Her Majesty (25 page)

Union numbers have remained steady since unions were recognised in the seventies with a fifth of the staff split between three trade unions (Unite, Prospect and PCS). It’s a particularly sociable workforce, too. The £5 per year Royal Household Football, Sports and Social Club incorporates staff from all the residences. Besides organising keenly fought sporting encounters with other institutions (the Corporation of London, perhaps, or the Bank of England), it arranges quiz nights and barbecues. It recently took over the entire upper tier of Tower Bridge for a staff ball. For employees who routinely run garden parties for eight thousand, such events are not unduly challenging. The cricket pitch and golf course
at Windsor Castle, plus the football pitch at Kensington Palace, are open to all. As well as the twenty-four-hour independent counselling service, there is the ‘Well Being’ service which sorts out maternity, paternity and adoption leave and allows staff to ‘buy’ extra holiday. There are free lunchtime and after-hours courses in ‘customer care’, ‘finance for nonfinancial managers’ and even ‘taming your grammar gremlins’. The more dedicated can study for a Chartered Management Institute qualification.

It has all been approved by the Queen, along with all the reforms to the pension scheme and perks like a loan scheme for buying bicycles. ‘I think we do change rather well and that’s led by the Queen,’ says Hunka. ‘I never get the sense she says no to something progressive. She’s practical. I remember the first staff survey in 1999, which was a bit of an unknown, and the Queen and the Duke were very keen to read the report.’

Hunka’s boss is Sir Alan Reid, the man with the Palace purse strings, hence that ancient title, Keeper of the Privy Purse. ‘We are seriously into training now and we get a huge amount of return for investing in people,’ he says firmly. ‘But we needed to empower a lot of people and it’s taken years.’ He was astonished to arrive in 2002 and find no external computer links. ‘It took three days to communicate with the outside world,’ he recalls. ‘You’d get a letter in, you sent one back and everything was happening unbelievably slowly. That was based totally on risk aversion. That’s why the risk-averse culture is so daft. The Queen is not remotely risk averse.’ The filmmaker Edward Mirzoeff would agree. Even more frustrating than his evening at the Ghillies’ Ball at Balmoral was his attempt to film a 1991 Privy Council meeting for the same documentary,
Elizabeth R
. The restrictions, he says, were almost comic. ‘It should have been very straightforward but the staff suddenly said: “You can cover the first item of business but not the second or third so you’ll have to leave the room and come back for the fourth.” This was crazy as the whole thing only lasted a few minutes and would have been over by the time we came back in with all our kit. We couldn’t do it. I saw the Queen talking to Robert Fellowes at the end of a corridor and I screeched up to her and said, “Excuse me, Ma’am, but I’ve got a huge problem. We can’t go in and come out again.” The Queen looked faintly puzzled and said to Robert: “I can’t see that there would be a problem.” And so Robert said: “No, I think that should be fine.”’

The historian Kenneth Rose has studied royal risk aversion through the ages and has a favourite story about two courtiers at Windsor looking out of the window during the reign of George V. One says to the other: ‘Don’t quote me, but there’s a blackbird on the lawn.’ The Household
mindset has progressed somewhat since then. Reid says that he is all in favour of constructive innovations from today’s younger staff, admitting that fresh ideas were less welcome in the not too distant past when retired generals ran most things round here. ‘Someone in their second career is not the best pilot for change,’ says Reid. ‘They’ve done the dramatic stuff. They want to run a safe ship. And they’re not getting the best out of junior staff. People used to think: “Everything is done superbly. Why put it at risk by letting footmen come up with ideas?”’ By computerising every section of the Palace, he says, there has been a major shift in staff relations. ‘A lot of people don’t understand how technology breaks down management structures,’ he explains. ‘It’s very easy for someone to send an email to the Private Secretary. He may not want to receive it necessarily but it’s a lot easier than getting a fifteen-minute appointment with him.’

The Palace intranet site is open to all 1,100 employees. Relaunched in 2010, it is very much an organ of the staff rather than the bosses. More than forty different departments nominate ‘editors’ and, while it has yet to embrace blogging, it is never short of suggestions and is about to launch eBay-style royal classified ads. It is run by computer scientist Nicola Shanks who used to run websites for children’s television characters like Bob the Builder and Angelina Ballerina. Now she is in genuine fairy-tale territory. Having moved from a tieless, jeans-and-T-shirt industry to the Palace, she has been surprised by the fact that the supposedly stuffy royal world seems to have more fun. ‘I was struck by the sense of community – all the clubs and things that go on. Even compared to the media industry, it’s very sociable.’

A random glance at the intranet pages shows a lot of charity and social events, including a fun run in sumo costumes and a sponsored golf marathon at Windsor. The Royal Household Book Club is turning its attentions to
The Hare With Amber Eyes
by Edmund de Waal and
Any Human Heart
by William Boyd. The Royal Household Film Club is about to show
The Adjustment Bureau
and
The Social Network
in the former cinema (it’s been renamed the South Drawing Room but the old projector still works).

All this change has not always been easy. Privately, some lament the passing of particular perks or quirks. Few doubt that the Queen must have had misgivings herself. As the recurring refrain goes: ‘The Queen does not like change.’ Yet she is also well aware of when sentimentality must yield to necessity.

Throughout the Royal Household, no department was more resistant to the changes of the eighties and nineties than the Royal Mews. This is
a part of the Palace which did not employ women until 2004. With its seventy stalls and an indoor riding school dating from 1766, it is a very grand but busy working equestrian centre and car depot in the very heart of London. It is also a major tourist attraction. The job of the Mews is to transport the Queen and her family by road. For 99 per cent of the time, this is done by a team of seven chauffeurs using a fleet of eight official limousines and several less conspicuous cars, all of which are based in a gloomy garage and workshop at the back of the Mews. On a handful of occasions each year, they travel by horse-drawn transport. This is done by around thirty horses which also enjoy larger, grander accommodation than anyone in the entire Palace.

Britain likes to pride itself on doing pageantry better than anyone else, and at the heart of any great state spectacle, you will usually find horses and carriages. The wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge was a superb example.

The Royal Mews has nothing to do with the Household Cavalry which comprises front-line army troops performing ceremonial duties between deployments. During most state visits – or royal weddings – it’s the Household Cavalry which provides the gleaming, clattering, swaggering Sovereign’s Escort which rides fore and aft of the royal carriage procession. The Royal Mews is the civilian operation which moves the Monarch and her family. But it is always run along military lines by an ex-army officer called the Crown Equerry. And given the Queen’s love of horses and the Duke of Edinburgh’s knowledge of competitive carriage driving (he wrote the modern rulebook), the Royal Mews always attracts keen royal interest. It was also a semi-autonomous province when Michael Peat and his consultants looked through the gates in the late eighties. The Crown Equerry of the day was Sir John Miller, a distinguished former Welsh Guards officer who was awarded the MC and the DSO within a month of each other for bravery in 1944. He could be similarly robust towards anyone interfering with the Royal Mews, which he ran for twenty-six years. As his
Daily Telegraph
obituary concluded in 2006: ‘Miller was effortlessly polite and wholly devoted to his Sovereign – though he was rather less genial to those whose social position was unclear to him.’ Fellow Welsh Guards officer Kenneth Rose has fond memories of talking to Miller shortly before a dinner at Windsor Castle. The Queen had planned a treat for her guests in the form of an after-dinner recital by Mstislav Rostropovich, then arguably the greatest living cellist. Miller was less than thrilled. ‘I’ve had a very difficult day,’ he informed Rose. Gesturing towards Rostropovich, he went on: ‘See that fellow talking to the Queen? He’s been playing his damned fiddle outside my office all
day.’ Miller was close to all the Royal Family, having introduced Prince Philip to carriage driving, the Prince of Wales to hunting and the Princess Royal to eventing.
^*

Such was the sort of opposition confronting the Palace reformers in the late eighties. Peat’s accountants arrived to find incomprehensible accounting systems and baffling numbers of horses. ‘Miller slammed the gates in Michael Peat’s face,’ recalls a former Private Secretary who witnessed the power struggle. ‘And, dare one say it, he enjoyed the support of the Queen so it wasn’t easy.’ The issue was partially resolved when Miller retired in 1987, after more than quarter of a century at the Royal Mews, with the GCVO for his troubles.
^*
Thereafter, the Royal Mews went into decline over several years. ‘It was an awful shambles,’ says one of those involved. ‘Morale was appalling, standards were down. It was like a really bad military unit and the chauffeurs were very much the second-class citizens. Cars are much more use than the horses but they are not as sexy.’ Finally, the discontent got so bad that the Queen had to act herself. In 1999, she decided that the Royal Mews really could not carry on being a royal department in its own right. Instead, it was placed in the care of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, the Palace’s ceremonial wing. Today, the men-only tradition is over. Female grooms – ‘liveried helpers’ as they are known – make up more than a quarter of the staff and that figure is rising. Some female recruits have fitted in extremely well, quite literally. Many of the uniforms for the big occasions – known as ‘state liveries’ – are 150 years old and can cost thousands of pounds to replace. Designed for the frame of a nineteenth-century groom, many are too small for a well-built twenty-first-century male but often suit a female outrider very well.

The Mews is thriving, as busy as it has been at any stage during the reign. One of its regular duties is to ferry new ambassadors and their senior staff to and from the Palace to present their credentials to the Queen. Some might argue that it’s a pantomime ritual in the age of modern diplomacy but it’s greatly appreciated by foreign envoys, even if they do have to dress up in evening dress at eleven in the morning. And they are more numerous than ever. In 1939, there were just two dozen
embassies in London. Today, after the fragmentation of the old world order, there are now 157 (plus several embassy-sharing ambassadors from smaller countries). Every single ambassador will get the full Royal Mews treatment on arrival in London whether they have an embassy or not. ‘The challenge is putting horses to a carriage built two hundred years ago and putting them out on the streets of London,’ says Major Simon Robinson, Crown Equerry until 2011. He arrived via the King’s Troop Royal Horse Artillery and the occasional stint as an amateur jockey for the late Queen Mother. ‘People do what they’re told but horses have a habit of letting you down if you don’t train them properly.’

The Crown Equerry is in charge of the most spectacular aspect of every state visit – the carriage procession for the Queen and her guests. Just one or two badly behaved horses could scupper years of finely tuned diplomatic planning. And the Queen – who will have approved every detail of the procession in advance right down to which horses pull which carriage – spots absolutely everything. In 2007, there was a nasty moment as the Queen welcomed President Kufour of Ghana to Britain. Several thousand Ghanaians had lined the Mall with drums, trumpets and bright flags and launched into a riot of noise and dancing as the Queen’s carriage approached. A few of the younger horses on duty were spooked. ‘The crowd just went potty and there were horses rearing, leather twanging and bits of broken harness,’ recalls Robinson. At one point, he had to ride alongside the Queen’s carriage, grab the bit in the mouth of the lead horse and literally pull the animal past the crowds. Back at the Palace – ‘I was in a muck sweat when we got down there’ – he discussed what had happened with the Queen. ‘She knew exactly what was going on,’ he says.

Most of the time, of course, the Royal Family moves around by car. Four-wheeled operations fall to the Transport Manager, former policeman Alex Garty. The horse/car relationship is entirely amicable these days, although the chauffeurs are fond of reminding the coachmen that they drive the Queen 365 days a year rather than six. The horsey element like to point out, in turn, that they do all their own repairs and maintenance (the Royal Mews carriage restorers are among the finest in the world) whereas the chauffeurs are dependent on the AA or the RAC if they have a breakdown. The Royal Mews employs no car mechanics.

The two flagships of the car fleet are the State Bentleys, made for the 2002 Golden Jubilee using the pooled wisdom of the Association of British Car Manufacturers. Each weighs four tons, has no number plate (no need), no tax disc (no need) and no rear-view mirror (for privacy). Nor does it have leather seating throughout. Instead, it is designed like a stagecoach – leather seating for the driver (who would have been open
to the elements) but cloth-covered seating for the passengers within. There is no satellite navigation system on display. The chauffeur will have learned the route already. But there will be an Ordnance Survey map of the relevant area which is always provided for the Duke of Edinburgh. The lack of gadgets was at the Queen’s request. The makers offered her every conceivable sort of luxury accessory but all she asked for was a radio and a CD player.