The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor (33 page)

So that is one explanation as to why he keeps him; he knows he can trust Fawcett to provide what he wants and it’s easier to stick with the devil he knows. His advisers will also say it’s because the Prince is fiercely loyal and he is rewarding the loyalty that Fawcett has shown him over the years. I find that one hard to swallow. The Prince
can
be fiercely loyal – and has been with Camilla – but there are plenty of people to whom the Prince has not been terribly loyal, including some in the early days of his marriage who went quite unjustly because Diana didn’t want them around. Another explanation is that Fawcett was with the Prince during the Wars of the Waleses and for all the years since; he knows every last detail of the Prince’s life down to his brand of toothpaste. His memories, were he to commit them to paper, would make every other treacherous ex-royal servant’s book read like Enid Blyton.

‘He has a very forceful personality,’ says a key figure at Clarence House, who has watched the relationship for years, ‘and he hasn’t been managed at all well.’

Fawcett is unusually able – he came from the bottom of the pile – and he’s very poor at reading and writing. I’ve never seen anything on paper from him, but he has the real talent of a salesman and has flair, brings style to a party – and he manages to get people to cough up money. He’s also known
the Prince a very long time. The Prince knows he’s a bully – a delegation from the staff went and told him so – but the Prince did nothing about it, I think out of a mixture of naivety and niceness. Until Peat came along he had far too much influence.

Peat is a different calibre of person from previous private secretaries. He is intensely serious, very clever and he’s tough. He’s not the greatest manager; but he’s very tough, and much more systematic than any of the others. I’d give him six marks out of ten as a manager; Stephen Lamport, three or four out of ten. He was a nice guy but he didn’t have much of a system; he was such a gent you never knew what went on in his head. Mark Bolland was a very clever operator but there was a total absence of management or systems with him; it rather felt as though he was being managed by the
Daily Mail.
Peat is respected – not universally liked – but he has brought order, increased income – he has an accountant’s pen – he’s concentrated on performances and he’s incorruptible. He’s more deferential than I would have anticipated – does a lot of Your Royal Highnessing and bowing, but he is very tough minded, stealthy, determined and he is certainly not a man who says ‘Yes, sir, no, sir, three bags full, sir’ – and in that environment it’s quite hard not to be. Red-carpet fever is a very serious disease; it gets in the way and a lot of people suffer from it.

But for all Peat’s virtues, Michael Fawcett still seems to have far too much influence. Someone running an event at Windsor Castle recently, for a charity of which the Prince of Wales is patron, was astonished by the tone and authority that Fawcett displayed in the planning process. He appeared to speak categorically on behalf of the Prince. This man was also less than chuffed to learn that the money raised at the event would be
shared between his charity and the Prince’s Trust (a common complaint, but nothing to do with Fawcett, more with the Prince’s private secretaries who decide which charities will benefit.) The organizers of other charities have been similarly dismayed by Fawcett’s high-handedness – if nothing more, he is a bad ambassador for the Prince of Wales.

And although he is self-employed and no longer the responsibility of the Prince’s household, and technically, therefore, no longer a liability, his influence is as great as ever. At the beginning of 2004 he was back in the driving seat – albeit temporarily – at the shop at Highgrove. After his resignation in March 2003, much to the relief of everyone who has to deal with the shop, the business was run by Duchy Originals. The new buyer of all non-Duchy products worked closely with the shop manager and built up a good relationship with suppliers, many of whom are small local businesses who had found Fawcett’s manner tough to take. Last January they were informed that Duchy Originals were no longer responsible for buying and branding – and phone calls to the friendly Duchy buyer to ask what was going on were met with ignorance. ‘If you find out would you let us know, please?’ Fawcett had moved back and immediately requested meetings with all the suppliers. He announced that he was changing the branding, the packaging and point-of-sale material and, although supposedly only assisting the acting managing director, Nigel Price (from the cutlery company Arthur Price of England), he has already put backs up. Two shop managers have gone in less than a year. Fawcett and Price have been hopelessly inefficient and introduced some highly questionable supply contracts which seem to go against everything that the Prince of Wales, as a supporter of small businesses, ought to stand for. Ownership of the goods goes to the shop on delivery (as opposed to on payment, which is more usual); invoices are to be raised
by the supplier no more frequently than quarterly and will be paid within sixty days from the date of the invoice. So a supplier delivering on 4 January could have to wait until the end of May for payment, which could cause severe enough cash-flow problems to put a small company out of business. Highly advantageous for the Prince of Wales’s Charitable Foundation but not the best way of raising money for charity.

I would be very surprised if the Prince was aware of what was being done in his name, but if there is just one lesson for him to have learned from the Peat Report it is that, before putting the rest of the world in order, he needs to take a closer look at what is happening under his own roof.

On Mike Gretton’s second day in the job as director of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award he was asked to go to London to see Sophie Rhys-Jones, who, a year later, was to become the Countess of Wessex. Sophie, who at the time was working as a consultant for the Award as well as running her own public relations company, was writing a feature on the new director. After more than an hour’s grilling about his past career, which he admits he found very agreeable, Gretton went back to his office in Windsor. The next day the phone rang and his PA said she had ‘Sophie’ on the line. ‘Hello, darling,’ said Gretton, thinking it was his daughter Sophy, who was in the middle of exams at medical school. ‘How really good to hear from you.’ There was a pause and a bit of a hush. ‘Michael,’ said the voice, ‘I didn’t know we knew each other quite so well, and quite so quickly.’ ‘Oh God, Sophie,’ he said, to peals of laughter in his ear, realizing his mistake. ‘I told you yesterday I had a daughter called Sophy. I thought it was her.’ Later that day he was in a meeting in his office when a head suddenly appeared around the open door and said, ‘Hello, darling.’ It was the Queen’s future daughter-in-law.

Mike Gretton is not the only person who thinks Sophie is fantastic or that she has been fantastically good for Prince
Edward. She has a lot of fans within the handful of charities she has taken on, such as Brainwave, in Somerset, which offers hope to brain-damaged children, and Chase Children’s Hospice in Guildford. They all say she is warm, relaxed, interested, easy and very good for fundraising. She also has fans at Buckingham Palace, where staff love her because she is courteous and friendly. And Edward is considerably less pompous than he once was, more relaxed, infinitely more mature and also friendlier.

But Sophie was not born to the position she now holds, and for a while it looked as if she might turn out to be the third daughter-in-law who looked so promising at the start but turned into an embarrassing liability. Sophie was a middleclass girl with a career that, quite commendably, she wanted to keep going. But she failed to see the pitfalls and the bear traps that awaited her, and there was no one at Buckingham Palace capable of reining in an HRH. They couldn’t do it with the Princess of Wales and they couldn’t control the Duchess of York either; and because each member of the family has its own household and its own set of advisers and staff there is no mechanism for central control. Lord Luce, the Lord Chamberlain, spent three months looking into the subject, but only as an afterthought once the damage had been done.

In April 2001, Mazher Mahmood, an investigative journalist from the
News of the World
, dressed up as an Arab sheik, hired an expensive suite at the Dorchester Hotel in London and invited the Countess and her business partner for a working lunch to discuss the possibility of giving her company R-JH a contract worth £20,000 per month. The room was bugged and, despite knowing nothing about the stranger she had only just met, Sophie chatted confidently, and very indiscreetly, about members of the Royal Family and figures in British politics and government. She referred to the Queen as ‘the old
dear’, described Prince Charles and Camilla as ‘number one on the unpopular list’, only likely to marry once the Queen Mother, ‘the old lady’, was dead; she called Tony Blair too ‘presidential’, William Hague, then leader of the Tory Party, ‘deformed’, and Cherie Blair ‘absolutely horrid, horrid, horrid’. Worse, she made it clear that her royal connections were ‘an unspoken benefit’ to her clients.

First she denied she had said any such things, then she issued grovelling apologies to those public figures about whom she had been rude, and then, to make matters worse, she made a pact with the
News of the World.
To prevent them using the tape recording, she agreed to give the paper an exclusive personal interview. It couldn’t have been more personal or more bizarre. She talked about her life and marriage, the rumours about her husband’s sexuality (a constant feature of his adult life) and their determination to have a baby, saying they were even contemplating in vitro fertilization – all of which the newspaper published with great glee under the headline ‘My Edward’s Not Gay’. But Sophie had been ‘had’ a second time. The tapes didn’t appear in the
News of the World
– the tapes were tame compared to what they had in exchange – but they found their way to other newspapers which gave maximum exposure to edited highlights of the secretly recorded conversation.

But the sting was not the first of Sophie’s faux pas. She was in trouble for appearing in a photograph with a Rover car – a royal endorsing a commercial brand was clearly not on. She then took on the Miele electrical appliances account whose closest competitor in the vacuum cleaner market was the British firm Dyson – not clever, when her PR material, with her name on the letterhead, effectively tried to rubbish the firm. One of the company’s directors went to see Robert Fellowes about it. ‘He didn’t think it was on either but there’s
a limit to what the Queen can do. I know Sophie must have got a frightful ticking off because a friend we have in common was staying somewhere and the Wessexes were also guests. My name came up and Sophie spat blood. But there’s a problem; there’s no command and control system within the family other than Prince Philip, so that tends to put people into camps.’

Prince Edward was doing no better. He had been much criticized for trading on the family name and using his connections to make films. He made a string of royal documentaries that no other television company would have been given the access to make. His films were criticized, his company, Ardent, was losing money – almost £2 million over ten years – and he was getting flak for doing too little to support the Family Firm. In August 2001 he and Sophie announced that they were intending to concentrate on their careers and would only carry out one public engagement in the following four months. The
Daily Mail
noted that during that same period Princess Anne had undertaken to do 166, the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester 39 and Prince Andrew 27 – and a Labour MP called it ‘scandalous’ that they were being paid £141,000 by the taxpayer to do so little. (In fact they were not being paid by the taxpayer – since 1993 all money paid to the Queen’s children, apart from Charles, is paid by the Queen out of her income from the Duchy of Lancaster, although newspapers, like MPs, continue to inflame us all by suggesting we are paying for them.) Then there was the St Andrews fiasco, with an Ardent film crew staying on in the university town after every other journalist and film crew had left at the request of the Prince of Wales’s office, which incensed the Prince of Wales and led to a rather public and unfortunate family falling-out.

The experiment of mixing royal work with a business career had been a disaster, and in 2002 Edward and Sophie gave up
the unequal struggle and, with the Queen’s Golden Jubilee celebrations providing a dignified excuse, retired from the business world to spend more time with the Family Firm. The decision must have damaged their pride and it certainly didn’t help their bank account. The Queen was said to have paid them £250,000 to compensate them for loss of earnings but that was pure speculation; in fact, she paid nothing. They now live on the £141,000 a year that Edward was awarded in 1990, plus the £45,000 increase he got when he married. It’s a hefty amount by most standards, but it does have to cover their office and household expenses plus the cost of official duties, plus the upkeep of Bagshot Park, their absurdly oversized fifty-six-room house in Surrey. At least with a baby, Lady Louise, born in November 2003, not quite so many of the rooms are empty now.

Marrying into the Royal Family after a normal life imposes other difficulties, too. When Sophie Rhys-Jones walked up the aisle she was known to everyone as Sophie. When she walked down with Prince Edward on her arm and a ring on her finger, she was Your Royal Highness; and whether she liked it or not, or insisted upon it or not, people’s attitudes towards her changed. And as a working member of the Royal Family that change was imperative.

Paul Arengo-Jones, who until his recent retirement ran the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award International Association, has known Sophie for many years – they were trustees of a breast cancer charity together. He has known Edward for many years too; they have worked together, travelled together and spoken regularly and often for more than ten years. An avuncular figure, I asked if he ever saw them socially.

I see them a bit socially but with members of the Royal Family there is always going to be a line beyond which you
do not cross, and that’s one of those things that is not so easy for the younger generations. Within the Organization here it’s a very interesting debate. If you want to have a focal point for an association – or a nation – you want someone on a pedestal; someone with an aura about them. They have a title, they have certain rights you don’t have, they’ve got a certain situation that is not yours to have, because they are something for you to look forward to meeting, somebody who can be of great value, they can open buildings, fundraise, be an attraction.

If you’re going to do that, you have to say that they are ‘Their Royal Highnesses, the Earl and Countess of Wessex’ and when you meet them you call them that, and you sit them in a car – you don’t clasp them round the shoulders and say, ‘Hey, Early, come with me’. Before the Countess was allowed to do things on her own I got her involved in the Haven Trust as a trustee, I wanted her to get involved in something which in the long term she could make a contribution to, and she comes to trustees’ meetings and makes a contribution and is a valued member of the team, and is very good with people, very confident, very photogenic. To begin with she was known as Sophie Wessex because she wasn’t being used in a formal capacity; but when we started using her in her royal role for fundraising, I had to say to the staff there I thought it was inappropriate for them to carry on calling her Sophie. Because if you’re going to ask someone to pay £200 to sit down and eat a meal attended by Her Royal Highness, you’ve got to put her on a pedestal whether she likes it or not; and if you do that, you have to surround them with an aura. It’s the same with the President of the United States. You don’t say, ‘Hi, George’; you call him Mr President, you give him an aura and he’s God. You put a line round them too, beyond which
you don’t cross – and that, I think, is the loneliness of being in that position, as well as a fact of life. For someone like the Earl and other members of the Royal Family, they were born into it and have to accept it, but for someone like the Countess it’s quite a tough line to step across, but if you want her to be HRH you have to put her in a glass case. We need people in glass cases. And, yes, she’s become grand; grand enough for us to be able to sell her. It would be an embarrassment if you put her in a glass case and she kept trying to climb out of it, if she didn’t turn up suitably dressed or say the right things to people, but she’s not grander than she ought to be. Some people say she has become too grand but I say, for goodness sake, she’s a princess, she’s HRH. You can’t have it both ways, you put them up there and that’s the role you want them to play. She does it very well, she’s very relaxed.

Arengo-Jones feels sorry for the Wessexes.

The Earl of Wessex works hugely hard. He had a rocky start being the youngest and, like all of them, he didn’t have a job. He legitimately thought he’d better go out and try and get one, and didn’t much like being tea boy to Andrew Lloyd Webber, has always had an interest in the arts and the theatre, then when he did eventually get some backers and do the thing he was interested in, he wasn’t allowed to do it, essentially, and neither was she, and so they have been left with no option but to go out and be members of the Royal Family, that’s the only thing the general public will let them do. I feel very sorry for them in a way. They don’t have great estates to fall back on, they can’t just go and hide and disappear, they’re not allowed to get a job, and so they have no choice. Yes, they made errors, but there but
for the grace of God go all of us, but we do it and come back another way; they can’t. They are never allowed to forget it.

Another chapter in his life which Edward has never been allowed to forget – apart from
It’s A Royal Knockout
– was his sudden and premature departure from the Royal Marines in 1987. Life in the Armed Forces was always going to be a safer option than business but Edward couldn’t hack it, and Paul Arengo-Jones, who was a Marine himself for three years and did the same course as Edward, has always admired his courage for that decision.

It is much harder to say you want to leave the course than stay on. It is such a tough course you cannot pass it unless you give 110 per cent. It is physically extremely demanding and if you’re not able to give 110 per cent you’re not going to pass it, and 99 per cent of people haven’t got the courage at that point to say they want to leave, because the peer pressure is so great; so they stay in and fail. He said no, my heart’s not in it. He knew what would happen and I thought, how brave; and it was so unfair because people don’t know what that course is like. Most Marines thought it was a very strong decision.

Mike Gretton agrees. ‘Why he went into the Royal Marines I’ll never know. Maybe out of loyalty to his dad who is Commandant General of the Corps. Edward is aesthetic; he’s much more interested in things like personal development of young people, the disadvantaged and music. He loves music.’

But once the press has it in for you it is very hard to alter the public perception. Yet Edward does some sensitive things and nice stories abound. Just before he went into the Marines
he went to a National Youth Music Theatre performance of
The Ragged Child
at the Edinburgh Festival. ‘A whole crowd of people were in the foyer,’ recalls Jeremy James Taylor, director of the company, ‘and one of our young front-of-house staff had some peanuts. She offered one to Edward who said no; then she backed into someone and all the peanuts went flying and were all over the floor, and, poor love, she bent down to pick them up, and Edward – I shall never forget this – said, “Perhaps I will have one after all”, and bent down and ate one off the floor, then helped her pick them up. I thought, that’s wonderful.’