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

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СКАЧАТЬ year. But they also go in their hundreds of thousands to the decommissioned Royal Yacht Britannia berthed at Leith in Edinburgh, to Sandringham, KP, Balmoral, and, more recently, Clarence House; and to watch the annual Trooping the Colour ceremony. The biggest free visitor attraction in London is the Changing of the Guard which happens every morning on the forecourt of Buckingham Palace at 11.00 a.m. and lasts for half an hour. The Guard is mounted by the two regiments of the Household Cavalry – the Life Guards and the Blues and Royals – each of which provides one squadron for a special ceremonial unit in London, which is housed in Hyde Park Barracks with more than one hundred horses, and men who do a two- or three-year stint before returning to their operational units. The man in charge is Major General Sebastian Roberts who sits at the Duke of Wellington’s old desk in the aptly named Wellington Barracks with history all around and the awesome task of ensuring that the military aspect of state ceremonials goes according to plan.

      Buckingham Palace is not just a magnet for tourists. It is a rallying point where people instinctively go when there’s a problem or a cause for celebration – either personal or national. When in 1982 a schizophrenic named Michael Fagan had family problems, it was the Queen he wanted to talk to. ‘I was under a lot of stress,’ he said, ‘and just wanted to talk to Her Majesty about what I was going through.’ So he broke into the Palace, found his way to her bedroom and she awoke to discover him sitting on her bed with a broken ashtray in one hand and blood pouring from the other – and, incidentally, needed to make two calls to the police switchboard within the Palace before anyone came to her rescue. When in 2004 a divorced man wanted visiting rights with his children, he dressed up as Batman and scaled the front of Buckingham Palace to stage a protest on a ledge and refused to come down for five hours. He caused a major security alert and the Metropolitan Police commissioner warned that the next time anyone tried a similar stunt they might very well be shot. (The mother of the interloper’s third set of children, meanwhile, walked out on him, saying that he spent twice as much time demonstrating as he ever spent with their children and she’d had it; but that’s not the point. The point is that he made his protest at Buckingham Palace.)

      Those of her subjects who don’t drop in personally – and the Queen prefers it if they don’t – tend to write to her. She gets about three hundred letters a day: some of them to do with political matters, some wanting help in solving a local problem such as housing or hospitals – or the difficulty for divorced fathers in seeing their children – and some are straightforward fan letters (and a few abusive), but others are also highly personal, just as Michael Fagan’s conversation was personal.

      And that is one of the functions of monarchy: providing a focus for people’s emotions. Two women spend an entire morning each day opening and sorting letters. The Queen doesn’t answer them personally but she sees them and gets a very good feel as a result for the issues that are worrying people. Her other great feeler for the mood of the nation is the conversations she has when she is on away days. People may only have a few seconds with her when she shakes their hand, and some are so overcome with nerves that they utter nothing intelligible, but some come straight out with whatever is on their mind, from Britain’s engagement with Europe to the contentious issue of foxhunting.

      The Queen’s other opportunity to meet people outside her own social circle is at receptions and lunches at the Palace. A recent innovation has been themed receptions. There was one for pioneers, for example, to which people like James Dyson, of vacuum cleaner fame, were invited; another for people who had changed the life of the nation, for which the television cook Delia Smith was chosen; and another for women of achievement, which included all sorts from Lady Thatcher to Kate Moss.

      The research for all of these activities is done by the CRU. They plan the Queen’s programme and research not only who the women of achievement, for example, are for the receptions, but also which parts of the country are due for a royal visit. They have the latest in IT – researched, you guessed it, by the CRU – and with this they can produce geographical analysis tables of royal visits, and can work out where each member of the family should go in the coming six months.

      On one of the days I followed the Queen she was in Surrey, where amongst other things she opened a new orthopaedic wing at Epsom hospital and met a familiar face – Mr Roger Vickers, the surgeon who operated on her knees and the Queen Mother’s hips so successfully. It was no random choice: she had not been to the county for five years. They also do research on patronages; if a charity approaches a member of the family asking them to become patron or president, they check it out. They research new thinking from the private sector, look at policy procedures, work with the Press Office on opinion polls, scrutinize travel plans; the list is endless, and, according to Havill, the unit is constantly changing, constantly modernizing, constantly evolving.

      A longer-established tradition are small, informal lunches at Buckingham Palace for assorted members of the great and the good. It was an idea suggested by the Duke of Edinburgh, who has had many good ideas during the course of the Queen’s reign. These lunches were held so that the Queen could meet interesting people and opinion formers who she didn’t normally come across; and, just as importantly, so that they could meet her. The first lunch took place in 1956 and she has been holding them ever since. People who go are generally enchanted, my own father among them. There were ten guests the day he went, a typical number. At the time he was editor and columnist of the Sunday Express; his fellow diners were a Tory MP, Sue MacGregor, then the presenter of Woman’s Hour, a High Court judge, an interior designer, the coxswain of the Humber lifeboat and Anne Beckwith Smith, lady-in-waiting to the Princess of Wales. They gathered promptly at 12.50 in the 1844 Room where they were given a drink before lining up to meet the Queen and Prince Philip who came in and shook hands with each of them and engaged in small talk. There were corgis roaming around and my father jokingly asked the Prince whether they were dangerous. ‘You mean are they in danger from you?’ he retorted. He had clearly done his homework and had a journalist in his midst under sufferance.

      At lunch my father found himself on the Queen’s left-hand side, the judge was on her right, and throughout the first two courses – salmon, followed by braised ham – she addressed not one single word to him. He was beginning to feel more than a little miffed. At the other end of the table he noticed that the Tory MP was in exactly the same situation. He was on the Duke’s left and for two courses had been completely ignored while Philip lavished attention on Sue MacGregor, seated on his right. The two of them looked at each other and shrugged their shoulders.

      But as soon as the pudding arrived the entire table was transformed. The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh both turned to the guest on their left and my father basked in the Queen’s full attention for the rest of the lunch. They chatted, he said, like old friends and he was always certain that the key had been horses. On the way to the Palace his office driver, a very keen punter, had told him to ask the Queen whether her horse Height of Fashion was going to win the Oaks. This is precisely what he did and the Queen immediately lit up and explained that the horse’s legs were possibly too long for the Epsom course but that its chances would be decided by whether the horse ran well at Goodwood. Bingo.

       SEVEN

       Diana

      Someone should have taken them to one side and said, ‘Make this work. Go out on to that balcony, hold hands, smile and when you come back down, one of you turn to the right, one to the left. Take a mistress, take a lover if you want, but for the sake of the boys, the family and the country, stay together.’ No one seemed to have the long view; Diana was a huge asset. She’d have been in her forties by now; and one of the most interesting women in the world, the best ambassador for this country ever. She could have been UNESCO’s child ambassador … Wherever we went people’s eyes widened – her mannerisms, her dress sense. What else did he СКАЧАТЬ