Her Majesty (16 page)

Lord Airlie and his team were effectively gambling the financial future of the monarchy against the future rate of inflation. The sum agreed was £7.9 million, a figure based on average inflation over the previous ten years. It looked good, but Lord Airlie admits that these were nervous times.

Parliament would need to agree the new deal. And the Labour-led Opposition might have raised hell had Mrs Thatcher not discussed it with the Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, in advance. In a rare display of unity, Thatcher and Kinnock organised an old-fashioned stitch-up. On a July afternoon in 1990, the House of Commons was given a few hours’ notice and just twenty minutes of parliamentary time to discuss the plans. Even so, there was no rejoicing in the Palace camp. ‘I have to say that I was quite concerned we hadn’t done a good enough bargain because inflation was going to go further,’ says Lord Airlie. To his eternal satisfaction, he was wrong. ‘What actually happened was inflation went down. We needed a bit of luck. It worked. It really did work!’ It worked so well, in fact, that the monarchy would not need a rise for another twenty years.

Lord Airlie and his team had struck another deal at the same time. They were allowed to take over the maintenance of all the royal palaces. Up to this point, it had been the job of various government departments. But why should it be left to civil servants to fix a hole in the roof? Michael Peat, with his keen eye for institutional blubber, was soon trimming away. ‘We think like the housewife. She knows how to run her house,’ says Lord Airlie. ‘We knew more about these palaces than they did.’ Within six years, the success of the new property system would persuade the government to take the royal transport budget off the civil servants and give that to the Peat team, too.

As a result, the nineties would see the overall royal bill run completely counter to the rest of the state’s expenditure. The whole royal show – including Civil List, maintenance and travel – cost £65.5 million in 1991-92. By 2000, that cost would be down to £38 million. Palace officials were wise enough not to expect any applause. They had pulled off a management triumph but the outside world was not paying any attention.
Those twin issues of ‘sex and money’ were now dragging the monarchy into new and more dangerous territory. In media terms, clever stewardship of the light bulb budget was irrelevant compared to increasingly lurid stories about the younger members of the Royal Family. These, in turn, had kick-started an entirely different debate: why was the Queen not paying income tax?

In every organisation people can usually look back to an incomprehensible event which makes everyone roll their eyes, shake their heads and go very red or very pale. All those record labels which turned down the Beatles must have had their painful post-mortems. Likewise the publishers which gave the thumbs-down to J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter. Most of the country, the Queen included, have asked similar questions about the brains in charge of the banking sector when the collapse of Lehman Brothers took the world to the brink in 2008. In the Royal Household, the Beatles-Potter-Lehman moment is still the day, in 1987, when Prince Edward put on Tudor fancy dress and cajoled certain members of his family to take part in a televised game show.

‘Oh God!’ winces a former Private Secretary, eyes closed, body stiffening, as if awaiting an unpleasant injection. ‘An unmitigated disaster,’ sighs another. Such is the reaction, even today, to the words
It’s a Royal Knockout
.

It was an idea born of good intentions and a myopic understanding of public opinion. Having graduated from Cambridge, Prince Edward had joined the Royal Marines only to resign before completing the infamously unpleasant basic training. It had been a bold decision to choose arguably the toughest unit in the Forces and an equally bold step to walk away from a corps whose Captain-General was his own father. Few of those who set out to become a Royal Marine succeed, a fact largely overlooked by an unsympathetic press. Undaunted, the Prince was keen to make his mark elsewhere. He decided to recreate the once-popular show
It’s a Knockout
, where rival teams in fancy dress have to compete in various custard-pie-style comedy capers. He would recruit his siblings as team leaders and sell the media rights to generate large sums for charity. In the process, it would show that the younger members of the Royal Family were unstuffy and happy to let their hair down in aid of good causes. Who could object?

The Prince and Princess of Wales smelled trouble straight away and declined. But the Princess Royal and the Duke and Duchess of York signed up. Whether they genuinely thought it was a good idea or whether they were simply being sympathetic to Prince Edward after his setback with the Forces is unclear. But with a healthy royal line-up secured, there
were plenty of celebrities keen to join in, too – singer Tom Jones, footballer Gary Lineker, racing driver Nigel Mansell and many more.

In retrospect, it might seem extraordinary that neither the Queen nor her advisers found a way of quietly suffocating the project. ‘I think like all parents, she finds it quite hard to say “no” to her own children,’ says one senior official charitably. ‘We all do.’ Another says that the Prince had been ‘very sneaky’ in planning the event. ‘We all tried to stop it,’ he says, ‘but it had been organised already without the knowledge of anybody in the Household. The only person who could have stopped it was the Queen and she wasn’t prepared to do it. I bet she now wishes she had. It was a step down the slippery slope. It brought ridicule on the organisation.’

At one level it was a genuinely well-intentioned piece of prime-time fun with celebrities pelting and dunking other celebrities during a series of harmless faux-gladiatorial contests. However, a large section of the population found it condescending. The sight of members of the Royal Family in medieval costumes cheerleading all this buffoonery was not merely incongruous but somehow inappropriate, with echoes of a latter-day Petit Trianon.

The organisers had also made a fundamental error in their handling of the media. Exclusive rights to the action had been sold to one newspaper while the rest were left to watch it on television in an adjacent press tent. The journalists who had been barred from the big event were, therefore, somewhat underwhelmed before the thing had even started. When it was over, a weary but exhilarated Prince Edward arrived for a post-match press conference, expecting some amiable banter. He had put months of work and effort into what, after all, was a colossal exercise in charitable fundraising. Having described the occasion as ‘one of the best fun afternoons that I have ever had’, he asked the journalists if they had enjoyed themselves, too. A phalanx of stony faces stared back. ‘Well thanks for sounding so bloody enthusiastic,’ he snapped. ‘Did you watch it? What did you think of it?’ Before anyone could answer, he then stormed out. Any lingering sense of goodwill towards the project left with him.

From that point onwards, the behaviour of the younger royal generation was the subject of increasingly caustic media coverage. Anything which smacked of extravagance or questionable taste was highlighted. The Yorks’ new home at Sunninghill Park was an early example. The absence of royal mourners at the memorial service for the Lockerbie bomb victims in 1989 was held up as evidence of royal disengagement from the rest of society.

Being a junior member of the Royal Family can be a thankless task. The trappings are there, of course, but you are destined for an
ever-diminishing role as younger generations are born closer to the centre. But how wide is the orbit? At the Palace, the Green Book – the Royal Household directory – extends the Royal Family as far afield as Lady Saltoun, the widow of the Queen’s distant cousin and late Highland neighbour, Captain Alexander Ramsay of Mar. The Court Circular, however, chronicles the official activities of just sixteen members of the Royal Family, the latest addition being a future Queen, the Duchess of Cambridge. They are each supported by an office and by the national network of Lord-Lieutenants. The rest do their own thing at their own expense. The dividing line can be confusing. Prince Edward, now Earl of Wessex and seventh in line to the throne, gave up his own television production company, embraced traditional royal duties and now, with his Countess, represents the Queen all over the world. Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, fifth and sixth in line, are of a different generation and will lead private lives. Princess Alexandra, thirty-ninth in line and falling, performs around ninety engagements a year. Peter Phillips, eleventh in line, is a full-time marketing man and performs none.

The Queen has remained steadfastly loyal to the wider cousinhood, meeting many of their costs and including them in all the major royal events. She still invites them all on to the Palace balcony after her Birthday Parade. A plan to reduce the numbers there was drawn up by the Private Secretary’s Office and discussed at one of the family’s Way Ahead Group meetings in the mid-nineties. ‘One of our joint recommendations was that when there were balcony appearances, there shouldn’t be hordes and hordes of people standing there,’ says one of those involved. ‘But the Queen wasn’t prepared to accept that. So it didn’t happen.’ Even officials at Westminster Abbey, the most loyal and royal church in the land, have suggested to the Palace that royal protocol verges on the excessive when nearly twenty people styled ‘HRH’ turn up and the clergy are expected to genuflect to all of them. The Queen, however, is not in the business of downgrading her relations. Nor does she encourage one-upmanship between them when it comes to official duties. Palace staff insist they keep no list of who does what, arguing that they want to avoid a ‘league table’ of royal activity in the papers. It’s a charming pretence, of course. A few seconds on a Palace computer could produce the results.

George V was obsessive in keeping a table of all family activity and would read out the results each Christmas. These days, however, the task is left to Tim O’Donovan, a retired insurance broker from Datchet, Berkshire, who methodically goes through the Court Circular every day of the year, tots up all the results and publishes them in a letter to
The Times
. What everyone in the family acknowledges, however, is that, in
future, the ‘active’ royal unit will be much smaller – the Monarch and the Consort plus children and spouses.

For now, though, the Queen is grateful for the work which her cousins do on her behalf But her reign has seen a complete transformation of life on the royal fringe. The Gloucesters are a good example. Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, was the younger brother of Edward VIII and George VI. He was looking forward to a military career until the Abdication crisis of 1936 promoted him to third in line. Should anything have happened to George VI, the Duke would have been Regent to Princess Elizabeth until she came of age. Within a year, he had been withdrawn from his unit, accelerated from major to major general and was destined to spend the rest of his days unveiling plaques. His no-nonsense military small talk is still the stuff of Palace legend. Opening a flower show, he remarked: ‘What a bloody big marrow. Glad I don’t have to eat it.’ And when a state visit involved an excursion to
Tosca
at the Royal Opera House, the Duke of Gloucester was heartily relieved as Maria Callas finally tumbled over the battlements. ‘Well, if she really is dead,’ he informed the occupants of the Royal Box, ‘we can all go home.’

Although he remarked that his memoirs should be called ‘Forty Years of Boredom’, he never complained. His elder son, Prince William of Gloucester, sought to break the royal mould during the sixties and pursued a career in the City and then the Foreign Office. ‘I am just a rather junior appendage to this extraordinary institution called the monarchy,’ he once explained. But duty duly called for this eligible bachelor. Having returned home to help his elderly parents with the running of the family’s Northamptonshire estate, he admitted: ‘It looks as though I shall spend the rest of my life shooting small birds and sleeping with larger ones.’ William’s tragic early death in a plane crash in 1972 propelled his younger brother, Prince Richard, from life as a professional architect to that of a trainee ‘royal’. Following his father’s death in 1974, the new Duke of Gloucester took on most of his father’s old patronages. But the nature of the job was changing. With the Duke of Edinburgh leading the charge, many members of the Royal Family were switching from a titular role to a semi-executive position in some of their organisations. Today, they still unveil plaques but they might also attend the board meetings. It’s a change which has suited today’s Eton and Cambridge-educated Duke of Gloucester well. In addition to some of the more traditional military and agricultural patronages, he is an active, hands-on supporter of organisations involved in architecture, disaster prevention, health and building technology. He also takes a mischievous pride in his patronage of the Richard III Society, a body dedicated to the rehabilitation of the most
notorious Duke of Gloucester in history. The latest model has flirted with controversy himself, using his maiden speech in the House of Lords, in 1984, to attack the tobacco industry and to argue that the government should do more to tackle it. His Danish-born wife, meanwhile, is patron of more than sixty organisations and a particularly active figure in the field of musical education. None of their children, however, will lead a ‘royal’ life.

The Duke’s heir, the Earl of Ulster, a soldier married to a doctor, has no royal style, no royal home and will not take on royal duties when he succeeds to the title. But for now, the present Duke, a grandfather and proud bearer of a Senior Railcard, continues to maintain an active royal schedule shaped not by tradition but largely by himself. He performs around three hundred royal engagements around the world each year. These events will never attract much interest from the national media but they are much appreciated by the school children, diplomats, nurses, veterans, scientists and whoever else happens to be on the receiving end of royal and national recognition in the shape of the Duke. It is much the same across the royal spectrum. The family call it ‘supporting the Queen’. It has long been the core business of royalty, accounting for thousands of events involving hundreds of thousands of ordinary people every year. But it counted for little as recession and post-Cold War uncertainties hung over the start of the nineties.