Her Majesty (38 page)

Given the professional rivalries between all the designers in the Palace state apartments tonight, it is just as well that the Queen has decided to
wear an in-house design made by her dresser, Angela Kelly. At the start, there is a reception line so that the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh ensure that they have met everyone. She knows quite a few of the guests already. The Duke receives a running commentary. ‘He does my hats,’ the Queen explains as one of her milliners, Philip Somerville, is introduced. Her eyes light up as Marie O’Regan is announced. ‘She used to make my hats,’ says the Queen. ‘She’s retired.’ Along comes Stewart Parvin, one of the current crop of royal dressmakers. ‘Another one of my designers …’ the Queen announces. The Duke is particularly struck by Steve Cochrane, a Middlesbrough fashion retailer, who is still wearing his coat, a nylon mac. ‘Are you expecting it to rain in here?’ asks the Duke. Cochrane roars with laughter and explains it’s from one of his own ranges. It is an odd choice of clothing for a reception at the Palace, perhaps, but no stranger than some other outfits. Nabil El-Nayal, twenty-four, has been invited because he is an award-winning student at the Royal College of Art. He is dressed in a black and white highwayman’s outfit which he describes as his ‘ethereal Elizabeth the First’ look. ‘I only wear black and white,’ he says later. ‘I think there is too much colour in the world.’

The last person in the greeting line is in jeans, a hoodie and a crumpled tweed jacket. It is the photographer David Bailey. The Queen does not bat an eyelid, welcomes him to the party and moves through to mingle with her guests. ‘I don’t know what I’m doing here,’ Bailey tells a couple of reporters. ‘I’m not much of a royalist and I haven’t taken a fashion photograph since 1980. So I’m here under false pretences.’ He says he has been to the Palace before, not to take photographs – ‘I’m too risky’ – but to receive a CBE from Prince Charles. ‘I said to him: “I want to get something straight, Prince Charles. I’m not joining. I’m infiltrating.” He laughed a lot.’

For all the studied indifference, Bailey is thoroughly enjoying himself. And it all makes good copy for the journalists. So, too, does the presence of Elizabeth Emanuel, best known as co-designer of Lady Diana Spencer’s wedding dress in 1981. Even for a former Palace pro, a night like this has been nerve-wracking. ‘I spent all week making something for tonight and then decided an hour before that I wasn’t going to wear any of it,’ says Emanuel. She has gone instead for a favourite black and duck-egg blue jacket and a black dress. The photographers are busy tonight. Many of the guests are used to the camera, including models Sophie Dahl and Yasmin Le Bon. Both describe themselves as ‘massive’ fans of the Queen. ‘I love her style. She’s timeless,’ says Dahl. ‘She wears her outfits, her outfits don’t wear her,’ says Le Bon. ‘She’s comfortable in what she does
and she does it in such an elegant way.’ Some guests go even further. ‘You know the Queen doesn’t even have a style,’ declares the Spanish-born, London-based shoe designer Manolo Blahnik. ‘She is just
her
. She is perfect.’

Many guests are from old family businesses with royal warrants – including Margaret Barbour of Barbour jackets and Douglas and Deirdre Anderson of the fifth-generation royal kiltmakers, Kinloch Anderson. It’s usually Douglas’s brother who gets the big invitations (Sir Eric Anderson, now a Knight of the Thistle, has the distinction of having taught the Prince of Wales at Gordonstoun, Tony Blair at Fettes and David Cameron at Eton). But tonight it is Douglas and Deirdre who find themselves chatting to the Queen about Deirdre’s new national register of tartans, for which she has been awarded the OBE. Needless to say they are both in kilts. ‘Are you advertising?’ jokes the Duke of Edinburgh. Someone who is uncharacteristically nervous tonight is the
Daily Telegraph’s
vivacious fashion editor, Hilary Alexander. She is a great admirer of the Queen but she is also a respected writer who tells it straight. When she didn’t like the Queen’s ball gown – another Angela Kelly design – at a recent state banquet, she said so in print. If it irked the Queen, there is no sign of it as writer and monarch cheerfully talk fashion. Alexander congratulates the Queen on tonight’s Kelly outfit, a pale gold and soft turquoise silk brocade jacket and matching dress. ‘One doesn’t want to look like everybody else,’ says the Queen. ‘Certainly not,’ replies Alexander. ‘You’re not wearing black!’ The Queen laughs out loud. Eventually, she makes a discreet departure, leaving everyone to carry on enjoying the party until the Household team think it is time to deploy their subtle technique of steering people towards the door without giving the impression that they want them to leave. Sandra Hunt makes the most of her last minutes at the Palace, taking it all in. She will return to Yorkshire, happy in the knowledge that she has received the same royal treatment as, say, Jasper Conran and Bruce Oldfield.

The following day, there is good coverage in the national and regional press. Most people will simply absorb the message that the Queen has honoured a lot of fashion icons by inviting them for drinks. It will make no difference to their view on the monarchy but it’s another brushstroke on that broad impressionist canvas of royal relevance. There were no headline-grabbing moments – good ones or bad ones – at the reception. But pictures of famous faces having a nice time with the Queen always brighten up a news page. Hilary Alexander writes that the Queen’s dress ‘was perfectly in tune, both with her own regal signature and with the fashion swing-shift away from the safe LBD [little black dress], as the omnipresent solution to
serious dressing-up’. She goes on: ‘A dazzling “sunburst” diamond brooch sparkled on her left shoulder. Up close, her skin is just as luminous. As fashion moments go, this one could not be beaten.’

‘Really, there wasn’t a person there last night who wasn’t thrilled to be in Buckingham Palace to meet the Queen,’
Vogue
editor, Alexandra Shulman, reports on her website. And, of course, there is the Palace’s own report about the evening. Until a couple of years ago, the Queen’s Press Office was entirely dependent on outside media to cover the monarchy’s movements. Now it’s up with the best of them. While it’s not (yet) in the business of scoops and spoilers and some of the other tricks of the journalist’s trade, the Palace happily embraces the latest media technology to produce its own reports and mini-films. It’s been a steep learning curve. Here was an essentially reactive organisation which, until 2002, still banned emails on security grounds. Back then, the Press Office organised logistics, made very occasional announcements and waited for the phone to ring. Now it is as proactive as any government department, running its own Royal Channel on YouTube and monarchy sites on Facebook, Twitter and Flickr. Its weak point, by its own admission, is working out a satisfactory email system with the public. People who write a letter will always get a reply whereas an email address can swiftly be flooded by spam, timewasters and trouble. But the Palace knows it cannot afford to ignore an important chunk of society. No one must forget the ‘key driver’ relevance. ‘We need to have some system for young people when all their correspondence is electronic and they don’t write letters,’ says website editor Emma Goodey. ‘But it has to be thought through.’ For now, public emails to the Palace come via Goodey. She used to run the website for London’s Barbican Arts Centre and never imagined that she would end up as the public’s online go-between with the Sovereign. If she spots a trend – like a sudden rush of questions about garden party hats or a royal anniversary – she will post a page about it on the website. Among the most frequent topics for questions are the Queen’s corgis (they have their own page). But the website also provides some useful feedback on who is interested in the monarchy and why. Of the 2.3 million people from 226 countries who visited the royal website in the first six months of 2010, the British (766,000) were only narrowly ahead of people from the United States (662,000). There was then a marked drop to the Canadians (132,000) and the Germans (103,000) followed by the French (72,000), Australians (65,000) and Italians (42,000). Nearly 70 per cent of them were new visitors, the average time spent on the site was 3.3 minutes and the most popular pages were the traditional ones – those about the Queen, her family and the history of the Palace.

Although the website traffic provides useful data on what interests people, there is still no substitute for the postbag when it comes to finding out what is pleasing or perplexing them enough to write to the Queen. Within hours of the clothing reception, the thank-you messages start arriving. A Fleet Street fashion editor is among the first to get in touch, sending an email via the Press Office: ‘Thank you so much for a wonderful evening. To have the Queen endorse the British fashion and clothing industry is immeasurably valuable.’ Another email arrives from a Yorkshire textile executive: ‘To receive so much time and attention from Her Majesty the Queen was very, very generous. None of the guests I spoke to realised we would have such open access to our hosts.’ He also wants to thank the footmen who had kept him ‘very nicely supplied’ with venison minicottage pies.

Most people prefer to express their gratitude in the traditional way – on paper. Over the next few days, traditional thank-you letters pour in. Some are formal and typed, some chatty and handwritten. Several are rather touching, remarking how proud a grandfather or a greatgrandmother or a founding father of a particular business would have been to see today’s inheritors invited to drinks with the Sovereign. A surprising number pay tribute to the venison mini-cottage pies (who would have thought that meat pies would prove such a hit with a gathering of fashionistas?). One lady guest wants to thank the Duchess of Grafton, the Queen’s senior Lady-in-Waiting, for befriending her as she stood looking at paintings on her own. The boss of Lancashire fashion house Sunday Best wants to thank the Duchess of Gloucester ‘who was lovely company and made us all feel welcome’. It is often said that the advent of the email has killed off the old art of letter-writing, but not as far as the Palace is concerned.

‘The letters go up in number every year,’ says Sonia Bonici, the senior correspondence officer in charge of the Queen’s post. In 2010, the Queen received almost 50,000 letters and cards (a third of them from overseas) and the Diamond Jubilee will multiply that figure many times. Many are messages of goodwill or thanks for a particular event. In 2010, she received more than 2,000 birthday cards and 4,000 Christmas cards from ordinary people. But many more are seeking some sort of help or satisfaction. The internet-fuelled rise in amateur genealogy has prompted a marked increase in letters about family trees. ‘People ask: “Could you find out if my Uncle Jim was related to Queen Victoria?”’ says Bonici. It’s not the Palace’s job to confirm or deny but the team (two full-time, two part-time) will offer advice on researching the internet and the National Archives. ‘We really do try to help,’ says Bonici. ‘We can’t do very much but we try.’

It’s not an exact science but the Palace has learned that letters to the Queen are a good barometer of the broader concerns of society. The Queen herself takes them very seriously. ‘One feels the buck stops here so to speak,’ she remarked in the 1992 documentary
Elizabeth R
. ‘I had a letter this morning about something. He said: “I’ve been going round and round in circles but you are the only person who can stop the circle.” I thought that was rather nice.’

People who might once have baulked at troubling the Sovereign over a personal issue now seem more inclined than ever to pour their hearts out to her. ‘In the old days,’ says Bonici, ‘they might write about one thing: “My roof is leaking” or “Nobody cares”. Now, it’s three or four issues. And the tone has changed.’

There was a sudden rise in correspondence immediately after the inconclusive 2010 general election result, just as there was after the MPs’ expenses scandal of 2009. ‘We had quite a few letters from people who thought that there would be riots in the streets and they wanted the Queen to take over,’ says Bonici. ‘Following the expenses scandal, people lost their respect for politics and thought: “The Queen doesn’t do that sort of thing.” So, their view was “Let her sort it out.”’ Sometimes, the letters are scathing about the Queen herself. None the less, she likes to see a complete cross section, even if they are critical. In any case, until the 9/11 terrorist attacks, she used to open a lot of her own post. Now it is all processed (except for certain private post, identified by specific codes). But the Queen has seen and heard enough over the years to be almost unshockable. ‘People are entitled to their opinion, even if they’re forceful,’ says Bonici’s deputy correspondence officer, Jenny Vine. Having previously worked for the manager of a top London hotel, she has experienced most facets of the human character. She has well-established procedures for dealing with crank letters but these are rare. ‘Obviously, if they say they’re going to blow up Parliament, then that’s a threat. But if someone writes in and says: “I despair. The Prime Minister’s a plonker,” then that’s an opinion and we would send that up to the Queen.’

Receiving and sorting the post is done first thing. The next issue is responding. In a few cases, the Queen may suggest a reply herself. Bonici gives the example of a man who recently wrote in asking why the Queen was using a State Bentley to attend a private church service. The Queen returned the letter with a note saying that the service was an official engagement and a suitable reply was promptly drafted. But that sort of micro-management is impossible as a rule. Letters from children and people offering kind remarks are usually passed on to the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting who will draft replies on her behalf. More technical
matters will be handled in the Correspondence Office. Everyone gets a reply, usually within a week, but that can depend on the issue. Nothing will stay unanswered for more than a month. ‘People now have a greater expectation of what the Queen can do for them,’ says Bonici. ‘They didn’t used to be so demanding but they often see the Queen as a last resort. So they write in saying: “We’ve tried everywhere. Can we try you because you’re the head of state?” They might have a social services problem or a childcare problem and we always steer them towards the right government department because it is the
Queen’s
government. We do get lots of letters back saying, “Thanks, it’s been sorted out.”’