Shadows of a Princess. Patrick Jephson

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СКАЧАТЬ later years the recce might have taken me three-quarters of an hour – 15 minutes for the recce itself and 30 minutes to chat up and generally get the measure of the hosts. As the rawest apprentice, however, I must have spent nearly two hours pacing out every inch of the route, nominating press positions and marking places for individual presentations.

      Then I changed everything and started again. I failed to get the measure of the hosts as well, but I think it can be safely concluded that they were very patient people.

      From this I learned the importance of not hesitating to change my mind if I thought it necessary. However tempting it was to cultivate an air of infallibility, complacency was a risky companion when planning a royal visit and often led me into embarrassing U-turns. Such was my spurious authority – and their customary good manners – that few hosts objected and some, I think, even enjoyed the chance to prolong the royal experience. Generally, though, changing my mind – like confessing to my mistakes – was a pleasure to be indulged in sparingly.

      Again and again I felt my lack of experience, but surprisingly quickly the time I spent on recces began to shrink. Even 15 minutes eventually became too much for some engagements. By then I knew what would work and what would not. The extra time was needed only to reassure myself that my distilled experience as passed on to the hosts would be treated like the politely phrased commandments I felt them to be.

      I knew, for example, that the Princess refused to be rushed when meeting people. If time was limited the only option was to reduce the number of people she met – not, as some hosts seemed determined to try, merely to persuade her to hurry up. Nothing was more calculated to make her slow down even more.

      I had seen that she liked to be punctual and well briefed, preferably in humorous, bite-sized chunks. ‘YRH will remember Mr X. Last time you visited he forgot to bow; he curtsied instead!’

      She also liked plenty of elbow room when she was in the public eye. Apart from a protection officer, she preferred the gaggle of officials and dignitaries who inevitably accompanied her to keep well out of her way. I sometimes thought the equerry and lady-in-waiting were mainly there to conduct a type of genteel crowd control. With sharp elbows and distracting small talk, we became expert in buying our boss the uncrowded stage she needed to perform at her best.

      I knew where the arrival line-up should be positioned, where the girl with the posy should stand, where the ribbon should be cut and where the press pen should be sited. The Princess liked short line-ups, preferably with spouses excluded. The girl with the posy should be at the end of the line, well positioned for the cameras because there was always a moment of amused miscommunication – small fingers reluctant to let go at the crucial moment – as the flowers were handed over. If not, she would laughingly contrive it. The flowers should be in neutral colours, in theory to avoid clashing with the royal outfit, and unwired.

      She liked the ribbon (or the plaque or the sapling or the pharmaceutical research laboratory) to provide a backdrop that identified the cause being supported and, ideally, someone very young or very old on hand to ‘assist’ photogenically with the cutting, unveiling or digging. She preferred the press to be well penned, unobtrusively positioned and silent but for the whirr of their motor drives. Muffled yelps of delight were permitted and not infrequent, but groans and calls of ‘Just one more!’ usually met the same contrary response as requests to hurry up.

      She did not like the press party – unkindly termed the ‘rat pack’ – to get too close. Cameras, flash guns and the dreaded boom microphone could all ruin the carefully arranged spontaneity that we tried to make her trademark. But nor did she like the pack too far away. She traded skilfully on the knowledge that they needed her just as much as she needed them, so she theatrically ‘endured’ their presence and could be sharp with her staff if any cameraman got too far out of line. All the players in this game knew it was a mutually advantageous conspiracy, however, and played by the rules accordingly. She gave them the shots both they and she needed, and they responded with enduring devotion.

      I learned the crucial importance of seeing all planning decisions through royal rather than mortal eyes. In my ignorance I had imagined that, as with some naval chores, royalty regarded public duties as just that: duties which had to be performed as a matter of necessity, to be enjoyed if possible, to be endured if not and all to be accomplished with a noble appreciation of the greater good being served – or at least with the satisfaction of a job well done. Now it slowly dawned on me that the process was more complex and allowed the intrusion of other personal considerations. While some might see only the outward appearance of royal concern – in, say, a children’s hospice – the equerry has to allow for the emotional toll exacted by 90 minutes’ close involvement in a dozen harrowing accounts of family distress.

      The engagements which required the greatest display of outward compassion (hospices were a case in point) were often those that drew deepest on the Princess’s reserves of inner goodwill and determination. I came to understand that, while showing sympathy with those in distress sometimes rewarded her with a virtuous glow, it also emphasized the loneliness with which her personal unhappiness had to be faced.

      Surprisingly often, even the most efficient and well-run organization seemed unable to understand the simple practicalities of designing a visit programme. Often it was the humblest charity which had the clearest idea of how long could be spent talking to a certain number of patients and how welcome would be the obligatory shaking of influential but otherwise ungripping hands.

      Watching it wrestle with such small considerations frequently seemed a measure of how well a management knew its own people. I quickly learned that the priority was not just to allocate the required number of minutes to a particular event. Frequently it was more important to practise ego-management, as a touchy official or departmental head hotly insisted on more time as if it were a measure of his importance or even – in extreme cases – his virility. Always to be pitied were those who would bear disappointing news home to their wives about the limit on line-up numbers, to the equal dismay of local hat-sellers.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ