Her Majesty (43 page)

There are, on the other hand, some media executives and editors who choose to assume that the monarchy has ceased to be of any great interest or relevance to the general public. It can be a dangerous assumption. In 2007, the BBC produced a publicity trailer for the five-part
A Year with the Queen
, the most extensive royal documentary series ever made. The trailer was a brief collage of highlights, one of which appeared to feature the extraordinary sight of an angry Queen marching out of a photo-shoot with the American photographer Annie Leibovitz. In fact, the Queen had been expressing irritation
before
the photography had started because Leibovitz had asked her to wear the cumbersome regalia of the Order of the Garter. Having struggled into her robes and ribbons, and after voicing her irritation, the Queen then soldiered on with the shoot like a true professional.

So how did the trailer get it all wrong? It turned out that the scene had been re-edited by the production company for internal use. The result had somehow ended up in a selection of promotional clips sent to the BBC. This seemingly momentous royal explosion should have set alarm bells ringing, yet it was never checked with anyone who actually knew what had happened. Instead, the scene was simply unveiled at a press conference.

The blunder cost two senior BBC executives their jobs, nearly sank the production company and forced the entire broadcasting industry to undergo a prolonged spell of therapy. In truth, there had been no intention to deceive. This was cock-up, not conspiracy, but it showed the folly of thinking that the monarchy can be handled as casually as any other reality show. Some members of the media like to describe the Royal Family as a soap opera. The mistake is to treat it as one.

The Queen will never allow another director to get as close as Cawston or Mirzoeff, but she and her staff know that the monarchy must continue ‘to be seen to be believed’, that the ‘key driver’ of relevance is an ongoing process. The trade-off, as ever, is access. The result is the occasional
high-profile quality documentary series such as
Queen and Country, The Queen at 80
and
Monarchy: The Royal Family at Work.
^*
None of these more recent films has managed to record a family barbecue or a cosy chat with the Queen about her postbag. But it doesn’t matter. People do not expect to be surprised by her. They have a very firm idea of the sort of person the Queen is and they are very comfortable with it. For a society in thrall to the makeover and the relentless pursuit for the ‘new’, the Queen is reassuringly identical to the Sovereign whom millions saw tasting her son’s salad dressing back in 1969. Hers is a world which continues to change while the central figure remains resolutely the same. It is what we expect of our Queen. However, should she ever decide to throw another pair of tennis shoes at Prince Philip on camera, it is unlikely that today’s cameraman will cheerfully surrender the tape.

^*
The act of placing the sword on the shoulders is known as the accolade – from the Latin
ad collum
(to the neck). Officially, a knight is not ‘Sir’ until the accolade is given. Because of the accolade’s military connotations and battlefield origins, clergymen cannot receive the accolade because they are ‘men of God’. If they become knights, they do not become ‘Sir X’- and their wives do not become ‘Lady X’. The exclusion only applies to Anglican ministers – a curious example of the Supreme Governor of the Church of England discriminating against her own Church.

^*
The barbecue has been a royal staple ever since the Duke saw his first one in Finland. ‘It was a great way of bringing the family together and that has developed as time goes on,’ says the Duke of York. ‘We all have to do it now. If the Duke of Edinburgh isn’t there or he doesn’t want to do it, he says: “You do it.”’

^*
Despite the disastrous trailer,
A Year with the Queen
was completed and successfully broadcast as
Monarchy: The Royal Family at Work
. Here the author must declare an interest. He wrote it.

7

Her and Us

‘
Happy people are why you are in the Happy People Business
.’

Lieutenant Colonel Gordon Birdwood and his little team are ‘hunter-gathering’ in the Palace garden. So far, they have snared a pretty good bag – a trio of commissioners from the Girl Guides and a young Royal Naval officer and his wife for the Queen. As for the Duke of Edinburgh, they have a couple of Water Rats and four ladies from the Air League. But they will need to keep on hunting. It’s going to be a long afternoon and the Queen and the Duke will expect to meet several hundred people between the moment they arrive on the Palace lawn and the moment they enter the Royal Tent for a cup of tea. From a distance, any monarch since Queen Victoria would instantly recognise this gathering. The royal garden party has been a staple of the summer season for more than a century. Aside from the clothes – fewer morning coats, fewer hats, shorter skirts – it looks much as it did when the Queen was a little girl. It sounds much the same, too – the clink of teaspoon on porcelain over a medley of popular tunes from the Band of the Irish Guards in one corner of the garden, alternating with the RAF Squadronaires in the other. Like everything else around here, of course, the way the Queen interacts with the rest of us is reassuringly familiar – except that it is completely different. From the way she draws up her guest lists to the way she sends her invitations, serves her food, hands out her honours, tours her countries, chooses her representatives and opens up her property, the relationship between our Queen and us has changed with no one noticing. No one, that is, except the Queen.

At the start of her reign, this lawn would have been covered with debutantes, members of the county set and people wearing uniforms or mayoral chains. Today, it is just the uniforms and the mayoral chains which survive, although the latter are unlikely to get a royal introduction. ‘I’m not looking for people who have already met members of the Royal Family,’ says Birdwood. ‘So I don’t want Lord-Lieutenants, High Sheriffs or commanding officers. We’re after troopers and senior ratings and people who might be backward in coming forward rather than people who are forward in coming forward.’

Birdwood is one of the Queen’s Gentlemen Ushers, that utterly dependable band of retired senior officers who, on occasions such as this, help things along and steer people in and out of the royal trajectory as effortlessly as possible. Today they must select suitable guests for the Queen and her family to meet. And by ‘suitable’ they are not referring to their rank or the shine of their shoes. ‘Clothes are immaterial. You get some fantastic people who are really scruffily dressed,’ says Birdwood who will soon be promoted to Senior Gentleman Usher. He simply wants people who will enjoy talking to the Queen and who won’t clam up. ‘And you don’t want her meeting three groups of submariners in a row.’

The garden party is the largest event in the Queen’s social repertoire. There are four main ones every summer, three at Buckingham Palace and one at the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh. With a few exceptions, guests are never invited more than once, the argument being that it really is a ‘once in a lifetime’ experience for as many as possible. Roughly 9,000 people will be asked to each one and around 8,000 people will turn up (the numbers are slightly higher for Edinburgh). They don’t talk about ‘refusals’. The Lord Chamberlain’s Office, which sends out garden party invitations, refers to ‘declinature’. Inevitably, infirmity and distance keep some people away. But it means that, during the course of her reign, the Queen has had two million people to tea.

The guest list is a sociological work of art which takes a small, parttime team – the Garden Party Ladies – months of planning in a Palace basement. For each party, there will be 1,200–1,500 ‘sponsors’, organisations which have a ration of invitations. These range from charities to government departments which are then supposed to scatter royal recognition as widely as possible in their own sphere. The Scottish Office, for example, receives 1,500 invitations each year whereas a tiny charity might get a quota of two invitations every three years. The Lord-Lieutenants will also feed in their own suggestions.

The idea, simply, is to recognise those who graft away quietly for the greater public good. Only three thousand people can receive an honour like an MBE each year. This is a way of extending that national recognition via a raspberry shortcake and a day to remember. And every invitee can bring a companion. The rule used to be just a spouse plus any married daughters between sixteen and twenty-five. By the nineties, the Queen felt that the rules were unfair on the widowed, the divorced, the gay and the single. No one, she decided, should come to the Palace without a friend with whom to share the day. So the rules were changed to include a companion of whatever complexion – and then unmarried sons were included, too. The Garden Party Ladies gather a bundle of passes and
badges for all of them. They must check every name and address very carefully, not least because most invitations (and many envelopes) will end up in a frame in pride of place on someone’s wall. Fortunately for the team, though perhaps sadly for the rest of us, modern technology has now crept in to this most Edwardian of summer rituals. The Garden Party Ladies no longer write the invitations themselves. It is all done by a machine with a special handwriting font. Household officials point out that it’s more efficient and people now get their invitations more quickly. What’s more, they say, no one has complained. No doubt they haven’t. It would be a little churlish to be invited for tea with the Queen and then grumble about the writing on the invitation. It’s just another little bit of modernisation in a far-flung corner of the Palace.

Technically, all royal invitations are a command issued to a senior member of the Royal Household – ‘The Master of the Household is Commanded by Her Majesty to invite Mr and Mrs Andrew Other to a reception’ etc. The formal way to reply is laid out in a book called
Debrett’s Correct Form
, the definitive guide to all forms of etiquette. In the case of a garden party, the invitation comes from the Lord Chamberlain and so the ‘correct’ response is: ‘Mr and Mrs Andrew Other present their compliments to the Lord Chamberlain and have the honour to obey Her Majesty’s Command to attend …’

In fact, given the huge numbers at a garden party, there is no requirement to reply if you are coming but a simple notification is requested if you are not. It’s a security rather than a catering issue.

For smaller Palace events like a reception or a dinner, the invitation will always say ‘RSVP’. Interestingly, only half of today’s guest list will respond in the traditional way. The rest will write whatever seems comfortable. ‘Dear Master of the Household’/‘Dear Lord Chamberlain’ is a frequent opener. It is an interesting indicator of social habits in modern Britain. People are no longer so bothered about traditional etiquette or ‘the form’, yet they retain their innate good manners. They want to reply, but they are happy to do it their own way, regardless of that ‘form’.

It is not just the guests who have changed. The Palace has updated the RSVP process. Because some people no longer write letters of any sort, royal invitations are now issued with an email address for replies. It is another tiny change but a giant leap in modern manners. Email has finally achieved social respectability. Hyacinth Buckets of this world, take note. Understandably, there are some people who are not aware of the abbreviation of the courtly French term
Répondez, s’il vous plaît
and therefore do not reply at all. Two weeks before an event, Sarah Townend, Deputy Secretary of the Master’s Department, will organise a team to
start chasing up non-replies. ‘Sometimes people don’t know they were supposed to reply, sometimes they have forgotten and you might get around fifty who never got the invitation because it went to an old address,’ says Townend. ‘Imagine how gutted they would be if they later found out what they had missed.’

Every facet of British public life is crunching across the Quadrangle, through the Palace and out on to the terrace where they look down on one of Britain’s largest camomile lawns. The Yeomen of the Guard have already started to ‘hold ground’ – mark out lanes through the crowds. Lieutenant-Colonel Gordon Birdwood and his team wander among the new arrivals chatting to people at random, gently enquiring what has brought them here, where they are from and whether they have met the Queen before. ‘If you feel they’re right – any conversation has got to be fruitful – you might say, “Would you care to meet me at that corner of the tent at 3.30?” Then I’ll come back and position them inside the lane. Only then do I tell them that they really are going to meet the Queen. You don’t want to disappoint people.’

One of today’s Gentlemen Ushers has specific instructions – or what is known as a ‘drift’ – to track down specific guests for the Duke of Edinburgh, among them a ninety-six-year-old war veteran from Nottinghamshire. At 4 p.m., the Queen appears on the terrace – she always wears a colourful, visible dress for these events; today it’s bright yellow – with the Duke, the Earl and Countess of Wessex and Prince and Princess Michael of Kent. Everything and everyone stops for the National Anthem. Some people suddenly find themselves overwhelmed. Whether it’s anticipation, pride, affection, the majesty of the setting or a mixture of all of those, a number of guests start to cry. It happens more and more as the Queen’s years advance, particularly since she inherited the mantle of national matriarch from her late mother. It’s that sudden acknowledgement of being a personal guest of someone who is not merely famous but exceptional. It can creep up on the most hard-boiled old cynic.