Best of all were the organizations who simply explained what they hoped would happen during their royal visit and then left the rest to us, the assumed experts. Less welcome were those who had considered every detail and were then unwilling, understandably, to accommodate changes made for reasons that I could not tell them, such as the fact that the Princess would probably prefer to climb straight on the plane home rather than sit next to an old bore like you during lunch. Least welcome were those who introduced their plan with the words, ‘Now, you won’t have to help us with any of this. We know the ropes. We had the Duchess of Blank here in 1971 and it was a huge success …’
A lexicon of soothing phrases, excuses and explanations quickly became part of my visit-planning toolkit as ministers, matrons and monks were lulled into complying with a programme whose constraints they might often have found eccentric, trivial or even offensive. Over time, however, the necessary mannerisms of speech accumulated into an oleaginous patina which proved hard to shake off when talking to people outside my narrow field of work. Thus can courtly talk slip into insincerity.
The final step in the planning process was to walk the course. An obvious precaution, you might think, but with surprising regularity it was possible to encounter host organizations who had overlooked elementary considerations such as the time actually spent walking from one part of a building to another.
To be fair, this was partly because their minds were quite properly concentrated on the people at the expense of less exciting aspects such as timing or camera angles. Also, until you had experienced it, it was difficult to estimate accurately just how quickly a 26-year-old Princess with the ground-covering abilities of a mustang could move between the car and the briefing room, the lab and the packing centre, the day room and the chapel, the royal box and the touchline, the presidential jet and the guard of honour, and so on. It did sometimes seem, however, that concerned hosts were expecting a visitor with the frailty of the Queen Mother rather than a young woman whose athleticism was becoming legendary.
Once I had achieved a shaky confidence in organizing the Princess’s UK engagements, I could look forward to the challenge of planning her overseas visits. I remembered pictures I had seen of the Princess looking cool and compassionate in a dozen exotic foreign locations. This, I thought, would be where my new job started to become a bit more glamorous. The reality, of course, was that it took a lot of very unglamorous hard work to reach the media-friendly results that she – and her public – expected.
I have always taken undue pleasure even from aimless travel, and to be offered transport and accommodation on such a royal scale and be paid to indulge my puerile desire seemed the best part of the job description. During my early days at St James’s I heard an endless travelogue of tour stories, some of dizzying tallness. As I was to learn, even in exaggerated form these tales struggled to convey the reality of transporting our royal circus to foreign countries. Not to be outdone, over the years I developed my own improbable repertoire of traveller’s yarns from which, if nothing else, my audiences learned that the overseas tour encapsulated in concentrated form all the best and worst aspects of life with the Waleses.
Tours were a big challenge for our royal employers too. The task of representing the country overseas as a kind of super-ambassador makes great demands on their reserves of diplomacy, tact, confidence and patience – not to mention the royal sense of humour, digestion and general physical and mental constitution. There are therefore big demands for both external comforts and internal strength. These must somehow be supplied from the foreign surroundings in which duty has deposited the royal traveller and from internal resources, reinforced by years of heredity and training. However gilded the cage, though, no guest palace provides the familiar, reassuring touches of home.
To help achieve the external comforts, the Waleses usually travelled with a surprisingly large entourage. On one of my first tours the party totalled 26. As well as more senior officials such as private secretaries and press secretaries, the cast included a doctor, four policemen, three secretaries, a butler, a valet, an assistant valet, a dresser, an assistant dresser, two chefs and a hairdresser.
Not surprisingly, we also needed a baggage master to look after the small mountain of luggage. In order to achieve the desired result of making the Prince and Princess feel that their temporary accommodation was a real ‘home from home’, an extraordinary amount of personal kit had to be carried with us. Everything from music equipment to favourite organic foods had their special containers – and came high on the list of priorities.
In-flight meals were seldom straightforward either. In later years when travelling on solo tours, the Princess was happy enough to choose from standard airline menus. This also applied to journeys with the Queen’s Flight, who usually found reliable airline caterers whatever the exotic destination. Before the separation, however, the Princess took a leaf out of her husband’s rather more fastidious book, and while their accompanying staff demolished the output of the British Airways first-class flight kitchen, our employers would pick at home-grown organic concoctions in Tupperware boxes like pensioners on an outing. They were a lot slimmer and fitter than most of us, of course, but it still looked like a pretty joyless experience.
Meanwhile, host government officials, Embassy staff and senior members of the Wales household (the collective term for private secretaries and other top management) laboured to produce a programme befitting the stature of the visitors. The planes, boats, trains and cars – as well as the cameras, crowds, guards of honour and banquets – combined to create the overall theatrical effect without which no royal visit can be really royal. Adjusted for scale, the same principles apply equally to a visit to a crèche as much as to a continent. Add the scrutiny of the press and the unpredictability of foreign hosts’ resources, and it is little wonder that touring is seen as one of the greatest tests royal service can provide. Little wonder either that it demands the full set of royal stage props to achieve its full effect.
Every month or so a list of forthcoming engagements was circulated in the office. For many excellent reasons it was treated as a confidential document, though whether to thwart terrorists or merely to baffle the Queen’s Flight was never fully explained. Its colloquial name was Mole News, since it was assumed that its list of dates and places would form the leaker’s basic fare. By the time of my arrival, however, the leaking was beginning to emanate from more exalted sources such as royal ‘friends’ and other thinly disguised mouthpieces for the Prince and Princess themselves. Eventually Mole News practically lost its original innocent purpose as a simple planning aid and became instead just another piece on the board game of misinformation in the intelligence war between them. As they drew up their diaries with more and more of an eye to the media impact of their activities, information on each other’s future movements became vital in the popularity contest that they were both beginning to wage.
Soon after my arrival I had scanned this programme eagerly, looking for my first chance of an overseas trip. Disappointingly it seemed that I would have to wait almost a year before I could join the veterans whose briefcases sported the tour labels which I so coveted. I was scheduled to accompany Their Royal Highnesses on a tour of the Gulf States in March 1989. At least, I thought, it was a part of the world I knew slightly and liked a lot. Also it would be hot and I would at last have an excuse to wear that expensive tropical uniform – the preferred choice of most officers who had seen Top Gun.
In Mole News joint engagements were indicated with an asterisk. What had not yet been widely noticed, however, was that asterisks were becoming a rarity. In fact, by the late eighties joint appearances at home were already mostly confined to set-piece events such as the Queen’s Birthday Parade, the Garter Ceremony, Ascot and the staff Christmas lunch. The same trend of disappearing asterisks was visible in the overseas programme. Solo expeditions had always been a feature of royal overseas work, but the Waleses were noticeably beginning to make more and more of their overseas trips alone. This was bad for publicity – it just fuelled rumours about the state of the marriage – but for staff in the firing line it