Her Majesty (36 page)

As the political historian Professor Harold Laski once explained, the Private Secretary ‘must know all … must be ready to advise upon all. Receiving a thousand secrets, he must discriminate between what may emerge and what shall remain obscure.’ It is the Private Secretary who must deflect any blows aimed at the Sovereign, if necessary by absorbing them himself. If an engagement goes wrong or someone feels that their worthy cause has been neglected by the Royal Family, the Private Secretary will take the hit. After the Queen omitted an important reference to the Holocaust from her 1996 speech to the Polish parliament, her Private Secretary, Sir Robert Fellowes, threw his hands up when confronted by a baffled press corps. ‘Blame me,’ he declared. ‘Just say it was all my fault.’ (The computer printer had contained the wrong sort of paper, the key paragraph had fallen off the page and no one had spotted it.)

Another important defensive task for the Private Secretary is to protect the Monarch from those close to her. Mary Francis can think of a few examples: ‘There were always people around who would make the Private Secretary’s Office quite cross, trying to get to the Queen to bend her ear about something and probably not understanding that there was very little she could do about it.’ The popular stereotype of the Private Secretary is of an over-cautious, over-protective, rather stuffy minder, forever second-guessing the whims of the Monarch. Such a candidate would not last very long. Charm, intuition, humour and an open mind are crucial. A little eccentricity is not unknown. A man like Sir Frederick Ponsonby, Assistant Private Secretary during three reigns and George V’s Treasurer, might have refused to speak to anyone with shiny buttons or suede shoes, but he also turned his hand to writing film scripts and hatched a madcap scheme to recover King John’s treasure from the Wash. Several of the Queen’s crop of private secretaries (eight so far) have possessed hidden talents – for painting, sculpting and dry stone walling among others. As Kenneth Rose has pointed out, the art of a good courtier is to be alert to the very major and very minor issue at the same time. Thus, on the eve of the Battle of Passchendaele in 1917, George V’s Assistant Private Secretary, Sir Clive Wigram, found himself resolving the pressing issue of whether lady munitions workers should shake the Queen’s hand during a factory visit. Sir Arthur Bigge, later Lord Stamfordham, was one of the greatest royal advisers of modern times. While he could be the most ferocious nit-picker, he also supervised the transformation of the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas into the House of Windsor. ‘He taught me how to be a King,’ said George V.

Sir Michael Adeane, the Queen’s longest serving Private Secretary, summed up the twin imperatives of the job: ‘It is no use thinking you are a mandarin. You are also a nanny. One moment you may be writing to the Prime Minister. The next, you are carrying a small boy’s mac.’ The Queen inherited her first Private Secretary, Sir Alan (‘Tommy’) Lascelles, from her father. Outwardly brisk and fearless (he had won the Military Cross), he was also a fiercely intelligent man. His hatred of self-importance extended to denying a peerage for himself. ‘He was a terrifying man if you met him in a corridor,’ recalls a junior member of staff from that era. ‘That glare – and those beetling eyebrows. I think he was the scariest of the lot.’ Lascelles was also determined to obstruct any attempts by the Duke of Edinburgh to encroach on his patch. While this spurred the Duke on to create his own dynamic role in public life, it would also leave him with a long-standing wariness of the Private Secretary’s Office.

Lascelles departed soon after the Coronation, to be replaced by his deputy, Sir Michael Adeane – himself a grandson of Lord Stamfordham. If there was a degree of nepotism at work, it was no substitute for ability. Other Royal Household positions – the Master of the Horse, for example – might depend on connections. The Private Secretary, though, had to earn his keep. Adeane had a first-class History degree from Cambridge and (for all their ‘tweediness’) had assembled an equally cerebral team around him. Outwardly, Adeane appeared a model of courtierly understatement. On being accosted by Prince Philip’s biographer Basil Boothroyd one morning, he listened politely for a minute or two, before saying: ‘I do hope you’ll forgive me but I’ve just heard that my house is on fire. I wouldn’t mind but as it’s a part of St James’s Palace …’He was a nimble political tactician, assisting the monarchy through some delicate territory, not least the choice of two prime ministers in the days when the Queen was expected to select them. He also defended the monarchy from what, at the time, represented the gravest threat since the Abdication. The 1971 House of Commons Select Committee on the royal finances was the one which argued that the Queen should become a salaried public official, that the Queen Mother should be pegged to a Prime Minister’s pension and that the Duchy of Cornwall should be nationalised. Following Adeane’s interventions, the monarchy emerged with none of the above and a doubling of the Civil List.

His nineteen-year tenure would come back to haunt his successors some years later when one of the great Palace scandals of the reign came to light. In 1979, the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, informed the Commons that the former Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, Sir Anthony
Blunt, had been a Russian spy. Adeane, it transpired, was informed of Blunt’s treachery in 1964 and had brokered a deal with the Home Secretary. If Blunt divulged his spy contacts to the intelligence services, he would be allowed to stay in post until retirement and the government would be spared another spy scandal. It seems inconceivable that the Queen was unaware of the arrangement In the finest traditions of the office, it was the Private Secretary’s Office which took the criticism.

Next came Sir Martin (later Lord) Charteris, a brilliant, innovative and impish figure who was happy to admit that he had been rather in love with the Queen from the moment he met her in 1950. A prolific snuff-taker, he would have to be brushed down by a footman several times a day, particularly ahead of his daily meeting with the Queen. But behind the eccentric veneer lay an arch-moderniser. On his watch, television was embraced as a tool and was no longer regarded as a hazard. The monarchy was seen as less aloof, more accessible. ‘Conscious decisions were taken that things needed to change,’ recalls Ron Allison, the Queen’s Press Secretary at the time. ‘Key to this, and never to be underestimated, was Martin Charteris, the wisest man I ever met.’ Charteris’s finest hour was the Silver Jubilee of 1977. His successor, Sir Philip (later Lord) Moore, was a more reserved figure but one of life’s all-rounders – shot down during the war, he was an Oxford exhibitioner, England rugby international and high-flying diplomat before joining the Royal Household. He was also the last Private Secretary of the wartime generation. He died in 2009, moments after sitting bolt upright in bed and declaring: ‘Come on, Moore, pull yourself together.’ Old-school to the last.

What might be called the new generation of private secretaries started with Sir William ‘Bill’ Heseltine, a rising star in the Australian Civil Service who served as Press Secretary before joining the Private Secretary’s Office. He was closely involved in the appointment of Lord Airlie, the Lord Chamberlain who would usher in the most radical internal reforms for a century. He had to keep the Palace in step with Downing Street during the Thatcher years but was equally solicitous of the Opposition. One of Mrs Thatcher’s last acts as Prime Minister was to reach that Civil List deal which would endure for the next twenty years. But, as the
Britannia
saga would prove years later, big-ticket royal items must have cross-party support. And the Labour Party was enjoying something of a revival under Neil Kinnock. ‘I did something fairly novel,’ says Heseltine, now retired and living in Western Australia. ‘I’d only met Kinnock at a few functions. And when he became Leader of the Opposition, I said: “Would you like to come and have dinner with me one night?” And he said: “Can I bring Glenys?” I said: “Of course.” And we had a rather
jolly little dinner at home – just his wife and myself and my wife – and we established a workable relationship.’ That relationship certainly helped when the time came for Heseltine and Lord Airlie to visit Kinnock to explain the Civil List proposals. ‘He was very good about it, too,’ says Heseltine. ‘He asked one or two pertinent questions, because, like Harold [Wilson], he had his discontented people on the left who would make a bit of a fuss about it. But he was very supportive.’

Heseltine departed just before the calamitous downturn in royal fortunes which would become known as the
annus horribilis
. That would turn into what one of today’s senior courtiers describes as a
decadus horribilis
. As the Queen led the monarchy through what were undoubtedly the worst years of her reign, her chief adviser was Sir Robert Fellowes. An unflappable optimist, his default mode was cheerful pragmatism. He had also known the Queen since childhood, having grown up at Sandringham where his father ran the estate. All of this would prove indispensable during the crises which started with the derailing of the Duchess of York in 1992 and reached a nadir with the death of Diana, Princess of Wales five years later. As a cousin of the former and brother-in-law of the latter, Fellowes was often in a difficult position but, equally, he was well placed to offer frank advice all round. This might often be garnished with a sporting metaphor. ‘We were on the seventeenth green,’ he would remark when anyone suggested that the Queen had been forced in to paying tax. Having seen the institution through the worst of the storms, he was succeeded by his deputy, Sir Robin Janvrin. A former Royal Navy officer and diplomat, he had already been introducing a new, more professional approach in the wake of the Airlie reforms. More women rose to senior executive positions across the Royal Household. Senior professionals were seconded from industry and Whitehall. As the death of the Queen Mother and the Golden Jubilee drew a clear line under the recent past, royal confidence returned. As one official puts it: ‘Up until then, it felt like a reign of two halves – Act One: good, Act Two: bad. Then, suddenly, we were into Act Three.’

Act Three has now outlasted the dismal years. A brilliant royal wedding has served as a prelude to an historic milestone seen just once in history, more than a century back. As the Diamond Jubilee raises the Queen even higher in the pantheon of great monarchs, her senior staff have gladly receded into virtual obscurity. Today’s Private Secretary, Sir Christopher Geidt, is very happy to be the most low-profile incumbent of the reign, seldom photographed, never quoted. A former diplomat and Balkans expert, he has quietly finessed a tri-generational approach to the business of monarchy while altering the Queen’s own schedule to one more suited
to the oldest monarch in history. It has been done so imperceptibly that her workload actually
rose
during 2010 – 444 engagements, 69 more than the year before.

‘It’s not about cutting back. It’s about managing her time more effectively,’ explains an official. ‘So, yes, she needs to meet the new ambassador for Belarus. But how long does she really need one-on-one with him?’ The Duke of York suggests that it could also be a case of curtailing some of the travelling: ‘There’s no getting around the fact that she’s got to go to the CHOGM [the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting]. You can get her there in comfort but the issue is the time zone.’ Sitting in his airy Buckingham Palace office overlooking the Mall, the breeze flapping the net curtains over the open window and wafting in the sound of a brass band, the Duke adds that more and more future engagements are likely to be scheduled for home: ‘I think you’ll probably find that there is more going on here because it’s easier for the Queen to do it here than having to travel miles and miles all over the world. It’s a sensible way of doing it.’ Just as the soup course has been quietly excised from the modern state banquet to shave twenty minutes off the evening, so every moment of the royal day is being constantly audited for savings. Under Geidt, the Palace has a created a new research unit, called the Secretariat, which is routinely charged with exploring new ways of doing the same old thing. Yet nothing has changed at all in terms of the most important constitutional duty of every monarch – her discussions with her Prime Minister. The Queen began her reign advising, warning and consulting a Prime Minister who received his army commission from Queen Victoria. Today, she deals with a man who was two years below her youngest son at prep school.

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Some have accused Blair of breaking the code of secrecy surrounding the meetings of monarch and Prime Minister by describing them in his memoirs. But there are no complaints from the Palace. While he may have indulged in some mildly indiscreet – and highly readable – scenesetting, he has been scrupulous in observing constitutional proprieties. We are still no closer to knowing what the Queen actually
thinks
.

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A member is called a ‘Counsellor’ rather than the more conventional ‘Councillor’. Senior members of the Royal Family are appointed as Counsellors of State, two of whom must be designated to stand in for the Monarch whenever she goes abroad. The Queen was appointed one herself on turning eighteen. It was a sobering experience for a Princess who had led a relatively sheltered life. She was said to be particularly shocked by the details of a murder case.

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The Queen also has a set of Privy Council implements laid out before her, including sealing wax and a candle to melt it. It’s a nice touch but a historic one. The reality is that all sealing is now done elsewhere with longer-lasting plastic.

^*
Princess Margaret duly married Antony Armstrong-Jones (later created the Earl of Snowdon) in May 1960 and the Royal Family’s surname (though not that of the dynasty) was changed to Mountbatten-Windsor in the same year.