The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor (39 page)

The Queen has been exceptional but there is no reason to suppose Charles will not match up. ‘Monarchy is better in wartime,’ says my senior civil servant, ‘having someone to die for.’ Would they be prepared to die for the Prince of Wales? ‘Yes,’ he insists. ‘He will change overnight when he becomes king, both himself and people’s perception of him. People in this country are very short term in their recollections. Previous controversies will fade overnight. Dignify it with the word “pragmatic” or else “short-term memory” but it’s one of the great strengths of this country; but you do need the institutions there as vessels in which you can put these thoughts. Democracy needs institutions; it can’t rest on the media.’

The media is probably the biggest question mark hanging over the future of the monarchy. Photographs of the Queen and
the Prince of Wales may not be so compelling any more but there is always a market for scandal and will always be one for sex – and with the Royal Family there is usually a means of linking the two. And with a character like Prince Harry on the loose there is potential for disaster. HRH is a very heady title and opens all sorts of doors; and there is no one, with the possible exception of his grandparents, who can say no to him. He is a nice boy but he has no sense of responsibility and no self-discipline – and since his mother died he has had no real discipline from outside either. Loving though the Prince of Wales is as a father, he has never put in the necessary time with his sons and by the time he woke up to the fact that Harry was keeping bad company and running wild it was too late to do anything about it.

It is not his fault that his Zimbabwean girlfriend Chelsy Davy had a chatty uncle only too ready to tell the world that his niece and the Prince had discussed marriage. But if Harry had been more controlled we might not have had to know that he and the buxom blonde enjoyed their first romp in a lavatory cubicle in a nightclub. ‘What an awful job,’ says Sir Richard Needham, who almost wrote to the Prince of Wales once to say, ‘If I were you I’d tell your sons to give it all in; the Brits don’t deserve a monarchy.’ ‘What a monstrous life those two boys have to live. It’s all very well saying, “Well, they’ve got all this money”, but that’s irrelevant. Why can’t they live their own lives? It’s really, really awful. They are the only people in this country born into something from which they have absolutely no escape and in which they are hounded, absolutely hounded. The press will get Harry sooner or later – even as an ex-royal he’d be hounded. But the Prince of Wales has got such an incredible sense of public duty he wouldn’t understand what I was talking about.’

Shortly before 8.30 on the morning of 10 February 2005 I was driving to London when my mobile phone rang – the first of about 58 calls from the media that day. It was the
Sun
newspaper with the news that Charles and Camilla were about to announce their engagement. Could I write something for Friday’s paper? A moment later it was GMTV, the programme was just about to end, could I comment before they went off air? Radio 5 Live had an outraged Anglican with whom I suddenly found myself in a heated exchange, and so it went on – Radio Gloucester, Cornwall, Wales etc. – all the way down the M4. The announcement had taken everyone by surprise – even Clarence House – which to Sir Michael Peat’s irritation had been bounced into making it public earlier than planned after the news leaked to the London
Evening Standard
(shortly after Tony Blair’s weekly Audience with the Queen).

The Prince had first cleared it with the Queen, his sons and the rest of his family at Sandringham over Christmas. He had then popped the question when he and Camilla were at Birkhall over New Year. As soon as she had said ‘Yes’, Sir Michael Peat set all the formal wheels in motion.

Within less than an hour of the news breaking on that Thursday morning, the world’s media had descended on the
Mall, and Canada Gate had turned into a mass of satellite dishes, television trucks and radio cars; and freezing presenters picked their way carefully over a snake-pit of communication cables to stand with their backs to Buckingham Palace and fill-in their viewers on when, where and how the couple would be married and the implications for the future. And on hand were royal watchers, historians, politicians, experts and commentators of every kind to give their reactions.

Most people seemed to be very pleased for the couple, and felt about time too, but my angry Anglican was not alone in his disgust. Talking to ITN outside Clarence House a little later I met a woman who was so appalled by the news she had come all the way across London to express it. ‘If Charles is going to marry that woman,’ she said spitting out the words, her face twisted, ‘he should never be king.’ Phone-in programmes called it an insult to Diana’s memory, and on BBC
Breakfast
the next morning there were emails from viewers that were so terrible they couldn’t be read out. ‘The adulterer should not be allowed to marry his whore’ was one of the more extreme I happened to see.

But the anger passed and by the weekend there were other matters on the front pages of the newspapers and opinion polls were beginning to suggest that the country was not going to be split so violently down the middle as at first seemed likely. The romantic element was creeping in. Camilla had revealed that Charles went down on bended knee to her, her diamond engagement ring was a family heirloom that the Queen had given them, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, was pleased they had decided to ‘take this important step’, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh were ‘very happy’ and had given the couple their ‘warmest wishes’, William and Harry were ‘100 per cent’ behind their father, and ‘very happy for him’, and Tony Blair sent congratulations
on behalf of the whole government. And photographs of the Prince and Camilla – both utterly radiant – at Windsor Castle on the night of the announcement were enough to thaw even the coldest heart.

A not insignificant part of the reason why they had waited until 2005 to announce their engagement was a sensitivity towards the boys. They didn’t want to foist a step-mother on William and Harry before they had fully grown up. Accepting Camilla as a fixture in their father’s life has been difficult for them and although they have been genuinely pleased to see him so happy, and genuinely like Camilla – and her children – the issue is complicated. The notion that their mother was a sacrificial extra in a long-standing love story between Charles and Camilla – a line most of the newspapers ran after their engagement – is hurtful. They loved their mother and are fiercely loyal to her memory – and know that Camilla was the cause of her terrifying unhappiness.

Harry has been particularly affected. Whether or not any of this is related to his behaviour is a matter for the psychoanalysts. In the meantime, it is important that a solution be found, before he, like his mother, self-destructs. The answer perhaps is to cut Harry free from the Family Firm. The concept of a Royal Family, of an idealized, closely knit unit that sets a shining example to the country, has had its day. We don’t expect our prime ministers’ families to be on parade. We certainly don’t expect them to play any part in national life, work in government – heaven forbid – or to press the flesh on away days on his or her behalf; and if we elected a president as head of state we wouldn’t expect it of his or her family either. If, as Tristan Garel-Jones would have us do, we think of the Queen as Head of State, then a consort and an heir are as many as should be expected to put up with the demands
we make of them. The Lord-Lieutenants would be enormously disappointed – they would like more rather than fewer royals – and the charities would miss out. Celebrities and politicians don’t have the same impact – even as minor royals – and they seldom have the commitment or the staying power. But there are thousands of charities that don’t have royal patronages and they manage perfectly well.

The late Princess Margaret’s two children, Viscount Linley and Lady Sarah Chatto, don’t feature in public life. Their names come up occasionally in gossip and society columns but they live normal lives, have married normal people and are not held up to public scrutiny. Princess Anne’s two children, Peter and Zara Phillips, live normal lives. Not many people would even recognize Peter, he is so seldom seen. Zara is instantly recognizable but that’s her choice. She invited
Hello!
magazine into her living room – and bedroom; she wears daringly skimpy outfits to Ascot, parades her boyfriends at public venues and clearly enjoys her celebrity status. And nobody minds. Her antics may upset her family but they do not reflect badly on the monarchy because she is not part it; she doesn’t work for the Family Firm. But so long as Harry is expected to, he will attract attention and, because he has already got off on the wrong foot, the media is watching and waiting for the next incident which will come as surely as a London bus.

I can see no purpose in making him knuckle down, forcing him into a mould that doesn’t fit. He is never likely to be king so why make him spend his life shadowed by security, visiting factories, opening hospitals, shaking hands and doing good works, knowing that the slightest indiscretion is going to embarrass his grandmother or his father or, in time, his brother? Why not let him step back from it all and do what he wants with his life? His father found it hard enough to carve out a role for himself and he is heir to the throne; the
Army won’t keep him for ever; and the Wessexes have already demonstrated how difficult it is to combine royal life with a career. So let him go out and earn a living free from all encumbrances. If his heart is really set, as he said it was, on following in his mother’s footsteps and carrying on with her work, he could do it as a private citizen. He will always be a name that any charity would want on its notepaper. And if the time ever came when he was needed to take up royal duties, then he could be brought back into the fold.

Which brings us neatly to the subject of the fold – or The Firm. Lord Airlie and Sir Michael Peat revolutionized life at Buckingham Palace in the eighties when they implemented so many of Peat’s recommendations but they didn’t alter the basic structure. Every member of the Royal Family who carries out public engagements has their own household with private secretaries and other staff, and although there are channels of communication in place they don’t always seem to work. According to Mark Goyder, who is director of Tomorrow’s Company, an independent think tank that promotes good governance in business, ‘the structure in management terms is three decades out of date. It’s not a firm, it’s more like a number of tribes, a federation of tribes, and although there is a titular head, corporately it’s quite inefficient.

‘If you were in General Motors in the 1950s or British Rail in the 1980s you saw exactly those things. Then modern management came along and said this is crazy, we must have a structure that reflects function, must have an organization that is effective with compartments, but united towards a common goal.’

A former Press Officer to the Prince of Wales believes doing away with the households is imperative.

It’s divisive. Why have we had this punch-up between St James’s Palace and Buckingham Palace? Because they
were working for the individuals and not the institution. It creates tensions. The difficulty for ordinary human beings to understand – and I didn’t understand until I got closer – is you are not selling a product, or a service or a commodity, you’re supporting that individual’s psyche and what they are and do every day of their lives; and they can’t walk away from it, and we the public owe a sense of responsibility which I don’t think we’re acknowledging at the moment, in terms of what price they have to pay and what price we should insist that the media should pay to allow them more privacy than they are allowed at the moment.

I am not suggesting a state department to look after the Royal Family but having people who have responsibility for the institution rather than the individuals and who have a code of practice and standards, not dissimilar to the civil service in terms of how they work, so they do the right thing for the institution. In the civil service we had a change of administration; the machinery kept going and was more important than the individual.

One solution, proposed by Tristan Garel-Jones, would be for the Head of State to have a private office that mirrors the Prime Minister’s. At No. 10 a series of bright young stars from various government departments work in the Prime Minister’s outer office for two or three years as part of the career path. This means they go back to their department with some knowledge of how the Prime Minister’s office and No. 10 function. This could be reproduced at Buckingham Palace at the push of a button. It is already moving in that direction but he would institutionalize the practice. The advantage is it would feed back into Whitehall a whole raft of up-and-coming civil servants who, having been doing the briefing notes and writing the speeches, would have an understanding of the Head of
State’s functions and an appreciation of how important and difficult it can be at times. He would also do away with the separate households – even the Prince of Wales’s, and would route everything through the Head of State’s office. ‘So if you’re a minor member of the Royal Family and you’re invited to go and open a hospital in Nottingham, you get on to the Head of State’s office and say “I’ve been invited, should I do it?” And they would say, “Yes, we’ll send you a briefing note and a speech.” Nothing can do more, in my view, to strengthen the institution than if we all got used to referring to the Queen as the Head of State and that she was provided with the sort of administrative back-up that the Head of State in a country like ours ought to have.’

Another good idea, suggested by a former press secretary, would be to find ways of engaging the public, giving them a feeling of ownership and involvement in the business of monarchy, so that they too understand what the institution is for. She would like to get schoolchildren to do projects for Trooping the Colour, for instance, and let the best ones go into the programme and have the winners meet the Queen; she would like to see ordinary children at the State Opening of Parliament – have them carrying the Queen’s train perhaps; and she would like to see people from the Palace go out into the community to explain to people what monarchy is all about. She once asked why the media were not allowed into investitures, given that the Queen was presenting medals on behalf of the country, and was told it would destroy the mystery. ‘I was made to feel as though I’d grown two heads,’ she says. ‘You won’t ever get the mystique back but I’m not sure you need it. It’s partly the mystique that has produced this lack of relevance.’

There is also a section of the community that the monarchy needs to reach out to. People at the top of the tree are rewarded
with gongs and garden parties and people at the bottom of the heap are catered for by the charities with which the Royal Family are involved. Their problems are well understood. But there is very little contact and therefore little understanding of the people in the middle. ‘What they have no feel for,’ says an equerry to the Prince of Wales, ‘is the middle-manager of a building company, who has a £100,000 mortgage on his house and has been told his job is redundant. Monarchy has a lot of support from the working class and the upper class. It’s the ones in the middle who feel it’s not relevant to them. That’s where the issue is. You go to a housing estate on a Wednesday afternoon in November and you know who you’re going to meet. Somehow you need to include those others.’

What monarchy needs, like any modern business or organization, is a regular health check; it needs to ask itself why it is there, what it is aiming to achieve, and whether it is being successful. According to Mark Goyder

a well-led company is one where there’s a very clear sense of purpose, of who and what you are and where you come from, clear values and a very clear understanding of all the relationships that are critical to your future success. The other idea we talk about is the licence to operate, the implicit permission that any business has – not granted by a regulator but by reputation, by trust, by the legitimacy in which you’re held. In the sense of clear purpose, I wonder if the question has ever been asked of the Queen, what are you here for? Or is that what it means to be the Establishment; that you’re so established you never have to ask that question? That might be the answer. In a world in which everyone else questions who they are and what they’re for, this is the one institution that doesn’t have to answer that question and maybe that is what defines them.