much she denied it, I think she secretly rather looked forward to these occasions. The reason was not hard to find. It came to me at the start of one afternoon’s proceedings, as I paraded in my top hat and tails at the edge of the Buckingham Palace lawn along with other members of the Prince and Princess’s senior household. At our backs a lawn the size of a football pitch was crowded with a multicoloured mob of deserving guests from all walks of life throughout the Commonwealth.
Three approximately equal gangways had been carved through this crowd by Beefeaters in full ceremonial dress. The idea was that three royal couples would descend the steps from the Buckingham Palace Bow Room door on to the lawn and split up, one couple per lane. They would then proceed through the crowd at a slow pace towards their reward: tea in a special marquee at the other end of the lawn with members of the diplomatic community.
In effect, it was a time-honoured and rather formal version of the walkabout which I had come to know so well on the streets of provincial Britain. This time, however, the sun was shining, the crowds were all in their Sunday best, if not better, and the Princess was dressed in clothes she might happily have appeared in on Ladies’ Day at Ascot. In other words, despite the formal royal setting and order of events and ceremonies which had changed little since Victoria’s time, here was a chance for the Princess to do what she did best, in front of an audience drawn from those she sometimes saw as her greatest critics, namely other members of the royal family.
Apart from the Queen, who was naturally the symbolic focus of all attention, with her Palace as a backdrop and her Guards band playing her anthem, no one outshone the Princess. She stood statuesquely, slightly to one side, eyes demurely downcast, an object of wonder and curiosity, holding the gaze of several thousand eyes.
She and the Prince decorously descended the steps on to the lawn and the show began. The private secretary bowed, I bowed, we all bowed. The Prince looked grumpy, the Princess looked radiant. Then I detected a wicked edge to the radiance. It came, I was sure, from the certain knowledge that she was about to outshine her husband in public and intended to derive no little amusement from the task.
She winked at me and I fell into step slightly behind her. She took the right-hand side of the lane and the Prince took the left. The Prince’s equerry and I then spent the next 45 minutes striding back and forth ahead of our royal charges, ensuring that some 30 or so preselected guests were hauled to the front of the crowd and made to stand prominently so that they could receive the handshake they had been promised.
We sometimes darted further ahead to where the Queen’s comptroller stood at the confluence of the three lanes, marching back and forth and looking important – something he did very well, except that he glanced at his watch rather too often. He had the tricky task of trying to arrange for the occupants of all three lanes to arrive simultaneously at the door of the tea tent. It was a practically impossible task, because each of the six royal runners had their own technique for working the crowd and their rate of advance was anything but uniform. Nevertheless, he had to try and we had to try to help him.
After a few years of garden parties it dawned on me that there was only one game for the Princess more amusing than putting her husband in the shade for the afternoon, and that was frustrating her equerry’s artful attempts to make her hurry up or slow down in order to fall in with the comptroller’s master plan.
It was hard enough trying to make the Waleses co-ordinate speeds even in their own lane. One year the couple were particularly at odds and their progress had been anything but co-ordinated. With something approaching panic, I watched the Queen finish her lane and start to make her way towards the tea tent. We were going to be very late.
‘You’re going to be very late!’ the comptroller snapped at me and I returned fretfully to my lane, trying to look blasé on the outside while feeling like an incompetent sheepdog on the inside.
I went to explain the problem to the Prince’s equerry. Once again demonstrating that alarming ability which all royal people seemed to possess, the Prince overheard our muttered conversation, taking place some 20 feet behind him. ‘I didn’t know it was a race.’ The words were flung peevishly over his shoulder.
Immediately I relaxed, reminding myself once again of that saying attributed to Balfour: ‘Nothing matters very much, and very few things matter at all.’ It was a piece of wisdom I sometimes wished had been carved in illuminated letters 10 feet high across the whole facade of Buckingham Palace. It was a valuable lesson, and one which the Prince had evidently learned many years before, at least in relation to garden parties. I duly received a black look from the comptroller for spoiling the perfection of his arrangements, but he recognized the notorious independent-mindedness of the Waleses and was in any case already thinking about tea; and so, soon afterwards, was I.
Hot on the heels of the garden party came another set-piece event at which the aim of portraying our household as one big happy family came rather closer to success. This was the annual Highgrove staff barbecue. Awnings were pitched on the Highgrove lawn, external caterers were brought in with superior bangers and steaks, and the Prince and Princess vied with each other to play gracious and relaxed host to their hundred or so staff and their guests.
The Princess was in her element. In a casual outfit which looked as though it had come straight from the set of a jeans advert, she worked the crowd as if this were a superior sort of walkabout. Most of the faces were familiar to her, of course. I watched as she adjusted her demeanour according to whether she pigeonholed the person she was speaking to as (1) friendly and therefore deserving proprietorial in-humour, or (2) potentially hostile and therefore marked down for commiserating good humour, on this occasion anyway, or (3) neutral between the two camps. For those in the last category she reserved her most winning smile of all.
Everyone seemed to be hyped up – the employees because their pleasure at feeling they were getting something from the management for free was moderated by the knowledge that they were still under royal surveillance, as they consumed as much food and drink as they decently could. They were also, in many cases, showing off for the benefit of their guests, who were either partners or family. For their part, most of the guests were overawed by being welcomed to Highgrove, which they knew was first and foremost a private residence. The Princess was vigorously marshalling her support and I, for one, was keeping a watchful eye on the progress of her own version of an internal MORI opinion poll. The only person who seemed truly relaxed was the Prince, not least because the event gave him another opportunity to take small groups of reverential employees on guided tours of the gardens which were his consuming interest.
Visiting the house itself on barbecue days was not encouraged, but I had been there often enough before. Engagements that fell on Mondays or Fridays usually began or ended at Highgrove, with an associated trek, inevitably at the worst time of day, along the M4.
It has been said that the Princess disliked Highgrove and my own observations would confirm this, particularly towards the end of the marriage. As has also been said, it was in most ways a typical, comfortable country house with cartoons in the loo, boots in the porch and Jack Russells, it seemed, almost everywhere. It was distinctly more homely than Kensington Palace and certainly, so far as the Princess was concerned, there was no distinction between family and staff areas of the house. When I arrived I might expect to find her perched on the kitchen table, swinging her legs and sharing gossip with the chef, or in the staff hall, listening to the housekeeper’s latest personal crisis.
When the Waleses separated in 1992, the Princess collected all her belongings from the house and quit without much evident regret. No sooner had she gone than comprehensive redecoration took place, together with large-scale purging of the domestic staff. Highgrove then formally became what it had always seemed to be: the Prince’s personal sanctuary and main domestic base. For the Princess’s staff, it became foreign territory overnight. She never returned.
As allegiances in the office and in the country hardened, I found myself firmly in the Princess’s camp. This was not because she was blameless – she could not and did not claim this for herself, as I knew better than most. In fact, she was refreshingly honest about her capacity to run amok in the royal china shop, without ever surrendering her right to do so. ‘Everything’s got to change, Patrick!’ she would say, and I spent