On Duty With the Queen: My Time as a Buckingham Palace Press Secretary (2 page)

Saying goodbye to it was ultimately the right thing to do. I had always been something of a challenge seeker. I knew I was about to take my place on a stage rife with thrills and spills, but when on 30
^th
June, 1988 I walked out of LBC’s Gough Square Studios for the last time, it was with only the briefest backward glance. The following day, I crossed the forecourt of Buckingham Palace with a renewed vitality, and bounded up the front steps to the Privy Purse Door.

This was it.

My next job.

My next rollercoaster ride…and what a ride it would turn out to be.

I
felt very comfortable entering Buckingham Palace that first morning. It was a place to which I had been going on a regular basis for a number of years, and as such had enjoyed virtually unchallenged access. I already knew my way around pretty well.

Yes, I was based in the same place and going to work with the same people – people with whom I had an established relationship – but now I had a completely different role. I was firmly on the inside looking out towards my former colleagues, and more importantly, I was one of the team whose job it was to manage how the Royal Family was presented.

I was welcomed by everyone in the press office, and at 10am Robin Janvrin held his daily morning meeting. The forthcoming State Visit to London by President Turgut Özal of Turkey was top of the agenda. I was well versed regarding State Visits because I had covered a great
many of them, but from this day on, I would be working alongside the planning team.

Following the morning meeting I was taken on a tour of the offices. It was a way of putting a stamp on my arrival, emphasizing that I was no longer a hack but a member of the royal household. Mid-morning, Philip Mackie, the incumbent I was succeeding, walked me across Green Park to St James’s Palace to meet the Prince and Princess of Wales’s team. A large group of tourists lined the Palace railings in the hope of spotting a member of the Royal Family. Being the subject of the crowd’s excited scrutiny was a novel experience, and an insight into what it must feel like to exist within the goldfish bowl of global celebrity.

In the coming weeks and months, I’d make the run to St James’s Palace often, up to three or four times a day was the norm. If a royal story broke, or more dramatically, was
about
to break, it really was a ‘run’. Fleet Street snappers would descend upon the gates and it was my job to control them.

For a reporter there’s a
lot
of running around. Running to cover a story, running to get to the next story, and then negotiating the complexities of London’s transport system to get back to the studio to edit the tape. That was the way I had always kept fit, but life had changed. Despite the dashes to St James’s, I was now primarily based at the Palace. Given the long days I knew I’d invariably be working, it was time to establish a new exercise regime.

I was never much of a jogger, but I did enjoy
swimming, and I knew there was a pool in the Palace, tucked just behind the Belgian Suite. I decided that one of the first things I’d do was enquire about the guidelines for household staff using it. I went to see the Master of the Household, Rear Admiral Sir Paul Greening. Paul was very much a people person, having been a career officer in the Royal Navy and, prior to joining the Royal Household at Buckingham Palace, commander of the Royal Yacht
Britannia
. He had also been responsible for planning the Prince and Princess of Wales’s honeymoon in 1981.

‘Yes, you can indeed use the pool,’ he confirmed when I asked him. ‘Just as long as it’s not at a time when a member of the Royal Family is using it.’

This mostly referred Diana, an avid swimmer who took to the pool most days at 7am. Princess Margaret liked to take her dip late morning, ‘which is probably why it’s a bit overheated,’ Paul added dryly.

He also told me I could leave my towel and trunks there. ‘As long as you don’t leave them lying around,’ he added, with his characteristic military attention to detail.

So that was me sorted. I’d always been an early riser. Living in Windsor and working in central London, it was something of a necessity, given the traffic. I would simply start early enough to cram in my swim and be out of the pool before Diana arrived. I began a daily morning swim the following Monday – a ritual I would continue for the next three or four years, till the time when the increased chlorination – insisted upon by Princess Margaret – began affecting my eyes.

In the meantime, it turned out to be the perfect routine. As on-the-job perks go, it seemed a pretty cool one, no matter how overheated the water.

I had already met the two royals whom I would ultimately answer to. As a reporter I’d interviewed the Prince of Wales regarding various environmental issues over the years, and had always admired him. Meeting him and his bride-to-be in 1981, just two days shy of their wedding, had been particularly special. I was the lead commentator for IRN’s coverage of the royal wedding alongside Brian Hayes, and I was privileged to have been granted 40 minutes with the couple in the Chinese Dining Room at Buckingham Palace.

The Chinese Dining Room gets its name from its furniture, which was bought by the Prince Regent, later to become King George IV. It had originally been bought for the Brighton Pavilion – the extravagant folly the Prince had created as a royal retreat. Queen Victoria didn’t have a lot of time for the place, so, during her reign, she sold it to the Brighton Corporation and had the furniture put into storage. It wasn’t until early in the reign of King George V that it was moved into Buckingham Palace to grace the room it still sits in today.

Little did I know when I travelled to the Palace to chat to the Prince and his young fiancée that evening that not only would I go on to attend numerous meetings in that same room, but 16 years after the wedding itself, I would be part of the team sitting around the same table, planning the late Diana, Princess of Wales’s funeral.

On that day, however, all was positive and expectant; it
was a landmark meeting. It was also unusual, in that the then press secretary, Michael Shea, had given no guidance as to what could or could not be asked. Nothing was off limits. Due to Prince Charles’s unguarded comment about ‘whatever in love means,’ when the couple had been interviewed upon the announcement of their engagement, I couldn’t help but wonder if more intriguing snippets were to come.

As it happened, nothing revealing came from the meeting, but over a cup of tea it was possible to at least gauge the feelings of the rather naïve, attractive 20-year-old girl who was going to be the focus of an unprecedented amount of global attention. It was also a first glimpse into the character of the woman who I would later come to call boss. Diana told me that her wedding day would be an overwhelming experience, but that she was not so much concerned for herself as she was for her father – the 8
^th
Earl Spencer. In 1978 he’d suffered a stroke that had left him quite unsteady. She explained that he was still determined to do his fatherly duty and walk his youngest daughter down the aisle of St Paul’s Cathedral – an aisle that was a daunting 210 feet long.

I remember being touched by her capacity for caring and understanding. Putting other people’s needs before her own was a trait for which she would very soon come to be known, and one which I would witness time and again.

I had been broadcasting for 15 years at the time of Charles and Diana’s wedding on Wednesday, 29
^th
July, 1981. In the months leading up to the big day I was charged with
organizing all of the outside broadcast commentary points along the processional route from Buckingham Palace to St Paul’s Cathedral – eight sites in all. I had decided that I would spend the day in the commentary booth on the Queen Victoria Memorial outside Buckingham Palace. I could have chosen any one of the eight sites, but I wanted to be right at the heart of the occasion, witnessing both the beginning and the end of the day’s celebrations.

My morning started with a sound check in the commentary booth at 5am, to ensure that everything was in working order. At 6am I was on the air setting the scene for listeners tuned into the
AM
breakfast show, and I continued to feed into other programming as the day progressed. Our coverage for IRN went out across the whole of the commercial radio network dotted throughout the UK – England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Royal events are organised down to the very last minute, which allowed for us to tailor our coverage accordingly. The day had been given over entirely to coverage of all things relating to the royal wedding.

The Queen’s carriage procession left the Palace at 10:22am. The procession, eight carriages long, conveyed every member of the Royal Family, 21 in total, to St Paul’s Cathedral. The groom’s procession – Prince Charles, accompanied by his brother, Prince Andrew, who was to act as his supporter – left at 10:30am.

A wedding is always a happy occasion, but this had been the most anticipated royal wedding in recent history. Some one million spectators lined the processional route to take in the sense of occasion, the pomp and pageantry. The joyful
atmosphere across London was arresting. And it wasn’t just limited to the Union flag-clad masses. The Queen, often perceived as rather dour, beamed throughout the day’s proceedings. From the moment she left Buckingham Palace in the morning, to when she ran across the Palace forecourt to wave goodbye to Charles and Diana as they left for their honeymoon at 4pm, the Queen was in her element.

Much has been written about the presence of Mrs Camilla Parker Bowles in the congregation at St Paul’s that day. Simply put, there was no reason why she should not have been there and every reason why she should have been. There was no animosity between Diana and Camilla. She was a long-standing friend of Prince Charles. Her husband, Andrew Parker Bowles, played polo with the Prince regularly, and on the wedding day, Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Parker Bowles was commanding the Sovereign’s Escort of the Household Cavalry, which led the Queen’s carriage procession.

Did Charles and Diana love each other? Yes they did, and it was readily apparent in those early days. I witnessed many an occasion when Charles couldn’t keep his hands off her. He would often rest his hand on her forearm, and every now and then give her bottom a light pat when they were out and about on engagements. To suggest that they were never in love is pure conjecture.

Reflecting on that July day, everything looked to be so promising in terms of a long and happy marriage for Charles and Diana. The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh had been married almost 34 years, and everyone hoped for an equally harmonious union for the next generation.
More than once, Diana told me that she never wanted a divorce. She had, after all, been a child of divorce herself. Unfortunately, their marriage was at the mercy of an insatiable media from day one. No doubt this contributed to its very public ‘he said/she said’ deterioration, which sadly forced them to call an end to their marriage once and for all.

I suppose the only strange thing about my first day as a press secretary was picking up the office phone to answer my first press call. Suddenly I was responding to the questions instead of asking them. It was an odd feeling, but as I settled into my new role I began to realise that this was a job that was going to suit me perfectly.

Once I’d had my swim, my first task every day was to scour the daily newspapers for stories; not only royal stories but those which included any mention of the word ‘royal’. I would mark up the pieces so that a synopsis could be delivered to the Queen. Then it was off to press office meetings, Prince of Wales office meetings and the business of strategizing upcoming royal engagements. I took to the job like a duck to water, but continued to find it remarkable that I had even landed the position in the first place. After all, the Royal Family didn’t employ people like me. I didn’t have any qualifications to speak of. I had no university education. I hadn’t served in the British military, and I had no experience working in government. I was for all intents and purposes a hack. All I knew was that I had come a long way from where I had begun.

I was born in north west London, in September 1940, about four-and-a-half miles from the royal Palace in which I now worked. I was the son of German Jews. My father, Hans, had left Berlin in 1930 to escape Nazi persecution, and my mother Ruth had left Aachen in 1939 to do the same. My own arrival had occurred in rather inauspicious circumstances. Thanks to the kindness of my mother’s cousin I came into the world in a private clinic in Finchley Road. I was born in the middle of an air raid courtesy of the
Luftwaffe
, though I imagine the bombing was the last thing on my mother’s mind. I doubt there are many things all-consuming enough to distract one from the fact that she might be blasted out of existence at any moment, but I suspect being in the throes of labour was probably one of them.

It was to be a long time, however, before I would have any sort of meaningful dialogue with the young woman who gave birth to me. She left my father and in turn me when I was just four years old. I never did discover the precise reason why. It might have had something to do with the fact that she was a vibrant 23-year old who had married a man who was not only in his 40s, but also desperately stricken with TB and diabetes.

Ill as my father was, I imagine my mother’s leaving must have been devastating for him. She was his second wife – he’d divorced the first back in Berlin, and meeting someone as young and lively as my mother must have felt like a miraculous second chance. They met during a card game at the home of my mother’s cousin, Alphons, in London. She had arrived in the city aged 17, and
he’d provided board and lodging for her, though not for nothing. He was in publishing and haute couture and was quite well off, but in exchange for a roof over her head my mother had to sing for her supper – cleaning both his apartment and his West End showroom.

He also had her help him when he was entertaining. One of the social preoccupations amongst the German Jewish refugee community in London at that time was to play cards – usually poker. My father was a regular player at cousin Alphons’s table, and as my mother frequently attended the card games, serving food and drinks, it wasn’t long before romance began to blossom. Within six months of her arrival in England, they were married.

Though the sudden disappearance of my mother must have been a great blow to my father, it wasn’t as traumatic for me. With the constant air raids and bombing, our lives were already punctuated by regular episodes of violent drama, so perhaps her leaving simply blended in to the daily angst we were already experiencing. My only memory of her during that early part of my life wasn’t even a particularly fond one. She was a stickler for table manners, and to ensure that mealtimes were conducted with a degree of decorum, she would make me sit at the table with a London telephone directory under each arm, to ensure I didn’t eat with my elbows sticking out like chicken wings.