royal service for life.
Michael Peat tried to put an end to that, suggesting short-term contracts of five years or so and retiring most jobs at sixty, although government policy on retirement will up that in future. It was a revolutionary idea and one that has upset some of the old guard. ‘In the old days people went there for life,’ says one. ‘It wasn’t for the money – there never was any – but they were proud to work for the Royal Family, it was a privilege. Today they just go there to get something on their CV; there’s no loyalty any more.’ However, having a constant flow of new blood coming into the Palace, bringing experience of the outside world with them, looking at the business with fresh eyes, not indoctrinated by the protocol or intimidated by the hierarchy, is undoubtedly good. And the fact that they are no longer coming exclusively from the Armed Forces is another giant plus. Loyalty is another issue. In the wake of the Daily Mirror reporter Ryan Parry taking a job inside the Palace – the final straw after a spate of revelatory books from former servants like Patrick Jephson, Ken Wharf and Paul Burrell – the confidentiality clauses in all royal employment contracts have been considerably tightened.
The man in charge of personnel and all matters financial is Alan Reid, the Keeper of the Privy Purse – old title, new man. He arrived in 2002 aged fifty-five, having been Chief Operating Officer at KPMG. A Scot, educated at Fettes and St Andrews, he was one of 234 applicants for the job. As with all senior appointments at the Palace these days a headhunter was used, but the job was also advertised on the open market. One of the applicants, from Australia, either a wag or understandably confused by the job title, said he ‘would be happy to carry Her Majesty’s handbag’.
‘People used to think we couldn’t take action, but we took an injunction out against the Mirror and Ryan Parry, and all staff in the Palace have signed new, tighter undertakings of confidentiality.’ Most of the challenges Alan Reid has faced since he began the job, he admits, have been to do with personnel and security. ‘They could publish in the United States and over the internet here, so it’s not foolproof, but we can and will take action in terms of anyone making money in this country; all money will go to charity. It used to be that if your principal had died, the undertaking of confidentiality died with him or her.’ This is how those people who worked for the Princess of Wales were able to publish with impunity after her death. ‘Now contracts are in the sovereign’s name and the sovereign never dies.’
The point of the Coordination and Research Unit is two-fold, and, unusually for job titles within the royal household, implicit in the title. It coordinates the family’s activities ‘because we want to have a joined-up, working-together sort of family’, as Paul Havill puts it. ‘There was a feeling that the different households didn’t know what the others were doing; each member has their own office and their own patronages and interests and there was a need to bring them together, to be more coordinated.’ Paul goes to all the six-monthly planning meetings when each member of the family sits down with their own staff to map out their diaries for the following six months. He advises everyone of the Queen’s movements. There is a pecking order in The Firm and she is at the top, then the Prince of Wales and so on down the line of succession (excluding, for these purposes, Prince William and Prince Harry who don’t yet carry out official engagements), and their planning meetings are held in order of precedence. Each member needs to work around those higher up the food chain, and if someone is needed to cover for the Queen, a date that she can’t make but an engagement which needs some sort of royal presence, Paul puts in his bid for another member of the Royal Family to take it on. And because he has an overview of what everyone is doing, if there is a disaster somewhere, such as the Madrid bombings, he can find a member of the family to drop everything and go.
And, as the name suggests, the CRU researches. ‘It provides an executive resource for the Queen’s private secretaries’, in civil service-speak; effectively it is a Palace think tank, picking up on what’s going wrong in the Family Firm and coming up with ideas for doing things better. And in the aftermath of Diana’s famous Panorama interview in 1995 – which happened at much the same time as the CRU was being set up – there was a strong feeling among the Queen’s staff that quite a lot was going wrong and the Princess of Wales was stealing a march on them all.
The public loved Diana for all sorts of reasons but not least because people felt she was in tune with them; she went down to the Embankment in London and met the homeless, she went to drug rehabilitation centres and she visited AIDS victims and held their hands. She connected with the public in a way that they liked. It wasn’t the royal way. Princess Anne once tetchily remarked, ‘The very idea that all children want to be cuddled by a complete stranger I find utterly amazing.’ She has a point; but Diana’s informality and the raw, controversial causes she adopted, symbolized a humanity that compared badly with the unemotional hands-behind-the-back approach of everyone else.
According to one of the private secretaries involved in the process of finding a new way forward:
That interview showed what a very different model Diana was and would continue to be, and it certainly gave impetus to the work that was going on in the Palace for change. What was their attitude to her style? Less hostility than I would have expected. There was an acceptance she was very popular and I never heard the Queen criticize Diana, but there was almost a sense of bafflement and a feeling that this wasn’t the style of the rest of the family. The Queen had a very strong, admirable sense herself of the need to be herself and not be something different. The Duke of Edinburgh will say, ‘We are not here to electioneer, to tout for short-term popularity’, and there was an understanding that they couldn’t adopt Diana’s style and pretend to be the kind of people they weren’t. But working out how they could be themselves and yet do somewhat different things, and show interest in somewhat different things, was something they needed a lot of help with.
The CRU began trying to steer the Queen and other members of the family towards official engagements that were more closely aligned to what was going on in society. They used MORI and other opinion surveys to track key issues and establish people’s views on a variety of issues. They looked at current polls which showed how many people in the population held republican sentiments, how many didn’t care and how many were staunch monarchists, and discovered that the ratio varied very little. The number of republicans was always between 8 and 12 or 13 per cent; a large majority was neutral and a small number of people were raving monarchists.
The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh have no interest in tracking opinion polls themselves. It’s a form of self-protection they have developed over the years. They read newspapers and the Queen watches the early evening news on ITV so they are well aware of what is being said and written about them, and they pick up the sarky comments in comedy programmes, but they don’t pore over the minutiae, as Diana did, looking to see if they had a good report today.
It’s the Private Secretary’s job to talk these kinds of issues through with the Queen, to discuss the way the monarchy is currently being perceived in the country and to work through the implications, and when and if necessary, recommend change. And it is probably one of the toughest and most crucial parts of the job.
You trod carefully as you would with a minister or Prime Minister, and probably more carefully because it is an intensely personal role. Generally if you are in public life you can console yourself that if you’re being criticized, it’s your official persona that’s being criticized. But it’s very difficult for the Royal Family because that boundary line between being a private and public individual is blurred for them. One of the things I took away from my time at the Palace was a feeling that there needed to be a clearer distinction between the two. I think they’ve learnt to protect themselves from taking the criticism personally to some extent, but only to some extent.
Criticism was at its fiercest, of course, in the days after Diana’s death, and that was the second major impetus for change. By the end of the week, when the family