Her Majesty (42 page)

As the film was being completed, the Queen decided that she would like a preview. Even for a fearless, veteran filmmaker, it was a nervous prospect as the Monarch, the Duke and the uppermost tiers of the Royal Household and the BBC trooped into a tiny BAFTA screening room. Before the viewing started, Mirzoeff had asked the Queen’s Private Secretary, Sir Robert Fellowes, how to decipher the Queen’s reaction. Back came the reply: ‘You’ll just know.’ ‘She didn’t react at all but, early on, there was this great roar of laughter from the Duke of Edinburgh,’ Mirzoeff remembers. ‘And from that moment, they all started laughing. Then, at the end, I said: “We’ve got some tea. Would you like some?” And the Queen said: “Yes, that would be very nice.” Just as Robert Fellowes had said, that was the moment we knew.’

The documentary attracted a vast British audience of almost thirty million – half the population – across both networks.

Whereas
Royal Family
had been a genuine eye-opener,
Elizabeth R
had been more of a refresher. Yet it marked the high-water mark of the Queen’s engagement with the media. It did so with the timing of a Greek tragedy. At the very moment of this landmark in royal communications, lawyers acting for the Duke and Duchess of York were arranging a separation which would mark the start of the infamous
annus horribilis
.

Never again would the Monarch allow the cameras and microphones so close. For the next five years, as we have seen, the Palace and the media would retreat to entrenched positions. Royal correspondents such as Richard Kay of the
Daily Mail
and James Whitaker of the
Daily Mirror
became celebrated mainstays of their respective publications. Their television equivalents, Jennie Bond of the BBC and Nick Owen of ITN, acquired their own celebrity status. Both the Prince and Princess of Wales would use television to present their respective positions to the wider world. At the Palace, Charles Anson and his team simply had to get on with the job. There were all the usual fixtures in the royal schedule -including some historic state visits and anniversaries – and there was nothing officials could do about the private lives of the Queen’s children. ‘It was like being a sailor in a massive storm where you had to batten down everything and then come up, finally, when the sun appeared to see what needed repairing,’ Anson recalls. ‘But the Queen was steady, never short; never irritable. Completely steady. That must have been down to experience, going right back to Suez and so on. But it must also be down to temperament.’

Having maintained a dignified silence through the most lurid tales in the media, the Queen and her staff finally ran out of patience. It followed Diana, Princess of Wales’s interview with the BBC’s
Panorama
in which she cast doubts on her husband’s fitness to reign. Not only did the Queen decide that the time had come to urge the Prince and Princess to divorce but the BBC was promptly relieved of its automatic right to produce the Queen’s Christmas broadcast. In future, the honour would rotate with ITV (and, latterly, with Sky, too). It might have seemed a small gesture, but in the executive echelons of the BBC and the broadcasting industry it was a very significant moment. The decision was not wholly unwelcome in parts of the BBC. The Corporation’s relationship with the monarchy was no longer ‘special’. And, for many inside the BBC and beyond, that was to be regarded as a good thing.

In the furore surrounding
Panorama
, the media had overlooked the Queen Mother’s own plucky attempt at media management.

She had been due to have a hip operation at some point but, on hearing about the forthcoming
Panorama
programme, she took some spirited pre-emptive action. Knowing that there was a risk attached to invasive surgery on a lady of ninety-five, Queen Elizabeth brought forward her operation to the same week as the broadcast. On that basis, if the operation was not a success, then at least she would have the (posthumous) satisfaction of kicking
Panorama
off the front pages. After a lively lunch at the Ritz with her ladies-in-waiting, she departed for hospital in high spirits – and re-emerged in equally robust form eighteen days later.

The shocking death of Diana, Princess of Wales two years later was followed by a public reaction which surprised the media as much as it did the Royal Household. It was uncharted territory for both, the first royal event of the global twenty-four-hour television news era. Despite some of the rabble-rousing headlines in the run-up to the funeral – ‘
SHOW US YOU CARE
’ and so on – the experience had a cathartic effect on relations between the Prince of Wales and the press. When he travelled around southern Africa a few months later, with Prince Harry on board, he allowed a large media posse to accompany him in his plane. Harsher critics began to give him the benefit of the doubt, to focus more on his qualities as a father than as an ex-husband. But it was a slow process. The Queen’s press team were less keen on rapprochement. All that royal pain accumulated through the nineties would still take time to disappear. The Queen and Prince Philip were in no hurry to mend fences either. When the Queen came to celebrate her Golden Wedding anniversary in November 1997, the media was kept outside, barring a solitary seat among the two thousand available – for the Press Association. ‘Lack of space,’ explained the Queen’s new Press Secretary, Geoffrey Crawford. Two months earlier, the media had been assigned several rows of the same abbey for the Princess’s funeral. On some occasions, press arrangements harked back to the age of Colville. When the Queen went to open Sydney’s new 90,000-capacity Olympic Stadium in 2000, the stadium was empty but only a handful of cameras and reporters were admitted – to widespread guffaws. ‘Lack of space’ came the official explanation once again.

Meanwhile, relations between the Palace and the BBC suffered another setback when the BBC announced that it would not be broadcasting the pageant for the Queen Mother’s one hundredth birthday, having originally indicated that it would. This gloriously chaotic carnival featuring all her three hundred patronages, from the Black Watch and the Special Forces Club to the Poultry Club and the Royal School of Needlework, was to be the highlight of her centenary celebrations and had long been planned
for July 2000. The organiser of the event, Major Michael Parker, architect of the Royal Tournament and the great VE Day and VJ Day fiftieth anniversaries, had been happy to fit the event around the BBCI schedules. The Palace hoped that live coverage would ensure that the event was enjoyed by more than the 12,000 people who could safely be accommodated on Horse Guards Parade. With two months to go, the BBC pulled the plug completely. It was a baffling decision which surprised many within the BBC itself. It then became a political issue when the Conservative leadership accused Corporation executives of being ‘out of touch’. Officially, the BBC explained that it was covering a Service of Thanksgiving for the Queen Mother’s one hundred years and, besides, the pageant would clash with its popular soap opera
Neighbours
. Major Parker offered to reschedule his event to suit
Neighbours
but the BBC held firm. Publicly, the Palace described the decision as ‘an internal matter for the BBC’. Privately, they were dismayed. It looked like yet another case of the monarchy being sidelined by the prevailing ‘Cool Britannia’ orthodoxy within the new political and media establishments. The new BBC Director General, Greg Dyke, a card-carrying Labour supporter, had just arrived and was keen to make his mark. It was only a few months since the excruciating Millennium Eve opening of the Dome. ‘Old Britain’ had never felt older. But the matter was not quite dead. A young executive at Carlton Television, London’s independent station, spotted an opportunity to trounce the BBC. Carlton’s track record with royal programming had not been a great one. In January 1997, the station had screened a shambolic nationwide debate on the monarchy which had left everyone involved faintly embarrassed. One Government Minister had been so appalled by the bearpit atmosphere that he walked out before the start. Here was an opportunity for redemption.

That quick-thinking executive was David Cameron, then Carlton’s head of corporate affairs (he would enter Parliament the following year). And during the weekend following the BBC’s decision, several ITV bosses received a call from the thirty-three-year-old future Prime Minister. Would they think about tearing up their schedules and reminding the nation that the BBC did not have a God-given right to screen all royal landmarks? They were all ears, as was Major Parker. More than a decade later, the Prime Minister is modest about his role in saving
The Queen Mother at 100
. ‘I think I just got the ball rolling, making a couple of calls and getting the interest of the boss and everything followed,’ recalls Cameron happily. ‘It was an opportunity for us. There were a lot of events like that where ITV just thought: “The BBC’s got it so we never will.”’

It was utter chaos on the day. Bomb scares at several London railway stations meant that a morning rehearsal had to be cancelled and Major Parker had no choice but to send 8,000 civilians and 2,500 soldiers on parade in front of live television cameras with his fingers crossed. ‘It all came out quite fresh,’ he admits. But the results were astonishing. The two-hour live production gave ITV its highest early evening audience in seven years. More than seven million viewers tuned in followed by a further five million who watched the evening highlights. Over on the BBC, the allegedly untouchable
Neighbours
drew just 3.5 million viewers. Major Parker became Sir Michael before the year was out (his knighthood was not from the government but a KCVO – a personal gift from the Queen). It was all highly embarrassing for the BBC and a timely reminder of the true extent of grassroots affection for the monarchy.

There was a similar misjudgement on Easter Saturday two years later when the news came through that the Queen Mother had died. The BBC newsroom had been rehearsing the event for years, and kept a stock of dark suits and black ties for precisely this sort of occasion. But, come the moment, as with the pageant, the senior management made the mistake of assuming that mainstream Britain thought as they did. ‘Don’t go overboard,’ the duty editor told newsreader Peter Sissons as he prepared to inform the nation. ‘She’s a very old woman who had to go some time.’ As Sissons recalls in his memoirs, he was also told to wear a burgundy tie rather than a black one. It was the wrong call. But the BBC was not alone. The following day, many papers and the twenty-four-hour news channels were comparing public reactions to the Queen Mother’s death with the scenes which followed the loss of Diana, Princess of Wales. The inference was that Britain cared more for the Princess than the last Empress. Aside from the obvious differences between the accidental death of a woman in her thirties and the departure of a centenarian, they had neglected to observe that the days immediately after the Princess’s death had been subdued, too. A week later, as people queued for miles through the night to file past the Queen Mother’s coffin, the comparisons disappeared.

But there was an upside to all this. The broadcasters and the Palace were finalising their plans for the Golden Jubilee celebrations two months later. Sure enough, the BBC would not make the same mistake again. Greg Dyke and his managers gave producers the freedom to ‘go overboard’ as the big jubilee weekend approached. This was not a job for the more politically sensitive news operation but for BBC Events, the department which has produced all the big national and global set-piece occasions from Live Aid to Prince William’s wedding. It duly rose to the occasion,
winning awards and acclaim for its well-judged blend of affection and professional detachment. The scenes were momentous and the BBC’s stirring footage would go on to serve as the main video content of London’s bid to secure the 2012 Olympics. The underlying message was simple: ‘Any city that can lay on a party like this can certainly stage an Olympics.’ When the winning name came out of the envelope, it was obvious that the International Olympic Committee had agreed.

The Palace’s relations with the media were picking up. But there were still internal issues to be resolved. It had become an open secret that the Buckingham Palace press team were at odds with the Prince of Wales’s own operation across the road at St James’s Palace, particularly the Prince’s Deputy Private Secretary and
de facto
lobbyist Mark Bolland. Many inside Buckingham Palace felt that Bolland was sometimes promoting his master – and the future Duchess of Cornwall – at the expense of other members of the family. But even Bolland’s critics had to concede that his work had paid off as widespread goodwill greeted the Prince’s marriage to the Duchess in 2005. By then, however, Bolland had left to start his own consultancy and the tensions between the two palaces subsided. Today, the old rivalries have gone. The Queen’s staff might use Red Boxes while the Prince’s are green. Her household might write menus in French whereas his are in English. But when it comes to communications (as Commander Colville would never have described his job) the prime strategy is a collegiate and uncomplicated one. It’s that ‘Mon United’ idea again.

As for the relationship with the press, it is now workmanlike and, arguably, as stable as it has been at any time since the mid-eighties. The Palace is not taking anything for granted. There is no complacency about happy headlines lasting for ever. Ever since former royal butler Paul Burrell made substantial sums selling his story, the Palace lawyers have tightened up their confidentiality clauses. Not only can staff be sued for indiscretion but they can be liable for indiscretions by others. If a chance remark to a gossipy aunt ends up in the papers, there will be trouble.

The British media is now adjusting to a new royal landscape with a glamorous addition to the regular royal narrative. The hyperbole of yesteryear has given way to more measured coverage at home but the level of global interest in the new Duke and Duchess of Cambridge has shown that the world’s appetite for a major royal production like a royal wedding is undiminished. Given the media circus which surrounded his mother and the paparazzi car chase which led to her death, Prince William, quite understandably, has a visceral antipathy to all forms of media intrusion. His engagement, stag night and wedding preparations were conducted
with all the stealth tactics of a covert military operation. Yet he has endured less harassment than his father experienced during his own youth. And he has managed to maintain a largely satisfactory trade-off with the mainstream media, offering occasional photo-opportunities in return for relative peace. Whether that equilibrium can be maintained now that the Cambridges are a fresh global media phenomenon remains to be seen. What is beyond doubt is that the Duke of Cambridge will be in no mood for compromise, particularly when it comes to the privacy of the Duchess.