘The Queen didn’t choose to be Queen,’ he says.

  She hasn’t competed for her place on the greasy pole. Anyone who knows anything about it realizes what a heavy sentence it is in some ways and the institution therefore speaks also about Call, Acceptance of Call, Doing your Duty, Service, and that is real. Also there’s no escape clause, it’s a contract. In all those ways it’s a very remarkable institution. However, England is changing so that we may not for ever be worthy of it. If there is no principled, philosophical support for monarchy then the whole thing depends much more on what, in a celebrity culture, is made of the individuals, how they are used. The Queen is a canvas on whom people project, as well as someone who stands for things. There is such confusion and shame about the British story that it hasn’t been taught and communicated for the last twenty, twenty-five years. We feel very sorry for individuals who have lost their story – their memory – they’ve lost part of their identity, they live an impaired life – but if the community has no sense of its story, if you exalt diversity as the only virtue then you find that you have a giddy, rootless population which can easily be swayed by gusts of indignation and emotion.

  As Lord Salisbury says,

  By its nature the monarchy is a long-term institution and perhaps the greatest thing in its favour is that it endures while fashion doesn’t, politicians come and go and editors come and go. So the fact that it is always there, like the papacy, is a huge strength. It occupies a position no one else does and by occupying it they prevent anyone else from doing so. It’s very difficult, not impossible, to have a military coup when the officers are loyal not to the Prime Minister and government but to the monarch. It’s very difficult, although much easier now with the European Court of Human Rights legislation and supremacy of EU law, but still difficult so long as judges owe their oath of fealty to the monarch rather than the government, for the law to lose its independence entirely – a keystone of the way our free society operates. It’s also very important that people should recognize the monarchy in this context that the Queen is part of Parliament. There are not two parts of Parliament; there are three: Monarch, Lords and Commons, and ultimately one of the great restraints of being in government is the feeling that you don’t want to drag the monarchy down into the pit of parliamentary and political dispute although that is becoming more difficult with the question of the monarchy’s existence being in play. So long as senior politicians of all parties owe a genuine allegiance to the Crown, always before you do anything, you have to ask yourself, does this breach the club rules? That is a great guarantee; but as soon as that consensus breaks down you’re in trouble.

  Tristan Garel-Jones again concurs.

  It’s true that power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely; when you’re a minister, even if a junior minister of state, it’s quite easy to end up thinking you’re quite important, because you have lots of people laughing at your jokes and telling you how clever you are and writing clever speeches for you, and you could end up thinking you’re quite somebody; and the beauty in Britain for me is there are certain positions that no politician can hold, ever. No politician can ever be Head of State. The Armed Forces in Britain do not swear an oath of loyalty either to Parliament or the Conservative or Labour Party or anyone else. Every officer in Britain is commissioned by the Queen. You can argue it’s all mirrors, but it removes all positions, albeit symbolic, from the hands of politicians, which is not a bad thing at all. Even in my case, if ever when I was a whip it passed through my mind that I was quite important, I had to sit down at the end of every day and write an eight-hundred-word letter to the Queen. Another thing that went with this position, you were a kind of messenger, you carry the messages from the Queen to Parliament, bits of paper she had to sign, and there were certain moments when I had to put on a morning coat, get into a motor car, go round to the Head of State’s office, stand to attention, present the Head of State with certain papers, and go back. It reminds politicians that there is something up there that is the Nation – the national interest – that is going to go on and on and on long after they’re dead and buried.

  The beauty of all this is because I held these positions [Vice Chamberlain, Comptroller of the Household and Treasurer – all of which go with the whip’s job] for quite a long time, all three, one after the other, I had quite a lot of contact with Buckingham Palace and with the Head of State. And audiences – you go in with your bits of paper, and whilst I can honestly say the audiences were perfectly courteous and even amusing sometimes, never once by hint or gesture did the Head of State imply to me that I was some kind of friend, that she was rather pleased I was a Conservative and not a Labour member, ever. I regard this as wonderful. I used to go in there regularly, write her letters regularly, and at the end of the day I have no doubt whatsoever, if instead of me standing in front of her it had been my opposite number, the Labour member for Jarrow, it wouldn’t have made a scrap of difference and I think that’s something the country needs to know. Certainly a lot of Conservatives think she secretly likes us. That’s bollocks. I am a person representing a function which is part of her duty and she does it with courtesy and humour and wit but never, ever, ever on any single occasion did I feel that I was in some way special or my party was in some way special.

  The Queen’s will be a very tough act to follow but the Prince of Wales has great strengths and rightly has many fans – but he was damaged by the breakdown of his marriage to Diana and by his determination at all costs to cling on to Camilla Parker Bowles. It damaged him and it damaged the monarchy. A stronger man would have put the greater good of the institution before his own personal happiness – as his mother, in the same situation, almost certainly would have done.

  But he did even greater damage by failing for so long to put a ring on Camilla’s finger when the majority of the public had so obviously come to accept the situation. It left the way open for so much debate, so much criticism. Shortly before the engagement was announced in February 2005, a powerful group of MPs, led by Alan Williams, a known republican, grilled the Prince’s accountants about how he spent his income from the Duchy of Cornwall and how much Charles was paying to support his mistress. He was beginning to take on the air of a victim, and victims attract bullies.

  And the situation left so much uncertainty about the future. The Queen’s eightieth birthday in April in 2006 was approaching and although she enjoys the best of health – an
d if she lives as long as her mother, might have another twenty useful years or more to go – the prospect of Charles being crowned with Mrs Parker Bowles sitting four rows back in Westminster Abbey – or even, on his insistence, at the front – would have caused constitutional mayhem.

  Their marriage at Windsor Castle on 9 April 2005 settled all that. It began to heal many wounds that had been festering for years and tied up a host of uncomfortable loose ends. Charles had insisted that he wanted Camilla to be seen as a legitimate part of his life. At last she was and the arguments of whether it was right or wrong for the country, good or bad for the boys, what kind of service it should have been, whether she should have been called HRH The Duchess of Cornwall or something more low-key, and what the Princess of Wales would have thought, all disappeared. The public didn’t want her to be Queen and we were told she wouldn’t be. When the time comes she will be The Princess Consort and have much the same role as the Duke of Edinburgh has in relation to the Queen. There may be opinion polls on whether she should, in fact, be Queen rather than Consort when Prince Charles ascends the throne – by then, it is my guess that the public will be perfectly content for her to be called Queen – and more opinion polls on whether, now he is married to a divorcee, he should still be King, but there is nothing new in that debate.

  The wedding was a triumph. It took place a day later than originally planned because the date clashed with the funeral of Pope John Paul II in Rome. The Pope’s death and the Vatican’s choice of date for the funeral gave the doom-mongers still more reason to suggest the wedding was jinxed but the plans were moved seamlessly to the following day, a Saturday, and despite a freezing cold day and fears that there would be protests at worst and apathy at best, it was a great day. Camilla looked endearingly nervous but beautiful in an oyster-coloured Robinson Valentine creation and hat by Philip Treacy and, despite the temperature, lingered chatting to well-wishers. Charles looked happier than he has looked for years, the Queen embraced her new daughter-in-law with a witty speech, the boys looked delighted and the critics were forced to eat their words. The wedding was a resounding success and proved a significant turning point.