Penny Junor - The Firm - The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor

Another major fault highlighted in Peat’s report was communication; and it was certainly my experience over the years that the right hand never knew what the left was doing. Press officers seldom appeared to know what the private secretaries were briefing and vice versa, and there was no sense that the various members of the family were all working either for the same outfit or towards the same goal. Peat didn’t criticize the private secretaries in other respects, but he found the idea of forward planning or discussing arrangements for their principal with other households within The Firm anathema. It was perfectly possible, and certainly not unknown, for two members of the family to have been visiting the same town on the same morning and know nothing about each other’s visit until they met in the high street.

There was another problem. They were constantly being caught on the wrong foot, always reacting to problems and situations, waiting for criticism rather than pre-empting it. The solution, devised by David Airlie, Michael Peat, Robin Janvrin, then the Queen’s Deputy Private Secretary, and Charles Anson, her Press Secretary from 1990, was The Way Ahead Group, which first met in September 1994. Hard to believe that so simple an idea had to wait until 1994. It was an informal meeting which took place every six months between the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, the Prince of Wales, the Princess Royal, the Duke of York and the Earl of Wessex plus their private secretaries and other senior courtiers to map out the coming half-year and discuss anything of importance. According to a leaked agenda from a meeting in 1996 that could mean a discussion about the possibility of abandoning primogeniture – and allowing the firstborn, whether male or female, to inherit the throne – abolishing the ban on heirs to the throne marrying Roman Catholics, ending the monarch’s position as Supreme Governor of the Church of England and reducing those working for the Family Firm to include only the consort, children and grandchildren directly in line. The constant surprise is that the Royal Family doesn’t discuss any of these sorts of topics with one another on their own; it takes prompting from their courtiers and the structure of a formal group. Privately their talk tends to revolve around the domestic scene: dogs, horses, sporting pursuits and Estate matters, interspersed with dirty jokes and nudges in the ribs. This is not a family that enjoys debate or intellectual conversation. ‘Some people regard “bugger” as a term of abuse,’ says a former courtier. ‘The Royal Family uses the word “intellectual” in much the same way.’

‘They do communicate in the oddest way,’ agrees another, echoing everyone I have known who has ever worked for the Royal Family. ‘It’s a very close family, but they don’t communicate directly. They let other people take soundings; they never say “I’ll talk about it with whomever” over the weekend. They do it through private secretaries or press secretaries. It’s very cumbersome.’

‘They used to write each other memos all the time, but that’s changed a bit,’ says one lady-in-waiting. ‘They no longer commit anything to paper that they wouldn’t want to see on the front page of the Daily Mail .’ Unfortunately for the Prince of Wales, an inveterate memo writer, old habits die hard. An internal memo sent to Mark Bolland, his Deputy Private Secretary at the time, about a secretary he thought ‘so PC it frightens me’ turned up in an industrial tribunal and was on the front page of every newspaper as recently as November 2004 and sparked off a massive row about education. The then Secretary of State for Education, Charles Clarke, weighed in and openly criticized the Prince of Wales for meddling in something he knew nothing about, thus breaking the convention that members of the government never criticize members of the Royal Family in public. In fact the Prince of Wales knows a damn sight more about education than most politicians, but it would be a shame to let the facts get in the way of giving the Prince a good kicking.

It has to be said that safe methods of communication are diminishing. The Duke of Edinburgh has seen his private letters to the Princess of Wales published for public consumption courtesy of Paul Burrell and his book, and the Prince of Wales knows all too well about the dangers of mobile phones, after finding his amorous late-night ramblings intercepted and dished up for the world’s entertainment. No wonder he doesn’t use email.

The Prince, in fact, still writes everything in longhand, pages and pages with plenty of underlining for emphasis. He fires off memos to his staff and to his charities – Julia Cleverdon at Business in the Community calls them ‘black spider memos’ because of the colour of his ink and the frantic scribbling as his pen tries to keep up with his thoughts. And he writes letters, a habit he acquired long ago, with no apparent thought about them falling into the wrong hands.

Says a former courtier:

He’s one of the great letter writers, except he needs an editor; his letters are far too long. But most people find letters of condolence the most difficult things to do. He would just sit down, pick up his pen and do four pages, or whatever, and it was always absolutely brilliant. He’s a very emotional man and his emotions, unlike ‘British’ emotions, are right there, available and articulated. That’s why he likes the descendants of Winston Churchill so much; they’re very given to tears. He likes the idea of people breaking into tears.

Charles finds he can express himself with a fountain pen. He has never used a computer and has no plans to start now, but his Luddite tendencies are not reflected elsewhere in The Firm. His father, now in his eighties – nearly thirty years older than Charles – was probably one of the first people in the land to own a laptop and has been writing letters on it and using email for as long as email has existed. Even the Queen is ahead of her eldest son. During a trip to Brunei in 1998 she remarked to the Sultan’s family, ‘I can’t write any more. I can only write on computers. You can rub things out. It’s so simple.’ The Duke of York is another devotee and has all the very latest hand-held wizardry, like his younger brother. Having worked in the film business, Edward is entirely familiar with computers and better than most at knowing how they work. Wandering into the Press Office at Buckingham Palace one day he found Ailsa Anderson, Assistant Press Secretary to the Queen, staring forlornly at a dead screen and immediately fixed it for her. The surprising thing about Edward is that for all that exposure to the real world, and all the nice touches that people report time and again, he is the most regal of all his siblings and in some respects the least relaxed about royal protocol.

The brainstorming that produced The Way Ahead Group threw up another good idea: the creation of a department that has no ties with the past and is staffed by no one with a military career behind them. The Coordination and Research Unit (CRU), which was set up in 1995, is currently run by Paul Havill, a civil servant who came from the Office of Fair Trading and is on secondment for three years, which has since been extended. He is the third incumbent. His two assistants are always from the private sector – usually from companies like Price Waterhouse or Arthur Anderson – and stay for a year, perhaps two. ‘The idea is to keep the fresh thinking and dynamism from the private sector coming into the heart of the private secretaries’ office.’ He works directly for Robin Janvrin, his assistants for Janvrin’s deputies.

With the best will in the world they need that fresh thinking and dynamism. It is very easy to lose touch with reality if your life is spent at Buckingham Palace. It may be more efficiently run than it ever was, but how many other offices in London have Old Masters on the walls, Georgian tables doubling up as desks and priceless works of art decorating every corridor? It’s only when you catch sight of computers, fax machines and filing cabinets that you realize this is neither a museum nor an art gallery. If you are travelling with the Queen you may visit schools and hospitals and meet a wide cross-section of society but you still travel with outriders, still walk on red carpet, and still, in the main, meet people who are pleased to see you. It is an unreal existence and it’s seductive, particularly when you stay for ten, fifteen or twenty years, as most of the Queen’s private secretaries do. Staff at lower levels are very often in royal service for life.