In passing, it should be noted that as Barber's principal private secretary, Ryrie had a duty not only to serve as the loyal servant of his Chancellor batting for him however sticky the wicket but also to act as an umpire in any turf wars between departments - oiling if not the bats then the wheels of the Civil Service machinery. This is precisely what the character Bernard Woolley, Jim Hacker’s PPS, did in the “Yes Minister” series. As one Whitehall watcher graphically put it, the private secretary fulfilled the part of "shock absorber" in the departmental machine.17 Traditionally the job of private secretary went to a Whitehall highflier and more often than not it proved a successful launching pad to much higher office with many occupants of that post going on to become permanent secretaries. Bill Ryrie - an Edinburgh-educated son of the manse who joined the Colonial Office in 1953 after serving as an intelligence officer in the Malaya emergency - finished his Whitehall career as Sir William Ryrie, KCB, CB, Permanent Secretary at the Overseas Development Agency. He went on run the International Finance Corporation before dying in 2012 aged eighty-three.
Just two days later - on July 21 - Airey disclosed in a second memo the bad news that "the Chancellor told me this morning that the paper I put up on Mr Houghton's scheme was somewhat too convincing and likely to appeal to the committee in preference to his own scheme."18 In the best Whitehall tradition, the civil servant offered to add "a few paragraphs emphasising the drawbacks," while in an attempt to cover his back he expressed his unease about taking sides since the paper was not designed "to argue the case for or against a solution on this sort" and then suggested that a better course of action might be "to leave the paper as it stands but not circulate it."
The Chancellor then appeared to reject this new strategy scrawling on the memo in a half-legible hand "…disadvantage is then made more [unclear/obviously?]. If you are happy publish & be damned!" In the end, all these machinations in "managing" the committee seemed to bear fruit since its final report concluded that the Houghton scheme was too costly and the Commons voted it down by three hundred votes to two hundred and sixty-three.
However, the government found it altogether more tricky killing off a second scheme - this time emanating from the ranks of their own party. John Boyd-Carpenter, the Conservative MP for Kingston-upon-Thames, former chairman of the Public Accounts Committee and Financial Secretary to the Treasury responsible for overseeing the last Civil List review in 1952, put forward in the early summer of 1971 a scheme that in his view would be welcomed with open arms by both the palace and his Tory government. In a throwback to the 18th century arrangements, the whole of the Crown estates revenues would be made available to the Queen and the surplus would revert to the Treasury. For the Queen, this would avoid the embarrassment of going cap in hand to parliament in cases of under provision and for the government it would free the Treasury of the chore of administering palace income and expenditure.
To more cynical eyes Boyd-Carpenter might seem to fall into Willie Hamilton's category of one of the palace’s "diligent sycophants." In his autobiography "Way of Life" he proudly records his family association with a long line of sovereigns. His grandfather, the Rt Rev William Boyd-Carpenter, the Bishop of Ripon and royal chaplain, was a close friend of Queen Victoria, knew both Edward VII and George V and confirmed George VI. As a young man, John Boyd-Carpenter dined with Edward VIII and later as a cabinet minister often met the Queen and her courtiers (Lord Cobbold was – in his opinion - the nicest of men.) His position before the royal family was always deferential: the Queen was a "courageous lady", while the Queen Mother was “physically incapable of being ungracious." His uncle, Sir Henry Boyd-Carpenter, a partner at Farrers, the royal family's law firm since 1789, was solicitor to the Duchy of Cornwall and later to the Queen personally.
Outside of the committee room, John Boyd-Carpenter argued his case through a number of personal interventions with the Chancellor. In one heart-felt letter addressed to "My Dear Tony,” he explained that "I feel as strongly about this as I have ever had on any public issue" since "our real objective" must be that "the Queen…shall never have to take the initiative of asking parliament for more money during the rest of her Reign…particularly (although we cannot say this in committee) if this happens it may happen during a spell of Labour government."19 In a most revealing aside, he outlined the secret strategy of his Labour committee colleagues: Roy Jenkins had used the Civil List review "as a lever to extract information about Her private fortune," Douglas Houghton "to try to get control of the Household through a government department" and Harold Wilson was trying to use it "to get his hands on the Duchies [of Lancaster and Cornwall]."20
Without realising it Boyd-Carpenter had touched a raw nerve at the palace. Although in theory they would have welcomed any scheme that would bypass parliament and offer them almost unlimited income from the Crown estate revenue, acceptance of the Boyd-Carpenter scheme opened up a can of worms in the shape of the hereditary revenues. If all the hereditary income from the Crown estates were made available to the Queen, then why should not the revenues from the Duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall be included in the pot? Lord Cobbold let slip this concern in a letter to Anthony Barber dated 24 September 1971 and marked "Personal and Confidential" (he also informed Treasury officials that he was anxious that no one but the Chancellor should see it) - "the point is taken that introduction of Crown estates revenues [the Boyd-Carpenter plan] into this picture might sooner or later add to pressures to alter the status of the two Duchies."21
His concern was put even more boldly in a letter four days earlier on September 20 from Barber to William Whitelaw: "Cobbold…would prefer our latest proposals to a link with the revenues of the Crown estates à la Boyd-Carpenter. His reason - which he would not want to give publicly - is that this might bring into issue the whole question of the revenues of the two duchies. I told him that this was what you had always feared."22
Later on December 14 this fear was spelled out in a briefing paper for the Chancellor prior to the House of Commons debate on the report: "the Lancaster and Cornwall revenues are in law the private income of the sovereign and the heir apparent respectively. Some members of the committee would regard them as being in a sense national property."23 Indeed another Treasury memo noted in an echo of Boyd-Carpenter's warning of Harold Wilson's secret agenda that "traditionally…there have been attempts in a Select Committee to appropriate the Cornwall revenues in aid of the Civil List or otherwise to derive some public benefit from them."24 This was indeed the openly-declared policy of one Labour member of the committee, Willie Hamilton who later made it a recommendation of his minority report.
What all these confidential comments revealed was the extreme importance the palace attached to the duchy revenues - Lancaster funded the Queen's affluent lifestyle, Cornwall Prince Charles's. This in effect was their bottom line - as was made crystal clear in a note from the Parliamentary Counsel, Sir John Fiennes, to the Treasury as early as 1 September 1970: "On all previous occasions one of the things which the palace has insisted on is that there should be no surrender of Duchy Revenues comparable to the surrender of the hereditary revenues of the Crown."25
The Treasury had their own reasons to oppose the plan. As a host of internal memos pointed out, the surrender of the hereditary revenues far from getting parliament off their back might lead to greater scrutiny from the legislature since the Treasury would still need to approve the expenditure of the palace in order to check how much had actually been surrendered and with the palace now having no incentive to economise, MPs might suspect collusion between the palace and the Treasury and "it might attract more rather than less annual attention in parliament." It also left unresolved the small matter of how you set the size of the annuity for individual members of the royal family.
With this ticking bomb lying in its in-tray, the Treasury had to find some way to persuade Boyd-Carpenter to defuse or dispose of his scheme without making too much of a commotion. After private discussions between Anthony
Barber and Lord Cobbold, it was agreed that the Chancellor should write to Boyd-Carpenter explaining what was now their final position on the funding arrangement. Then, in order to let him down gently they could meet "on a Privy Councillor basis" (in other words, in secret) and Cobbold "would explain why he does not favour Boyd-Carpenter's proposals."26 The confidential papers remain silent on how Boyd-Carpenter reacted to the killing of his plan but he did not appear to make a fuss. It might be a complete coincidence that around this time (and to be fair, the chronology of events is far from exact as he dates the event "in the latter part of 1971") the Prime Minister offered him the chairmanship of the new Civil Aviation Authority. Knowing that he was out of favour with the Heath administration which had failed to back his bid in 1970 to become Speaker, he accepted the position but since it was a salaried job he was obliged to resign his seat in 1972 ending twenty-seven years' service as the member for Kingston-upon-Thames. He died in 1998 after completing his autobiography. His three-hundred-page memoirs contains a whole chapter on his work with the CAA but not one word on the Select Committee on the Civil List.
The duchy revenues were the main bone of contention when another sensitive matter was discussed at the Treasury - what would happen if Prince Charles died prematurely. In most scenarios discussed in a paper bluntly entitled “The Death of the Prince of Wales” the Queen would then get the duchy money and she would deduct the same amount from her Civil List payments so that the outcome was revenue neutral. Although the monarchy does not gain materially from this arrangement, the sovereign does this to preserve the Duchy of Cornwall revenues for future sons of the sovereign. But if such a situation were to arise during the Queen's reign, hostile Labour MPs such as Willie Hamilton might use it to increase pressure on the sovereign to end this convoluted and outdated practice and surrender the duchy revenues to the Civil List once and for all. (Interestingly this was precisely the line of argument used by Margaret Hodge when in July 2013 she challenged a duchy official in oral evidence of the Public Accounts Committee).27
If this was the unspoken fear of the palace, then an equally jittery Treasury was prepared to express it in writing. One revealing internal memo raised the issue of the way a select committee on the Civil List might want to "appropriate the Cornwall revenues in aid of the Civil List…The Chancellor will wish to resist any change in this respect. Interfering in any way with the interests of the present Prince of Wales would make the ensuring legislation hybrid and there is no cause to overturn the 1952 arrangements in respect to another minority duke."28
To avoid any embarrassment, Whitehall and the palace agreed that if the select committee raised the issue of the surrender of the revenues from the duchies, a Treasury mandarin rather than the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Geoffrey Rippon, would give evidence.29 For some unexplained reason they feared that Rippon would not be a helpful witness. In the event, it fell to an official of the Crown Estate Commissioners, the luckless E.R. Wheeler, to face a grilling from Willie Hamilton. After reminding the witness that he had written recently to Mr Rippon about the duchy finances, he began probing its privileged tax status and then its history, in particular the surprising decision in 1760 not to surrender the two duchies along with the other hereditary landed revenues. Despite repeated inquiries and verbal jousting, Mr Wheeler could provide - to use Hamilton's words in his minority report - "no explanation… for this exclusion." All he could suggest was that the revenue from the Duchy of Lancaster was "already regarded as earmarked for the enjoyment of the sovereign.”30
A possible explanation why the Duchy of Lancaster was overlooked can be found in one of the released Treasury papers that states it "only produced the derisory sum of £16 18s 4d in that year [1760]."31 In other words, it slipped through the net because it was so small. However, if the government of 1760 had known that a century later Prince Albert would after a little reorganisation of rents transform it into a cash cow producing close to £50,000 a year they might well have had second thoughts and included it in the overall sum handed over to the public purse.
When they were not agonising over the fate of the Duchy of Cornwall, the Treasury and the palace were much preoccupied by the possibility of the death of another duke. A series of strokes in the late sixties had left the Duke of Gloucester a permanent invalid and unable to perform any royal engagements. In 1970 nearly all of his official duties were undertaken by either his wife, Princess Alice, or his younger son, Prince Richard (his eldest son, Prince William was otherwise engaged in work for the diplomatic service). On 6 August 1971 Lord Tryon, the Keeper of the Privy Purse and erstwhile executor of Queen Mary's estate, wrote to Lawrence Airey at the Treasury suggesting that "it may also be necessary in the event of the Duke of Gloucester's death to provide for Prince William and possibly in the course of time for other Members of the Royal Family - Prince Richard and Prince Michael. As we explained at our meeting, it is difficult to foresee the extent of royal duties which such Members of the Royal Family may carry out in the future but in our opinion a figure of £10,000 to £15,000 per annum should cover demands during the next five years." Given that minor members of the royal family were not customarily provided for specifically by name from the Civil List, some might have suspected that Lord Tryon was trying it on.
When in mid-August 1971 Chancellor Anthony Barber saw a first draft report of the recommendations proposing that the Duke of Gloucester's annuity should rise from £10,000 to £45,000 and the Duchess of Gloucester should now receive £20,000, he was far from pleased, scrawling on the text in an agitated hand: "Am I wrong in my understanding here? Is the idea that the duke's annuity is increasing [unclear] (although he performs no duties?) and that the Duchess should forthwith get £20,000?"32 According to the Treasury files, a suitably chastened civil servant amended the recommendations and reported back to Barber's office "the Chancellor's suggestions have been all incorporated (p.27) [the Duke's annuity was now set at £20,000]. As regards the Duchess of Gloucester, the intention is certainly that her annuity of £20,000 will not be payable until she becomes a widow."33
Treasury mandarins were also keen to finesse another privilege linked to the duke's annuity. In the course of cross examination from the committee, the Permanent Treasury Secretary Sir Douglas Allen was forced to admit that most of the annuities of the royals - including that of the Duke of Gloucester - were tax exempt, since the sums were deemed a legitimate expense of their work. So embarrassing did the Treasury regard this disclosure that when it came to the publication of the oral evidence they decided that it should be censored - or to use the civil service euphemism "side-lined." A later Treasury briefing paper for the Chancellor classified "Confidential - Not for disclosure" - revealed the full extent of the tax exemption: "The cases in question are Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, Princess Anne and Princess Margaret [100% exemption]. The Duke of Edinburgh is allowed 80% and the Duke of Gloucester almost 95%. These figures have been given to the committee but are not for disclosure and have been omitted from the evidence as printed."34 Even today, more than forty years after the event, the online digital record of the testimony of Sir Douglas on this tax relief is blanked out by a series of asterisks.
Time and time again, the Treasury seemed to be acting in consort with the palace to spare their blushes. The Chancellor even proposed to Lord Cobbold and Sir Michael Adeane in their original meeting in June 1971 that the members of the royal household should offer some "suggested questions" with him "to open the proceedings."35 A rather diffident Adeane dutifully sent to the Treasury a few days before he gave evidence five questions that the committee chairman might ask him, adding in a separate note: "I fear they are of a very general nature but if they are put they will, I hope, bring out such points that may be of use to the committee."36
Not surprisingly the questions were hardly penetrating - and certainly not in keeping with any serious scrutiny by a parliamentary committee. The first - "Has the Queen's work increased since she came to the throne - and if
so to what extent?" - was indeed repeated almost verbatim by the Chancellor when he addressed Adeane in committee. "Mr Chairman I'm glad you have asked me the question in that form," responded the courtier with a straight face.37 Shortly after, the third question drafted by Adeane - "What is the function of the Royal Archives?" - was asked word for word by the committee's deputy chairman William Whitelaw, who might have been expected to find weightier issues to address other than how the Windsors' personal papers were stored and catalogued.
Barber was also not above planting in the newspapers favourable information about his role chairing the select committee. No doubt he was seeking to recoup some political capital for all the personal effort he had invested on the marathon talks. In another Treasury memo reminiscent of a “Yes Minister” storyline, the Chancellor instructed his private secretary, Peter Middleton to ask the press office "whether it would be possible to get a favourable mention in the gossip columns of The Times, The Financial Times and The Daily Telegraph when the report on the Civil List is published. Mr Airey [the Treasury Undersecretary] would be able to supply facts about the number of sittings etc which would bring home that in addition to his responsibilities for the economy and the IMF situation, the chancellor had to spend a great deal of time chairing the select committee."38
The story that duly appeared in The Times’ Diary of December 3 - and was placed in the Civil Service files alongside the request - could almost have been lifted from the original Treasury memo:
"The Commons Select Committee on the Civil List…held no fewer than twenty meetings – all of them presided over by the chancellor Anthony Barber. This compares with the nine meetings which were necessary to fix the Queen’s salary at the time of the accession in 1952 and only four meetings when George VI came to the throne.”
In fairness, the Chancellor had devoted considerable time and effort to the matter in a year when he was trying to keep the UK economy afloat. In public he tried to make light of the workload mentioning that the report weighed in at "more than two hundred and fifty pages" and that the committee had seen more witnesses and considered more schemes "than any other Civil List committee at least this century (and I would guess in the previous century as well.)"39 But in private he admitted to his frustration in dealing with this Sisyphean task, writing in exasperation to his friend, the Prime Minister Edward Heath:
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