Her Majesty (7 page)

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President Richard Nixon resigned from office in August 1974. It emerged that he had attempted to block investigations into the burglary of his political opponents’ offices in Washington’s Watergate building.

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In 1956, after Egypt’s Colonel Nasser had nationalised the Suez Canal, Britain and France reached a secret arrangement to support an Israeli attack on Egypt. A global backlash forced a hasty and humiliating withdrawal.

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In 1963, the War Minister, John Profumo, resigned from public life. He admitted lying to the Commons about his relationship with Christine Keeler, a model who had been sharing her affections with a Russian naval attaché.

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Once again, more was spent on tobacco (£500) than on flowers (£430) or an orchestra (£195). And, once again, it was ‘beer and sandwiches’, at
£
I a head, for the BBC.

2

Herself

‘
You make it up a lot as you go along
.’

The water is splish-sploshing over the sides of the swimming pool. Built in the thirties, it was designed with relaxation in mind rather than earnest distance swimming by multiple bathers. There are no marked-out lanes. Unlike swankier, funkier corporate keep-fit clubs, there is no music system, no sauna. It’s a bring-your-own-towel affair. The heavily tinted glass means that if you happened to walk past this corner of Buckingham Palace, you would not have a clue what lay within. But inside, privacy extends to little more than a couple of shower curtains.

But there will be no complaints from the users. Who cares if a few mod cons are missing? All are conscious that they are enjoying what is unquestionably one of the most exclusive perks in London.

For many years, this was royal-only territory. Diana, Princess of Wales, and Princess Margaret were keen users. The Duke of Edinburgh taught his children to swim in this pool. Today, the swimmers might be an entire cross section of Palace life – an equerry, a chauffeur, a secretary from ‘up the road’ at Clarence House or St James’s Palace. Sometimes, they are joined by the most senior non-royal figure in these parts, the Lord Chamberlain.

It’s the same story next door. The corridor may be painted in an institutional green but there can be few offices in central London with an en suite squash court. The Duke was playing on this very court as he waited for the birth of his eldest son (in the days when expectant fathers had to stay out of the way). These days, anyone can play. The reigning Palace squash king is the retired Royal Naval officer who runs the Princess Royal’s office.

How times have changed. Not so long ago, any staff found exercising in here would have been fired, if not court-martialled. Edward VII sent a courtier away in disgrace for using a comb instead of a hairbrush. His son, George V, refused to allow jazz, cocktails and ladies with painted fingernails to intrude upon his Court. A horse belonging to George VI was not allowed to breed with another horse on the grounds that its
owner was a bookmaker. And yet, today, cleaners and peers of the realm might be splashing side by side in the Queen’s pool a few yards from where the Sovereign is discussing affairs of state with the Prime Minister. So how on earth was the Queen – and the Duke for that matter – persuaded to approve this below-stairs revolution? Very easily, it turns out.

‘I went to see her and explained why it might be a good idea for staff welfare and she just said: “Yes, try it,”’ says Air Vice-Marshal Sir David Walker, Master of the Household, and, as such, the man in charge of running all the royal residences. When a plan is well argued and well presented, the Queen’s response can be very straightforward. The Earl of Airlie, the former Lord Chamberlain, recalls a similar reaction when he submitted his proposals for the most far-reaching restructuring of the Royal Household since the Victorian era. He discussed them at great length with the Queen, at the end of which a decision was needed. ‘She just said: “Get on with it.”’ He finds that a slow response is a pretty reliable indicator that the Queen does not like an idea. ‘If you write a paper, it will be back in short order. If she doesn’t like what you’ve said, you might not get an answer so quickly,’ he explains. ‘But when you are talking to her about difficult subjects, somehow or other
she
makes
you
feel better when you leave the room.’

Ask anyone who knows and works with the Queen to describe her and they will begin by emphasising how different she is from her public persona. She is ‘very funny’, ‘a great mimic’, ‘pin sharp’, ‘doesn’t miss a thing’, ‘very feminine’, ‘better with men’ … But the public persona – solemn, remote, inscrutable – is not so much a persona as a professional demeanour which has served her well. If she was known for her vivacity or exuberance, people would be disappointed and curious on the inevitable occasions when it was not there. Expect regal and you will always get regal. We know that there is a private Queen, just as there is an ordinary man beneath the bearskin and the red tunic. But if we think that this private Queen is simply a more relaxed, humorous, animal-loving, racing-mad country cousin to the public model, we are very much mistaken. As her prime ministers have learned, one should never make any assumptions.

‘There is a quite mistaken view of the Queen that she is just a small-c conservative. And that’s not true,’ says Tony Blair. ‘She’s just very protective of the monarchy. What I found to be her most surprising attribute is how streetwise she is. Frequently, throughout my time as Prime Minister, I was always stunned by her total ability to pick up the public mood and define it in the conversations I had with her. She completely understood what was going on and had a very clear ability to analyse people and their strengths and weaknesses very quickly.’

Sir John Major was also struck by the Queen’s quiet worldliness: ‘There’s very little she hasn’t seen. In my own experience, there is almost nothing that ruffles her. She’s a good student of human behaviour.’

Prince William, the Duke of Cambridge, believes that, for all the advisers dispensing wise counsel to the Queen throughout her life, much of her success has been down to following her own gut instincts. It is a strategy which she has passed on to the younger generation. ‘It’s very much the case that she won’t necessarily force advice on you,’ he says. ‘She’ll let you work it out for yourself. She’s always there for a question or two; for whatever it is you might need. But, just as she probably had to do, she feels that you have to work it out for yourself, that there are no set rules. You have to make it work. You have to do what you think is right. And she’s a prime example of that. She had to carve her own way and she’s done it fantastically for sixty years.’

Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, learned the royal ropes the same way. ‘You have to find your way, develop your interests. There is never any direction,’ says the former Royal Navy Commander and former business ambassador. ‘But you’ve then got to be given the guidance and help to be successful. She’s always given hugely important consideration and advice. I don’t think any of us would have done anything in isolation.’ He also points out that the Queen treats her discussions with her children and grandchildren just like her audiences with her politicians. There will be no round-the-dinner-table discussion about what was discussed one-on-one during the afternoon. ‘It’s one of those odd things. It’s exactly the same as the conversation the Monarch has with the Prime Minister. That is a conversation between the two of them and only the two of them. The same thing is true with the other members of the family. None of us actually discuss the conversations that each of us has had.’

In a society where the reality show and phone-in have made a virtue of being noisy and opinionated, the Queen is a rare advertisement for the power of silence. ‘Where she’s been brilliant is in her quietness,’ observes Charles Anson, her former Press Secretary. ‘In a very noisy world where people constantly want to express themselves or overreact, what the Queen has done has been the opposite. She is not a celebrity. She’s not at all shouty. You get back, perhaps, to that part of the brain where a child wants reassurance from a mother or father. They might call their parents “old squares” but, deep down, they want the quiet reassurance from the parental figure.’

Propping it all up is a faith which dates from childhood but was substantially reinforced soon after her father’s death. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, believes that one of his predecessors,
Geoffrey Fisher, played his part. ‘Before the Coronation, Geoffrey Fisher prepared a little book of meditations and prayers for her to use daily,’ says Dr Williams. ‘I think she really treasured that. She showed it to me once at Windsor – it’s in the library there. I just have a hunch that the period before the Coronation was very, very formative for her and for the way she’s approached everything since. It was a time when seriousness kept breaking in.’

But the Queen’s staff also know that nothing helps a bold idea along like a spot of levity. She has a keen sense of the ridiculous. After meeting a Scottish ice-cream manufacturer in 2007, she was fascinated to hear that he had developed a robotic milking operation for his cows. The Queen asked the Keeper of the Privy Purse, Sir Alan Reid, to investigate. Might it be feasible to build an automated milking shed at Windsor? Keepers of the Privy Purse have had many strange duties to perform through the centuries but none has ever had to become an expert on remote-controlled manure sweepers and bovine waterbeds. The Queen was not only fascinated by it all but close to hysterics when Reid explained how the cows would congregate in a ‘loafing area’ prior to milking. ‘The way it was described, it was as if the cow would sit and read a magazine or wander around chatting,’ says one of those involved. ‘She loved it.’ The plans sailed through, the £900,000 milking shed is now up and running and anyone invited to stay at Windsor for the weekend will be given a very animated guided tour – from the proud owner.

After more than thirty years in the Royal Air Force, Air Vice-Marshal Sir David Walker understands chains of command better than most. He was previously in charge of 14,000 men and women as head of RAF training. Yet he regards the Queen as the best boss he has encountered. ‘She is far more accessible than most senior officers I’ve worked for. She’s got a good mind for detail and if you want to see her, you’ll get to see her.’ As the man in charge of all royal hospitality, he knows that the Queen wants to be consulted on all new ideas. ‘She’d tell you if it was a stinker.’ A state banquet might look like a time-honoured set piece but every aspect of it will be revisited every time. It’s hard to rearrange the furniture much at a place like Windsor where the St George’s Hall table is said to be the longest in Britain. But the Queen always likes to fine-tune the arrangements. A few years ago, she decided that state banquets were, simply, going on too long. She discussed it with the Master and a solution was found: lose the soup. ‘It saves twenty minutes,’ says Walker.

The Secretary of the Master’s Department, Michael Jephson, is used to suggestions from the very top when he is compiling guest lists for a reception. Sometimes the Queen will ask him to invite an interesting
person she has just heard on the radio. She has a similar eye for detail as an employer. ‘She is very beady. She has an uncanny way of knowing exactly what is going on,’ says the current Lord Chamberlain, Lord Peel. ‘I wasn’t prepared for the level of in-depth knowledge.’ The loyalty of long-serving staff to the Monarch is reciprocated. ‘She really does feel as if she is part of a team and sometimes it shows,’ says a former senior official. In particular, she will not tolerate rudeness towards her own people.

Many of her staff – and those who come up
against
her staff – talk about her pragmatism. She can display what former Prime Minister Tony Blair has described as ‘a certain hauteur’ (it would be surprising if a monarch could not) but she is not stuffy.

Some have found that the best way of dealing with over-protective, second-guessing royal officials is to bypass them altogether and go straight to the top. It’s a high-risk strategy but sometimes it’s the only way, as the television producer Edward Mirzoeff discovered when he was filming the great 1992 royal documentary,
Elizabeth R
. The final scene was to be the Ghillies’ Ball at Balmoral – the social highlight of the Queen’s stay in the Highlands. It had been a fraught day. The ballroom was so gloomy that Mirzoeff had been forced to scrounge a vanload of lighting from his local ITV rivals in Aberdeen. He had even enlisted the van driver as a ‘sparks’ to light the room before the Royal Family arrived. Finally, after his crew had only been filming for a few minutes, Palace staff intervened. Mirzoeff was informed that his time was up. The cameras had intruded for quite long enough. Mirzoeff admits that he ‘nearly lost it’ with the courtiers: ‘I thought: “This can’t happen.” So I dashed across the dance floor and went straight up to the Queen – and said: “Ma’am, we have to keep on filming.”’

He remembers the ‘Bateman looks’
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as he committed the ultimate dance-floor faux pas. But it worked. ‘I simply cannot tell you how marvellous she is in a situation like that,’ says Mirzoeff. ‘She said to me: “Fine, well just carry on.” And we got our ending. In fact, I had problems with everybody at one time or another making that film – except her.’

As the royal biographer Kenneth Rose observes: ‘One of the most pertinent mottos of the Household is “Better Not”.’ The same is not true of the boss. After more than thirty years of sponsoring one of Ascot’s plum royal fixtures, the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes, the diamond giant De Beers decided to step down. Only one company
was prepared to come forward with the requisite pot of money. And Betfair, an online betting company, was not what some of the Jockey Club grandees had in mind. But there was no objection when the suggestion was put to the overall boss of Ascot Racecourse. As one official explains: ‘The Queen accepted the reality. If no one else is willing to sponsor something, then there is no choice.’ What used to be called ‘Diamond Day’ became the ‘Betfair Weekend’.