Her Majesty (21 page)

Catherine Middleton’s radiant happiness on the arm of her father, Michael – a man displaying his own Olympian powers of composure – struck an instant chord with the public. Some commentators had previously tried to project the union as a clash of class and culture, the girl from the happy, entrepreneurial Home Counties family being tossed into an unbending, snobbish world obsessed with pedigree. All of a sudden, those Jane Austen conspiracy theories simply collapsed. Everything about the occasion bespoke a genuine, solid love match, an impression reinforced by the armies of lip-readers employed by Fleet Street to translate every inaudible aside. ‘I am so proud you’re my wife,’ the new Duke of Cambridge whispered as he helped the new Duchess into the State Landau outside the Abbey. Since boyhood, Prince William has carried a colossal – at times overwhelming – burden of expectation. That burden, at least, could now be shared.

And despite the inevitable comparisons with the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer thirty years earlier, the backdrop was reminiscent of a different event. The 1981 royal wedding took place in an era of cloudless skies. During the build-up to this wedding, though, there had been a miasma of negativity. There were grumbles about the expense of it all (even though the cost to the public purse amounted to 0.2 per cent of the bill for the 2012 London Olympics). There were complaints from the modish left that another burst of Charles-and-Di-style razzmatazz was projecting an outdated image of Britain. Just days before the wedding, the Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, announced that he was planning to end male primogeniture in the Royal Family and allow the eldest child to succeed to the throne, female or male. It’s a recurring cross-party idea, always good for a headline yet forever thwarted by almost insuperable constitutional complexities. On this occasion, it merely succeeded in kickstarting a debate about the entire monarchy on the eve of a wedding.

There were rows about the guest list too, notably the absence of invitations to the two former Labour prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. The omission carried uncomfortable, subliminal political messages – even if none was intended. To many, it smacked of a snub. The problem was that the two surviving Conservative ex-premiers, Lady Thatcher and Sir John Major, had been included. The Clarence House team charged
with drawing up the guest list had decided to include all members of the Order of the Garter, on the grounds that Prince William was a Knight of the Garter himself. Lady Thatcher and Sir John were members of the Order. Blair and Brown were not. This was no ‘snub’. It was just an oversight – ‘a cock-up’, as a senior Buckingham Palace aide acknowledged. Blair had met Prince William many times and had gone out of his way to defend the monarchy at its lowest ebb. Brown had not only been scrupulous in his dealings with the Palace but, as Chancellor, had chaired the committee which created a permanent public memorial to Diana, Princess of Wales. With the monarchy, perceptions of neutrality are as vital as the exercise of neutrality. If the guest list could include every Lord-Lieutenant and the footballer David Beckham, it could surely have included two former prime ministers. But the overarching concern was one of tone. The marriage was taking place against a backdrop of economic hardship and substantial cuts in public spending. The situation was certainly not as bleak as the conditions of post-war austerity which prevailed in 1947 when Princess Elizabeth married Prince Philip. But now, as then, it was vital for the monarchy to strike a happy balance between spectacular pageantry and common sense.

And yet, all these worries simply melted away by mid-morning on 29 April 2011. The moment the bride arrived at the altar in her masterpiece of lace and ivory satin by Sarah Burton at Alexander McQueen the occasion was already a monumental triumph. It had the bonus of making Britain feel a great deal better about itself at a time of economic malaise. And in that regard, the closest comparison was not the ballyhoo of the royal weddings of the eighties. This one, rather, echoed that unexpected revivalist hit of the previous decade – the Silver Jubilee of 1977.

Overall, inter-generational royal relations have seldom been better. Once at loggerheads, the Prince of Wales’s staff and the Queen’s officials now liaise, dine and even work out together on a daily basis. Michael Peat, the architect of all those royal reforms on behalf of the Queen, was knighted and went on to become the Prince’s Private Secretary, a move which helped to harmonise the two operations. In 2011, after more than twenty years of royal service, he finally announced that he would return to the private sector, to be replaced by William Nye, a senior civil servant. The Prince has rearranged his household at Clarence House to replicate the structure of Buckingham Palace, complete with a Master of the Household. But the Queen is well aware of the need for each generation to exercise a sensible independence from the one in front.

So while Prince William and Prince Harry had previously depended
on their father’s staff at Clarence House, they have now set up their own office next door in a corner of St James’s Palace. The Queen also pays for Prince William to have his own independent constitutional adviser in the form of Sir David Manning, former British ambassador to Washington.

Long before their wedding, the Prince and his bride-to-be had been renting a farmhouse together in Anglesey following his posting there with the RAF. As man and wife, however, they also needed a new London base. The new Duke and Duchess of Cambridge could hardly be expected to share the Clarence House bachelor flat with Prince Harry.
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A modest apartment in the private wing of Kensington Palace – where the Duke spent much of his childhood – was allocated to them.

However, there was no question of Prince Harry moving out of the shared office. The two Princes remain extremely close and several guests at the evening party after the wedding were reduced to tears during Prince Harry’s irreverent but poignant tribute to the big brother who had helped him through the turmoil of their mother’s death. Today, the Duke, the Duchess and the younger Prince plus nine office staff all work out of a small terraced house which had previously been earmarked as accommodation for the Lord Chamberlain. Guests are greeted by a bust of the Queen and a portrait of Edward VII next to a very ordinary kitchen where the royal residents and the staff share a coffee machine, a kettle and a table covered in newspapers. Brynnie, a friendly working cocker spaniel belonging to senior aide Helen Asprey, is part of the furniture.

The single stairwell (there are no backstairs for staff) is dominated by a Franz Winterhalter portrait of Queen Victoria and lined with smaller military prints and a view of Windsor from Eton. It is smart but not grand. There is an easy informality and a bustling sense of purpose as young assistants trot between floors bearing correspondence or dress samples. If the Duke of Cambridge is between official engagements, visitors are as likely to bump into him wearing chinos, open-neck shirt and tank top as to find him in a suit.

Space is tight, though. This may be the headquarters of the most famous young couple on earth but they don’t just share the same first-floor study with each other. They share it with Prince Harry, too. And because there is only room for two desks, the trio are reduced to what, in modern officespeak, is known as ‘hot-desking’. ‘It’s not a problem as they’re hardly ever all there at the same time,’ explains a member of staff. While the Private Secretary works in the room next door, the other
officials and assistants occupy the floor above. Here, the atmosphere is even more informal, the walls lined not with works from the Royal Collection but delightful sketches of the Princes as very young children. It’s a small, close-knit operation without the trappings of larger royal households – equerries, ladies-in-waiting, orderlies and so on. And at this stage in his life, that is precisely how the next monarch but one likes to keep it.

With the domestic situation happy and settled, it is money which has crept back up the agenda again. Today, it is a matter for Sir Alan Reid, Keeper of the Privy Purse since the Golden Jubilee. An international management consultant from the same KPMG stable as Sir Michael Peat, Reid has quietly introduced an entirely new financial structure for the monarchy. In 2010, exactly 250 years after the creation of the Civil List – an anniversary studiously ignored by everyone at the Palace – the old system was torn up. The ten-year Civil List deal had come to an end and Reid and the Coalition Government both agreed it was time for a simpler plan. Instead of receiving a fixed head of state allowance from the state plus complicated grants for maintenance and travel, the monarchy would receive one lump sum every year – a percentage of the Crown Estate’s annual profits. Announcing the plans in June 2011, the Chancellor, George Osborne, said that the initial share would be 15 per cent – to meet a projected royal bill of £35 million. But the figure, he added, could be adjusted up or down. What’s more, it would have a new name. The term ‘Civil List’ would be consigned to the history books. The new deal would be called the Sovereign Grant.

Once upon a time, the Sovereign had taken the entire Crown Estate pot. In 1760, George III swapped it all for the Civil List. Now, 250 years later, the monarchy would live on a slice of that original pie. It seemed like a good deal all round. The Royal Household had finally achieved Lord Airlie’s dream of being ‘masters of their own destiny’. Parliament would have scrutiny of the whole royal budget via the National Audit Office. But, looking to the future, there are risks, too. The Crown Estate is a dynamic property developer in a tough market. Any unpopular decisions – and it has made many – may now rebound directly on the Queen. What’s more, the new deal was announced in the teeth of a dire economic crisis. And, unlike most of the public sector, the monarchy had already spent the previous twenty years cutting costs. Thus, there was less flab to lose. Yet Reid has already identified new cuts, not least by securing a place on the Royal Visits Advisory Committee. Previously, royal visits were decided by the Foreign Office and the royal visitor, while the bill was then sent to the Treasury for payment. Now that the cost must,
instead, come out of the monarchy’s central budget, Reid will in future be in a position to clip royal wings. It is unlikely that a state visit will ever be called off because of the transport costs. But if the choice is between sending a junior member of the family to the Pacific or hiring a new footman, it may help to focus the mind.

Lord Airlie is the first to admit that he and Michael Peat have not made things easy for their successors by stripping out so much of the fat during the nineties. ‘I don’t think we’re that popular,’ he jokes. Subsequent arrivals have observed that one side effect of the reforms was a surfeit of risk-averse, box-ticking accountants. ‘It was a classic pendulum thing,’ explains a member of today’s Royal Household. ‘There was no financial control in the 1980s and then way too much by the time of the Golden Jubilee in 2002. There were just far too many accountants reconciling their numbers with other accountants.’ Another official recalls the way that, over time, the level of financial control was becoming counterproductive. ‘If you had a good idea, you were told “no” straight away and then you had to fight to say why it was a good idea.’ The risk-averse culture had got to the point that Palace staff could not even send or receive emails for fear of hackers. One of Reid’s first moves on taking over the Palace’s financial operations in 2002 was to slash the number of fellow accountants and install new computers.

The scale of the great Airlie/Peat reforms is not forgotten, however. ‘What Lord Airlie did was brave, it showed great foresight and it was not an easy task,’ says today’s Lord Chamberlain, Lord Peel. ‘I know the difficulties he faced and the opposition he encountered but he changed the face of the Household and since then it has evolved at a pretty rapid rate.’

The Duke of York is under no illusions that this rapid rate of reform is set to continue. ‘This organisation went through a restructuring under Lord Airlie and I suspect there are going to be huge changes in the way things are done for the Sovereign Grant,’ he says. ‘The whole thing is going to have to change and it’s a question of how that’s done. There won’t be a compromise solution. There will be a solution that best meets the needs of the time.’

None the less, in her Diamond Jubilee year, the Queen can look back on a minor royal economic miracle. When she came to the throne in 1952, her income from the Civil List was £475,000 – equivalent to 60 per cent of the Crown Estate’s profits – not to mention all the other allowances. The entire Royal Family was funded by the state and the Queen paid no tax. Today, the monarchy costs not 60 per cent but 15 per cent of the Crown Estate’s profits. Aside from the Queen and Prince
Philip, none of the Royal Family receives an annuity from the state. And the Monarch is taxed. The Civil List, that central royal budget, has now been replaced. But for twenty years – from 1990 to 2010 – it never had an increase. In other words, the monarchy was the only arm of the state to exist on the same budget for two decades (by way of comparison, an MP’s salary tripled during the same period). ‘Business would think we were mad!’ jokes the Duke of York. In the year of a £9.4 billion Olympiad, the Royal Household’s budget for the entire Diamond Jubilee is
£
1 million – less than a thirtieth of the cost of a single, temporary Olympic basketball arena.

To the monarchy’s critics, it will always be a ‘luxury we cannot afford’. Since a presidency would presumably involve a national election (going rate: £80 million) this is a moot point. But the Royal Household is certainly in a stronger position to defend itself after the reforms of the last twenty-five years. If the Airlie/Peat revolution had not started when it did, who knows what further damage might have been done when those explosive issues of sex and money finally detonated at the start of the Nineties? ‘It had to be done,’ says Lord Airlie. ‘And what would one say if it hadn’t been done?’ He would, doubtless, accept that the ultimate credit for the overhaul of Her Majesty’s Household rests with Her Majesty – since she appointed him and gave him special powers in the first place. The Duke of York certainly thinks so. ‘That comes from leadership from the top,’ he says. ‘Whether or not there were people in the institution who would have had that sort of bravery, I am not sure.’