The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor. Penny Junor

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СКАЧАТЬ the facts get in the way of giving the Prince a good kicking.

      It has to be said that safe methods of communication are diminishing. The Duke of Edinburgh has seen his private letters to the Princess of Wales published for public consumption courtesy of Paul Burrell and his book, and the Prince of Wales knows all too well about the dangers of mobile phones, after finding his amorous late-night ramblings intercepted and dished up for the world’s entertainment. No wonder he doesn’t use email.

      The Prince, in fact, still writes everything in longhand, pages and pages with plenty of underlining for emphasis. He fires off memos to his staff and to his charities – Julia Cleverdon at Business in the Community calls them ‘black spider memos’ because of the colour of his ink and the frantic scribbling as his pen tries to keep up with his thoughts. And he writes letters, a habit he acquired long ago, with no apparent thought about them falling into the wrong hands.

      Says a former courtier:

      He’s one of the great letter writers, except he needs an editor; his letters are far too long. But most people find letters of condolence the most difficult things to do. He would just sit down, pick up his pen and do four pages, or whatever, and it was always absolutely brilliant. He’s a very emotional man and his emotions, unlike ‘British’ emotions, are right there, available and articulated. That’s why he likes the descendants of Winston Churchill so much; they’re very given to tears. He likes the idea of people breaking into tears.

      Charles finds he can express himself with a fountain pen. He has never used a computer and has no plans to start now, but his Luddite tendencies are not reflected elsewhere in The Firm. His father, now in his eighties – nearly thirty years older than Charles – was probably one of the first people in the land to own a laptop and has been writing letters on it and using email for as long as email has existed. Even the Queen is ahead of her eldest son. During a trip to Brunei in 1998 she remarked to the Sultan’s family, ‘I can’t write any more. I can only write on computers. You can rub things out. It’s so simple.’ The Duke of York is another devotee and has all the very latest hand-held wizardry, like his younger brother. Having worked in the film business, Edward is entirely familiar with computers and better than most at knowing how they work. Wandering into the Press Office at Buckingham Palace one day he found Ailsa Anderson, Assistant Press Secretary to the Queen, staring forlornly at a dead screen and immediately fixed it for her. The surprising thing about Edward is that for all that exposure to the real world, and all the nice touches that people report time and again, he is the most regal of all his siblings and in some respects the least relaxed about royal protocol.

      The brainstorming that produced The Way Ahead Group threw up another good idea: the creation of a department that has no ties with the past and is staffed by no one with a military career behind them. The Coordination and Research Unit (CRU), which was set up in 1995, is currently run by Paul Havill, a civil servant who came from the Office of Fair Trading and is on secondment for three years, which has since been extended. He is the third incumbent. His two assistants are always from the private sector – usually from companies like Price Waterhouse or Arthur Anderson – and stay for a year, perhaps two. ‘The idea is to keep the fresh thinking and dynamism from the private sector coming into the heart of the private secretaries’ office.’ He works directly for Robin Janvrin, his assistants for Janvrin’s deputies.

      With the best will in the world they need that fresh thinking and dynamism. It is very easy to lose touch with reality if your life is spent at Buckingham Palace. It may be more efficiently run than it ever was, but how many other offices in London have Old Masters on the walls, Georgian tables doubling up as desks and priceless works of art decorating every corridor? It’s only when you catch sight of computers, fax machines and filing cabinets that you realize this is neither a museum nor an art gallery. If you are travelling with the Queen you may visit schools and hospitals and meet a wide cross-section of society but you still travel with outriders, still walk on red carpet, and still, in the main, meet people who are pleased to see you. It is an unreal existence and it’s seductive, particularly when you stay for ten, fifteen or twenty years, as most of the Queen’s private secretaries do. Staff at lower levels are very often in 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 СКАЧАТЬ