Her Majesty (22 page)

There must have been times when the Queen wondered whether she was doing the right thing. With hindsight, she must have wished she had done some of them faster. There is no doubt that the monarchy had grown complacent through the eighties. The shadow of the nineties should hang near enough to ensure that the same mistake is not made again for a while. But the new Sovereign Grant is the culmination of one of the greatest royal upheavals since George III was on the throne – back in the days when there was still a monarchy over the Channel in France. As he gets up to leave, the most influential courtier of modern times allows himself a shy smile. ‘It’s all right now, you know,’ says Lord Airlie proudly. ‘It’s all right.’

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Plans for a civil ceremony in the castle had to be shelved when it transpired that the castle would need to obtain a wedding licence and, subsequently, make itself available for general wedding hire. The event took place in the Town Hall, minus the Queen. Her absence denoted her disapproval of the arrangements, not of the marriage. She attended the service of blessing in St George’s Chapel, hosted the reception and made an affectionate speech with a racing theme. It was the day of the Grand National.

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While Prince William was dressed as Colonel of the Irish Guards, Prince Harry wore the Household Cavalry uniform of a Captain in the Blues and Royal.

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Fraternal living arrangements were fairly relaxed. It was reported that the brothers had resorted to marking their initials on the soles of their shoes. Otherwise, one might walk off in the other’s footwear.

4

Her People

‘
The word “corporate” is a word the Queen does not like
.’

There is no fanfare. Instead, there is Ray Wheaton. One of Buckingham Palace’s senior liveried staff, quick-witted Wheaton is the Page of the Chambers, a one-man reconnaissance patrol who moves through the Palace ahead of the Queen, checking with a beady eye that everything is as she expects to find it. As his face pokes round the huge mirrored door to the White Drawing Room, the assembled staff and guests stop talking, clear their throats and stiffen. Moments later, the Queen comes through the door looking purposeful and then her face lights up as soon as she is introduced to the first of her three hundred guests. Two hours later, she will have met every single one.

It’s party time at the Palace. Tonight’s guests include charity workers, financiers, a millionaire astronaut, doctors, nurses, a wine grower, a pop star – all of them with one thing in common: South Africa. A week from now, the Palace will be putting on a dazzling show of old-world pomp and modern hospitality to welcome the new President of the Republic of South Africa, Jacob Zuma.

The relationship between Britain and South Africa is a close and vital one. The British Government wants to underline this with a full state visit for Mr Zuma, just a year into his presidency. It is the British Government which decides who receives an invitation for a state visit – there are two each year – but the Queen will be the host. She must ensure that all visitors are treated exactly the same. Even so, she will have a particularly soft spot for this event. South Africa was the first foreign country she ever visited. She had never ventured beyond the Isle of Wight until, in 1947, she accompanied her father, mother and sister on a great post-war tour to what was then still part of the British Empire. It was in Cape Town, on her twenty-first birthday, that she pledged her life to the imperial family of nations in a broadcast which is said to have reduced Winston Churchill to tears when he heard it on the radio back in London. Douglas Hurd was with her as Foreign Secretary when she returned to Cape Town for the first time nearly fifty years later. ‘That
speech weighed on the Queen’s mind,’ he says. ‘She was very conscious of it.’ Today, South Africa is a key member of her beloved Commonwealth. There will be no shortage of talking points with Mr Zuma.

For the first fifty years of this reign, state visits were set in aspic. But now, at an age when most people would probably feel that they have got their entertaining down to a fine art, the Queen has decided to shake things up a bit. She believes that these visits could benefit from some extra razzmatazz in advance. So she has started holding warm-up parties. Not only does it get everyone more excited about the visit but it also gives her some extra insights into the nation she is about to honour. And tonight’s reception offers plenty of those. The Queen is introduced to a little group which includes singer Annie Lennox, Labour politician Lord Mandelson and Mark Shuttleworth, the first ‘African astronaut’ (a software tycoon, he explains that his only qualification for space travel was that he ‘bought a ticket off the Russians’). Talk turns to Nelson Mandela. The Queen remarks that the father of modern South Africa is still as bright as a button in his nineties although she’s a little worried about his knees. All agree. Afterwards, Lennox admits that she herself is a little star-struck, an unusual situation for a pop star. Despite playing at the Golden Jubilee pop concert in the Palace gardens in 2002, this is her first meeting with the Monarch. ‘She’s beautiful, radiant. A very gentle person,’ says Lennox, who greeted the Queen with a huge smile and a textbook curtsey. ‘I thought she’d be a bit intimidating but she is very personable with a big twinkle in her eye.’ Recalling her days as an anti-apartheid protestor, the scale of the journey suddenly sinks in: ‘Here we are with the Queen celebrating the new South Africa. I’m rather emotional.’

London was the hub of the anti-apartheid movement in the days of white-only rule. A lot of old hands from the African National Congress are here tonight. ‘I can’t believe I was just talking to the Queen. Brilliant!’ says Nduna Biyase, chair of the London branch of the ANC. He is not the only one enjoying the sense of the surreal. South African international footballer Quinton Fortune (formerly of Manchester United, now of Doncaster Rovers) thought it was a joke when his invitation arrived. The thirty-two-year-old midfielder was equally astonished when his manager gave him the night off to go to the Palace even though it would mean missing an important match (the boss must be furious with himself; at this precise moment, Rovers are losing at home to Leicester City). Fortune says that no one is more excited than his mother, sitting at home in South Africa and demanding a full report (she’s not talking about the match). ‘My mum can’t believe it. South Africa is mini-England.’ He is not the only footballer here. Gary Mabbutt, former Spurs and England defender,
has long been an ambassador for the Prince’s Trust and helped South Africa with its bid for the 2010 World Cup. ‘Just look at this,’ he marvels, surveying the room. ‘Look at the job the Queen does. It’s the same with Prince Charles. He does an amazing amount but the media never portray that side. It’s always so negative.’

That’s certainly a subject on which the two heads of state may have something to say. Mr Zuma’s hectic private life has been dominating press coverage of the visit, with the press wondering which of his three current wives will join him on the trip. Tonight, one of his daughters by an earlier marriage is here. Nkosazana Zuma, twenty-eight, is a student of International Studies and Diplomacy at the University of London. When the Duke of Edinburgh learns that she is studying diplomacy, he promptly steers her towards the Foreign Secretary, joking: ‘You can learn something from him.’ She has been perfecting a curtsey in recent days, much to the amusement of her student friends, but fears that tonight’s attempt was not a success. ‘I think I got my curtsey wrong but the Queen didn’t seem fazed at all. Someone told me that the staff are more uptight about protocol than the Queen.’

The staff are certainly out in force tonight. The more junior liveried staff are handing round the champagne and Sandringham apple juice. Two dozen of the most senior members of the Household – a cross section of ladies-in-waiting, private secretaries and equerries from the offices of almost every member of the Royal Family – are mingling with the guests in the Picture Gallery. They wear discreet blue name badges and scatter themselves among the guests, many of whom have arrived not knowing anyone. All the staff have had thorough briefings from the Master of the Household and his team. No guests are to be left awkwardly studying the paintings with no one to talk to. The party is buzzing, the bonhomie infectious. There has already been a reception line at the start so that everyone has been introduced to the Queen and Prince Philip. Ice broken (up to a point), the royal couple can now move around the room, their staff introducing them to random clusters of guests. And no one is more than a few feet from a Windsor because the Queen has brought along reinforcements. Tonight’s royal turnout also includes the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester, the Duke of Kent and Prince and Princess Michael of Kent. It is quite a production, but nothing compared to the state welcome which is just a week away. President Zuma is well used to grand ceremonies and motorcades overseas. But his daughter Nkosazana has no doubt that this one will be in a different league. ‘We have so many ties with Britain and it’s a big deal for South Africa to be recognised by the Queen. And not everyone gets to ride in a carriage!’

Everyone at the Palace, from the Sovereign down, knows the importance of keeping it a ‘big deal’. The Royal Household is about to go into overdrive, just as it will soon afterwards when President Barack Obama of the United States comes to stay. Short of a Coronation, nothing beats a state visit when it comes to glimpsing the full extent of the royal machine.

‘It’s a team effort and if we don’t have that team effort, it doesn’t work,’ says Lord Peel. His job has been likened to that of the non-executive chairman of the Royal Household.
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These days, every position at the Palace has a formal job specification, even the medieval post of Lord Chamberlain which comes with a ‘wand’ of office and a ceremonial key attached to the waist (no one knows what it unlocks). The Lord Chamberlain has many responsibilities: he has to ‘ensure strategic direction to the Household … to ensure the Household runs smoothly as one integrated entity’; he is ‘responsible to the Queen for ensuring that clear strategic direction is given to the Household’ and he must also see to it ‘that people of appropriate calibre and experience fill the senior posts’. He must ‘support close co-ordination’ between the Queen and the Prince of Wales and help to ‘create a pleasant but professional atmosphere’. The job specification also notes that the successful candidate should be in his or her late fifties or sixties, retire by seventy and devote half a working week to the task in return for £82,000 a year. The ideal Lord Chamberlain should have ‘a wise and balanced approach’, ‘experience of acting as a chairman’, ‘prestigious standing in the wider community’ and ‘some understanding of the public sector’. He should, ultimately, ‘be reconciler, healer and facilitator’.

A tall, jovial Yorkshire landowner and direct descendant of Sir Robert Peel, the Tory Prime Minister and founder of the police, Lord Peel came highly recommended by the Prince of Wales. Prior to this position, he spent twelve years performing a similar role for the Prince at the Duchy of Cornwall (a position with the even more exotic title of Lord Warden of the Stannaries). A Lord Chamberlain needs a considerable degree of both tact and nerve. As in any family business, it is not always easy for an outsider to spell out home truths to family members who know the place a great deal better than he does.

‘Whenever I go round any of the royal palaces I always have to have a lot of oil with me,’ he jokes. ‘You never know what’s going to happen so I just spread it into the joints.’

He chairs a monthly gathering of all the heads of department – ‘like a board meeting’ – plus a weekly update every Tuesday morning. Having
worked for the Prince of Wales for many years, he is very keen on making the Clarence House staff feel part of the wider royal team and regularly organises joint meetings and lunches for the Prince’s officials and their opposite numbers. Football-minded courtiers have a phrase for this new pan-royal
esprit de corps:
‘Mon United’.

‘They know each other, of course they do, but there is no substitute for actually looking across at somebody and having a proper conversation,’ says Lord Peel. ‘And I think we rely on computers too much these days. The human touch is sometimes lost.’

The Royal Household remains a sometimes confusing blend of old world and new, an early pioneer of alternative energy but also a place where, even in the twenty-first century, female office workers were quietly advised that trousers were ‘inappropriate’ office wear (the rules have now changed).

The contrast certainly made an impression on Lord Peel when he arrived in 2007. ‘What surprised me most was the fact that underneath this formal facade was a highly effective, highly efficient modern system of work. It’s a mixture – longstanding employees who bring a band of security to the system at the same time as young people coming forward with ideas and challenging the old systems. People are proud of working here and they like to show it off.’

Today’s Royal Household is another world from the Court of, say, George I, whose retinue included a Polish dwarf and a feral child found in the woods near Hanover. The modern management culture actually compares favourably with the more forward-thinking ends of both public and private sectors. But it can still be a bewildering network of quirks and hierarchies. A team of forty-three still wear ‘the livery’ – red and black tailcoats for front of house, black or dark blue for the more senior attendants within. There may be a Yeoman of the Cellars and Britain’s last fendersmiths. And yet, the more demeaning job titles – lady clerks etc. – have now gone. While there’s a lot of talk about ‘service’, there are no ‘servants’. It’s ‘staff. And all of them, from Lord Peel to a trainee footman, have access to a twenty-four-hour helpline, a book club, selfimprovement courses, one of Britain’s most picturesque golf courses and the cheapest cappuccinos in London SWI, not to mention that Palace pool. Bottom-up communication is encouraged. On this wet spring morning, Lord Peel is in the process of following up an email suggestion from a junior member of staff who has a bright idea for new solar panels (the Sandringham Estate installed some of the first ever seen in Britain).