Her Majesty (20 page)

Inside the Palace that initial sense of shock on day one was soon replaced by a steely unanimity of purpose. ‘It was an occasion when people pulled together like you could never imagine,’ Sir Malcolm Ross remembers. ‘We had daily conferences with the Archbishop or his representatives, the Dean of Westminster, the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police, the Head of the Army and so on. Lord Airlie chaired it and was going round the table saying, “Can you do that by lunchtime today?” “Yes,” said the Commissioner. “Yes,” said the Archbishop. “Yes.” “Yes.” “Yes.”’ Nor was the Royal Family as detached from it all as the critics suggested. The members of the funeral committee gathered in a Buckingham Palace drawing room each morning and were regularly joined by Prince Philip on a conference telephone. As one of those present recalls: ‘Prince Philip was being a typically crisp and efficient chairman from Balmoral and saying: “Hang on, why not do this, or do that?”’

The new Prime Minister himself was earning plaudits – even from old foes like the
Daily Telegraph –
for protecting the monarchy. Some had winced at Tony Blair’s demotic language in lamenting ‘the People’s Princess’ hours after her death but his stature continued to rise as he defended the Royal Family from the brickbats. It needed it. Tabloid headline writers and the left-wing broadsheet commentariat had found rare common cause. The Royal Family, they declared in increasingly shrill tones, simply did not understand modern Britain. Proclaiming the dawn of an ‘emotional revolution’, an editorial in the
Independent
even suggested the following: ‘What would really do the monarchy good, and show that they had grasped the lesson of Diana’s popularity, would be for the Queen and the Prince of Wales to break down, cry and hug one another on the steps of the Abbey this Saturday.’ In retrospect, it seems hilarious. At the time, less so.

Despite his mantra of ‘New Britain’, Tony Blair realised that his primary duty was to protect ‘Old Britain’, as the monarchy was being portrayed by much of the media. At the height of the flag hysteria, he urged people to show sympathy for the Royal Family and to understand that the Windsors were ‘trying to cope in a tremendously difficult situation’. As he writes in his memoirs: ‘I really felt for the Queen.’ He describes how he worked closely with the Prince of Wales to persuade the Queen that she had to come to London, to be seen and to address the nation. Contrary to the way in which these events would be depicted in the film
The Queen
, the Prince of Wales played a key role in helping the monarchy turn the corner. ‘I respected her [the Queen] and was a little in awe of her,’ writes Blair. ‘But as a new Prime Minister, I didn’t know her or how she would take the very direct advice that I now felt I had to give her. So I went to Charles.’ The Prince was in full agreement with the Prime Minister and, up at Balmoral, the Queen duly concurred. It would change the national mood completely. Looking back on it all now, Blair says that the Queen ‘rightly’ viewed some of the public and media hysteria as ‘irrational’. At the same time, she came to a pragmatic view about it. ‘She completely got the fact that it had to be met, at least a little part of the way,’ says Blair. ‘And once she did, she did that very, very adroitly.’

At the same time, though, Blair’s emissary to the Palace planning meetings was getting a mixed reception. Just five years earlier, Alastair Campbell’s ‘
HM THE TAX DODGER
’ story in the
Mirror
had left some of the Royal Household in tears. Now he was back in the role of helper – or, as his own diaries suggest, as saviour. In his view, the Palace was hopelessly out of date and out of its depth. As one of those who attended the daily meetings
recalls: ‘It was the big Alastair Campbell takeover: “We’ll take it over. She was the People’s Princess” and all that.’ The Downing Street team were advocating a ‘People’s Funeral’ with the public marching behind the coffin. Campbell refers to it as his ‘Pied Piper’ idea. The police and the Royal Household were less enthusiastic. ‘There would have been a major disaster if we’d followed Campbell’s idea to have a “People’s Funeral”. His ideas were insane,’ says one of the Metropolitan Police planners. ‘The first was to have the cortege with all the people following behind. One of the officers in charge said to him, “How many people do you want to kill?” All the people would have got to Parliament Square but you can’t turn a huge crowd like that. They would have ended up spilling down on to the Underground.’ The other Downing Street suggestion was for the coffin to be carried around Trafalgar Square. The police took an equally dim view of the likely crowd surge within the square. According to Palace and police sources, Number Ten then took a back seat and left the pageantry experts to put together this historic medley of ancient and modern.

Not so, according to Campbell’s memoirs. He acknowledges that his ‘Pied Piper’ plan was vetoed by the police but says that the Royal Family and its staff needed his ‘constant assurance that they were keeping in step’. He also quotes their repeated gratitude for all his insights. The monarchy certainly was (and still is) grateful for Downing Street’s support during one of the worst weeks of modern times. But, at times, Campbell seems to misinterpret genuine expressions of warm appreciation – which the Palace does very well – as signs of inadequacy.

If he was unaware of the tensions he was creating, others remember things differently. ‘He was ejected,’ says one of the Palace planning team. ‘Robert Fellowes handled it beautifully and I think he took Alastair Campbell outside and effectively removed it from his grasp.’ It must have been handled very well as each side would forever after speak warmly of the other and there are no lingering resentments. In his memoirs, Blair describes Fellowes as ‘a thoroughly sensible man’, adding: ‘I don’t know what he really thought of Diana – I think he saw both sides to her, loved the side he loved and shrugged at the other – but he was a professional and as you sometimes find with well-bred upper-class types, a lot more shrewd and savvy than he let on.’ Fellowes, in turn, would invite Campbell to the Buckingham Palace leaving party which the Queen gave him on his retirement.

While ‘Pied Piper’ ideas were being quietly smothered, there were more practical decisions to be taken. The Princess’s coffin, it was agreed, would be carried on a gun carriage, despite the military/royal overtones. ‘I wanted people to be able to see the coffin,’ says Sir Malcolm Ross. ‘If we were
going to have this mass of people in London, a hearse and a low vehicle with glass between the public and the coffin was not the spectacle we were trying to achieve.’ Ever since the horses bolted at the funeral of Queen Victoria, coffins on gun carriages have traditionally been pulled by humans from the Royal Navy. Ross, however, decided to give the horses the chance to redeem themselves after nearly a century and called in the King’s Troop, Royal Horse Artillery. ‘You can whistle up the King’s Troop in ten minutes but you try and get two hundred sailors. Not a chance.’

The smallest details could require mini-summits. The authorities at Westminster Abbey were happy to have Sir Elton John singing his lament for the Princess and yet they had reservations about the inclusion of Verdi’s Requiem on the grounds that it was a secular piece of music (the Abbey relented). ‘I had Plácido Domingo on the line from San Francisco asking if he could take part,’ says Ross. ‘I said: “So sorry, the job’s gone.”’

By now, the two main concerns for the organisers were the reaction to the Queen’s impending return to the capital and the size of the crowds at the funeral. The Palace team had come up with three suggestions which, according to police sources, avoided a serious crowd control issue or even loss of life. The first had been the extension of the funeral route by starting from Kensington Palace, the Princess’s old home, rather than St James’s Palace. The second was the erection of giant television screens in London parks to ease congestion around Westminster Abbey. The third was the decision to publicise a processional route for the hearse all the way through London and up to the Princess’s ancestral home at Althorp, Northamptonshire.

All eyes were now on the Queen’s arrival from Balmoral to meet the crowds and address the nation. Much of the midweek anger had vanished as quickly as it had appeared following the sudden – and astonishingly composed – appearance of Prince William and Prince Harry with their father amid the mourners and flowers outside Kensington Palace. Newly released details of the funeral arrangements also gave the rolling news channels plenty to chew on.

Even so, some of the most experienced members of the Royal Household still look back on that moment as the most pivotal of the Queen’s entire reign. As one retired aide puts it: ‘The stakes were at their highest when the Queen made that broadcast after she came down from Balmoral. She did it live which was a crucial decision by her. It was a high-risk thing but she did it brilliantly. Then she made another very important decision. It was her initiative – what she wanted to do and felt she should do. And that was to walk outside the Palace and bow to the coffin as it went past. A very big moment, that, actually.’

Any lingering doubts about the core strength of the monarchy were dispelled as much of the world watched the Queen deliver her tribute to her late ex-daughter-in-law. ‘What I say to you now as your Queen and as a grandmother, I say from my heart,’ she said (the ‘as a grandmother’ phrase was a genuine Alastair Campbell contribution). The following day, as she led her family out of the Palace gates to lower their heads as the coffin passed by, few could doubt the significance or sincerity of the gesture. The Sovereign, who traditionally bows to no one, had not merely shown leadership and humility. She had also displayed genuine majesty.

‘The important thing is that at the end of the day on that Saturday, it went all right,’ says Lord Airlie. Drawing on a metaphor from his days in the City, he adds: ‘You may well find in years ahead, that that crisis, that awful situation, was the very nadir of our stock market. Look back and it’s probably true. But the monarchy has come through.’

Two years later, the Royal Family assembled for another royal wedding. The marriage of Prince Edward to public relations executive Sophie Rhys-Jones did not bring the capital to a euphoric weekday standstill but took place on a Saturday afternoon in the family church, St George’s Chapel, Windsor. There was none of the bunting and street-party mayhem which accompanied the weddings of the Prince’s brothers back in the eighties. This was not supposed to be another ‘fairy-tale wedding’. The world could watch and yet it was not expected to get involved. Even so, Windsor Castle, now restored to greater grandeur than before, rose to the occasion beautifully. The two main television networks cleared their schedules to pack it all in and stations around the world carried the event live. The choice of Windsor made it emphatically a family affair, not a state occasion. The scale matched the mood perfectly. Similar thoughts led the Prince of Wales and Camilla Parker Bowles to choose St George’s Chapel for the blessing of their wedding in 2005. The whole occasion was marked by sensitivity, given the divorces on both sides, the Prince’s future position as Supreme Governor of the Church of England and the death of Diana. There were problems with the location of the civil marriage ceremony
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and even the date. Come the day, though, there was a carnival atmosphere around Windsor. Here was a stylish and inescapably modern occasion in an impeccably ancient setting with a buzz and
a warmth epitomised by the obvious happiness of Prince William and Prince Harry. A line had been drawn. The world wished the Prince of Wales and the new Duchess of Cornwall well. It was time to move on.

For the Queen herself, the Golden Jubilee of 2002, with its sad start and its stupendous crowds, surpassed all expectations. As she was cheered through the packed streets of Windsor three years later on her eightieth birthday, the Queen’s position as the new Mother of the Nation was beyond doubt.

Henceforth, the Royal Family would be looking forwards. True, the Duchess of York would continue to cause the occasional bout of royal apoplexy, most notably when caught trying to sell royal access to an undercover reporter. There are some who believe that she should now relinquish her title, not least because it was the Queen Mother’s during the Queen’s formative years. But the general feeling is that the harm she inflicts is on herself – and that it might even fulfil a necessary role. Sir Antony Jay, observer of royal fortunes across four decades, shares a favourite theory of the late Lord Charteris – the importance of royal lightning conductors. ‘Every royal family needs a wicked fairy, someone to pick on,’ he points out. ‘It’s a displacement activity. It was Princess Margaret then Princess Anne then Princess Michael of Kent. The press tried it on with Prince Harry and nightclubs for a bit but it didn’t work. Now it’s Prince Andrew. You always need someone to be picked on.’

But as well as wicked fairies, every royal family needs a few happy endings, too. The sense of euphoria which accompanied the wedding of Prince William to Catherine Middleton in April 2011 surprised even the most optimistic royalists. Following the announcement of the couple’s engagement the previous November, there was a palpable sense of restraint, of not wanting to tempt fate, among the press and the British public alike. A recurring media theme was that the people had been hoodwinked by a fairy-tale wedding thirty years earlier and they did not want to be duped again. The rest of the world, however, took a less cautious view. Here was a great new chapter in the one-thousand-year story of the world’s most famous family. Why not just enjoy every moment?

Come the day, a 10,000-strong media contingent from all over the world watched a million people in central London enjoy a day of uncomplicated exuberance. Across Britain, all that doubt and caution simply evaporated. People suddenly found themselves much more excited than they had expected to be. The sight of Prince William and Prince Harry travelling to the Abbey together evoked powerful memories of the two boys making that heartbreaking walk behind their mother’s coffin in 1997.
Here they both were fourteen years on – two dashing young blades waving and smiling at near-hysterical crowds in their immaculate army uniforms; a credit to Diana, to the monarchy and the country.
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